Chapter 3 The Grain Town #3
They pulled. The door rose by agonizing increments, rattling on its tracks. Outside the back was a narrow lane between the garage and the grain elevator, cluttered with machinery parts and an old auger. Beyond it, Dane could see the service road leading away from town.
“Nell!” Rosa called. “Up!”
Nell climbed from the pit with the cooler, face tight but controlled. Dane reached to help her, and for once she took his hand without arguing. Her fingers were cold and strong.
A man appeared at the side window, trying to climb through the broken frame. Rosa turned, but her rifle jammed against the workbench. Dane raised the revolver.
Before he fired, a shotgun boomed from the office.
Elias stood with his old double-barrel against his shoulder, smoke rolling from one muzzle. The Mileman fell backward out of sight.
The old mechanic broke the gun open with shaking hands.
“I said this was my shop.”
Dane did not waste time praising him.
“Come with us.”
Elias stared.
“What?”
“You stay, they kill you.”
“They might not.”
“They will.”
Outside, the infected had reached the first pickup.
Screams rose with the gunfire. The front lot had become chaos: bodies stumbling through red flare smoke, Milemen retreating, muzzle flashes, silhouettes colliding.
Silas appeared near the hood of the second truck, dragging one of his men away from reaching hands.
He looked toward the garage just as Dane looked out.
Their eyes met across the smoke.
Silas shouted something Dane could not hear.
Elias closed his shotgun.
“I got nowhere to go.”
Dane said, “Neither do we. That hasn’t stopped anyone.”
For a moment, the old man looked toward the office, the walls, the cabinets of labeled parts, the calendar, the life he had held inside this building long after the rest of town had emptied out. Then a bullet punched through the bay door above his head and made his decision for him.
“Damn it,” he said. “My coffee’s in the office.”
“Leave it,” Rosa snapped.
“Tastes terrible anyway.”
They piled into Tomber with less order than urgency.
Dane behind the wheel, Rosa in the passenger seat this time, Nell and Otto crammed between them, Elias climbing into the cargo box through the interior access hatch with a toolbox, his shotgun, and a stream of complaints.
The medical cooler ended up wedged beneath Nell’s feet, strapped again with the seat belt after her hands fumbled twice and Rosa quietly helped without comment.
Dane started the engine.
Tomber roared awake.
The rear bay door was still only halfway open.
Otto stared through the windshield.
“Is that enough?”
“No,” Dane said.
He put the truck in gear anyway.
Tomber rolled forward, grille pointed at the gap, roof lights scraping the door’s lower edge with a shriek that set everyone’s teeth on edge. Metal bowed. The door resisted, then surrendered upward in a violent buckling snap as the truck forced its way through into the lane.
Elias’s voice bellowed from the cargo box.
“You peeled my bay door!”
Dane shouted back, “Bill me!”
The service lane was too narrow for speed.
Tomber’s side panels scraped the grain elevator supports, sparks flicking where metal met metal.
An infected worker in a seed-company jacket lurched from behind the auger; Rosa leaned out the missing mirror gap and fired the revolver Dane handed her without asking.
The shot took its head sideways, and the body vanished beneath the truck’s flank.
They burst out behind the elevator onto the service road.
For three blessed seconds, there was open pavement ahead.
Then the second Milemen pickup cut across the far end, trying to block them.
Silas stood in the truck bed, one hand gripping the cab roof, pistol in the other. His face was no longer reasonable. He aimed for the windshield.
Dane did not brake.
Rosa saw his hands settle.
“Oh, hell,” she said, and grabbed Nell.
Tomber struck the pickup just behind its rear wheel.
The impact spun the lighter vehicle sideways, tires screaming, Silas thrown hard against the bed rail.
His shot went wild, punching a hole through the roof above Otto’s head.
The pickup skidded into the ditch and slammed against a telephone pole with enough force to fold its hood.
Tomber kept moving.
The steering wheel bucked in Dane’s hands, but the repaired rod held.
Barely.
Behind them, Vesper receded in smoke, gunfire, and red flare haze. The grain elevators stood tall over it all, pale towers above a town that had held its breath and then screamed.
No one spoke until they reached the county road and Dane turned west.
Then Elias hammered on the interior access hatch from the cargo box.
“If that front end fails, I’m haunting every mile of this foolishness!”
Otto, breathing too fast, pressed one hand over the fresh bullet hole above him.
“I would like it known that I did not enjoy being shot near.”
Rosa looked back through the cracked rear window.
“I don’t see them.”
“Give it time,” Dane said.
Nell bent forward and checked the cooler latch with both hands. Once. Twice. Then she looked up at Dane.
“You told me what to do if all of you died.”
“Yes.”
“What do I do if you don’t?”
Dane kept his eyes on the road. The question sat beside him heavier than the shotgun, heavier than the truck, heavier than the miles.
“Same thing,” he said after a while. “You decide.”
Nell studied him, and this time some small part of her anger seemed to shift, not vanish, not forgive, but make room for something else.
Behind them, in the far distance, a dark column of smoke climbed above Vesper and leaned east with the wind. Ahead, the road narrowed into open country, and the sky over the west broke just enough for a thin line of light to show beneath the clouds, pale and cold and almost impossible to trust.
Dane drove toward it anyway.