Suddenly my window exploded into a million pieces. It had been cracked by a previous blow, so a punch from one of those things shattered it. A young woman tried to climb through the smashed window, trying to grab me. She reached in and touched my face. Her touch was cold. Cold, wet, and dead.
I panicked, almost like when this whole nightmare started. Paralyzed with terror, I could feel her trying to slip inside the vehicle as Prit shouted hysterically in Russian and Lucullus hissed inside his carrier, baring his teeth.
When she put her hand on my thigh, I finally shook off my stupor. I grabbed the AK-47 and bashed her temple with the butt. She raised her head and hesitated for a second, staring at me with dead, bloodshot eyes. I hit her in the face again. The woman slipped back out the window, unable to hold on, her face completely mutilated.
Drenched in sweat, grimacing, I turned to Prit. One look around told me that either we got out of there immediately or we’d be dead men in minutes. The resilient Ukrainian nodded and wrung a little more out of the damaged, groaning engine.
Once again, our luck held out. Just five hundred yards away, half-hidden by the weeds, was a sign pointing to a ramp to the nearby highway. Just a little farther, and we might be saved.
With one last push, Prit turned on to the highway. There, the van picked up speed, though the damaged motor was still making some very scary sounds.
At last we were on the highway. We felt relieved. We didn’t know the worst was yet to come.
The highway looked like a ghostly lunar landscape. I’d made this trip a million times, every time I had business in Vigo. Back then this stretch of highway had been packed with traffic. Now, it was deserted.
With the van making a deafening noise, we drove as fast as that battered motor allowed. We passed a few cars abandoned in the strangest positions. Some of them were ringed with blood. Others looked like they’d rammed into something—or someone. Aside from a couple of corpses rotting in the sun, we saw no sign of humans.
I tried to imagine the scene. In the first days of the epidemic, dozens of undead turned up suddenly, staggering down the middle of the road. Startled drivers tried to dodge them. Some couldn’t avoid running over them, and they crashed. Some caring people, unaware of those monsters’ true nature, must’ve stopped to help what they thought were badly injured pedestrians. Either way, the drivers’ fate was fucking awful.
A mile or so down the road, we came upon the first serious accident. A Nissan SUV had slammed into the concrete median, knocking it down. The Nissan had bounced back into the middle of the road and collided with a couple of cars and a small delivery truck. All those vehicles were now a huge pile of bloody plastic and steel lying in the middle of the road, blocking all the lanes. We stopped, stunned by the scene. Rising off that mass of iron was the foul, sickening smell of corpses that had been rotting in the sun for several months. The smell of death.
Those people had been in a brutal accident and no one had come to their aid. They hadn’t even removed the bodies. My God!
A small space on the left allowed us to continue on our way. Prit drove deftly through the narrow gap, leaving some of our paint behind in the process. I wondered whether that lane was there by chance or whether another survivor had been there before us, moving the wreckage aside.
After two or three miles, we saw another major accident in the opposite lane. It was a huge pileup of about forty or fifty cars, buses, vans, and trucks. They had collided in a chain as they sped along, running from those things or just trying to dodge them. As a gauge of how hard the impact was, I saw a small Smart car folded like an accordion under the cab of a truck.
Those who weren’t killed in the collision had died in the fire that followed. The heat was so intense that pieces of asphalt had melted. A couple of blackened skulls stuck out from the charred frame of a car. The scorched remains of several more bodies were visible here and there. A shocking scene, right out of hell.
This was not a highway. This was a graveyard.
Six miles later, we saw undead again, reeling down the road. Prit said this meant we were getting closer to an urban area, so we’d better be prepared. My frowning friend ordered me to buckle my seat belt, and then he floored it. Bad idea. Something under the hood exploded with a thunderous bang, causing a sizable dent. Thick black smoke poured out of the engine. My heart almost flew through my mouth.
The Ukrainian looked at me, chagrined. “A rod,” he said laconically, as we came to a standstill. “The engine kaput.” He let the dying van roll slowly down an exit ramp.
I couldn’t read the highway sign, so I didn’t know where the hell we were. For the first time, I was totally disoriented.
We were wondering how the hell we were going to make it without the van when chance smiled on us again. The ramp was steep, so the van coasted to the bottom of the hill, right in front of a small industrial park with fifteen or twenty warehouses. There, in front of us, as if it were expecting us, was a huge car dealership with the familiar logo of the three-pointed star enclosed in a circle.
This was fucking great. I smiled and asked Prit how’d he like to drive a brand-new Mercedes. The Ukrainian’s beaming smile spoke volumes. We’d be traveling in style.
Momentum had carried us about 150 yards from the dealership. We could see several undead in the distance, but we’d passed by them unnoticed, since we’d driven the last half mile in neutral.
We got out of the battered, smoldering van and grabbed everything we could carry in one trip. We couldn’t risk coming and going, drawing unnecessary attention. I put the soldier’s knapsack on my back and the speargun across my chest and held Lucullus’s carrier tightly in my arms to keep him from escaping. The last thing I needed was to chase after my cat through an unfamiliar industrial park full of monsters eager to sink their teeth into me.
Prit carried the AK-47, the heavy box of ammunition, and some of the food from the Russian ship in one hand and the notorious briefcase in the other. The rest, unfortunately, we had to leave behind.
Loaded down like that, we didn’t think we’d ever reach the dealership. When we finally got there, we were out of breath. In the shade of the huge entrance gate, I collapsed exhausted against the giant glass window. Prit glided along like an eel, pressed against the building, searching for a way in.
As I waited, I took a swallow from the canteen and rummaged around in the backpack. At the bottom, I found a pack of crushed Chesterfields. I remembered putting them there when I left home. Kicking back a little, I lit a cigarette. After all this time, the first puff was like a shot of heroin to a junkie. Everything seemed simpler.
The muffled sound of breaking glass shook me out of my trance. I jumped up like lightning, the blood pounding in my temples. I gripped the speargun, braced for whatever might come next.
Suddenly I heard the metal door open behind me. I was terrified. But then I saw Prit’s amused smile. He’d slipped inside through a bathroom window. Hot damn!
I lumbered through the entrance to the dealership, loaded down like a mule, with Lucullus scampering around at my feet and Prit standing guard. Once we got inside, he closed the gate again and threw the bolt to secure it.
Prit and I stood still for a long minute, trying to determine if anyone—or anything—was in there.
I stood there dumbstruck. The interior was dark and cool. Somehow, this dealership had been spared by looters. I could make out neat rows of vehicles in the shadows. I smiled. Time to go shopping.
That darkness felt really good. After a long day on the run, my muscles relaxed for the first time in hours. I’d started the day on the Zaren’s deck staring down the muzzle of an assault rifle. Now I was lying on a leather couch in a Mercedes dealership, puffing on a cigarette, thinking how wonderful it would be to sleep for three days in a hotel bed. And drink a cold beer. And get a foot massage from ten girls in sexy lingerie…I’m not shitting you. I sat up with a groan, every muscle pinging. I’d never been so tired in my life.