We enter a nameless little town and come out the other side, still the only moving object for miles around.
“I took this route on my last trip to New York, before I heard about the migrations. Hundreds of Ossies here. Barely made it through.”
“What were they doing?” Julie asks. “Just standing in the street?”
“Seemed confused. Purposeless. I got the feeling they were waiting for something.”
“Like what?”
Tomsen shrugs. “For the field to tip back in their favor? Their next opportunity?”
I remember the last thing I heard from their dusty archive of prerecorded messages, the anonymous voice of some long-dead spokesman buzzing with immutable confidence:
You will become us. We will win. Always have, always will.
The wrench trembles in my hand. Half fear, half rage.
“R,” Julie says as Tomsen guides the RV around a wrecked convertible. Its driver is grinning at us, and Julie holds eye contact with its hollow sockets until we pass. “What are they?”
I watch the skeleton recede behind us, now grinning at nothing.
“They’re not just dried-up zombies,” she says. “They’re different.”
I nod.
“So what happens? How does a shuffling corpse turn into a running, jumping, roaring…” She trails off with a shudder. “What’s the line they cross?”
“There’s no line,” I reply. “It’s gradual.”
“But…what makes them get stronger and smarter when they should be falling apart?”
I shake my head. “Boneys aren’t smart.”
She gives me a skeptical side-eye. “R. They had you guys serving them dinner. They were judge and jury. Everyone knows the Boneys run the hives.”
I consider this for a moment. “They’re not smart, they’re just…unencumbered.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Self-awareness…empathy…perspective…all heavy weights. Boneys climb to the top…by shedding them.”
Julie nods. “Okay…” We drive past a wrecked RV with all its windows broken, doors torn off, claw marks gouged into its sides, and cracked-open skulls littering the ground around it. “But that doesn’t explain how they can do that.”
She has me there.
“How can something get stronger the more it rots?” She stares into the rippling liquid of the horizon, and I can tell that she’s high but this is no dismissible stoner rambling. Her questions are disturbingly valid. “It’s like…inverted life. Like they’re feeding on the entropy.”
Dark thoughts begin to cascade in my head. Perhaps this is the reality of the undead world: a physics of consciousness, a biology of intent. Perhaps when I consumed the Living, it wasn’t the life itself that fueled my unnatural body, but the very act of taking it.
Where did this come from? In what tarry bog of the universe did such a monster evolve? And how do we send it back?
An hour later, Julie and M are deep in quiet contemplation. Tomsen, meanwhile, scans the horizon with a puzzled squint and increasing agitation, like a lost tourist looking for landmarks. “I don’t understand,” she mutters. “Two months ago, they were everywhere.”
The highway curves away from the train tracks and into another little village. The road is more pothole than pavement here, and Tomsen slows to a cautious creep, babying Barbara’s delicate joints. I see two skeletons in the shadow of a police station and I stare into their grinning faces as we approach. My mind is far away, still exploring Julie’s questions, so the skeletons are already behind us by the time it registers:
They were standing up.
A crack from the rear bedroom. A scream from the cushion fort. I whirl around just as Tomsen hits the gas and the surge sends me stumbling back onto the bed, landing face to face with the nearly toothless skull of a long-dead officer. It has punched a finger through the rear window, but as the coach accelerates it stumbles and falls, leaving its finger quivering in the glass. Sprout pops out from the cushions and pushes it back through the hole, then returns to the safety of the fort.
The spike in my heart rate slows as I watch the Boney cop and its partner scramble after us. This isn’t the threat we’ve been bracing for, the swarm of catlike demons that clawed its way up the stadium walls. They lurch. They totter. They are stripped of tissue, almost ready to become dust. And still they pursue us, as blindly certain as ever that they’ll win.
“Bye,” M says, waving at them through the window.
“Maybe that’s all that’s left,” Julie says. “Maybe the rest all starved.”
Tomsen shakes her head. “The swarm’s always shedding its old and weak. Leaves them behind like dandruff. But there were thousands of thousands, like ants, termites, wasps, locusts, cicadas—they didn’t all die in two months.”
“So you think they…migrated again?”
Tomsen shrugs. “I don’t think anything. No idea. But if they’re not here anymore, they’re somewhere else.”
I spot a few more as the sun dips into the west. Some linger around towns and rest stops, others have wandered into the desert on splintering legs or no legs at all, dragging their torsos through the sand on fingers worn to sharp points. I think of insects crawling across a parking lot. What brings a bug to that endless expanse? What tiny blips of thought inform its decisions? What does it imagine it’ll find at the end of all that effort? Like insects, like animals, like most human beings, the Boneys don’t pause for such questions. Their line of inquiry stops far short of introspection, landing somewhere around how do I get?
It’s a pathetic sight, but every time I feel the urge to empathize, they twist their heads around and snap their teeth and struggle in our direction, revealing the brutal monomania that drives them, and my empathy recoils. These things are not people. They’re not even creatures. They’re the embodied reverberations of a single ancient utterance, and I have heard it too many times.
We pass a sign announcing: Highway 50, Loneliest Road in America. Below it, another one warns: No Services 88 Miles, but the 88 has been sprayed over and amended to 146. No doubt it’s due for another update.
The road is a straight line all the way to its vanishing point. Mountains rise and fall on the horizon like frozen waves. We are approaching the end of the Midwaste, and Tomsen’s swarm is still a no-show. Somehow, this is far from comforting.
A high metallic squeal has joined the rattling in the RV’s front axle. Combined with the whistling from the hole in the rear window, it sounds like an aural expression of a panic attack. Julie and M are mellow now, but I see Tomsen’s eyes twitching in the mirror.
“Sounds bad,” M says. “CV joint?”
“I keep replacing them,” Tomsen says through gritted teeth. “Barbara hates these roads. She’s an old lady. She wants to go home.”
“Should we stop and check it?” Julie asks, grimacing as the noise drills into her high.
Tomsen’s hands twist on the steering wheel like she’s wringing out a rag. “Of course we should stop! That’s the herald horn of a breakdown! But we can’t stop on the Loneliest Road a few hours from the witching hour. Can’t trust reality out here, it’s liquid, it’s slippery! Shows you cracks and holes, ghosts and demons, things you’re not ready to see. Very bad place for a pit stop.”
Julie watches Tomsen’s hands tremble. “Huntress…are you sure you don’t want some weed?”
“No weed. No damn cannabis. I told you it makes me jittery.” She’s shaking her head violently.