She picked the rock up in her fist and rolled onto her back.
An old woman had her ankle. She kicked loose, then threw the rock at the woman’s face before she had to hear another iteration of arrre yooooou. As the lady fell backwards, Annie climbed to her knees and then her feet, and then stopped, because a much larger person was now blocking her route.
She’d never seen him before, but he was enormous. He looked like the kind of zombie a rock to the face would only slightly inconvenience.
Then she heard the car again.
“I’M OVER HERE!” she shouted. “HELP ME!”
There was shuffling in the row behind her, and rusting to her left and right.
Nowhere to go.
The engine’s roar was the first indication that all was not lost. The headlights were the second. Then the army Humvee exploded onto the scene with the kind of cinematic drama one just didn’t see all that often around Sorrow Falls. The front fender connected with the huge zombie barring her path and sent him flying, and then skidded to a stop with the back door aligned with the cornrow. The door flew open. Annie half expected to hear an orchestral swell.
“Get in, girl,” the driver said. It was an army guy; she thought she knew him. “Hurry up!”
She ran. It was only twenty feet but she could hear them closing in on her so it was a terrifying twenty feet. She dove into the back seat and landed squarely on top of Doug Kozinsky.
“Dougie??”
“Hey Annie,” he said.
She pushed off him and reached back to close the door as the driver floored it.
“Pickles, right?” she said.
“Corporal Dill Louboutin at your service.”
“How’d you guys even find me?”
The Humvee fishtailed a little, trying to execute a turn to get back up onto the road, so Dill had to concentrate for a few seconds. Annie peeked behind them. The field was crawling with zombies. It was a wonder they hadn’t gotten her.
“You can thank your boyfriend there,” Dill said.
“I’m not… Sorry, I’ve been telling him…” Even in the dark, she knew Dougie was blushing.
“I broke out of the base with a gun to my head,” Dill said, “so this young man could ride off to your rescue instead of just getting the hell out of town like any sane person. We drove to your house, but nobody was home. Looked like you’re missing some floor in that place, too. Dunno if the zombies did that or what, but… well, then we spotted the bike light from the porch. It seemed clear there were a number of zombie folks interested in converging on a moving target in the middle of the field. Mr. Kozinsky imputed that this moving target was you, and we’re both a little surprised he was right.”
“I recognized your bike,” Dougie said.
“From up the hill?” Dill asked. “It wasn’t anything more than a light.”
“Yeah but I knew.”
“Well thank you, both of you,” she said. “They almost had me.”
The Humvee made it out of the corn. Rather than crest the road—it was steep from that angle—Dill kept to a route on the space between the lip of the street and the edge of the field.
“So what did they want you for?” Dill asked.
“I think they want to take me to the ship.”
“Oh. How come?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Okay. Well I’m gonna hook up with the road up here and do everything I can to get you two kids out of town, all right?”
“There is no out of town,” Annie said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Nobody can get in or out. We’re all trapped here.”
He laughed. It had a tinge of hysteria in it, like that was the piece of news that finally sent him over the edge.
“Well, all right, where do you want to go?”
“Can you take me to the spaceship?”
“I thought that’s what the zombies wanted to do.”
“It is.”
“But you’re going anyway.”
“Yes. I’d just rather do it under my own power. Less bruising that way.”
“Well, all right. I was on my way there after as it was. Plus these villager zombies ain’t trying to kill me like the army ones are. Should be fun.”
IT WASN’T FUN.
Dill seemed to enjoy it all right. He’d reached a sort of dissonance over what he was doing, which was running over people. He was good at it. In a video game he’d be leveling up. In the real world, he was having a psychotic episode.
There were sick thuds and crunches, and the Humvee kept lifting off the ground unevenly, and she knew what each one of those sounds meant. She kept her eyes closed and tried to resist telling him to slow down and go around, because that was the wrong advice.
“It’s going to be okay, Annie,” Dougie said. He’d been clutching her hand since she landed on top of him, thinking perhaps that this was comforting. She didn’t find it comforting, but he probably did. Plus, he rescued her. That was worth at least a little handholding.
“There’s a lot going on you don’t understand, Doug. But thanks. I appreciate you thinking of me.”
“Of course.”
“So Dill, why were you going to the ship?” she asked.
“Seemed like the place to go,” he said. “Spaceship makes zombies, go to the ship to stop the zombies, right? Plus, my boy’s there.”
“Sam?”
“You know it. Woo, look out!”
He swerved into a guy in a polo shirt and knocked him sideways off the street.
“Ten points.”
“Sam’s not there,” Annie said. “I left him a little while ago.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“There are a lot of long stories, Pickles, I don’t have time to tell you any of them.”
“Yeah okay, but don’t call me that. So he’s all right?”
“He was when I left him.”
“That’s one thing I don’t have to worry about, then, girl, thanks. I didn’t want to run down my buddy. Glad he’s not one of these dead-eyes.”
“The soldier zombies are bad,” Dougie said. “We had to go through a lot of them to get off the base.”
“What were you even doing on the base?”
“Mom and dad are out here somewhere, so… Once I figured out what was going on I found dad’s revolver and snuck on. I do it all the time; they don’t even check the fences below the field grass. I saw something was up with the soldiers and thought, you know. I know you were there before.”
Annie realized he’d risked his life looking for her, and added it to the list of things she was already feeling bad about. It wasn’t as consequential as possibly triggering a zombie apocalypse that was slowly killing the town, but it was right up there.
“Comin’ up,” Dill said.
Annie took a look through the windshield. The grounds around the ship remained lit up by spotlights, but there wasn’t a lot to see. The campers looked abandoned, and there were hardly any zombies.
“Do you have a key to the gate?” Annie asked.
“No, but I can just… uh-oh.”
“What?”
The answer was coming up the hill. Army soldiers zombie-walking in something like a coordinated fashion, at a slightly faster clip than the civilian ones had exhibited. They were headed for the gates as well.
“Behind us too,” Dougie said, looking out the back window.
“They’re converging on the ship,” Dill said.
“To keep us out?” Dougie said. “Cuz we’re gonna beat them there.”
“Keep us out or keep us in,” Annie said. “Look, I don’t want you two to get hurt. If you want to drop me off, I can get in there on my own.”
“How are you going to get in?” Dill asked. “There’s barbed wire over the top, you know that. Why do you even want to get in?”