Chapter 1 The Road West #3
Dane turned his head toward the front of the clinic.
The sound was distant but gathering, voices without language folding into one another block by block.
The pharmacy shot had brought them after all.
Maybe the bell too. Maybe simple bad luck, though Dane no longer believed luck had the decency to be simple.
Rosa whispered, “How many?”
Dane moved to the window and peeled back one corner of newspaper.
Down the street, figures staggered through the rain from the direction of the pharmacy.
Five. Nine. More behind the cars, shapes emerging from alleys and storefronts, drawn by echoes they could not understand but hated enough to follow.
“Too many to wait out,” Dane said.
Rosa swore under her breath and went for a backpack near the counter.
Quist closed his eyes.
“I had hoped for ten more minutes.”
“You had yesterday,” Rosa said.
“I was busy being shot.”
Nell crossed to the cooler and reached for it, but Rosa caught her wrist.
“I’ve got it.”
“It’s mine.”
“Nell—”
“It came from me.”
The two stared at each other across the open cooler. In Nell’s face there was fear, yes, but under it something harder, a child’s fury at being protected so thoroughly she had no space left to stand.
Rosa let go.
Nell lifted the cooler with both hands. It was heavier than she expected; her arms dipped, but she did not put it down.
Dane watched them and felt the old familiar door closing in his chest, the one he had built after the pileup outside Amarillo when his driving partner, Luis, had been pinned behind the crushed dash and begged Dane to pull him out while smoke turned the cab into a furnace.
Dane had pulled until skin came off his palms.
He had pulled until the first responders dragged him back.
For two years afterward, he had avoided remembering Luis’s voice by keeping engines loud and conversations short.
Now a girl held a cooler like it might bite her, and a doctor with a bullet in his arm was asking him to drive into the entire dead country.
“No,” Dane said, but the word had lost its spine.
Quist heard it.
“Mr. Whitlock, I am not asking you to save the world. The world is too large and has historically resisted improvement. I am asking you to take one child, one box, and one chance farther than I can.”
The moaning outside thickened. Something struck the plastic-covered front doors with a dull slap. Rosa hurried past Dane into the waiting room.
“We need to move.”
Dane looked at Quist.
“You walking?”
The old doctor smiled, and this time there was no humor in it.
“No.”
Nell’s head snapped around.
“You said you could.”
“I said I might.”
“You lied.”
“I hoped.”
“That’s the same thing when you’re old. You think if you say it calmly, it counts different.”
Quist flinched. Not from the wound. From her.
Dane wished he had left after the pharmacy.
He wished he had started Tomber, driven west, and let Sallow Creek shrink in the mirror into another place where somebody else’s grief lived.
But he had not. He had come when the bell rang, and now the room had tightened around him until leaving alone would require a kind of violence he was not sure he had left.
Rosa returned with her pistol in one hand.
“Front won’t hold long.”
Dane took the cooler from Nell before she could protest, testing the weight.
“You got a back way?”
Rosa stared.
Dane said, “Don’t make me repeat it.”
“The alley door. It opens toward the church lot.”
“My truck’s on Maple.”
“I know where your truck is.”
“Of course you do.”
Nell looked at Quist, her mouth trembling with effort rather than weakness.
“He’s coming.”
Quist lifted his uninjured hand. Nell did not take it at first. Then she did, angrily, fingers clutching his as if she could punish him into standing.
“You listen to Rosa until you can safely ignore her,” Quist said.
Rosa made a wounded sound.
“You listen to Dane when he talks about roads, engines, and danger. You do not listen when he talks about himself.”
Dane looked at him sharply.
Quist’s gaze stayed on Nell.
“And when you reach Harbor Nine, you insist on being spoken to before being spoken about.”
Nell’s face broke then, but only for an instant. She leaned over him, pressed her forehead to his, and whispered something Dane did not hear. The doctor closed his eyes as if the whisper weighed more than the blood he had lost.
The front barricade crashed inward.
Rosa shouted, “Now!”
Dane thrust the cooler against Nell’s chest.
“Hold it tight. If you drop it, don’t stop to pick up anything else.”
“I won’t drop it.”
“Good.”
He handed Rosa the duffel.
“You stay behind me until the alley. Then you lead.”
“I don’t take orders from truckers.”
“You do when the trucker has the shotgun.”
A thin, almost unwilling smile flashed across her face.
“Fine. For the next thirty seconds.”
Dane stepped into the waiting room as the first infected forced itself over the fallen cabinet. It had no lower lip, and its teeth clicked together with blind eagerness. Behind it, hands pushed through torn plastic, reaching into the clinic’s clean little island with gray fingers.
Dane fired once, close enough that the blast turned the room white for half a heartbeat. The infected dropped over the cabinet and tangled there, blocking the next two. He did not wait to admire the result.
“Move.”
Rosa grabbed Nell by the shoulder and shoved her toward the hall. Dane followed backward, pumping the shotgun, watching the barricade shudder as more bodies pressed in. Dr. Quist remained on the exam table, one hand resting on his chest, face turned toward the ceiling.
At the hall’s end, Rosa kicked open a rear door, and rain blew in cold and hard.
The alley beyond was narrow, cluttered with trash bins and a fallen telephone pole.
Dane heard the infected at the front spill into the waiting room, their bodies knocking chairs aside, their voices rising now that warm life was moving away from them.
Nell slipped on wet pavement. Rosa caught her by the back of the flannel and hauled her upright.
“Keep your feet under you,” Rosa snapped.
“I know!”
“You didn’t!”
Dane stepped out last and pulled the door shut behind him. There was no lock worth trusting, so he jammed the shotgun through the handle and a bent pipe bracket, then immediately regretted losing the gun’s freedom. A body struck the other side of the door. The bracket groaned.
He yanked the shotgun free.
“Go.”
They ran.
Not fast. Fast made people fall, and falling made people die.
They moved at the desperate half-run of the exhausted and overburdened, Rosa ahead with the pistol up, Nell in the middle clutching the cooler, Dane behind with the shotgun and the hard sense of distance shrinking at his back.
The alley opened beside the church. Its front steps were crowded with infected drawn by the bell, their faces tilted toward the steeple as if waiting for a sermon.
Rosa stopped so abruptly Nell nearly hit her.
“Left,” Dane said.
“Left is fenced.”
“Then climb.”
The fence behind the church playground was chain-link, six feet high, slick with rain.
Rosa threw the duffel over first. Nell handed the cooler up, and Dane took it while she climbed with quick, furious movements.
An infected in a choir robe turned from the church steps and saw them.
Its moan sharpened. Others followed the sound.
Rosa cleared the fence and dropped hard on the other side. Nell got one leg over, froze when her sneaker slipped, and for one bad second Dane saw her hanging there, small and exposed against the gray sky.
“Don’t look down,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I hate you.”
“After the fence.”
She swung over and fell into Rosa’s arms. Dane tossed the cooler down carefully, then climbed after them with less grace and more weight. His boot caught near the top. Behind him, fingers hooked through the fence, rattling metal. He kicked loose and dropped badly, pain jolting up his left knee.
Rosa saw it.
“You hurt?”
“Only in the places I keep.”
They crossed a backyard where laundry hung dead on a line and a golden retriever, infected or merely starving, barked from inside a screened porch until its voice broke. Dane did not look at it. Maple Street lay beyond a hedge, and Tomber waited at the curb like the ugliest promise he had ever made.
Two men stood beside it.
For a moment Dane’s mind refused them because they were alive and upright and not part of the plan he had been forming while running.
One wore a motorcycle helmet with the visor lifted.
The other had a red scarf tied around his neck and a rifle held loose in both hands.
Both turned as Dane, Rosa, and Nell broke from the yard.
The man in the scarf smiled.
“Well, hell,” he said. “Doc wasn’t lying.”
Rosa raised her pistol.
Dane raised the shotgun.