Chapter Twenty-Three #3
The convoy in front of us begins to move, and with a tremulous breath, Maisie throws the SUV into gear. Behind us, Mom and Dad squeeze into the cab of another plow-mounted army truck and follow.
It doesn’t take long to hear the groaning.
We drive on grass to reach Washington Road.
The trees to our right light up with flashes of electricity, followed by the occasional scream.
The electrified perimeter is visible in patches as we slowly follow the convoy, driving parallel to the northern front lines.
I search the darkness for glowing eyes and hungry mouths.
A gunshot makes me jump, then another. A loud, hissing crackle’s audible through our windows. The walkie-talkie flares to life.
“Come in, this is Convoy Leader Jo-Jo, the northern perimeter line has been breached. I repeat, the line has been breached.”
A pause.
A heavy breath. Then, “Prepare for swarms.”
“Light ’em up, people!” Dad’s voice bellows through the radio. “Go, go, go!”
“Do you see anything?!” Maisie surges forward until she’s almost plow-to-bumper with the convoy truck in front of us.
“No, nothing, except—” I squint into the darkness, sweat collecting in my palm where I clutch the military-grade Taser wand.
Something skitters along the ground, so fast it could be the wind, ruffling the grass.
I’m about to say so when glittering eyes rise from the ground, lifting ominously upward, one pair, two pairs, twenty pairs, a hundred. A plague of glowing white eyes.
A body batters my window. The door. The trunk.
With a shriek, Maisie juices the plow. Five squirming, crawling bodies are thrown back instantly, thunking against the pavement like sacks.
The convoy truck in front of us lurches forward, bodies raining upon it, sliding off, now unexpected speed bumps that Maisie screams each time we crunch over.
They are fast. Gaunt things, eaten things, hungry things.
The glow of their horrible disease wet and visible through open wounds, missing limbs, gaping holes.
The remains of a fist pound the glass beside my head, and I scream as the swollen flesh bursts against my window.
A spray of shimmering gore, the rot thick and coming in through the air vents, enough to make us gag.
I roll the window down just enough to stab my Taser at the thing. When it climbs toward the roof, I deliver the surge to its heart.
A clump of dark limbs jumps on the truck in front of us, as if all belonging to one many-legged beast. The vehicle rocks to the side, the soldiers’ urgent instructions suddenly audible as a door is opened, then ripped from its hinges.
Soldiers pour out the side like blood from a wound, falling upon the darkness punctured by shining eyes.
Tasers light up. Bodies fall. The convoy truck lurches over the embankment, no one left to steer it.
Mom’s voice now. “Plan B, sweethearts—go, now! Don’t look back!”
With great, heaving breaths, Maisie goes.
The SUV peels forward, crunching over more downed zombies.
A loud crack sounds overhead. Something’s hit a solar panel—fuck!
Can’t worry about power now, can’t worry about anything except getting out of here alive.
The SUV screeches onto Stony Lonesome Road.
The reservoir’s up ahead. The athletic fields just past it.
The worst is yet to come.
“Plan B!” Maisie yells at me over the sound of zombies pelting the car, human-sized hail. “Come on!”
“Right!” I shakily connect my phone to the modified speaker hopefully still strapped to the top of the car.
“Don’t let me down, Christian Slater.” I grit my teeth, then press play.
Music booms from Maisie’s roof. The opening drums cascade into crunchy guitar as the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation” crashes across West Point’s campus.
A zombie, perfectly framed in my window, releases its grip on the car and falls away, as if it doesn’t love Gen X rock anthems that came out before I was born, so weird.
In front of us, the growing swarm seems to falter.
I laugh, incredulous. “It’s working! They’re afraid of loud noises, just like Julio said!”
The swarm changes direction, away from us, away from the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack blaring through our speakers. They spill across the road, down toward the reservoir, and I do what my parents expressly forbade.
I turn around.
A loud splash. I watch as the headlights of my parents’ truck sink into the water.
An arc of blue current dances over the truck’s roof as their electrified plow plunges below the surface.
My heart jolts in my chest, as if I can feel the electric current traveling through the water all the way from here.
Two large white-suited figures exit the truck and jump into the water.
“Are they in?” Maisie swerves to avoid crashing into a smaller swarm racing toward the water. “Are they still moving?!”
I squint, then crane my neck, but finally I see their bulky arms flashing as they wade deeper into the water. “Yes! The suits are working!”
I’ll admit that when my sister attempted to explain what a Faraday cage is and how it protects the person within from electrical current passing around them, I was more than a little lost, but the important thing is that she was, as always, completely, obnoxiously right.
She swore up and down that astronaut suits are built to be Faraday cages to protect the astronauts within from harmful space radiation, and that if we belted our parents into the ones Maisie and I stole, Mom and Dad would somehow magically survive entering a reservoir amped to high heaven.
I clearly had issues believing this, but she was right. Fucking overachiever. Chemistry and virology aren’t enough, she has to understand physics, too?
Grinning, I mash the walkie-talkie button. “Gemma, you asshole. I’m so proud of you!”
“Told you I was right,” her voice crackles back, smug as ever. “Give me a visual.”
“They’re headed toward the middle of the reservoir, almost up to their necks now.” I lift the binoculars Gemma stashed in our car for this purpose. “I can see their helmets.”
“And the zombies?”
“They’re following them in, just like we planned. The electrified water isn’t up to their hearts yet.”
Please, god. Let this work.
I watch my parents, my intense, courageous, completely impossible parents, who are apparently the presidents of this country now, go as deep as they can in the heavy, ungainly suits.
If the seals break, if water rushes in, will the Faraday cages be breached?
Will they be electrocuted, too? Or will the batteries fueling the electrified plow fizzle out, leaving my parents stranded in heavy space suits in the middle of a reservoir while starving zombies thrash toward them?
The reservoir is filled with snarling bodies. The town had already stopped using it for the water supply years ago after a bad contamination, and if our plan tonight works, it’ll never be usable again.
Mom and Dad reach the maintenance platform in the middle of the reservoir. It pitches unsteadily as they try, and fail, to hoist themselves up. Glowing eyes stream toward them.
But then a zombie’s body launches into the air, flopping like a fish. Mom scrabbles up the platform’s ladder, water pouring off the suit. Dad gives her ass a final shove up, then climbs up, too.
All around them, the dead begin to pop and float. Bobbing up to the surface, their already decomposing bodies full of buoyant gas.
“It’s working!” I yell into the walkie-talkie. “The electrified water’s reached the zombies’ hearts!”
Mom and Dad embrace, side by side, and raise their hands in tandem. They wave goodbye as we pass the last of the athletic fields and rip through the Stony Lonesome Gate out onto the clear, dark country roads.
They’re safe for now, and somehow, so are we.