Sven the Zombie Slayer (18 page)

Then Lorie’s field of vision began to swim, the zombies’ banging and rubbing against the car disorienting her.

“What are they doing in the middle of the road like this?” Sven asked.

“What are they doing?” Jane repeated angrily. “What are they doing? Who cares what they’re doing? What are
you
doing driving so fast? And what are they going to do to us now?”

Sven turned around to look in the back of the car. He nodded at Lorie, who now had Evan burrowing into her back to get away from the monsters outside. Lorie nodded back at Sven, put an arm around Evan, and turned back to watch the staggering figures circling the car. Evan’s face was pressed into her shoulder, and it felt very hot. It felt wet too, like Evan was crying.

“You’re right,” Sven said, and to Lorie his voice sounded shaky. “I really messed this one up.” The zombies’ moaning and scraping were growing louder, and the car began to shake.

Lorie slid herself and Evan away from the windows so that they were huddled in the middle of the backseat. The figures outside were clawing at the car, but none of them reached for the door handles. It was like they didn’t know how they should be trying to get in, even though the doors were locked.

“Can you drive through it?” Jane asked. She was breathing hard, but Lorie saw hard eyes behind the panic, and it was reassuring.

“Yeah,” Sven said, “okay, let’s try that. Okay.”

The big man eased his foot off the brake and the car inched forward. The monsters became more frantic in their clawing and banging, and their moans became more agitated. The moans were dry, like chalk on a blackboard—not the point of a piece of chalk on a blackboard, but the broad side of a piece of chalk on a blackboard, like when you wanted to fill in the outline of a picture. That wasn’t how people were supposed to sound, all dried up like that.

The car stopped, settling into place.

“What’s wrong?” Lorie asked.

Sven looked confused for a moment as he looked down at the steering wheel, the gear shift, and back outside. Then he began to jerk at the key, apparently trying to turn it. He shifted the car into park, then tried to turn the key again.

“It’s dead.” He tried the key again, still nothing. “It must have shut down when we were out of control.”

Sven turned the key to the left, then to the right.

Still nothing.

Lorie understood what was going on right away—the same thing had happened to one of her friends in the middle of a driving lesson. The engine had automatically shut off after her friend spun out. Then Lorie remembered the worst part of the story. Her friend’s engine hadn’t turned on again for
several
minutes.
It didn’t look like they had minutes to spare.

“No, no, no,” Jane said. “Why won’t it start? This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening!”

The car was shaking harder now, and Lorie was starting to think that she might be at the end of the ride. It was no good to think like that, but she couldn’t keep the thoughts out. Those monsters would get in, and they would bite and tear and—

Ivan hissed at Lorie, and swiped a clawed paw in her direction. Lorie ducked out of the way, and Ivan hissed again.

But he wasn’t hissing at her, Lorie understood, he was hissing at Evan. Hadn’t he hissed at Evan earlier? Lorie wasn’t sure.

Lorie pushed the overheating Evan gently away from her and propped him up against the middle of the backseat.

Then she suddenly found herself entranced, watching the keychain that hung from the ignition, jangling in time with the car’s rocking.

Lorie began to feel faint, as if she were floating away, up, up, and—

The door was ripped open, and Lorie saw a gnarled, shriveled hand—no, it was more a claw than a hand—reaching for her feet.

47

Lorie screamed.

Jane couldn’t believe the engine wouldn’t turn, and now one of the sick people had ripped the door open, and it was getting into the car with them. As hopeless as she thought their situation was, Jane had to help the kids. She wasn’t just going to let those things grab Lorie and Evan. She was going to go down fighting, and she was going to see to it that they all would.

She frantically glanced around the car for some kind of weapon, but found none. Before Jane realized what she was doing, her body was in action. She threw herself into the backseat between Lorie and the intruder just as its shriveled hand closed around Lorie’s ankle. Another one of the sick people was trying to push through into the car, but with the first intruder blocking most of the door, there was only room for the second one’s grasping arms.

The grasping arms were in Jane’s face, and Lorie was being dragged across the floor of the backseat, toward the flailing crowd outside.

“No!” Lorie shrieked as she struggled. “No! Help me!”

“Sven!” Jane yelled as she yanked on the girl, trying to keep her inside the vehicle. “Start the car, start the damn car!”

Lorie was trying to wriggle away, but even with Jane trying to keep the intruder out and Lorie in place, the girl was still being dragged out.

Then a grasping arm caught hold of Jane’s hair and pulled.

The pain was sharp, causing Jane to grit her teeth. She saw one of the grasping arms with some of her hair in its hand, then the hand opened, the hair fell, and the hand was grasping for her once more.

Ignoring the pain and the grasping hands, Jane made herself focus on Lorie. She had to save Lorie.

Jane leaned into the backseat with her back, putting herself between Lorie and the zombie.

The zombie? Encountering the dehumanizing term playing in her self-talk startled Jane, but now was not the time to reflect on political correctness.

Pushing the thoughts out of her head, Jane pressed her shoulders into the seat, brought her right knee up into her body, and kicked the zombie in the head. She did it in a pressing motion, connecting her heel with the bottom of the zombie’s chin.

There was a horrible snap, and the zombie fell backward into the grasping zombie behind it.

Bolstered by the successful kick, Jane got on the offensive. She kicked with her left leg, roundhouse-kicking the slumping zombie, propelling him backward into the zombie behind him. Then she got up off the seat in a crouch and followed up with a sharp side kick—the best she could manage in the cramped space. The first zombie and the grasping arms of the second fell out of the car, and Jane rushed forward, grabbing the door to shut it before more of the surrounding throng could climb in.

She pulled, but before she could close the door the grasping hands were back, clawing for her hair again. They were making it impossible for Jane to shut the door, and she found the door being wrenched open again by the crooked, lifeless hands of other zombies who were now stepping over their fallen, broken-necked comrade, kicking him under the vehicle.

The zombies were clamoring for a piece of the action, and Jane knew that she was going to have to oblige.

“We really need the car to start,” Jane said, and then she intentionally loosened her grip on the door, letting the zombies pull it open a little wider.

48

Sven was bent over the ignition, taking the key out, putting it back in, turning it, praying, turning it again.

Nothing.

He paused, took a breath, and told himself that this was going to be the one. He turned the key with a hopeful, frantic twist of his wrist.

Nothing.

Damn safety features, he thought, damn you all to hell.

Was there another solution? Sven tried to figure out what to do next, but being surrounded and breached by the mob of zombies, Jane’s karate-kicking in the backseat, and Ivan’s hissing to cheer her on, all made it very difficult to think clearly.

“Lorie,” Sven said, “are you okay?”

“Yeah, that thing grabbed me, was pulling me out, but I’m okay now. What do we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wanna try it again? It should come back on, if it’s like my friend’s car it should. I think it turned off because we spun and then kind of crashed.”

Sven groped for the ignition, about to turn the key again.

With his fingers sweating on the key, but just before he turned it again, a thought occurred to him. What if it didn’t work? What if this was it? If the automatic fuel cut-off was to blame, then the engine should start again. The back door always worked too, until one of the zombies had broken it open. What if the engine wouldn’t turn, and they were all devoured in the car? Sven shot a glance at his hissing, skittering cat and an even deeper sadness swept over him.

Sven gave the key one more twist. To his surprise, his worry didn’t materialize.

“I got it,” Sven whispered, in disbelief.

“I got it,” he repeated, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Sven twisted around to check on the situation in the backseat, aggravating the morning’s injuries.

Jane’s jaw was set and her eyes were brimming with rage. Sven had never seen her so powerfully angry—not even in their worst arguments with each other before they broke up. She looked really hot.

But what was she doing? Was she opening the door? She was about to let them in!

“Ja—” Sven started to say, but then he realized what she was doing, and though he knew he should begin plowing through the throng, he couldn’t look away.

Jane opened the door wide enough for two of the zombies to poke their heads in. They were trying to bite Jane, gnashing and clicking their teeth, but Jane leaned back to keep herself just out of reach.

“Give it to ‘em,” Lorie said, and Sven saw that the girl was massaging her red ankle. “Give it to ‘em good.”

And Jane gave it to them alright. Sven watched, unbelieving, as gentle Jane—the Jane that would pick up spiders with pieces of paper and let them out of the house rather than kill them—he watched as she opened the door just wide enough, then swung it at the zombies’ heads, bashing them repeatedly with the edge of the door. Sven couldn’t help but wince at all the cracking and crunching, but Jane continued to stare down the zombies as she crushed their skulls, her face showing no emotion but anger.

After more than enough bashing, the two zombies with their destroyed heads fell back into the throng, and Jane pulled the door shut, closing it with a crunch on eight or nine grasping zombie hands. Lorie was helping Jane hold the door shut against all the squirming, undead fingers.

Jane spun around. “What the hell are you waiting for? Let’s get out of here!”

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Lorie said. “Come on.”

Sven turned back to the dashboard. His body was locking up with panic now. He had taken his foot off the brake already. Why the hell wasn’t the car moving?

Think Sven, think.

Of course! Sven shook his head, this really wasn’t his day for being sharp, and it was exactly the day he
had
to be sharp. All of their lives depended on it.

They weren’t moving because the car was in park. Sven shifted the car into drive, and took his foot off the brake again. Mercifully, the car began to move. Sven floored the gas pedal. The car lurched forward, and began mowing down the zombies in its path. The zombies groaned as the car plowed into them, but the ones that hadn’t been plowed did not clear out of the way. They waited patiently for the car to mow them down and go over them, and it did. They were good zombies that way. Sven felt the snap of bones under the tires as he went over them.