The Dead Circle (28 page)

Mouths snap at him, inches from his face. The horrifying sound of teeth dryly clapping together sends a shiver up his spine. It’s a violent sound. They are biting so aggressively that several teeth break and he is showered with dusty bits of molars and incisors.

Chris can feel weight starting to press on him. Instantly he’s eight years old again. He’s back in the tree. The branches are trapping him in a dark claustrophobic cocoon. He knows he’s in danger; he’s climbed too high without realizing it. He wants to cling to the sticky trunk and wait for rescue, but knows he must keep moving. The walls enclosing him are not made up of nice-smelling pine needles, they are literally trying to grab him and tear him apart. Nobody can save him now. He can only save himself.

He needs to move or die. With all the effort his adrenalized body can muster he rolls hard to the left. He trips up the first row of bodies and keeps rolling over the fallen corpses until he is parallel with the truck. Three bodies block his only route of escape—under the tank. When he gets to his feet, he thinks of the old coach of the Denver Broncos, Mike Shanahan, who instructed his offensive line to use cut blocks. The huge men would literally dive at the knees of their opponents to open up space for Terrell Davis to run through. It was dirty, but it was effective. He does a cut block of his own, diving at the knees of the two zombies in his way and is slightly satisfied and slightly horrified to hear all of their weakened tendons snap apart like old string. The knees buckle backwards, folding them over in a heap. Chris rolls over their mangled bodies and into the relative shelter beneath the tanker.

He looks for daylight and finds it on the far side of the rig. He rolls out and up to his feet. With most of the zombies on the far side of the tanker, he is briefly in the clear but the ladder on the back of the tank is completely swarmed.  Sarah’s back is to him as she screams wordlessly into the horde. She could not see through the bodies and had not seen him roll under the truck.

As Chris climbs one of the huge wheels and reaches for the railing on top of the tank, he sees Sarah planning to jump off the other side to rescue him. She doesn’t say anything, but he can read her body language and he sees her make the decision. He’s so out of breath the world is swimming, but he’s able to choke out sound.

“SARAH!! No!”

Sarah turns around to see his hand poke up to grab the rail. She drops to her knees to help him up.

“Chris!! Fuck. Jesus. Fuck!”

Chris pulls his torso up and she helps him swing his legs over and onto the roof. He collapses at her feet, panting in exhaustion.

Abruptly dropping to her knees, she frantically checks his body for injuries. “Where are you hurt!?”

Chris is so exhausted he can barely speak, but he’s able to choke out, “I’m OK. I’m OK.”

Ignoring him, Sarah turns him over and continues checking for blood, bone or other injury. Chris eventually catches his breath enough to speak normally.

“I’m OK. We have to keep moving.”

Sarah looks up to see that all the commotion has attracted another flood of Fred and Gingers. Hundreds stream down the freeway from both directions. Sarah thinks it looks like someone just opened the gates at Woodstock and every Fred and Ginger in the world is rushing to get seats close to the stage.
Grateful Dead indeed.

The sun is starting to set over the skyline. They can feel it rapidly getting darker and the impending darkness sets off an ancient instinctual alarm that reminds them that humans used to be prey. The onrushers are throwing long shadows on the road in front of them as they charge the truck.  The glare from the low sun makes it hard for Chris and Sarah to see the danger converging, but they have no trouble hearing the impacts as one after another zombie runs into the tanker.

The dead are swarming. They start to climb. They’re climbing the rig. They’re climbing each other.

Chris and Sarah scramble down the tank and onto the roof of the cab. It’s obvious that they won’t be able to get in through the doors. The zombies block both sides and are packed three-deep.

“The sunroof.” Sarah pulls a hammer out of her bag.

Sarah raises the hammer and brings it down onto the window as hard as she can. The glass seems unimpressed by her attack and the hammer bounces off. She tries again. A third time. Chris reaches to try himself, but she lets out a scream of frustration and shatters the safety glass into the cab below. She jumps in through the sunroof feet first, noticeably wincing when she lands. She locks both of the doors while Chris tosses the cat carrier in and falls into the seat beside her.

They are safe. For a moment at least.

“Woah.”

Sarah grimaces. “Well that went exactly to plan right?”

“Exactly. Are the keys in the ignition?”

Sarah checks. Her heart drops. “No! Shit.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me! Fuck! Try the shade? That’s where they always are in movies.”

“And it never makes sense.”

“They have to be here. We’re in the middle of the highway. A Fred wouldn’t have taken the keys with him.”

“Yeah, but he might just have easily dropped them outside. If that happened, we’re fucked.”

“Don’t you think I know that?!”

They frantically search the cab, digging through the pair of pants the driver abandoned and pawing through the trash that litters the floor. They are immensely relieved when Sarah ducks her head down and finds the keychain at her feet under an old McDonald’s wrapper.

“Thank God.”

Sarah pops her head up with a sigh of relief that is immediately choked out when she sees a horrible face on the other side of the window. She is face-to-face with a middle-aged woman. The only that separates them is a thin pane of glass, and death.

The face used to belong to Kathryn McKitrich, a gym teacher at the Heavenly Mercy Catholic High School. She had loved her job teaching the basics of basketball, football and floor hockey to disinterested hormone-poisoned teenagers. It was a simple but satisfying life for Kathryn. She wasn’t a nun. She wasn’t even Catholic but the job provided a steady salary and benefits for her and her wife Terri. She used to be self-conscious about being such a stereotype: the lesbian gym teacher. But Terri always told her not to be bothered by it. She said if she loved her job that’s all that mattered and if anybody gave her shit about being a stereotype, fuck ‘em. Kathryn spent twenty years wearing the shorts and holding the whistle. Ironically the Catholics never really bothered her about being a lesbian either. She heard horror stories about gay teachers being fired in Philadelphia and in the south, but at her school at least they pretty much minded their own business. Her boss pretended not to notice that Terri was a woman when she was listed as her spouse on insurance forms. Kathryn assumed this was because her boss, a nun, probably also preferred the company of women and chose life as a nun in a time when it was much more difficult to live openly, or even secretly, with someone of the same gender. It broke Kathryn’s heart a little bit, but she wasn’t one to question somebody else’s decisions if they were happy. Apparently, her boss was.

Kathryn’s body had lost an eye somewhere in the circle. The socket had filled with a dark mixture of dirty blood and pus. Her scalp had cracked and started to peel back at the intersection of her forehead and her greying hair. The exposed skull that peeks out from the ever-widening slit in her skin is bright white. As she wipes her face over the glass, the slit opens further, exposing a nest of maggots which gets mashed into the glass. Her jaw snaps open and shut rapidly as she attempts to bite through the window. Her broken teeth make a chilling dry scraping sound on the glass.

Sarah screams and drops the keys. What used to be Kathryn, the dedicated gym teacher stereotype, starts to pound on the glass. It makes a terrifyingly loud noise.

Sarah is now screaming her words without realizing it. “Fuck!!”

Chris grabs her shoulder. “Sarah. Stop. Breathe. You have to calm down.”

“Fuck!”

She retrieves the keys but her hands are shaking too badly to get the key into the ignition.

“SARAH! Stop. Close your eyes. Count down from ten. Do it!”

The pounding on the glass is starting to intensify as more and more hands join in. Many of them are horribly mangled. They have dislocated fingers going in strange directions. Some have missing fingers. Some have missing hands.

“OK. Ten, nine, eight, seven,”

“Keep breathing.”

“Six, five, four, three, two, one.”

She opens her eyes. She is still frightened but not panicked.

Chris continues. “Move quickly, but with purpose. Put the keys in the ignition. Start the engine.”

Sarah starts to think more clearly. Her hands have stopped shaking as badly. “Nice trick. You learn that in one of your secret boy meetings about fighter jets and guns?”

“I saw it on an episode of Lost.”

“Ah. Of course. What I wouldn’t do for a nonsensical Polar Bear about now.”

She puts the key in the ignition and turns it. The motor makes a series of groans and clicks, but the engine does not start.

Chris grimaces for a second then tries to appear calm. He hopes she doesn’t see his fear. This is not good.

This time Sarah is the calm one. “It’s a Diesel. When it’s cold you have to warm up the fuel injectors.” She flips a switch and a small light on the dash illuminates. She waits for ten seconds then tries again. The engine roars to life. She puts the truck in first gear and slams on the gas.

The engine roars, but the wheels do not turn.

Chris tries to speak calmly, trying to avoid scaring her again. “What’s wrong now? Are you in gear?”

“Yes!” A cosmically intense frustration boils almost instantaneously, making her want to smash something with her bare hands. This isn’t fair. None of this is fair. “Shit!”

“Try again.” Chris is now having a harder time appearing calm. His mind races for new options. The pounding on the glass continues to intensify. The sound of fingernails, teeth and exposed bone scraping the outside of his window starts to gnaw at the edges of his sanity.

Click… click… click… SLAM!... click… scrape… clack… SLAM!

Sarah puts the truck in gear and presses the gas pedal more slowly. The wheels still do not turn.

“Is there a parking brake?” Chris asks.

“Yeah, right there. But it’s not on. Why can’t we fucking move!?”

Sarah closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. She feels like somewhere in the cloudy recesses of her mind, there is an answer. She imagines herself pushing through the clouds and rifling through file cabinets that store her life’s memories. She doesn’t imagine pulling out a piece of paper or anything quite so cinematic; rather the information seems to interrupt her imagination. She opens her eyes with an unlikely grin.

“Wait! You’re sort of right. Something this big has got to have air brakes! You have to build up the air pressure in the brake lines before they will release.”

She finds the switch for the air compressor and flips it on. The compressor’s tiny engine starts to hum and the cab is filled with a hissing noise as the pressure begins to build.

“Look at the gauge. It has to build up to 90 PSI before we can go.”

The windows are now completely covered with zombies. They’ve climbed onto the hood and are fighting to get through the windshield. The glow of the setting sun is almost blocked out by the cluster of Fred and Gingers. Tiny shafts of light peek through the bodies as they shift and swarm, exposing random little flashes of a beautiful sunset. Chris is grateful to be behind glass, but he wonders how long before they break the windshield or discover that the sunroof is wide open.

“How much longer is this going to take?” He asks with a great deal more urgency than he’d intended to convey.

“We’re up to forty PSI. Soon.”

The hissing gets louder and louder. It sounds like a jet engine warming up from a distance. The pounding and scraping on the glass continues.

Click… click… THUMP… scrape… scree… SLAM!…

Chris discovers that yes, it is possible to be more afraid than he was five minutes ago.

The pressure takes less than ninety seconds to build up, but it feels like a lifetime, especially when a crack appears in Sarah’s window.

The gage hits 90 PSI and there is a satisfying beep.

“Yes! What do you say we get the fuck out of here?!”

Sarah depresses the clutch, shifts into first gear and hits the gas. The engine roars, but the tires are barely turning. The truck is completely swamped in flesh, slowing their momentum. But eventually the 380 horsepower engine is too much for the Fred and Gingers to hold back.

The first few zombies get knocked down and are crushed under the enormous tires. Whatever fluids remain in the bodies leak out as they are pulverized and it causes the tanker to lose traction. The tires start to slip and spin giving Sarah the sensation that they are trying to plow through a snow drift. She knows the feeling well. First you get slowed by pushing through the snow, and then you have to deal with the loss of traction it causes. It does nothing to improve Sarah’s frustration. But as she switches to second gear, the other wheels find traction and compensate. As the truck picks up speed, it begins to plow a pathway through the naked horde. The truck crushes dozens of zombies, causing the ground to become even more saturated with entrails and human debris. The wheels continue to spin and slide down the highway. Sarah remembers her father’s advice for driving in snow.
‘Spinning your tires just makes it worse Sarah.’
She lets off the gas a bit and tries to slow the wheels to get better footing. It’s good advice and they eventually pick up enough speed to get some stability.

“Jesus!”

The tanker finally hits fifteen miles an hour, leaving a wake of spatter and twisted bodies behind them.

“Look out!” Chris points at the line of abandoned cars blocking their pathway. They are seconds from crashing into a dusty Toyota Camry.

“Uh, what do you want me to do?! We can’t go around. We’re going to have to go through!”