Eaters (27 page)

“Might as well. There’s no point in turning around and heading back the way we came. We already know what’s behind us.”

She felt that she could see the gears turning in his mind as they packed up their things.

“There’s no highway straight to Arizona,” Aidan said as he kicked some more dirt over the embers of the fire. “We’d be taking a lot of mountain roads. We’d need a map, a shitload of luck, and some—”

The intruding noise of a deep, reverberating hum interrupted him. It was hard to tell which direction it was coming from and they swung their heads from side to side, attempting to locate the source.

“What is that?”

Aidan remained frozen with a wild, frightened look in his eyes. His disturbed appearance scared her more than the sound, causing a chill to snake down her spine.

“What the hell
is
that?” she said again.

“Get the guns.”

She took a step backwards, the heel of her boot crunching into a pile of leaves and reached down to grab their guns.

After taking his gun, Aidan took a few quick steps towards the motorcycle then his knee wobbled and he winced in pain. “Go to the bike!”

She hesitated. The noise didn’t sound like anything she’d ever heard before. Could it be tanks, helicopters? There was a brief flash of hope.

“Go!”

There was ice-cold fear in his eyes, not any sort of optimism.

She ran to the motorcycle and hopped on the back. He hobbled over to the duffel bag, threw the strap over his shoulder then limped towards her. “Not the back, the front.”

“What?”
He couldn’t mean for her—

“I can’t drive. My knee is too fucked up.”

The blood drained from her head, making her feel faint. Mark’s voice growled in her ear. It wasn’t anything coherent; it was more of a guttural battle cry. She closed her eyes for a second, took a deep breath, and saw him as clear as if he was standing in front of her. He wore his fatigues and had black stripes of paint under his sparkling blue eyes. His hands were on his hips, and he was barking at her like a drill sergeant. The image infused her with his warrior spirit.
You can do this.

The strange sound was clearer now. It wasn’t any sort of machinery. There was no doubt that it was a chorus of voices, a mix of echoing alto moans and soprano screeches—the desperate sounds of hungry walking corpses.

“What do I do?” she asked as she slid forward and grasped the handles.

“Turn the key, pull the clutch back to put it in neutral, then hit the start button.”

She tried to replay every syllable he said, focusing her mind on this one task as he hoisted himself onto the back of the bike with a grimace.

The motor rumbled to life, and she was surprised to find herself exhilarated being at the reigns of so much power. If she could just get it down the slope and onto the road.

“Alright, remember the way we came up? Head that way. Watch for trees and rocks.”

The discordant moans were upon them now. She glanced back and saw the trees move.
No more time for a riding lesson.

A jaw-dropping number of them emerged from the trees. They looked like cadavers or the synthetic version, extras from a horror movie that had spent hours in the makeup chair having layers of latex and corn syrup blood applied to make them look as gory as possible.

But this wasn’t a movie.

It was real.

As Cheryl eased off the clutch and rolled forward, they lumbered towards them in an awkward mass all at once like one big amoeba made up of necrotic tissue. She’d only gone a few feet when a few suddenly broke ranks and charged towards the fire pit. They hobbled straight to the rabbit carcasses with outstretched arms. A woman in a tattered uniform from a local pub with bloodstains on her apron reached one first, but another woman with torn flesh curving the corners of her mouth into an oversized grin like the Joker from
Batman
quickly snatched it away. They began to fight for it, grabbing at ribs, breaking them in two like wishbones and swallowing them. One laggard, an elderly man with one eyeball hanging out of its socket and whipping around like a tetherball, found one of the rabbit skins a few feet away. As he reached for it, a boy with gelatinous eyes the color of curdled milk snagged the rabbit’s ear. It became a tug of war, each of them pulling and snapping at the skin with their teeth. The boy won and began to devour it, stuffing the fur into his mouth. Others piled on him like a pack of hyenas.

The rest of the group came straight for Aidan and Cheryl.

“Faster!” Aidan yelled.

Downhill. Why did she have to start out downhill?
There were too many trees in the way. As she sped up, branches scraped at them, and they bounced up and down over rocks hidden in the leaf litter.

“Left. Left!”

She narrowly avoided a multi-trunked aspen as a spray of leaves slammed into her face. The unexpected maneuver threw her off balance. Aidan instinctively leaned to the right a half second before it occurred to her, helping them avoid laying the bike down completely. Cheryl knew that if that happened it was all over, at least for Aidan. He certainly wasn’t going to be doing any running. If she had a brief head start, it might be possible to outrun the pack, but she couldn’t run indefinitely, and one advantage the Eaters had was that they were indefatigable.

Dodging more trees, like a racehorse flying through barrels, she kept on. There were spots of mud hidden underneath the leaf debris, and twice the back tire spun out, threatening to dump them, but she held on. Fear seemed to have suddenly instilled her with a flash course in equilibrium that helped to keep them upright.

There was a tree-free area coming up. When she reached it, she dared a glance back and was immediately sorry. The slope had added some momentum to the group. They were moving with unbelievable speed, their wobbly feet stumbling one after the other in a macabre salsa with their torsos and heads flopping from side to side as if they had no neck bones.

She faced forward again, and she heard a click behind her (or maybe she just sensed it, because it seemed impossible that she could hear anything over the roar of the motor and the chorus of groans) and knew that Aidan was preparing to fire. If he was going to use up ammo now, she knew he wasn’t sure if they were going to get away and was going to attempt to pick off a few.

A couple of gunshots followed, and she felt Aidan’s body kick back into hers with each round. That wasn’t helpful; it was all she could do to hang on the way it was and it looked like the terrain wasn’t about to get any easier.

She gripped the handlebars tighter as they entered a steeper area of the slope. Densely packed pines forced her to tap on the brakes and slow down. Some of the Eaters tripped and tumbled down the slope, rolling past them like dead bodies tossed out of hell. She knew they’d be waiting at the bottom near the road, maybe with a few more broken limbs and heads gashed by boulders that had stopped their freefall. It was also disturbingly possible that they could be joined by more of the undead down by the road that just hadn’t started climbing up yet.

Three seconds later, that dread was confirmed. She saw a glimpse of the road a few yards ahead in between a pair of massive boulders, but the view was partially blocked by the silhouettes of human heads.
Damn…damn…damn!
There wasn’t going to be any easy ride once they hit pavement.

She veered to the right at the last possible moment, just avoiding crashing into the boulders. A glance back confirmed that the tactic worked. Bodies collided into the boulders, heaping upon one another into a pile of rotten flesh. She gave herself a mental high five.
No brains. No brakes.

Aidan tapped her shoulder from behind.

With that group slightly delayed, she focused all of her attention on the upcoming road, preparing for the worst.

How many? How many waiting for them?

She knew they’d be drawn to the sound of the motor and the shrieks of the others. Would they be starting to climb up in a loose, easily penetrable formation, or lined up shoulder-to-shoulder? She hoped for the former. She’d just learned barrel racing; there wasn’t time to pick up linebacker skills.

It looked like those skills were indeed going to be necessary, though. Up ahead, she could see a crowd anticipating their approach. There was no gauging the total number of them; she knew that what she saw could be just the tip of the iceberg. More could be lingering nearby or coming up the road to join their ranks.

Aidan pointed over her shoulder to the right. She saw where he intended for her to go. There was a clear patch of asphalt on the other side of a three-foot wide stream. She’d have to jump the bike to get to it. It would be a Hail Mary event, but it was either that or head straight into the waiting mass of death.

The stream came up too soon. She didn’t think she was ready, but the next thing she knew, they were flying through midair and smacking down onto the pavement. The impact threw her forward into the handlebars, slamming against her ribs and knocking some of the wind out of her lungs.

She felt stunned for a second as she tried to retain control and steer towards the center of the road away from another gathering group that was advancing towards them. Her speed was still much faster than she felt comfortable with, so she let off the gas just a hair. As the machine obeyed, slowing down just the right amount, she felt like it was cooperating with her as if it had the same mission. Now if she could just steer it better and retain her balance, they might be alright.

She pulled away from that mob of Eaters, and was only a few yards down the road when it curved and she found herself heading towards another lot of them. The swaying dead bodies with filmy white eyes stood in a random arrangement, stretching across the span of the road.

There was no choice but to hunch down and blast her way through. It was a scene much like they’d encountered on their mountain ascent. At first, that gave her confidence, but then she realized that she hadn’t been the one driving the motorcycle on the way up.

She felt Aidan’s hands squeeze tightly around her waist. He hadn’t fired a shot since the first round. Was he saving ammunition in case things got even worse up ahead?

Her steering was so wobbly that when she tried to swerve around an Eater reaching for her with skeletal fingers a handlebar smacked into his arm, and she saw it detach from his body and fly up into the air.

The next obstacle came far too soon for her to react. It was a squat form with decaying rolls of blubber sloughing off its sides. There was no immediate indication if it was male or female, or even something that had once been human. She twisted the handlebars away from it and tried to speed up in the same instant. The motion pulled her opposite the white-eyed dead Buddha figure and lifted the front tire from the pavement.

For a split second, the motorcycle reared up like a horse frightened by a snake, balancing on the rear wheel. That sliver of time seemed to happen in slow motion
.
In her movie mind, they were two knights on a black and silver steed, frozen in the blue sky as decayed hands reached up for them.

Then, the front wheel came down with a violent impact. It was a miracle that she held on and didn’t soar head first over the handlebars. Her bruised limbs were thrust away from the bike and before she could grab the reins again, the front wheel ran over a pair of feet—bare toeless things that looked more like putrefied fish filets than human flesh.

There was another sparse group up ahead, each wobbly form zigzagging towards them. She felt like a pinball as they smacked through them, ringing into one after another. Her tunnel vision, hell bent on finding her way out of this pocket of Eaters, kept her looking straight ahead so she wouldn’t focus too much on the scores of individual dilapidated faces with missing teeth, sparse hair, scrappy skin, and exposed jawbones. Hands clawed as they passed, and she had to block out the shudder she felt from every corpse finger that touched her and grabbed at her clothing.

After a couple of seconds, she saw clear road ahead. They were almost out except for one last obstacle—a single chain of Eaters spanning the road just before a sharp curve. She’d have to bust through them and somehow manage to slow down immediately afterwards to avoid flying straight off the side of the cliff. Even with her helmet on, the thought of crashing into such a wall of rotten flesh made her stomach tighten. Many in the line were bloated and had skin sloughing off. Fluids dripped down their bodies: blood, pus, and rivulets of indeterminable green and black sludge.

Aidan’s grip tightened around her waist again.

She floored the gas and burst through the mass of rotten flesh a second later, but she lost control after that. The back wheel of the motorcycle skidded out into the shoulder and crashed into a section of guardrail, causing a spray of gravel to fly over the side of the cliff. The momentum would have taken them up and over if they hadn’t both thrust their bodies in the opposite direction at the same exact moment. It saved them from falling to their deaths, but the over correction flung them to the road as the motorcycle crashed onto its side. They landed hard, bouncing a couple of times, and would have been a splatter of red meat if they hadn’t had their helmets on and their clothing hadn’t given them some protection. Aidan’s leather jacket made it through intact, but her heavy camouflage shirt had a new long tear through the elbow.