Chapter 2 Static on the Air #4
Rosa threw the rifle into the cab first, then climbed after it. Otto reached the door and froze, staring at the high step as if asked to solve a theological puzzle.
Dane grabbed him by the hoodie and hauled.
Otto landed half across Rosa’s lap.
“Hello,” he gasped.
“Move,” Rosa snarled.
Dane slammed the door and ran around the front of the truck. An infected lurched into his path, mouth open, hands rising. He struck it with the shotgun barrel, not enough to kill, enough to turn it aside, and pain flared through his knee as he climbed into the driver’s seat.
Silas appeared beyond the cracked windshield, pistol now in hand.
For one suspended second, they looked at each other across the hood.
Silas did not aim at Dane.
He aimed at the passenger side.
Dane ducked and punched the accelerator.
Tomber lunged forward. The pistol shot snapped through the air and shattered what remained of the passenger-side mirror.
Nell cried out, but not in pain. Dane drove straight at Silas, who threw himself aside as the truck roared past, cattle-guard grille clipping the open pickup door and bending it backward with a scream of metal.
Rosa twisted around.
“He’s still up!”
“Most problems are.”
Otto, wedged between the door and Rosa, stared at Nell and the cooler.
“Oh,” he said. “That girl.”
Nell glared at him.
“Don’t start.”
“I would not dream of starting. I am joining mid-disaster.”
Dane swung Tomber across the lot, avoiding the densest knot of infected now swarming the disabled pickup.
The second pickup tried to cut them off near the exit, but its driver hesitated when three infected stumbled into its path.
Dane did not. Tomber mounted the curb, crashed through a flimsy roadside sign, and dropped hard onto the state road with a jolt that made every loose object in the cab jump.
Something cracked under the truck.
Dane felt it in the steering before he heard it: a new vibration, low and wrong, coming from the front end.
Rosa heard the change.
“What was that?”
“Nothing good.”
“How bad?”
“Ask me when it becomes worse.”
Behind them, the weigh station vanished into a churn of infected bodies, gunfire, and diesel smoke. One pickup remained in the lot. The other fought to turn after them, but the shredded sign had tangled beneath its bumper, and by the time it broke free, Dane had Tomber moving west at sixty.
No one spoke until the weigh station was a gray square in the mirror.
Then Otto raised one finger.
“I vote we do not stop there again.”
Rosa looked at him as if deciding whether to laugh or throw him from the moving truck.
Nell said, “You’re Otto?”
“I am. You’re Nell, I gather. Important girl, cooler enthusiast, horn operator.”
“I’m not important.”
The cab went quiet around that.
Otto’s expression changed. The joke left him gently, as if he had set down something fragile.
“Right,” he said. “Sorry.”
Nell looked back to the windshield.
Dane kept driving, feeling the new vibration through the wheel with every mile.
The truck had fuel now, not enough to be comfortable but enough to reach evening.
It also had a hole in the cargo box, a damaged front end, four people in the cab, and at least one organized road gang aware of their direction.
Rosa leaned close enough that Otto had to flatten himself against the door.
“Your knee,” she said quietly.
“It’s attached.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“It’s my answer.”
She studied him a moment longer, then looked away, accepting the limit for now. Nell rested her forehead against the cooler lid, eyes closed but not asleep. Otto watched the road, the fields, the sky, his hands trembling in small delayed bursts he tried to hide by pressing them between his knees.
Ahead, the state road split.
Northwest toward the interstate.
Southwest toward smaller roads, less fuel, fewer people, less certainty.
Dane slowed just enough to read the signs.
Rosa asked, “Which way?”
The old Dane, the man who had survived three weeks by not becoming attached to anyone else’s destination, would have taken the interstate long enough to disappear, then found a place to leave the others with a map and half the medicine.
The thought came to him whole and familiar, an exit ramp inside himself.
But Nell’s hands were still locked around the cooler. Rosa had blood on her sleeve and would not admit she was exhausted. Otto had crawled out of a ceiling because strangers had sounded marginally better than dying alone.
Dane turned southwest.
Rosa watched the sign pass.
“That road adds miles.”
“Yes.”
“Less chance they predict it?”
“Maybe.”
“You always this reassuring?”
“No.”
Otto gave a weak nod.
“I appreciate the honesty. I hate the content, but I respect the brand.”
Nell opened her eyes and looked at Dane, not forgiving him, not trusting him, not yet. But seeing, perhaps, that the truck was still moving and she was still in it.
Behind them, far back on the broken road, a dark pickup appeared at the turn.
Then another.
Dane saw them in the mirror and said nothing. Not yet. The others would know soon enough.
He pressed the accelerator carefully, feeling Tomber’s wounded front end tremble beneath them, and drove west into the long, open miles where the dead were not the only things that followed.