Four

The ride up the hill was long, made longer by hairpin curves. Daniel’s threat to upchuck was the only thing spoken since they started listening to the radio. Guy clutched the steering wheel, his knuckles white, his forehead creased. Kimberly looked dazed. Richard held her close. He looked confused. The radio buzzed with static, and Colleen adjusted the dial until the hiss broke.

A few minutes into a report on the looting going on in Detroit, Daniel said, “I want to see the deer.”

Guy said, “Why? It’s dead. I took care of it.”

“Right,” Daniel said, amused. “I know, but don’t you see what you’re saying? It’s dead now. So… let’s see if it’s come back.”

“They’re not saying anything about animals,” Richard said.

“It was already dead,” Kimberly said, glancing at Richard and then looking at the back of Guy’s head. “Right?”

“I think so,” he said. “It was in bad shape.”

“So it was dead, and it came back, and you killed it again?” Daniel said, sneering.

“Yeah,” said Guy. “I think so.”

“So it’s dead again.”

No one said anything.

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense.” He laughed, his tone derisive and devoid of humor. “What’s going to stop it from coming back again? This is bullshit.” He threw himself back against the seat and allowed his hair to obscure his face. He pulled out more of Greg’s shitty pot and lit up without offering to share. The van filled with the smell of grass and the radio’s lone hiss.

Kimberly squeezed Colleen’s shoulder. Richard spaced out.

The man on the radio continued. There were more reports of attacks from assorted cities across the US, and Colleen felt her head grow light. Daniel was right about one thing: nothing made sense. They’d left home not even forty-eight hours ago. How could the world get turned inside out within two days?

Following a wrap-up of events, the other side had their say: a noted biologist from London disputed the reports that the dead were returning to life. Such a notion was preposterous, he said, and he promptly went on to blame the explosion of misinformation on the US media.

“See?” Daniel said, looking hopeful. “I told you.”

A little over ten minutes later, he didn’t look quite as hopeful. The radio host played an interview with a doctor in Austin, Texas. The doctor confirmed that he’d been on hand for at least four revivals over the past two hours, and no, what he’d witnessed could not have been a living person reacting to the affects of an as-yet-unidentified viral or chemical agent that lowered vital signs and created the illusion of death, because in one of the three revivals the revived had been eviscerated in a construction site accident. The good doctor in London needed to get out of his office and go into the field.

Daniel grunted, finished his joint and mashed what was left of it against his sole. He coughed once and resumed his slump.

The interview ended, and the man on the radio actually broke for commercials.

“I knew it,” Kimberly said. “I knew the bastard was going to pull something like this.”

No one had to ask who the bastard was. For several months now, Kimberly has assured them that Tricky Dick would not be leaving office, no matter what truths came to light, and no matter how ready Americans were to get the hell out of Vietnam. He was here to stay, and he’d manufacture a disaster in order to permanently lodge himself in office.

Colleen had no love for Nixon, unlike her mother, who’d thought the man a saint—if they did something illegal at the Watergate, they probably had a very good reason for doing so—but she didn’t think Kimberly was right about this. Whatever this was.

The commercials ended. The man on the radio cleared his throat. After a short lead-in for those just tuning in, he described video footage that was aired, only minutes ago, on CBS television affiliates across the country. The announcer didn’t sound composed any more. His voice was lower and softer and getting a little ragged.

In the footage, he said, that he had watched himself just now, a naked woman stumbled around an unidentified morgue in Gainesville, the Y-incision running down her torso, just flapping, her internal organs sitting in a heap on the stainless steel table beside the gurney, her stomach cavity clearly empty. Just an empty black hole.

“Oh, God,” someone said. Daniel stomped his foot once.

A large blue pick-up truck appeared behind them, quickly closing the distance. Its grille was dented, its headlights smashed. The driver blasted the horn, and Colleen swallowed down a shriek. He would run them off the road, and the last thing she’d see would be the face of the driver, slack and dead above the steering wheel.

Guy slowed the van and hugged the side of the road. When the stretch ahead was fairly straight, the truck shot past them, blowing its horn once more. In no time, it was gone from sight, and they were alone on the road.

The man on the radio interrupted himself once more, this time to read a report confirming that the walking dead were eating the flesh of the living.

“Fuck,” Guy said, and nobody added to it.

The report was quickly followed by another. Countless law enforcement officials (not to mention armed citizens) had confirmed that the revived dead could be put down with a blow to the head or a bullet to the brain. It was, the newsman said with more than a touch of sarcasm, a morning of revelations.

Guy shot a glance back at Daniel, who continued to sulk. Colleen looked out at the world around them—just trees and blue sky, and dammit, it looked like it was supposed to look, there was nothing wrong with the world—and suddenly she never wanted to leave the van. It was safe here, and it always would be, as long as they didn’t budge. Guy’s right hand was on her shoulder, and she was crying, and she could see her mother’s heavily made-up corpse at the wake, plastic and unreal in the dim light of the funeral parlor viewing room, the smell of flowers barely concealing the stale and antiseptic reek of the place.

Her thoughts advanced one more step and overtook her.

“Oh, God,” she said, her chest heaving.

“What?” Asked Guy. “Are you going to throw up?”

“No,” she said, turning in her seat. “Daniel.”

He didn’t respond. He was asleep again.

“Daniel, oh my god.” She was going to pass out. Guy pulled over and the jerk was enough to shake Richard from his vacancy long enough to turn in his seat and push Daniel once, hard.

Daniel’s eyes sprang open. He jerked away, frightened.

“Daniel,” Colleen said once more and wondered if maybe she was going to throw up after all.

“What?”

“Mom,” she said.

Kimberly gasped.

“Damn,” Richard said.

“Lord,” said Guy.

And then it just hung there for a moment.

“I know,” was all Daniel said, slumping into himself once more.

Colleen wept. Guy snapped off the radio and held her. After a few minutes, she pulled away, palming tears from her face. “We should keep going,” she said, turning on the radio. She felt everyone else’s gaze on them, on her.

“I know.”

“So let’s keep going.”

He checked his side-view mirror and took off.

“Where?” Daniel asked.

“There’s a little town at the bottom of this hill,” Guy said. “And a bigger one about twenty miles east.”

“Do we really want to go where people are?” Colleen asked.

“What else can we do?” Guy said, giving her a reassuring smile. “We need to get to a phone. I need to talk to Chris.”

“Oh, God,” Colleen said, punching her thigh. How had she not thought of Chris? Guy adored his little brother, a charming and hilarious six-year-old who was the spitting image of his big brother, right down to the ridiculous dimples, and she was too busy assembling fears about her dead mother for the boy to even cross her mind. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t even—”

“He’s going to be okay,” Guy said, more to himself than to anyone in the van with him, and Colleen lost it. Her tears came fast and hard, her shoulders rocked.

“Brock,” Kimberly said, reaching for her friend. “Come here, honey.” Colleen crawled into the back seat, sat beside Kimberly, who peeled away from Richard’s embrace and settled into hers. They held each other until they got to town.