Chapter 12

 

By the time Joel found himself driving across campus (and "found" did seem the operative word here, following his negotiation of a dozen involuntary twists and turns as he hurried from the fraternity across a world gone absolutely insane) his mantra had changed from Dean or you to a simple yet heartfelt echo: You are so fucked. You are so fucked. You are so fucked…

He’d hit people, for Christ’s sake, plowed right through them. And in turn, they’d cracked his windshield. Someone had thrown something, too—a brick or stone, Joel thought—and it had popped the glass in his rear passenger window.

"Compromised" is the word, he concluded. You’ve been compromised. And now… now you are so fucked. It was that sense of being compromised, vulnerable to all these crazy bastards—what the hell was wrong with them, anyway?—that led him to make all those bad turns. After hitting the kid in the striped shirt, he’d kind of lost it, he guessed. From that point forward, whenever he saw people in the street, he turned. A quick left here, a jagging right there, whatever he could do to get away, he’d done it, and now, maybe ten minutes later, all those turns had compromised him in a big way. While he should have been out of town, heading north at a hundred and ten per, he was somehow here on campus, doing his best to maintain that twilight speed that was too fast for runners to catch him and slow enough that he wouldn’t accidentally commit to the wrong one-way street.

He turned right on Jefferson, punched it a little past some crazy looking bitch holding a rake, hit the brakes to avoid a mob down the street, made a left onto Parker, and plowed into a wall of bodies.

The car lurched, angled, popped the curb, struck something that snapped and clattered, and stopped. Crazies swarmed the car. They pulled at the doors and pummeled the hood and trunk, the windows and quarter panels. So many of them, too many, blocking out the streetlight, laughing and screaming and gibbering.

They scrambled onto the hood and kicked the windshield, which crunched, smashing but holding together to sag inward with each stomp. Joel jerked at the stick shift and worked the pedals, but he couldn’t seem to get the thing into gear—You are so fucked!—then heard someone growling through the broken back window. He swiveled and saw the sneering, bloodied face of a girl, the mouth smeared in green ooze, the eyes locked on him. She clawed at the air between them, straining, and a foot stepped through the trashed windshield inches from Joel’s face.

He gave up on the stick and fought with his seatbelt, tearing at its catch with both hands, barely feeling his fingernail rip away as he clawed at the metal clasp.

Gunfire exploded to the left. Joel pitched himself across the seat as he realized bullets were thunking into his car. It continued in a steady roll, raking back and forth, and Joel thought, That’s a machine gun! One of them has a machine gun!

He heard bullets striking crazies and lay with his eyes shut tight, feeling the warm spray of blood across his face and arm and hand. The car shook as bodies flopped and flailed overhead. A bullet shattered the rear window. Joel struggled forward into the foot wells so that the stick shift jammed into his gut. It was a horrible feeling, having his back turned to all of this, a terribly compromised position, but the girl in the back had stopped growling, and the crazies had stopped kicking and howling, and a moment later, the shooting stopped, too.

Joel lay still.

The shooter fired again, a short burst. The firing stopped again.

Through ringing ears, Joel heard the engine hissing and, closer, something drizzling onto the floor mat near his face. He risked a peek and saw the blood pooling there, draining down from overhead.

You are so fucked, his mind told him. So fucked.

Footsteps crunched across broken glass in slow, measured steps, coming close.

The door opened.

Joel squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to move. He heard the shooter breathing, felt him standing there.

Don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t even think…

The gun exploded over him, so close and loud that he pitched involuntarily forward. He curled into a tighter ball, throwing his hands over his head, and his mind shrieked at him, You moved, you stupid son of a bitch! You moved and you are so fucked!

Another gunshot popped overhead. Joel screamed, waiting for the pain.

"Two for flinching," a voice said.

Joel opened his eyes and saw a skinny, dark-haired guy grinning down at him with a gun in each hand. The guns were not pointed at Joel, and though the eyes and smile looked every bit as crazy as those of the girl who’d been crawling into the back of the car moments ago, the mouth was not green.

Joel breathed, and his muscles slackened with relief. "You’re not one of them."

"I congratulate you on your firm grasp of the obvious," the guy said, and let out an awful, high-pitched giggle.