People tended to look twice when they saw her on it. The A-frame design was flattened and stretched, so riding on it meant always being in a forward position. This lowered the center of gravity, kept her out of the wind and made it easier to corner and maneuver in tight spots, but also made climbing hills a lot more difficult. It also probably looked a little odd.
AT FIRST, Annie tore past the zombies like they were standing still, because they almost were. It was a little harder than with regular pedestrians because normal people moved with intent in one direction and these guys were kind of drifting, but they were far enough apart for this to not be an impossible problem. It was just a new challenge. She enjoyed it perhaps more than was appropriate under the circumstances.
It only became clear how foolhardy she was being after about a mile of travel. That was when the zombies ahead of her started organizing, and focusing less on trying to grab her as she went by than on closing off her available routes of travel. It stopped being so much fun then, especially after she nearly ran over a seven-year old girl.
Annie knew the child, sort of. She didn’t know the girl’s name, but she’d spotted her in the library a couple of times. Seeing her out at two in the morning, in her pajamas, stumbling around with the others and trying to catch Annie—or whatever their intentions were—was like a punch in the stomach. It was enough to remind Annie that her two A.M. bike ride wasn’t putting just her at risk.
She decided to go over the shoulderless left side of the road. If the bike was meant to be thrown down hills, perhaps it was time to try it out on one.
Liberty, Patience, and Spaceship Road—and Annie’s own street, a small spit of connective tissue between Liberty and Patience called Calabash Way—encircled a large land area consisting of private roads and farmlands. The properties belonged to six different families. From her bedroom window, which was on the top floor of a house already at the top of a hill, she could see the checkerboard effect of their vegetable crops, smell the fertilizer, and hear the cows lowing on warm afternoons.
From a distance, the farmland looked flat. Annie didn’t realize exactly how incorrect this was until she hit the first field off the roadside. The downhill wasn’t all that bad. She nearly went over the handlebars thanks to a couple of ditches, but neither was deep enough to completely eat her front wheel, so she made it out. But once the area flattened into what should have been easy travel, it became much worse.
The soil was loose and muddy, and either terribly uneven or full of rows that stuck up like train tracks. Travel felt like one of those dreams where she was trying to run but couldn’t move her legs fast enough to get anywhere, unless she was getting thrown from the bike in which case it felt like one of those dreams where she was falling off a cliff.
She got thrown three times, thankfully to a soft landing each time. This was hardly guaranteed, as the fields had their share of sharp protrusions just waiting for someone to get impaled.
The good news was, the terrain slowed the zombies down too. She was going ten miles an hour or less depending on the size of the plants in her way, but the uneven surface was causing a lot of comic stumbling and falling behind her.
The bad news was, this detour was only a temporary solution. Since there were roads on all sides of the fields, and the zombies were all along those roads, she’d basically put herself in a position to be closed in on from all sides. Her hope was to punch through to the other side while there was still a gap to hit.
That was a solid plan right up until she hit Mac Tunney’s cornfield.
It wasn’t the field itself that was the problem. Actually, it was the smoothest ride she’d experienced up to that point. The rows were neat and wide and the ground between them was level and a lot more solid than she had a reason to expect. But the rows didn’t head in the direction she wanted to go, and it was impossible to ride against the grain in a cornfield in August. The stalks were too high.
She had to stop five or six times to push diagonally through the rows before continuing the ride. This was a little terrifying, because off the bike she couldn’t see over the stalks, and she knew there were people out there closing in on her. She could hear them.
Then she got the flat.
It wasn’t easy to poke a hole through one of her tires. There was a thick layer of Kevlar between the tread and the inner tube that could redirect everything short of a nail driven dead straight through the middle. For that to happen, she either had to run over a nail positioned on the ground just so, or someone had to go after her tire with a hammer and a nail.
For whatever reason, there was a stray nail in farmer Tunney’s field. Maybe it fell from one of the combines or out of a hardware kit, or maybe the universe hated her personally. Somehow, in a two-acre field of corn, her rear tire found that nail.
She felt it right away, and knew exactly what it was, and kept riding anyway. One of the things about hitting a nail was that you could keep going for a little while so long as you didn’t pull the nail out. It plugged the hole it made.
The seal was weak, though, so air escaped around it pretty quickly. She made it probably an extra quarter-mile on her dying tire, and then another forty feet on the flat before giving up. It just wasn’t possible to continue; the rear wheel couldn’t give her any traction at all, and her maneuverability was gone.
It was better at that point to continue on foot. Although better was a relative term. It was faster than the bike in its current state, but not much faster. And she was taller on the bike. She could see Calabash, and her bedroom window, on her right, and used that to help maintain the correct orientation, but there was no avoiding the zombies any longer. If they came up from the left or right, she wouldn’t know until they had her.
Maybe that’s okay, she thought. Maybe I should just let them catch me.
AFTER ONLY TEN minutes of running, Annie was too winded to continue. She felt like this was something she should have been embarrassed about, until she remembered how late it was and how much of the past twelve hours she’d spent fleeing. Perhaps simply running was easier on her head, because it kept her mind from dwelling on all horrors great and small, but it was hell on her legs and lungs. She had scratches all over those legs—she was in shorts—and her lungs didn’t seem to know how to get enough oxygen any more. Her heart was racing at an alarming pace; she could feel it thumping all the way up her shoulder and along her left arm.
So she stopped, and listened. And determined two things.
First, they were all around her. She could hear corn stalks rustling in every direction. There was hardly any wind so it couldn’t have been anything else.
Second, something big was coming. Something with an engine.
It wasn’t on the road; that was obvious from the bumping and crunching sounds. Somebody was driving something through the corn stalks. Since as far as she knew, zombies didn’t drive cars, she headed toward that noise.
She got close enough to see the headlights bouncing in her approximate direction (as opposed to tail lights heading away from her) when a hand grabbed her ankle.
The dirt came up fast, swatting her in the side of her face and knocking her a little loopy. It was a second before she understood that the ground was where it had always been, she’d just fallen onto it. Her head was next to a big rock that would have probably cracked her skull if she’d fallen a little to the right.