Chapter 136: Dinner Bell

/Third Person POV/

-Bzzzzzzz-

The drone came back in over the rest stop’s sign with its battery light blinking red, and Kara was already walking toward the sound before Nora said a word.

Her sister sat on the Ascender’s rear step with the controller in both hands, and the screen tilted away from the snow, and under the brim of the navy cap, her face had no color left in it anywhere.

"Sis."

"I’m here."

"There’s a lot of them."

The highway ran top to bottom across the little screen, a grey line laid through white fields, and the grey line was moving, all of it, one long shape pouring down both lanes and the shoulder and the median, the front of it strung out into figures that ran and the rest of it packed thick enough behind them that the asphalt had stopped showing through.

"How far?" Kara asked, her voice gone quiet.

"Two kilometers... Maybe less." Nora’s thumb twitched on the stick, and the picture lurched and came back. "The fast ones are past the water tower already ... t-they’re coming here, sis, they’re coming right down the-"

There it was, the stutter, and Kara heard it land in her own stomach a half second before the rest of the fear did.

Then the fear came, all of it at once, into her hands and the backs of her knees and the place under her chest where her breath lives, and then it went wherever it goes, and what was left standing in the light snow was the part of her that makes lists.

"Leo! Engine!" She was already turning. "Mr. Norton, handle the bags, all of them, don’t sort them, just throw. Nora, bring it home and get in the truck. Sixty seconds, everyone!"

Leo was up off the picnic table with the knife and the half-carved bird he had been failing at for a week already dropped in the snow, and he crossed to the driver’s door in four strides without asking one question.

The Ascender’s big diesel turned over twice and caught with a sound that rolled off the back of the rest stop and out across the fields.

-VRRRRRMMM-

Norton went for the bags with his coat flapping and his glasses already sliding, both hands moving, while Kara kicked the fire apart herself, boot through the middle of it, snow over the coals, three kicks and done, while the drone came down out of the grey and dropped in front of Nora.

Then Nora had the handset up, and Kara heard the call go out from six meters away, thin and cracking and all in one breath.

"N-Nikki-! Nikki, come in-! Please, please pick up, it’s- it’s an emergency, we-"

-Kzzzt-!

"Kid, I’m here!"

The voice came back through the little speaker, with a helicopter inside it, wind and rotor beat, and a man raising his voice over both, and Kara stopped halfway to the passenger door with one hand on the mesh, because she had been reading that voice for three years and it had never once sounded like that.

"Slow down," Nikki said. "What’s happening?"

"I-Infected, sis put the- I put the drone up and the highway’s full, they’re coming here, t-two kilometers-"

"How many, and how fast?"

"I- I don’t- a lot-"

"Kid." Flat, over the rotors. "You’re stuttering."

The silence on the step lasted one full second, and then Nora’s whole face changed shape.

"I do NOT stutter-"

"Then give me a number."

Kara watched her sister take one breath through her nose, and hold it, and let it go, and the girl who came out the other side of it had her chin up.

"...Hundreds. The front ones are running. Two kilometers, maybe less, and closing."

"Good. That’s all I needed. Now everybody listen, because I’m only saying this once... Kara."

"Here." She was in the cab now, the door pulled shut, the Gen-12 across her knees.

"You leave now. Not in five minutes, now... Take the highway, head west, as fast as the Ascender can go. You don’t fight anything with legs today, any of you... I’m fourteen minutes out, and a highway is the easiest thing in the world to find from the air. Now roll."

"Rolling," Kara said, and the truck was already moving under the word.

Norton came through the rear door with the last bag and pulled it shut behind him before settling into the seat behind hers with the medical pack between his boots, and the first thing he said, once, in the voice that has said everything once for thirty years, was not about himself.

"Nikki. Where is my daughter?"

"Beside me. Boots out the door, rifle on her knee, safe as anything gets... She says drive."

Norton nodded at that as though the mic could see him, and then he said the second thing.

"Everyone should have a tourniquet on them... Show me."

They showed him, one after another, Kara from her thigh pocket, Nora from the strap of her rifle, Leo with one hand lifted off the wheel for half a second to tap the pouch on his belt, and Norton looked at each of them before looking away satisfied, and that was all the medicine there was time for.

The dirt trail ran two hundred meters out from behind the rest stop to the highway, and Leo took it faster than he had ever taken it, the whole truck rocking on its tires while the ram wedge on the nose swung across white fields and found the road.

Kara looked east, because somebody had to.

They were there already, the front of it around the last bend, thirty or forty of them out ahead of the rest, running with their arms hanging wrong and their swollen faces turned straight at the sound of the engine, and behind them the road simply stopped being a road.

"The situation is getting worse," Nora said from the back seat, flat as a table, and Kara loved her so much in that second that it hurt.

Leo put the truck up onto the westbound lanes and put his foot down, and the diesel climbed through its gears, and the runners came on behind them for two hundred meters, then three, and then the gap started opening the other way, and kept opening, until the mirror had nothing in it but snow.

Kara let her breath out; she didn’t realize she was holding it and looked at her watch, because it was the only thing in the cab she could be certain of, and it said twenty-four minutes past three.

-Kzzzt-!

"Nora." Nikki again, and the helicopter behind his voice had gone deeper, as if he had told it to hurry. "Why now? Did anything happen before you put the drone up? Anything at all?"

"There was a car..." Nora said, slower now, working it out as she spoke. "About an hour ago... It went past on the highway, going west, and it was honking the whole way, on and off, and the exhaust was loud, like it was broken... I thought it was just some idiot. Then I put the drone up to see if it had brought anything with it."

The channel stayed open, and nothing came down it for one second before-

"That’s a lure," Nikki said plainly, with no weight on it at all.

"Somebody drove past a horde with the horn going and towed it down that highway to your front door... I know exactly what it looks like, because I’ve done it more times than I care to remember... They didn’t want you at that rest stop. They wanted you on this road, in a moving truck, with nothing behind you but that."

Kara’s hands had gone still on the shotgun.

"Who’s they?"

"Pretty sure the people who want what’s in that truck," Nikki replied.

For a long moment, those words sat in the cab with the four of them, and nobody touched them.

"T-then we stop," Kara said. "We pull off, we find somewhere, we-"

"You don’t stop, and you don’t turn around, because there’s a horde behind you and there’s nowhere on that road to hide the truck... Just keep moving. A truck at a hundred is the hardest thing on that highway to kill, and they know it, so they’re going to want somewhere they can make you slow down... A crossroads... A bridge... A town... maybe... I’m missing something... Nora, get the map out."

Paper tore somewhere behind Kara’s head.

"There’s a crossroads..." Nora said after a moment. "Fourteen kilometers. Old state road crossing the highway... there’s a gas station on it... There’s no other way west without it, sis, the next exit’s twenty after that."

"Then you go through it at a hundred," Nikki said, "... and you do not slow down for anything. Not a car in the road. Not a person in the road. Not a child. You drive through it, Leo... and you don’t look back to see what you hit."

Leo said nothing, though his knuckles on the wheel tightened to the point of turning white.

"And Kara."

"Here."

"If they stop you anyway..." The rotors filled the gap he left. "Then it’s people in front of the gun, and you shoot them. Whoever’s standing there... You gotta shoot them."

She did not answer that, and he did not ask her to.

-Kzzzt-!

"Leo."

"Big bro."

"It’s yours now. You know what I mean."

Leo’s eyes had gone red, but they never left the road.

"...Right," he said. "I’ve got them."

He had been told that once before, on a rooftop, with a rifle he hadn’t wanted yet in his hands, and knew he had not forgotten one word of it.

"Ten minutes..." Nikki said. "I’m ten minutes out."

Kara checked her watch, and it said twenty-nine minutes past.

The fields went by white and flat and empty on both sides, fence posts and corn and one farmhouse with its door standing open. The snow came at the mesh over the windshield in long lines and slid off, and nobody in the cab said anything for a while, because there was nothing to say that would make the crossroads come any slower.

Nora had the drone in her lap with its battery light gone amber, and she looked at it, and looked at the speedometer over Leo’s shoulder, and put it down again without a word, because nothing that small can keep up with a truck doing ninety.

"Eight minutes," Nikki’s voice came over the radio.

Her watch said thirty-four minutes past three.

Five minutes had gone by since he said ten, and he had given her back two, and she understood that he was lying to her by three minutes and that he did not know he was doing it.

But she let him keep the three minutes.

"Crossing in two," Leo said.

Kara pushed her hair back off her face with one sweep of her arm, pushed the Gen-12’s safety off with her thumb, and put her feet flat on the floor, while behind her she heard Norton’s bag unzip and Nora’s rifle come up off her knees without anybody telling her to.

Then the crossing came up out of the snow exactly as the map had promised. A state road crossing the highway at a level junction, a gas station with its canopy sagging on one corner, a boarded feed store on the other, a scatter of cars at the pumps with snow on their roofs, and nothing moving anywhere in any of it, not a bird, not a body, not even a light.

"I can’t see anyone," Nora said.

"That’s the point," Kara said.

Leo held ninety, and the junction came at them quiet and wide open, and the wedge crossed the near lane of the state road, and the middle, and Kara had let one quarter of a breath go when the gas station’s lot moved.

And just as their body released the first ounce of tension, a car came out from behind the pumps on their right with its lights off and its engine screaming, a beat-up brown sedan with the driver’s door already swinging wide and a man already rolling out of it, while the car kept coming without him, straight at the front wheel, low and fast and aimed by somebody who had done this before.

-KRRAAASSSH-!