Rolling from beneath its thrashing dead weight, he scrambled to his feet and ran into Zach. The dead man gasped, its breath rank.
Wayne jerked back, pulled the Doctor from the holster on Zach’s right hip, and blew the thing’s head into pulp.
A pickup truck burst from within the motor pool, tires screeching and bouncing over the parking lot dividers. Screaming and flailing, several people flew from the truck-bed and slammed against the concrete.
Wayne ran. The further he got from the warehouse, the less activity he found. Within five minutes he found himself sliding behind the wheel of the Jeep, panting. Two minutes later, the headlights passed across the nightmare taking place outside of the warehouse.
Sue walked toward him, clutching Devon to her chest, her gun held high. There was no sign of Shawn or Greg, save the glistening red tangle over which the things fought just inside the loading door. Its ragged jaw twitching and useless, Ted’s corpse dragged its baseball bat through the blood pooled around the feast. On the roof, someone waved and yelled for help.
Wayne brought the Jeep to a halt.
“Are either of you bit?”
Sue shook her head.
“Good. Get in.”
She did.
They drove away.
He walked for days, thinking of the girl and of her hair, though not entirely sure which hair or which girl. Sometimes he wondered where she was, what had happened to her or if the signs around him had anything to do with her. NEW ORLEANS 65, one of them said, but that wasn’t quite right. Almost right, maybe, but not quite. It was and it wasn’t.
His wandering carried him from the highway and into a town. HAMMOND, the sign said, and that meant something to him, or had. The town was shattered and wrecked and broken, like the stumbling forms who were so like him and not at all like him.
One storefront was more thoroughly destroyed than the others he had seen. The front doors were lying on the ground, ripped from their frames. He looked past them and saw a small machine, about the size of a man, lying further from the store, as though it had somehow been yanked through the doors, tearing them out along with it. The small machine had three letters across the top-“ATM.” He didn’t recall what it was used for, but it looked sad lying there.
He looked back to the devastated store. To the left of the entrance, a dead woman stood raking her head back and forth across the wall. Little pieces of her face clung to the bricks. As he stepped into the store, she pulled her forehead away from the smeared rainbow of filth to watch with listless eyes as he passed. Because so much damage had been done to the front of the store, it wasn’t as dark inside as the others. Boxes and trash were everywhere. The floor was slick with dirty water. The broken doors let the rain in, and this reminded him of something else, something that came to him only in images: the interior of the place he shared with the girl sodden and ruined, black stuff growing on the walls. He moaned once, and a dead boy sitting in the middle of the candy aisle moaned in return. He peeled the crinkly and shiny paper away from something colorful. Dropping the paper, he placed the colorful thing into his mouth, retched, and spat.
He made his way slowly to the back, where there were hundreds of little plastic bottles all over the floor; a few were also on metal shelves. He picked one up. It rattled.
Unlike his random thoughts in the night, one now came to him with some logical connection, though it was as unbidden and unpredictable as any of the others. He remembered the girl needed what was inside these little bottles. He remembered opening them for her and very carefully counting out two of the little white disks into her palm. He fumbled with one bottle now, but there was no chance of him opening it. He raised it up to look at the label, but the print was too small for him to read. When he noticed this problem, he instinctively reached for his shirt pocket: he remembered there was always something in that pocket that would help him read things that were too small, though he couldn’t remember what the device was called or what it looked like. But his pocket was now empty.
He began going through all the bottles, arranging many of them on a counter there in the back of the store. He couldn’t read any of the labels, but he tried different ways of arranging the bottles-from biggest to smallest, or in an undulating “wave” of descending and then ascending sizes, or separating the round bottles from those with squared corners. Then came combinations of the various organizational methods he’d tried. He was very careful and spent most of the day on this project. He didn’t know why he did this, or what exactly guided his hand, but he knew when he had the bottles arranged in the “right” way, the way that formed the perfect pattern on the counter. He stepped back to admire it. Then he stepped forward and counted the seventh bottle and removed it. Stepping back, the pattern still looked “right.” Counting another seven, he removed a bottle, and still the pattern looked to him unmarred by this removal. He repeated this process five more times, and, when he was satisfied the remaining pattern was still the correct one, he looked at the seven bottles he had chosen. He nodded. These too were correct, he thought, and put them in the hole in his stomach, next to the metal band he had taken from the woman. He walked from the store and continued down the street, feeling somewhat more full and satisfied than before.
Eventually he worked his way back to another highway. I-10, the signs said. NEW ORLEANS 50. His mind buzzed and he walked and walked. The sun sank and rose, and he walked and sometimes he sat down and closed his eyes or pulled the round thing out of his stomach and held it. When the sun got too hot on his skin, he sought peace in the shade of the forest or beneath one of the large wheeled things or sometimes even inside one of the smaller ones.
He walked and walked, and sometimes those like him walked with him, side by side, as if he had someplace to go and they wanted to be there with him. Other times they ignored him, busy with their own broken journeys.
Once he came across a dead man being pursued by four others. The man crawled and gasped and tried to stand, but the four grunted and pushed and would not let him rise, battering him with loose fists and rocks, bashing away his nose and shattering his teeth. He moved toward them, wondering in some way if he could help the man, but the others pushed him away and lashed at him with sticks. One of them tried to take the things in his stomach. He slapped them back and, as they turned their attention to the pitiful shape writhing on the ground, crept away.
He walked and walked. NEW ORLEANS 35 and 20 and 10, and though he didn’t know what that meant, he nonetheless knew it when he saw it, silent and dark and still.
The sun was again going down as he ambled across a large bridge. All over the roadway were large machines of metal and glass, all of them smashed, many of them burned. There were motionless bodies inside most of them, with many more on the pavement. Many were not whole, but were just limbs or torsos in dried-up pools of blood. There were swarms of loud, ugly flies all over. He shook his head and kept walking, looking up at the beautiful angles of the bridge’s proud steel frame. There was another bridge next to the one on which he walked, and this meant something to him, too, though it made little sense: CCC. And: GNO.
Halfway across the bridge, he saw a yellow metal box attached to it at eye level. The box was open and a plastic thing hung from it by a cord. The plastic thing was grasped by a right hand, severed sloppily just below the elbow. He looked above the metal box and read the sign there: “Call Now. Life is Worth Living. There Is Hope.”
He stared at the words for some time. He tried mouthing them, but his lips and tongue felt like cloth flaps attached to his body without really being a part of it. The words were simple, but he couldn’t quite grasp them, or why those ones in particular would be written on a bridge. More and more, he concentrated on the first word of the second sentence. He tried to breathe out as he mouthed it, but he couldn’t control the vowel sound properly, or how to press his lower teeth against his upper lip to make the “f” sound, so it kept coming out differently as “Laf… lav… laf… lof… lov…”