Chapter 4 The Tower Light #3
“What does protection mean?”
The radio hissed.
The voice did not answer immediately.
Dane knew then. So did Rosa. Even Otto stopped moving.
At last the woman said, “It means survival.”
Nell’s thumb slid off the button.
The room filled with static.
No one spoke.
Outside, Elias fired one barrel of his shotgun.
The blast broke the spell.
“They’re at the fence!” he shouted.
Dane grabbed the microphone from Nell and shoved it toward Otto.
“Shut it down.”
Otto started switching panels off.
“What? Why?”
“Because someone else heard.”
As if summoned by the sentence, another voice cut through the receiver before Otto killed the channel.
“Well now,” Silas Pike said through the static. “That answers several outstanding questions.”
Rosa went pale with rage.
Dane snatched the microphone, but Silas continued, amused and breathless, his signal stronger than it should have been.
“Mr. Truck Driver, Miss Venn, young Nell, and whoever else you have adopted since the garage. You are becoming very difficult to protect from your own poor judgment.”
Dane pressed the button.
“Come close enough and try.”
Silas laughed softly.
“I will. But not tonight. Tonight the dead have the hill, and I have the roads below it.”
The receiver crackled.
“You can’t keep driving west forever. Fuel ends. Asphalt ends. People end. When one of those happens, remember that Reeve Calder rewards practical surrender.”
Dane killed the radio.
For half a second, the silence inside the relay room felt worse than Silas’s voice.
Then the fence began to rattle.
They ran.
Elias stood beside the generator shed with smoke curling from his shotgun, his face lit by the red tower beacon.
Below him, infected pressed against the chain-link fence in a long, uneven line.
Their hands hooked through the metal. Their bodies pushed and shifted, each one stupid alone, dangerous together.
More were climbing the hill through the wet grass, drawn from fields, farmhouses, culverts, wherever they had waited without waiting.
“The van!” Dane shouted.
Rosa understood first. The maintenance van still blocked the gate from inside. If the fence fell, the gate would clog them.
She raised the shotgun and fired at the nearest infected gripping the chain.
Dane took the revolver, aimed carefully, and spent one of the dead man’s borrowed rounds on another whose weight had begun to bend the gate inward.
Nell stayed behind him with the cooler, not hiding, not in the way.
Otto stumbled out of the building carrying two handheld radios and a coil of cable.
Elias reloaded with shaking fingers.
“I am getting too old for fresh nightmares.”
“Then use old anger,” Rosa snapped.
“Got plenty.”
They moved as a group toward the gate. Dane reached the van first, climbed into the open driver’s side, and nearly gagged at the smell inside. No keys. Of course. He checked the visor, the floor, the cup holder. Nothing. The infected slammed the fence hard enough to rock the van’s frame.
Rosa fired again.
“Dane!”
“No keys!”
Elias shoved past him, dropped under the steering column with a grunt, and ripped away the plastic cover.
“County van,” he said. “Same cheap ignition as every public vehicle they overpaid for.”
Dane looked through the cracked windshield. Beyond the gate, dead faces gathered close, pale under the tower light. Teeth snapped at the metal mesh.
Nell stood beside the van, breathing fast.
“Can we climb?”
“Not with the cooler,” Rosa said.
“I can throw it.”
“No.”
“I can.”
“No.”
The van coughed.
Elias twisted wires together, cursed, twisted again, and the engine turned over with a grinding whine. It did not start. The fence post beside the gate leaned inward.
Otto stared.
“Please tell me this is part of the process.”
“This is the process being rude,” Elias growled.
Dane looked at the fence line. They had maybe fifteen seconds.
He grabbed Nell by the shoulder and pushed her toward Rosa.
“When it opens, go straight to the truck. Don’t stop for us.”
Nell grabbed his sleeve.
“No, don’t do that sentence. I hate that sentence.”
“It’s still useful.”
“Then say a different useful sentence.”
The van engine caught with a ragged roar.
Elias popped up from beneath the wheel.
“Move!”
Dane slammed the van into reverse and stomped the gas.
The van lurched backward, shoving the gate open against the mass outside.
Bodies fell beneath the rear tires with sickening bumps.
The gate twisted. Chain-link tore loose from the hinge post.
Rosa seized Nell and dragged her through the widening gap while Otto followed, clutching the radios to his chest.
Elias fired his second barrel through the passenger window at a dead woman trying to climb into the van.
Dane kept reversing until the van struck the ditch. He threw it into park, jumped out, and pain exploded through his knee when he landed. He nearly fell. A hand grabbed the back of his coat.
For one terrible instant he thought infected.
It was Nell.
She pulled with all her slight weight, face furious.
“You said useful sentences, not stupid actions!”
Rosa appeared on his other side and shoved him upright.
“Run now, argue later!”
They ran downhill toward Tomber.
The infected spilled through the ruined gate behind them, no longer a line but a flood.
The tower beacon blinked red over their heads, turning the wet grass, the gravel, the running bodies into fragments: red, dark, red, dark, red.
Otto reached the truck first and yanked the passenger door open.
Elias climbed into the cargo box, swearing at the height of the step, at his knees, at Dane’s knees, at the entire concept of knees.
Dane shoved Nell in, then Rosa. As he climbed behind the wheel, an infected slammed against his door and drove its face into the gap. Teeth snapped inches from his sleeve. Rosa leaned across Nell and fired the revolver past Dane’s shoulder, so close the muzzle flash burned white across his vision.
The body dropped.
Dane got the door shut.
Tomber started on the second try.
The headlights came on and filled with dead faces.
“Hold on,” Dane said.
Otto grabbed the dashboard.
“I have been holding on since birth.”
Dane drove.
Tomber surged forward through the grass, away from the tower road because the tower road was already thick with bodies.
The truck bounced hard over uneven ground.
The repaired steering jolted but held. Infected struck the grille, the sides, the rear box, each impact a dull, temporary claim.
Dane aimed for the slope west of the compound where the hill fell toward a narrow drainage cut and, beyond it, the county road.
Rosa saw the cut.
“Can we make that?”
“No.”
“Then why—”
“Because we can maybe survive not making it.”
Tomber hit the drainage cut at an angle. The front wheels dropped, slammed, climbed. The rear came down harder, the cargo box booming like a drum. Something in the back crashed, and Elias shouted a word old enough to predate radio.
For a breathless moment, the truck tilted right.
Nell made a small sound and clutched the cooler.
Then the tires caught wet soil, spun, grabbed again, and dragged them up the far side onto the shoulder of the county road.
Dane did not slow.
Behind them, the tower light blinked red above the broken fence and the moving dead. Two short. One long. The signal continued as if nothing had changed.
Inside the cab, everyone breathed like survivors of a drowning.
Otto looked down at the handheld radios in his lap, then at Nell.
“I got these,” he said weakly. “In case anyone wondered whether my panic had deliverables.”
Nell stared at him for half a second, then laughed.
It was not a happy laugh. It broke in the middle and turned almost into a sob before she forced it back. But it was laughter, and in the cab it sounded stranger than gunfire.
Rosa put one hand over Nell’s without speaking.
Dane drove with his jaw clenched against the pain in his knee and the new shudder in the wheel.
The road ahead was dark now, true night settling across the fields.
Harbor Nine was real. It was also two thousand miles away, behind mountains, militias, quarantine gates, and people who thought survival answered every moral question.
In the side mirror, far below the hill, headlights appeared on the road.
Not close. Not rushing.
Following.
Dane watched them for one second too long, then faced west again.
No one asked what he had seen.
Maybe they already knew.