“Just what’s in the cylinder, I think there’s five rounds left and that’s it.”
Bob glances in the rearview mirror. Lilly sees his deeply lined eyes sparking with panic. Bob is looking at Lilly when he says, “Thoughts?”
Lilly says, “Okay, so even if we take out most of them, the noise is gonna draw a swarm. You ask me, I say we avoid them altogether.”
Right then, a muffled thudding noise makes Lilly jump. Her ribs twinge as she twists around. In the narrow little window on the back wall of the cab, Megan’s pale, anxious face hovers. She pounds her palm on the glass and mouths the words What the fuck?
“Hold on! It’s okay! Just hold on!” Lilly yells through the glass, then turns to Josh. “Whaddaya think?”
Josh looks out his window at the long, rust-dimpled mirror. In the oblong reflection, he sees the lonely crossroads about three hundred yards back, barely visible in the dying light. “Back up,” he says.
Bob looks at him. “Say what?”
“Back up … hurry. We’re gonna take that side road back there.”
Bob jacks the lever into reverse and steps on it. The truck lurches.
The engine whines, the gravitational tug pulling everybody forward.
Bob bites his lower lip as he wrestles the steering wheel, using the side mirror to guide him, the truck careening backward, the front end fishtailing, the gears screaming. The rear end approaches the crossroads.
Bob locks up the brakes and Josh slams into his seat as the truck’s rear end skids off the far shoulder of the two-lane, tangling with a knot of wild dogwood, cattails, and mayapple, sending up a cloud of leaves and debris. No one hears the shuffling sounds of something dead stirring behind the scrub brush.
No one hears the faint scrape of the dead thing lumbering out of the foliage and clamping its dead fingers around the king cab’s rear bumper until it’s too late.
* * *
Inside the rear camper compartment, each of them tumbling to the floor in the violent pitching motions of the truck, each of them giggling hysterically, Megan and Scott are oblivious to the zombie now attached to the running board in the rear. As the Dodge Ram slams into drive and blasts down the perpendicular dirt road, they each climb back onto their makeshift seats fashioned out of peach crates, each still giggling furiously.
The air inside the cramped camper is blue from the haze of an entire bowl of sativa weed, which Scott fired up ten minutes ago. He’s been conserving his stash, nursing it, dreading the inevitable day he would run out and would have to figure out how to grow it in the sandy clay.
“You just farted when you fell,” Scott chortles at Megan, his eyes already dreamy and blistered with a major buzz humming behind his eyes.
“I most certainly did not,” she counters in her uncontrollable giggle, trying to balance herself on the crate. “That was my fucking shoe scraping the fucking floor.”
“Bullshit, dude, you so farted.”
“Did not.”
“You did, you so did—you just ripped one, and it was such a girl fart.”
Megan roars with laughter. “What the fucking hell is a girl fart?”
Scott guffaws. “It’s—it’s kinda like—kinda like a cute little toot. Like a little train engine. Toot-toot. The little fart that could…”
They both bend over with an uncontainable spasm of hilarity as a livid, milky-eyed face rises up like a small moon in the dark surface of the window at the rear of the camper. This one is male and middle-aged and nearly bald, its scalp mapped with deep blue veins and wisps of mildew-gray hair.
Neither Megan nor Scott sees it at first. They don’t see the wind blowing its mossy strands of thinning hair, or its greasy lips peeling back to expose blackened teeth, or the fumbling of insensate, rotting fingers as they push through the gap in the partially sprung hatch.
“OH, SHIT!” Scott blurts the words out on a stutter of sputtering laughter when he sees the intruder boarding. “OH, SHIT!!”
Megan now doubles over with convulsive laughter as Scott spins and falls on his face and then scuttles madly across the narrow floor space on his hands and knees toward the garden implements. He’s not laughing anymore. The zombie is already halfway inside the camper. The sound of its buzz-saw snarl and the stench of its decomposed tissues fill the air. Megan finally sees the intruder and she starts to cough and wheeze, her laughter garbling slightly.
Scott reaches for the pitchfork. The truck swerves. The zombie—all the way inside now—stumbles drunkenly sideways and slams into the wall. A stack of crates tumbles. Scott gets the pitchfork up and moving.
Megan scuttles backward, sliding along on her ass, burrowing into the far corner. The terror in her eyes seems incongruous with her high-pitched, hiccupping giggles. Like a motor that won’t stop turning, her garbled, deranged laughter continues as Scott stands up on wobbling knees and lunges with the pitchfork as hard as he can in the general direction of the moving corpse in front of him.
The rusty tines strike the side of the thing’s face as it’s turning.
One of the spikes impales the zombie’s left eye. The other points go into the mandible and jugular. Black blood ejaculates across the camper. Scott lets out a war cry and pulls the implement free. The zombie staggers backward toward the windblown hatch—which is flapping now—and for some reason, the second blow gets a huge, convulsive, crazed laugh out of Megan.
The tines sink into the thing’s skull.
This is so goddamn hilarious to Megan: the funny dead man shuddering as though electrocuted, with the fork sunk in his skull, his arms reaching impotently at the air. Like a silly circus clown in whiteface, with big goofy black teeth, the thing staggers backward for a moment, until the wind pressure pulls it out of the flapping rear hatch.
The pitchfork slips free of Scott’s grasp and the zombie tumbles off the truck. Scott falls on his ass, landing in a pile of clothes.
Both Megan and Scott crack up now at the absurdity of the zombie careening to the road with the pitchfork still planted in its skull. They both scuttle on hands and knees to the rear hatch and gaze out at the human remains receding into the distance behind them—the pitchfork still sticking straight out of its head like a mile marker.
Scott pulls the hatch shut and they both crack up again in spasms of stoned laughter and frenzied coughing.
Still giggling, her eyes wet, Megan turns toward the front of the camper. Through the cab window, she can see the backs of Lilly’s and Josh’s heads. They look preoccupied—oblivious to what just occurred only inches away from them. They appear to be pointing at something in the distance, way up on the crest of an adjacent hill.
Megan can’t believe that nobody in the cab heard the commotion in the rear camper. Was the road noise that loud? Was the struggle drowned out by the sound of giggling? Megan is about to bang on the glass when she finally sees what all the pointing is about.
Bob is turning off the road and heading up a steep dirt path toward a building that may or may not be abandoned.
FIVE
The deserted gas station sits at the top of a hill overlooking the surrounding orchards. Bordered on three sides by weed-whiskered clapboard fencing and scattered garbage Dumpsters, the place has a hand-painted sign over its twin fuel islands—one diesel and three gas pumps—which says FORTNOY’S FUEL AND BAIT. The single-story building features a flyspecked office, a retail store, and a small service garage with a single lift.
When Bob pulls in to the cracked cement lot—his lights off in order to avoid detection—night has fallen into full darkness, and the king cab’s tires crunch on broken glass. Megan and Scott peer out of the rear hatch, taking in the shadows of the abandoned property, as Bob pulls the truck around behind the garage area, out of the line of vision of any nosy passersby.