Oh dear.
“I… we, that is… we’re just trying to get the hell out of here.”
Michael and Amanda opened the rear doors and sat inside, thumping the doors shut and fastening their seatbelts. Amanda kicked at the back of the driver’s seat. “Will this thing start?”
The woman looked over her shoulder and grinned at the children. “Hell yeah, girl.” She pressed the keyless ignition, and the car rumbled to life. “Quality German engineering will never let you down.” She leaned over towards Angela. “I am the mother-fucking owner of this car. How’s that for a shocker?”
The tires squealed as she pulled the shifter into drive. Angela fumbled for her own seatbelt as the car tore forward. “They’re killing each other above. I don’t care if you own, lease, or rent the damned thing. Just be careful.”
“This is my baby. Don’t you worry, I’ll be careful.”
Angela saw two things when the Audi pulled around the pillar they’d snuck around moments earlier. Marie Hodgkins was lying on the concrete floor in a pool of blood. There were three holes in her chest and stomach. Her final shift as manager and commandant at the Sandman had come to a grisly end. The second thing Angela saw—and prayed she would forget—was Roy the mall security guard standing bare naked over the dead body with a full erection. The little man with the greasy ponytail was hastily pulling his pants up behind him.
“God-damn,” the Audi owner yelled as she slammed on the brakes. “Now that is definitely not a sight for sore eyes.”
“Don’t stop!” Michael pleaded. “He killed our Mom, and he’s gonna kill us, too!”
The woman didn’t need any more convincing. Roy was pointing a rifle at the windshield. “You kids get your heads down and keep ‘em down till we’re out of here.” The car shot forward again and Roy started firing. The first bullet went through the middle of the windshield and punched into the back seats between Michael and Amanda. A second bullet ricocheted off the car hood. Roy didn’t get a chance to fire a third shot. The big woman swerved at the last second, and the rearview mirror on her side struck Roy in the stomach with enough force to tear it clean off the door. Angela looked back and saw him fall to his knees.
Not enough to kill him. A golf club in the back wasn’t enough, and a big German car couldn’t get the job done either. Can’t anything kill that bastard?
“Fucker smucked my car up. Big-ass, small-dick mother fucker.” She continued teaching the Fulger twins colorful words and introduced Angela to a few new ones as she drove up and out of the parkade. Corey—or whatever oxygen-masked clad guard on duty it was—lowered his weapon and stood back. The Audi roared off into the night.
The woman held her hand out to Angela. “My name’s Caitlan. Sorry we got off to such a rough start. I’ve run into a lot of assholes since the world went to shit.”
Angela shook her hand. “I’m Angela. The two back there are Amanda and Michael. And don’t apologize. I’ve met a few undesirables along the way as well.”
Caitlan chuckled. “Undesirables… That’s another way of putting it.”
“You’re going the wrong way,” Michael said.
She looked at him in the rear view mirror. “What way am I supposed to be going?”
Amanda answered. “West. We were going west.”
“What difference does it make? West, east, north, south. It’s all the same.”
Purple lightning forked through the sky ahead of them. The thunder that followed a moment later shook the car. Caitlan slowed down and turned around in the middle of the highway.
“This lane’s one way only,” Michael said. “You should cross over into the other one at the next exit.”
“I don’t think we’ll be running into much traffic tonight.” Caitlin weaved between an abandoned bus and trashed half-ton. She pressed down on the accelerator when the way was clear and the four sped off into the dark, driving west ahead of the storm.
Chapter 21
“Come on, you have to help me out.”
“Give me a fucking break, would you? I just got run over by a car.”
“No, you were sideswiped by the mirror,” Louie said. They’d wasted enough time just getting Roy to stand up. It seemed to take an eternity for him to get back into his underwear. He had helped the giant up through two levels of parkade, but it wasn’t fast enough for Louie’s liking. He had seen the dark mist creeping along the floor towards the hotel manager’s corpse.
How did they escape from the tenth level of the DSC? There aren’t many better sealed off places anywhere on earth.
There was still time, Louie figured. The ticks could travel quickly, but they were microscopic. Louie and his new-found friend could keep ahead of them if they maintained a steady pace.
But it wasn’t just the ticks Louie was worried about. He had seen what they were capable of doing when they’d infested Richard Sheffield’s dead body. Louie had seen it again when the grey swarm crawled over Marie Hodgkin’s corpse as well. Roy hadn’t noticed—he was too busy with his aches and pains to notice the woman’s body when it started to swell. Roy didn’t see her fat fingers start to twitch.
They had to keep ahead of the swarm. They could outrun the ticks, but they would have a difficult time staying clear of the human hosts the ticks inhabited. And there were plenty of hosts to inhabit.
Living and dead.
Chapter 22
The ride east had been hard. Small towns that Hayden had driven through on his way to and back from Winnipeg had been made even smaller. Most of the people had packed up what they had left and moved out, heading east for the city, or heading off in all other directions to find something… anything.
“My bum’s sore.”
Hayden rested the tip of his chin on Nicholas’s head. “Mine too, bud. That’s what happens when you sit on a horse and let it do all the walking for three days. Did you want to hop down and give Trixie a break?”
The little boy shook his head. “Heck, no. I’m too tired to walk on my own. I’m hungry and thirsty, too.”
They gave Trixie a rest a few miles on, dismounting in a farm-yard twenty miles west of the city. There was water in the abandoned house that Hayden drew from a stand-up cooler. It wasn’t all that cool—there was no more power available to make things hot and cold—but Nicholas didn’t seem to mind. Hayden filled a few 2-litre plastic pop bottles with what remained and placed it into the saddlebag they’d found on another farm a hundred or so miles behind them.
Nicholas sat down on the steps of the front porch and drank his water. “How come there aren’t no cars on the highway?”
“Because they won’t start anymore.” That wasn’t entirely true. Hayden and Nicholas had seen vehicles on the roads along their way. There hadn’t been many—perhaps a dozen or so in the last hundred and fifty miles—but they had heard the old things rumbling their way from what seemed like provinces away. Since Jake, Hayden wasn’t taking any chances with anyone. He had taken his horse and rode out into the fields, putting at least a quarter mile between the vehicles travelling down the highways and the three of them. Perhaps he’d seen too many post-apocalyptic movies, but Hayden wasn’t going to risk all he had left to strangers roaring down the roads in vehicles manufactured before he had been born. “All the newer cars have computers to help them start and run. All those onboard computers were fried after the bad morning. The cars we’ve seen are a lot older, built back in the nineteen-seventies and earlier. Even most of those don’t start.”