Light through her eyelids. Flickering, orange-y red. Miles had never been a heavy sleeper growing up, and was even less so now. She got to her feet, blinking away dreams of her father, and reached across the short distance between her bed and her window to make a gap in the blinds.
Fire. Three of the main buildings, near the center of camp. She ducked her head to see higher and noticed that the fire had already spread to some of the trees overhead. Fall had arrived, and the leaves had changed, and everything was dead and dry. Worst case scenario stuff. She stepped into her shoes and hurried out the door of her little hut. It had been a shed in a previous life but she didn't need much, and as she looked higher up, following the overlap of dry trees, she saw that she wouldn't have it much longer. If the fire didn't spread overhead, through the canopy, it would spread through all the dry brush on the ground.
She spent another second, only one, staring at the buildings. The fire was loud, but there was no hint of voices. No echoes of cries. For all she knew, she was already the only one left.
She darted back inside just long enough to reach under her bed and grab her dad's old army rucksack, and her course was set in her mind the moment her hand touched canvas.
She sprinted around the woodshed, temptingly full of tools, and went straight for the rusted out Monte Carlo. The door creaked fearsomely, like something out of a horror movie, as she pulled it open. No key in the ignition: that fucker Jones was always so careless. She fished out her little pen light, praying to a god she didn't believe in that the little AAA inside would hold out for this, as she crawled into the driver's side footwell, and reached up under the dashboard. None of the wires were the color she was expecting, so she started tracing them from end to end.
Through the dirty windshield, she could make out the light getting brighter, which was a bad sign.
"Anyone?"
Miles grabbed the steering wheel and hauled herself partially up, enough to peek her head over the dashboard. "Eeeeeey" she said, flashlight still clenched between her teeth. She pulled it out with her other hand and repeated,
"Hey!"
Reese, one of the other women, whipped around like an owl, and darted toward her, repeating "Oh no, oh no," over and over as she moved.
"Gas can," Miles shouted, pointing at the woodshed. "Siphon from the F150."
"Which one is the--"
"The red one!"
Miles screamed, as she put the light back between her teeth, pulled her pocket knife from her hip, and started stripping the insulation off of the one she really hoped was going to the starter.
"Oh boy, oh jeez, oh man, oh jeez."
"Less talking more sucking!"
She heard the bigger woman slam into the truck on the other side of the aged car she was working on. She very much wanted to stop and check that Reese had any idea how to siphon gas, but she needed to do her part first. It twisted her insides to leave an important task to anyone else, but she was starting to feel intense warmth on her legs, where they were sticking out of the side of the car. She very much would have wanted to just take the truck and be on her way already, but the engine on that one had just seized and was probably shot to hell. Replacing it was on their todo list.
There was an ironic kind of relief when, a moment later, she heard Reese retching and spitting.
She nicked her thumb cutting the second wire, but there was no time to slow down. She touched the wires, dimly aware that just about every muscle in her body was clenched in anticipation, and gave a garbled whoop when the motor lurched.
"That's it!" she cried. "Let's go!"
"I didn't get much,"
Reese called back.
"Whatever you got," Miles shouted, "it'll be enough."
"Oh gosh, oh jeez, oh gosh, oh gosh."
Miles kissed her flashlight, then jammed her thumb into her mouth and sucked on the wound while she shoved the flashlight back into her pack and her knife into her pocket, fastidiously returning everything to the exact place it had been. Reese was pouring the fuel into the Monte Carlo, and staring back toward the fire.
"Did you see anyone else get out?" Reese called, near to shouting to be heard over the growing fire.
"Just you," Miles said, as she tossed her rucksack into the back seat. "Did you grab anything?"
"I didn't have time!"
"It'll have to do," Miles said. "Put the can in the back when you're done." Then she slid down into the driver's seat, slammed the door shut, and grabbed the two wires between her fingers.
"Come on, come on, come on," Reese was muttering, loudly, and seemingly to herself, as she screwed the cap back on. Miles pulled on the trunk release, and Reese threw the red plastic can inside, shouting,
"That's it!"
as she ran around and jumped into the passenger seat.
The old Monte Carlo, a heavy thing of Detroit steel, the pet project of someone long gone, rumbled to life and started moving.
"I'll get the--"
"No time," Miles said, as she pressed down on the pedal and accelerated toward the chain link gate. The fire was spreading along the brush now, creeping toward their escape route.
Reese stretched out next to her, planting her feet in the well, grabbing the door in one hand and bracing the other against the roof, as they slammed into and through the flimsy, padlocked barrier. The metal frame banged open, partially dislodged, and a piece of it slammed into the windshield, leaving a long crack that ran from the passenger side ceiling corner down to the driver's side hood corner, but they were free. They were free, and they were surrounded.
The moment they swung out onto the little dirt road, they could see
them.
Dozens of them. Some were illuminated in front of them, in the dim yellow of her headlights, and others she could only see by the way the firelight reflected in their eyes as they moved toward a bright, loud disturbance. As if the fire hadn't been bad enough.
"Ooooooh," Reese whined, wild-eyed.
"Hold on tight!"
The old car spun its wheels for a second, when she was a little too ambitious with the clutch, and then they were moving. Most of the dead around them were focused on the fire, but the ones directly in front of her had noticed the very loud, very bright, very-much-moving car maneuvering through them, and were shuffling toward it. She knew she could afford to hit a few of them head on, but the headlights wouldn't take very much in the way of direct hits before shattering, and every time one of them got ran into near the waist, they'd slam down on the hood and bend it more and more until it was stuck shut forever or, worse, pushed it down into something that wasn't designed to be pushed into.
The brakes were soft, and she had to whip the wheel around pretty far to turn the thing at all, but the motor was big and loud and powerful. They rocketed down the shabby little gravel driveway, away from the derelict scrapyard that had been her home for over a year.
A minute later, they burst out onto Evans, careening sideways into the still mobile corpse of a very old man, and Miles' heart was in her throat. There was easily a hundred of them, spread out down the street, in the front yards of the houses on her right and in the fenced-in field behind the elementary school on her left. Except for the handful that had noticed them, all of them were facing the fire, now licking up over the treetops on their right. Reese hadn't shifted an inch the whole time, and looked like she might rip off the door handle if she didn't chill out, her massive thighs clenched to a sculpture-like tightness matching her white-knuckled grip. She was muttering the whole time, though rarely loud enough to be heard over the throaty eight-valve.
"...And sail off... out of sight, out of... while they sleep... come clean, and start..."
"Stop that," Miles snapped, as she gunned it onto Perryman. She craned forward over the steering wheel, trying to peer around the edge of the church at the corner to gage how wide or tight she could take it.
Reese did not stop. She didn't even seem to be aware of Miles. She just stared forward, eyes zipping between different zeds ahead of them, and pressed herself down so hard that the chair was creaking as she continued to mumble.
The Monte Carlo roared once they turned on to Main, and Miles got it all the way up into third gear by the time they were passing the Gigamart. That was short lived, though, because there were two clumps of them ahead, about a hundred yards apart, and she had to make a sweeping S turn to get around, between, and past them.
"Left," Reese grunted, as they came up on Route 60.
"Left!"
But the road to the left was more crowded, and there were three bad wrecks she could see even just approaching that way. Her group had been diligent about clearing the roads of Rosewood, but they hadn't set their sights on doing much more than town and the way to the corpse disposal dump. Miles turned right.
***
Reese did not start to relax until the car crossed the bridge, even though the number of bodies shambling across the street thinned out to almost nothing once they started heading east. Dawn was getting closer, rendering the fire less noticeable against the low clouds. There were few places that Reese wanted to be less than where they were headed, but the place they'd come from was one of them.
The car started making little shudders, and Miles pulled over off the road. She kept going once they got onto the grass, and brought it to a very gentle stop with the nose of the thing kissing a tree.
"So people just think it's another wreck," Miles said, seemingly answering the question that was forming in Reese's head. "Then, maybe one of us can get some more fuel and come back for it."
"Ah," Reese said, as she relaxed a little. Everything ached, and relaxing hurt more than she'd thought it would. "Okay."
