Chapter 1 The Road West #4
The helmeted man brought his weapon up slower than he should have, maybe because he had expected frightened clinic people and not a trucker with rain in his eyes and murder suddenly simplified in his head. Dane did not fire. Not yet. Guns were math, and math punished emotion.
The man in the scarf looked at Nell. Then the cooler.
“Easy now. We’re not here to hurt anybody who acts sensible.”
Dane said, “Step away from the truck.”
“That yours?”
“More than it’s yours.”
The man chuckled.
“My boss’ll like you.”
Rosa’s voice went flat.
“Milemen.”
The scarfed man gave her a little bow.
“Road’s got to belong to somebody.”
“It used to belong to everyone,” Nell said.
He looked at her with amusement, which was the wrong thing to do if he wanted Dane to keep thinking mathematically.
“That so, sweetheart?”
Dane fired into the pavement six inches from the man’s boot.
The blast cracked down Maple Street, louder than thunder. The scarfed man stumbled backward with his rifle half-raised, eyes wide now, smile gone. The helmeted man flinched so hard his shoulder hit Tomber’s door.
Dane pumped the shotgun.
“Next one costs more.”
Rosa moved first. She shot the helmeted man in the thigh. He screamed and dropped, rifle clattering under the truck. Nell made a small horrified sound but did not drop the cooler.
The scarfed man swung his rifle toward Rosa.
Dane shot him in the chest.
The impact knocked the man against Tomber’s grille. He slid down, scarf darkening, hands pawing at the rain as if searching for something he had misplaced. Dane felt the recoil in his shoulder and nowhere else. Later, maybe, it would arrive. For now it was only one more door closed.
Rosa stared at him.
“You said next one.”
“He raised the price.”
The infected at the church fence had found the gate. Metal shrieked behind them.
Dane grabbed the helmeted man by the back of his jacket and dragged him away from the driver’s door.
The man was sobbing, clutching his leg. Dane wanted the keys to whatever they had driven, wanted their ammunition, wanted the answers that might be hidden in their pockets. There was no time for wanting.
He opened Tomber’s passenger door.
“Nell. In.”
She climbed awkwardly with the cooler, face white and wet. Rosa threw the duffel after her, then looked back toward the clinic.
The bell rang once more.
Not from the rope.
From inside.
Rosa whispered, “Harlan.”
The sound carried over the rain, over the gathering moans, over the wounded Mileman’s crying. One last cracked note rolled across Sallow Creek, deliberate and impossible to misunderstand. Dr. Quist had found enough strength to pull the infected back toward him.
Nell turned in the seat.
“No.”
Dane got behind the wheel.
Nell twisted toward the clinic, eyes huge.
“No, we can’t just—”
Rosa climbed in after her and slammed the door.
“Nell.”
“No!”
Dane started the engine. Tomber coughed, ground, and then caught with a roar that shook rain from the windshield. He could not hear the bell now. Maybe it had stopped. Maybe the engine had swallowed it.
Nell hit the dashboard with the heel of her hand.
“He’s still there!”
Rosa grabbed her wrist, not gently but not cruelly either.
“He gave us the road.”
“I didn’t ask him to!”
“No,” Rosa said, and her voice broke in a place she clearly had not given permission. “He gave it anyway.”
Dane put the truck in gear. In the side mirror, the church fence gate buckled open and infected spilled through, robes and work shirts and pajamas plastered to their bodies by rain.
The wounded Mileman tried to crawl. Dane looked once, then looked away.
The new world was full of judgments no one had clean hands to make.
Tomber lurched forward.
An infected struck the passenger side and left a smear across the plywood.
Nell recoiled. Rosa held her in place. Dane drove over the curb, around the dead man at the grille, and down Maple Street toward the county road, the truck’s heavy frame shuddering as bodies thudded against the sides and fell away beneath the engine’s growl.
At the edge of town, the rain thinned enough for the westbound highway to show itself.
It ran straight into open country, a black ribbon under a bruised sky, empty for the first half mile and unknowable after that.
Somewhere beyond it waited broken cities, road gangs, dead towns, mountains, desert, and an ocean Dane had not seen since he was nineteen.
Somewhere beyond it, if the radio had told the truth and men had not ruined the last good thing simply by reaching it, there was Harbor Nine.
Dane checked the fuel gauge. A little over half a tank.
He checked the mirror. Sallow Creek was already shrinking, church steeple fading behind rain.
Nell sat rigid between him and Rosa, both arms wrapped around the cooler.
Her mouth was pressed into a hard line, her grief packed tight because there was no room in the cab for it to unfold.
Rosa watched the side road with the pistol in her lap, jaw clenched, blood on her scrubs not all of it belonging to strangers.
Dane kept both hands on the wheel.
He had one truck, three guns, and two thousand miles of zombie-infested America ahead of him.
For the first time in three weeks, he was not driving alone.