Her heart leaped at the sight of the keys lying in a pool of red on the driver’s seat, each key sticky with someone’s blood. Old-fashioned keys, not a key fob. She grabbed them as she lunged inside the vehicle, the sickening, squishy sound of her skirt becoming slick with the congealed blood barely registering. She grabbed the door and pulled at it with all her might. The Buick was a big car with big doors, and pulling at the door was like closing the twin gates of some castle under siege.
It closed with a loud bang!, so loud that it made her jump.
Kate stabbed the key into the ignition, and the Buick’s engine fired up on the first try as the creature raised itself up from the ground and stood next to the passenger’s side window, looking in through the closed glass at her. There was a noticeable indentation along its neck where the tire iron had struck, and the creature’s head was tilted to one side in a comically grotesque image. The red choker had cracked, and pieces had fallen loose.
The creature scrambled onto the hood of the Buick as Kate grabbed the gear shift, pulled it into drive, and slammed her foot down on the gas pedal. The creature lurched as the car shot forward. It lost its balance, smashing its face into the windshield before Kate jammed her other foot down on the brake. The Buick screamed as it slid to a sudden stop and the creature was flung backward, landed in a ball of bones and flailing flesh on the street.
Then it slowly got back up.
Kate gunned the gas again and the big American car launched clumsily forward and the creature let out a loud shriek as it disappeared underneath the hood. Kate heard the thump-thwump! as the right front tire ran the creature over, and less than a second later, another thump-thwump! as the rear right tire ran it over as well.
Then Kate was out of the garage and on the street, and she turned right along Louisiana Street and kept going. She glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw the creature stumbling back up to its feet, looking after her, its head still impossibly angled to one side.
They won’t die. They just won’t die.
Kate was rolling up the window when she saw Bell Street coming up. She turned right, running a stop sign, wondering if there were any cops left out there to write her a ticket. She had never wanted a police ticket more in her life.
There were cars on the street, silent and still and driverless. She swerved around them, going much too fast, heard the tires squealing and the Buick’s grill delivering glancing blows off one of the vehicles, then another. She had to use both hands because turning the Buick was a monumental task. She didn’t know how anyone could drive such a monstrous car all day long. Her hands were already aching.
She saw the same cars and intersection pileups that she had seen from the fifth floor of the garage, but up close they looked more vicious. And the blood. There was blood everywhere underneath the bright street lamps.
The red Camaro flashed across her mind, and she pulled her foot off the gas with some effort, watching the speedometer drop from fifty to forty and then finally to thirty. She came to a red light, where a pileup had rendered the entire intersection impassable. Kate came to a near stop, but then panic overtook her and she made a hard U-turn, a difficult feat given the Buick’s size. She managed to scrape the sides of two more cars before she could finally turn all the way around.
She went back up Bell Street, in the direction she had come, never once allowing the Buick to stop completely.
She took her foot off the gas some more and brought the speed all the way down to twenty. Then did it again until she was going as slow as ten miles per hour. She kept her right foot firmly poised over the gas pedal, ready to crunch down any second if needed. She prayed that she wouldn’t need to, because Kate wasn’t entirely sure the Buick could accelerate on a whim.
But there was no need to push the Buick. Although she could see them in the shadows, along the rooftops, and between the alleyways and sometimes inside the parked vehicles, they didn’t attack. They watched her instead, following her with black, unblinking eyes, waiting for an opportunity. Just waiting…
They were everywhere.
They were simply…everywhere.
She drove in silence, scanning the roads and sidewalks and buildings around her for signs of survivors. There had to be others. She had survived, and there was nothing special about her. She had no training, no weapons — unless you counted the tire iron or her high heels — and she had managed to live through the night. For now, anyway.
Look for order out of chaos. Look for order out of chaos…
She leaned forward in the big seat as she neared Smith Street, which ended Bell and forced her into a decision — left or right. I-45 was to her left, and turning right would only take her farther into the Downtown district.
Order out of chaos…
She listened to the soothing click-clack of the lights as they changed from yellow to red then to green and back to yellow again.
Lights. So many lights. That was all she heard. All she could hear.
The buildings were quiet, the streets lifeless around her.
She didn’t know how long she sat there, but at some point, and she didn’t know when exactly, she turned right and kept driving…
CHAPTER 5
LARA
She was dreaming, though she wasn’t entirely sure about what, when the pop-pop-pop sounds of gunshots intruded and she woke up with a head full of rocks.
Lara opened lazy eyes to the pitch-black darkness of her room and lifted her head from a heavily dog-eared copy of Pocket Medicine.
I need to get a Kindle version…
Blonde strands of hair fell across her face, and she blew at them, then sat very still and listened, wondering if she had actually imagined the sound of gunshots. Her mind wasn’t nearly creative enough to spend precious brain cells conjuring up non-existent sounds of violence. God knows she saw enough of it in real life; she didn’t need to go dreaming about it, too.
Her laptop was open in front of her, a dimmed screen saver featuring the cast of ER floating in the background, until she accidentally tapped the casing and Windows desktop flickered back on, the first source of light in the entire room for…
How long had she been asleep?
She glanced down at the clock on the laptop: 10:11 p.m.
Ten hours…
She had a throbbing headache, and her joints felt restless and tired at the same time.
How many melatonin pills had she taken? She only remembered one. Maybe two. It was hard to think at the moment.
Never again…
Lara forced herself to stand up, get the blood flowing again. She moved across the room to the window, taking her time with the short distance. She stepped over a backpack, its contents spilled out all over the place. She made a mental note to get rid of the two-day-old sandwich in the corner, which explained the smell.
She swiped at the curtains, wondering if Tracy had left any cans of Red Bull in the fridge. Red Bull was usually good to wash away melatonin-induced drowsiness. What were the chances of that, though? Miniscule. Tracy drank Red Bull like water.
Lara stared listlessly out the second floor window at the apartment complex across the street. She saw lights on behind a couple of windows, but most of them were dark. Which was unusual. The Eastside University Village Community had its own ebb and flow, distinct from the city around it, and you could find lights on at all hours of the night, seven days a week, but especially on the weekends. After-hours clubs were plentiful and popular around here.