ZE Outbreak Novel, Chapter 9

continued from chapter 8

En route to Bryn Mawr, 8:50 PM, Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The brake lights stretched out like a red snake coiling through the dark, each pair of taillights with another set of vertebrae in a spine that wasn't moving fast enough. I could see the checkpoint from at least three blocks back, the portable floodlights they'd set up turning the intersection into something that looked like a prison yard at midnight. I was squeezing the steering wheel so tightly that the leather was squeaking. Amber reached over and rubbed my shoulder, probably to ground.

I reached across the console and popped open the glove box, digging past the owner's manual and a tangle of charging cables until my fingers found the worn leather of my old military ID holder. The thing was beat to hell, edges soft from years of being shoved in and out of pockets, the Army star embossed on the front faded to almost nothing. I flipped it open and stared at the photo inside. A younger version of myself stared back with a high-and-tight haircut and the kind of blank expression they teach you to wear for official photos. The plastic covering had started to peel at one corner, and I smoothed it down with my thumb before setting the whole thing on the console between us, where I could grab it fast when we got to the front of the line.

"We're going to be fine," I said, not sure if I was talking to Amber or myself. My eyes glanced over at her and then back at the slow crawl of cars ahead as we inched forward another few feet. "I've got my military ID, and most of these National Guard kids are going to see that and wave us through. They're looking for infected or people who are obviously sick or bleeding, not a couple of civilians who know how to keep their mouths shut and follow instructions."

Amber's fingers had been drumming a quick tap-tap-tap on her thigh for the last five and it was starting to annoy me. I didn't say anything because I knew she was trying to hold it together, and pointing out her tells would only make it worse. She turned in her seat to look behind us, craning her neck to see past the headlights of the sedan that had pulled up tight on our bumper, and when she faced forward again, her jaw was set in a way that told me she'd already figured out what I was about to say.

"There's no way to turn around," she said, almost like she didn't want to admit it out loud. "We're boxed in. Cars behind us, cars in front, and those concrete barriers running down both sides of the street."

I'd noticed the barriers as soon as we'd turned onto the highway. These were the kind of heavy Jersey barriers they use for highway construction. Each one probably weighed a few thousand pounds and were set so close together that even a motorcycle would have trouble squeezing through the gaps. They'd lined them up on both sides of the road to create a single-lane chute that funneled everyone toward the checkpoint. It was a smart tactical move, but it also meant we were now committed, whether I liked it or not.

The Humvees sat at angles across the intersection ahead, their bulk blocking off the rest of the highway, and even from this distance I could make out the shapes of soldiers moving between the vehicles, flashlights cutting through the dark as they worked their way down the line of waiting cars. Most of them looked young and were probably barely out of basic training. I could see the way some of them held their rifles, with their hands too tight on the grips and shoulders hunched up near their ears like they were expecting someone to take a shot at them any second. The National Guard pulled many part-time weekend warriors who had regular jobs during the week and did their service one weekend a month. I'd bet most of these kids had never expected to end up manning checkpoints in their own cities.

The line crept forward another car length, and that's when I heard the shouting. At first it was just raised voices and the kind of back-and-forth you'd expect at any checkpoint where tensions were running high. Within seconds, it escalated into something sharper and angrier. Three cars ahead of us, a beat-up Nissan sedan had stopped at the checkpoint, and I could see a man in the driver's seat gesturing wildly through his open window, his arm swinging out as he pointed at something beyond the barricade.

Two soldiers stood at his door, both young, maybe early twenties, and even from where I sat, I could read the tension in their postures, the way they'd shifted their weight onto the balls of their feet and adjusted their grips on their rifles. The driver was still yelling, his voice carrying over the sounds of the checkpoint, and while I couldn't make out every word, I caught enough to understand he was demanding to be let through, insisting he had family on the other side who needed him, that he had a right to pass.

"This is going to go bad," I said quietly, though Amber heard it, and my hand moved automatically to rest on my lap near where my Glock sat concealed under my jacket.

Here we had young soldiers, likely with itchy trigger fingers, thinking that one bite is going to put them in the morgue. Why the hell was this guy arguing with them?

One of the soldiers leaned in closer to the driver's window, his rifle held across his chest in what was supposed to be a non-threatening ready position, but came across as anything but. The driver yelled something at him, not that it was too garbled for me to hear. The driver yelled something like “stand down”, and it sure as hell didn’t didn't calm the driver down. If anything, it made him angrier, because he threw his door open so hard it bounced back on its hinges, forcing the soldier to stumble backward to avoid getting hit. The driver was out of the car, all six feet and change of him, built like someone who worked construction or lifted heavy things for a living.

"You can't keep me here!" the driver shouted, and this time his voice carried clear across the checkpoint, loud enough that it cut through every other sound and made everyone within earshot go quiet and still. "My wife is out there, my kids are out there, and you're telling me I can't go get them?"

The soldier who'd nearly been hit by the door recovered his balance and brought his rifle up to a proper ready position, muzzle pointed at the ground but clearly visible. It was a warning that things could escalate further if the driver didn't back down. This is what we were taught at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. His partner moved to flank the driver from the other side, and within seconds, two more soldiers had materialized from between the Humvees, all of them converging on the Nissan with their weapons at low ready and their faces set in hard, professional masks that didn't quite hide the fear underneath. The driver was erratic and hot, and these guys were not having it for a second.

"Sir, I need you to get back in your vehicle," the first soldier said, his voice cracking slightly on the last word. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five years old. "We have our orders, and nobody gets through this checkpoint without proper authorization. If you have family beyond the perimeter, there are procedures in place to verify their location and arrange for supervised contact, but you can't just drive through."

The driver took a step toward the soldier, and I saw the kid's finger move from the trigger guard to rest on the actual trigger. I knew exactly what it meant. This was a kid who'd been trained to shoot if he felt threatened, and right now, some angry civilian, who resembled Bigfoot’s cousin, was closing distance on him while refusing to follow orders. The gap between this situation and live rounds in the air was getting thinner by the second.

“Not good, not good,” Amber said as she sank down in the passenger seat, like bullets wouldn’t go through the windshield.

"Procedures?" the driver spat, and there was something wild in his voice now, something beyond anger, beyond reason. It was the sound of a man who'd been pushed too far and didn't have anything left to lose. "You're talking about procedures while my family could be dying? Fuck your procedures, fuck your orders. I'm going through."

He started to move toward the gap between two Humvees, and three soldiers immediately stepped into his path, rifles coming up to point directly at his center mass, and I heard one of them yell "Freeze!" in a voice that cracked halfway through the word. The driver stopped, his hands out at his sides, but he didn't back down. He didn't retreat to his vehicle. Instead, he stood there in the harsh glare of the floodlights, his chest heaving.

Fear and I had never been on speaking terms, but even I recognized that staring down the muzzles of four M16s held by kids with authorization to shoot would make any rational person's bladder want to give up.

For a few seconds, nobody moved. The whole checkpoint had gone silent, every engine idling, every conversation stopped, and everyone watching to see how this would resolve. I found myself holding my breath, my hand now fully on my Glock under my jacket, thumb on the safety, even though I had no intention of pulling it unless this situation went completely sideways and somehow involved us directly. That Glock could have been me playing with stress balls.

Then someone in the Nissan's passenger seat threw open their door.

It happened fast, too fast for the soldiers to react, and a woman emerged from the car in a stumbling rush, her face streaked with tears and her hair wild around her shoulders. She couldn't have been more than thirty, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that had a Penn State logo across the front, and the moment her feet hit the pavement, she was moving, not toward the soldiers but past them, trying to reach the gap between the Humvees that her husband or boyfriend or whoever the driver was had been aiming for.

"Let us through!" she screamed, and her voice was raw with desperation, cracking on every syllable. "Please, just let us through. We have to get to our daughter! She's only eight years old, and she's with my mother, and we can't reach them on the phone, and please, please just let us go to them!"

Two of the soldiers broke off from the group surrounding the driver and moved to intercept her, but she was faster than they expected, fueled by something only mothers had, and she actually made it past the first Humvee before they caught up to her. One of them grabbed her arm, and she spun on him, not attacking but pulling away, trying to wrench herself free, and I saw the soldier's grip tighten as he tried to hold on without hurting her, caught between his orders and some instinct not to manhandle a crying woman.

The driver saw his wife being grabbed, and something in him snapped. He let out a roar that was barely human, but all rage and fear compressed into a single sound. Then he was charging the soldiers. He set his sights straight at the kid who'd had his rifle pointed at him a moment ago. The soldier's eyes went wide, and his whole body tensed. Even at this distance, I spotted his finger squeezing the trigger.

"Don't!" I heard myself shout, but my voice was lost in the chaos, drowned out by the woman screaming and the other soldiers yelling and the sudden sharp crack of gunfire that split the night open like a whip.

The first shot caught the driver high in the chest, spinning him sideways, and for a heartbeat, he stayed on his feet, his forward momentum carrying him another step before his legs gave out. The second shot came from a different rifle, fired by a different soldier, and this one hit him somewhere in the abdomen based on the way he folded in half, arms wrapping around his midsection. The third shot was unnecessary, redundant, the kind of thing that happened when training took over, and muscle memory said keep firing until the threat stopped moving. It caught him in the shoulder as he was already falling.

Killing Daniel Thorne hadn't cost me a moment's sleep. Neither had killing the infected going after the man on the road. And it didn’t bother me when my hand held the knife many times before. But this was different somehow. I watched it happen instead of doing it myself, and the uncomfortable sensation spreading through my chest might have been what normal people called remorse, though I'd never felt it before and couldn't say for sure.

The driver hit the pavement face-first, and the sound was wet and heavy, the kind of sound a sack of meat makes when dropped from a height. Everything went quiet except for the woman's screaming. She was on her knees now, the soldier who'd grabbed her arm having let go the moment the shooting started, and she was screaming her throat raw, words I couldn't understand anymore, just sounds of pure anguish that seemed to go on and on without her needing to draw breath.

Amber's hand clamped down on my thigh hard enough to hurt. Her nails dug in through my jeans, and when I looked over at her, she had both hands pressed against her mouth, and her eyes were huge and glassy with shock. Around us, other people in other cars were reacting: some ducked down below their windows, others stared in frozen horror, and a few fumbled for their phones to record what had just happened. The soldiers at the checkpoint looked just as shocked as everyone else. The ones who'd fired stood with their rifles still pointed at the body, breathing hard, while the others moved in to secure the scene, like they were running on training alone because thinking about what had just happened would break them.

The woman was still screaming when the Honda Civic directly in front of us lurched forward, tires screeching as the driver floored it. I saw it happening in the kind of slow-motion clarity that adrenaline sometimes gives you. The brake lights winked at me like, “I got this” and the car shot forward, aimed straight at the gap between two concrete barriers on the left side of the checkpoint. The driver must have thought he could squeeze through maybe a six-inch space between the barriers and the Humvee parked at an angle, and decided it was worth the risk, that anything was better than sitting here watching people get shot.

He was wrong.

The Civic hit the barrier at what had to be forty miles an hour, and the sound of the impact was enormous, like someone dropped a tractor off a roof. The front end crumpled like tinfoil, the hood buckled upward, and the windshield spiderwebbed instantly. For a second, the car just sat there with its engine revving uselessly and wheels spinning against pavement. Then the driver must have thrown it into reverse because the tires caught, and the car started backing up, with smoke pouring from under the hood and the whole front end twisted at an angle.

The soldiers reacted exactly as I had expected. They opened fire.

Muzzle flashes lit up the checkpoint like a strobe light, at least six rifles all firing at once, the sharp crack-crack-crack of M16s on semi-automatic hammering through the night air. I saw the Civic's windows explode, safety glass turning to diamonds and spraying across the interior, as the car shuddered under the impact of round after round punching through sheet metal, plastic, and flesh. The driver's side door sprouted holes, one-two-three-four in a tight grouping that said someone knew how to aim, and I caught a glimpse of the driver's head snapping back against the headrest before more rounds chewed through the windshield and turned everything inside the car into a spray of red.

Amber sat next to me, covering her face with her hands, but her fingers spread so she could peek through like a child watching a horror movie.

The Civic rolled backward maybe ten feet before it stopped, and by then the shooting had already tapered off, the soldiers lowering their rifles and staring at what they'd just done with expressions that ranged from shock to horror to grim satisfaction. Smoke drifted from the car's shattered windows, mixing with the exhaust from our idling engine and the acrid smell of gunpowder that hung in the air like a fog.

Around us, the checkpoint dissolved into chaos.

A minivan two cars back threw itself into reverse, backing up so fast it clipped the sedan behind it. Someone was screaming, maybe multiple someones, and the sounds were overlapping until I couldn't tell how many voices were contributing to the noise. Car doors started opening as people abandoned their vehicles, some running back the way they'd come, others just standing on the highway with their eyes wide and mouths hung open, and one man sprinted toward the soldiers with his hands up and his mouth moving, like he was trying to surrender or beg or explain that he wasn't a threat.

The soldiers ignored him, since they were already moving to secure the wrecked Civic. Behind them, more National Guard troops were pouring out from between the Humvees, and someone shouted over a loudspeaker.

“Remain in your vehicles and stay calm!”

These words were the most pointless ones anyone could say in this circumstance.

I had my hand on the gearshift, and every instinct told me to get us the fuck out of here before the situation deteriorated any further, when Amber's fingers dug into my forearm hard enough to leave bruises.

"Sam," she said, and there was something in her voice that made every nerve in my body go tight. "Look. Sam, behind us."

I twisted in my seat to look through the rear window, following her gaze down the line of stopped cars toward the street we'd come from, and for a second, I didn't understand what I was seeing. The intersection behind us was maybe two hundred yards away, far enough that details were hard to make out in the dark, but close enough that the shapes moving through the pools of streetlight were unmistakable once you knew what you were looking for.

A figure stumbled into view from an on-ramp, moving with that distinctive jerky gait I'd seen twice a few toppings now. It shambled forward a few steps and then stopped, head swiveling back and forth like it was searching for something, and it had the unmistakable yellow-green tint to its skin under the sodium lights.

"One of them," Amber whispered, but she was already looking past the first infected, her eyes tracking something else. "Sam, there's more. There are three of them now. No, wait, four."

I leaned forward against my seatbelt, squinting to see past the glare of headlights from the cars behind us, and felt my stomach drop as more shapes emerged from the darkness. She was right. What had been one infected a few seconds ago was now four, then five, then six, all of them converging on the line of stopped cars from different angles like they'd been drawn by the noise or the lights or the scent of living people packed together in one place.

"Seven," Amber said, her voice climbing higher with each count, one hand gripping my arm and the other pointing at the rearview mirror. "Eight. Oh God, Sam, they're coming this way."

I checked my side mirror and saw what she was seeing: the infected spreading out across the street like a net pulling closed, some of them moving faster than others, but all of them heading in the same direction, drawn to the checkpoint and the mass of humanity trapped in front of it. Nine infected. Ten. A woman in a torn hospital gown. A man in a business suit with most of his throat missing. A teenager still wearing a backpack, jaw working rhythmically as it shambled forward.

"Eleven," Amber said, and her breathing had gone rapid and shallow, the kind of hyperventilating that came before a full panic attack. "Twelve. They're getting closer, Sam. What do we do?"

The nearest infected was maybe a hundred and fifty yards away now, closing the distance at a slow but steady pace, and behind it the rest of the pack followed. The people in the cars behind us were starting to notice, heads turning to look back, and someone screamed. A whole new layer of terror had entered the situation. The infected were coming.

I did the math in my head, calculating distances and speeds, and felt the cold certainty settle over me that we had maybe three minutes before the first infected reached the back of the line and maybe five before they were swarming over the stopped cars. The checkpoint was still blocked ahead of us, with soldiers distracted by the shot-up Civic and the panicking civilians. Behind us, over a dozen infected were closing in with more appearing every few seconds as they emerged from that damn on-ramp.

We were boxed in. Barricades on both sides, cars front and back, soldiers shooting anything that moved too fast, and a growing horde of infected bearing down on us from behind.