“Is it working?”
“I think so. We’re almost to Main… uh-oh.”
He was looking in the rearview mirror.
“What is it?”
“They stopped walking to the bridge. They’re circling back.”
“Back to where?”
The rear windshield shattered from a heavy blow. It didn’t explode in pieces, because car glass was good like that. Instead, it fell down into the back seat as a single sheet.
Annie screamed.
“Dammit,” Ed muttered. Then he punched it.
The engine screamed, and the car lurched forward, then up, then forward again. Annie was practically on the floor of the car, and could feel every bump and thud through the undercarriage. Without question, they were running over people.
Meanwhile, someone was trying to crawl into the car through the space left by the shattered rear window. It was a woman Annie didn’t recognize, clinging onto the side of the opening and bleeding from the pieces of glass stuck in the frame. She was probably on the lower side of her forties, this woman. Maybe she was a mother of one of the younger kids in town. She could be someone who liked antiquing, and ice cream, and Sunday choir. Now she was running the risk of losing a finger as her vacant eyes searched the car for Annie.
Ed hit a rough patch in the road and started to fishtail. Annie could feel them losing control.
“Slow down before we end up in the river,” Annie shouted.
“You are…” the woman in the window said.
“If I slow down we’re stuck. I’m… dragging at least three people. Hold on tight.”
“To what?”
“Um, okay, sit up, get your seat belt on.”
She pulled herself back up into the bucket seat and strapped in. The woman clinging to the rear appreciated this, clearly, as she started saying “you are” even louder.
The hood of the car had a passenger too, a confused looking young man Annie recognized as a customer of the diner. His expression seemed to indicate that he had no more idea than anyone else why he was riding the outside of a moving car.
Ahead of them, townspeople were converging on a point just ahead of the hood of the car. There was no way anything short of a tank was going to make it through all of them.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Look left.”
She did. There were more zombies, but on the other side was an empty space for about ten feet, beyond which was Main.
“No, no, no, don’t do that.”
“Why not, it’s clear.”
“It’s clear because the grass is hiding a crevasse.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“I’m dead serious. There’s a crease right there.”
“A crease? I can jump a crease.”
“Ed…”
There was no more discussion, because then Ed jerked the wheel to the left and floored the gas, and committed to the move.
The space he was aiming for actually had a name, and that name was Charlie’s Pocket. It was well established long before the early demise of one Charles Dane Fincus that it was possible, if not paying attention, to miss the turn for the bridge, but Charlie performed the feat so spectacularly that he was the one everyone talked about when they talked about the pocket at all.
Building the bridge meant extending the land from the level of Main Street to the edge of the river. The process left a little lip of space at the corner, on both sides, where Main dropped off but before the land build-up for the bridge commenced. Most parts of the year, the void was invisible, either due to the naturally growing long grasses that came up from the riverfront, or snowdrifts.
One night some years prior, Charlie Fincus took the turn for the bridge at a speed estimated after the fact to be somewhere in the range of seventy miles per hour. He missed the road, and hit the pocket instead. At that speed, the pocket turned into a slalom course that carried his car straight down on its side until it rammed into the edge of the river, flipped up and landed upside-down in the water.
Charlie wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, so he didn’t make it all the way to the river in the car. Instead, he was flung like a rock from a sling when his Chevy went hood over tailpipe. He landed on the riverbank, but what made the story so memorable was that the bank he landed on was on the other side of the river. He died on impact, thankfully.
Annie knew the legend of Charlie’s Pocket, but didn’t think she had enough time to convey it to Ed, who wasn’t working with a ton of options anyway. She was just glad the town hadn’t gotten around to putting up the necessary guardrails yet, a rare instance of bureaucracy working in someone’s favor.
The car hit the curb at an angle, the left tire bouncing up before the right, turning them a little bit too even with the edge of the bridge. Their momentum corrected for it in time, though---barely—so they hit the pocket with a little speed.
The good news was, when they went airborne they lost the people (or parts of them) that were being dragged. The bad news was they weren’t airborne nearly long enough to clear the jump. The weight of the engine block pulled the nose right down to the ground, and far too soon. Ed hit the gas as soon as the front tires were down, but by then the car was already facing a twenty-degree angle. In other words, while the car’s nose was pointed at Main, it wasn’t heading in that direction. It was sliding into the pocket.
“Annie, you’re going to have to jump from the car,” Ed said, way more calmly than such a statement warranted.
“What?”
“I mean it, right now. Unbuckle, open the door and jump as far as you can.”
“What about you?”
“I have to hold my foot on the gas so you can get free. Soon as you’re out, I’ll join you.”
“C’mon, that’s what people say right before they die in a ball of—”
“Annie, please!”
“Right, but I better see you in a minute.”
“You will, I promise.”
She unbuckled, pushed open the door, and jumped clear, into tall grass that hid an unanticipated steepness.
As soon as she was out, the car gave in to gravity. It slid past her and caught the deep part of Charlie’s Pocket. It didn’t stop until it reached the river.
She didn’t see Ed get clear.
“Dammit, Ed, now what am I supposed to do?”
It seemed unreasonably quiet, lying there in the tall grass. She could hear her own breathing, and the car grinding to a stop at the riverbank, but she was beneath the bridge and the road, and so insulated from the sound coming from those places. It was oddly peaceful, and staying right there was tempting. Maybe the zombies wouldn’t find her there, and if they did, it was possible every one of them would slide into the pocket and never get near her.
It wasn’t a terrible plan, and she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
“You are…”
The woman from the back of the car made it out okay, it looked like. She was halfway down the hill and climbing in Annie’s direction. It made for a compelling reason not to stay where she was.
Violet’s. I could go there.
She would need to find a car, or find someone with a car.
Just break into a house and find the car key, that’s all.
It wouldn’t have been all that difficult, not with everyone in town on the streets. Zombies weren’t driving, and there was twelve blocks of row house residences less than a mile to her left. Sure, driving the car anywhere was going to end up being a serious challenge, but one thing at a time. Annie couldn’t stay where she was, so even if stealing a car wasn’t really a viable long-term plan, it was at least a plan.
She got up and started climbing. Main was pretty close, and she was a fast runner, and none of these people were moving all that quickly. She could do it.