A loud gurgling sound snapped him back into reality and the disturbing chaos taking place outside. Danielle appeared from the bathroom, a mixture of shock and confusion etched across her face. Hot lucid tears brimmed in her eyes, pouring rivers of wet black mascara down her cheeks.

  Her nose and chest flared. “Too many bath salts?”

  “I beg to differ.”

  He inhaled, drawing great clouds of cool air deep into his lungs. The breeze flooding the doorway carried a sharp putrid odor into the room and stung their nostrils. When he glanced up at Danielle, the mingled look of confusion and shock shifted to one of simple confusion.

  Colin used the edge of the bed to hoist him to his feet, spun around and followed her gaze. He crept across the room, paused beside the foot of the bed and glanced out the window again, his chest rising and falling with each labored breath he took. In the reflection of the window, Danielle clamped her hand across her mouth, her cheap silver ring glinting in the sunlight, and sunk down onto the edge of the rumpled bed.

  He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Confusion etched tiny creases across his face, bracketing the corners of his mouth and eyes. His heart thudded.

  The heavyset brunette in the cartoon tee-shirt sat up from across the hood, her wide petrified eyes baring the same milky blue gaze as Alicia’s attacker; the black couple soon followed, baring open pockets of torn flesh. Their faces saggy and creased, they looked as if they’d been roused out of a deep sleep. The color had been drained from their tightly sunken skin, fading to a tombstone-gray pallor.

  “No fucking way.” Danielle said. “No fucking way. Those people are supposed to be dead and they just-just-just-ohmigod-they just fucking stood up like it was nothing.”

  Colin sprinted away from the window, snatched his gray pocket tee and deep blue denim jeans from the floor and slid them back on. Danielle hadn’t realized what he was doing until after he tied his shoes. She leaped up from the bed and slid back into her skin-tight blue cotton skirt and baggy red Cleveland Cavaliers tee-shirt.

  By the time Danielle slipped her feet into her open-toed brown sandals, a thick putrid stench began to permeate from Alicia’s motionless corpse. Colin knelt beside of her, cradled her left hand inside of his right and kissed the knuckles on her second and third fingers just as he’d done before they danced during their reception. He wanted to say something, anything that could make things better but he knew it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.

  The words were there but the sadness lodged in his throat blocked them from coming out. No matter what he said or did, there was nothing he could do to fix this.

  He kissed the backs of her hands, placed them on her lap. He snatched Danielle’s right hand, stepped over Alicia’s bloody motionless corpse and led her out of the room. Beads of cold sweat dotted their forehead, trickled down the back of their necks, secreted inside of their pits and coated the back of their necks.

  He snatched his remote keypad of his dark-blue Ford Explorer from his right pocket, thumbed the LOCK button and sent a loud chirping sound across the parking lot. They opened their doors, hopped inside and shut their doors. Danielle placed her purse onto the passenger floorboard, wiped a tear from her cheek and peered at her reflection in the passenger side mirror.

  Colin punched the START button, fired up his dark-blue Ford Explorer, snapped on his seat belt and backed out of the slot. The motel’s square yellow sign (the words KISOR MOTEL scrawled across the bottom in perfect red script) loomed above the parking lot, hovering in the bright blue sky like a second sun.

  He turned the wheel to the left, bounced the rear passenger tire over a deep jagged pothole in the middle of the motel’s entrance and climbed onto Campbell Avenue. When the Explorer righted itself, Danielle drew a cloud of stale air through her teeth, flicked her gaze from the side mirror and out the front windshield.

  A necklace of deserted vehicles stretched across the street like fractured bones, their bumpers glinting under the mid-afternoon sunlight. Each open door and busted window told a different story that didn’t end well.

  The people who failed to reach safety had been tackled to the ground and ripped apart by the walking dead; great puddles of slick maroon blood spread across the street and glistened under the warm yellow sun. Chunks of pulpy red flesh either clung to the asphalt or hung off the mouths of the undead; limbs were devoured with voracious delight, gnawed down to the bone like a Thanksgiving turkey; faces, severed heads and ears were stripped of every inch of their flesh by crooked black teeth. Other people gave chase in an endless quest for human flesh; some were lucky and some weren’t.

  Colin gnashed his teeth together, tightened his grip around the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white and stomped down on the gas. The engine rose from a low murmur to a loud guttural groan as he cut the Explorer through the maze of immobile traffic and ravenous fiends. Her eyes wide with shock at the carnage taking place, Danielle clamped her left hand across her mouth and suppressed the scream rising toward her throat.

  He merged into the right lane and drove up along the shoulder. A loud vibration spread through the car as the tires slid across the curb, leaving faint black smudges behind. His side mirror collided with the passenger side mirror of a bright blue Toyota Yaris lying on its side in the middle of the street and exploded in a mist of broken glass and metal shavings that rained down across the hood.

  A zombie with frayed blonde hair sticking up from the top of her head shambled across the street from his left. She wore a bright red with a white-silk sash slung across the front of her chest; the words MRS. BUCKEYE was stitched across in large purple font. Her left cheek had been peeled away, exposing a crescent of gnarled black teeth and tiny bits of flesh pocked bone.

  Danielle reached up with her right arm, grasped the hard gray-plastic armbar fixed above the passenger door and squeezed until it hurt. She gave a tinny squeal, her body growing more tense as she braced for impact.

  The Explorer smashed into the beauty queen. Her body exploded, spraying a mist of thick spongy flesh, shattered bone and tousled hair across the street. An arm (Danielle wasn’t sure which one) landed on the hood of the SUV with wet squelchy thud; other chunks of flesh streaked the windshield.

  His face set in a hard line, Colin engaged the wipers and swept various chunks of flesh off the windshield across the hood. Danielle peered across the top of the severed arm and saw the MRS. BUCKEYE sash clinging onto the hood ornament, flapping crazily in the breeze. She clamped her left hand across her mouth and swallowed the lump of bile back down her throat.

  “That’s not something you see every day, huh?” She said.

  She followed it with a nervous chuckle. Colin kept his attention on the road, peering around every few seconds for any more obstructions.

  “Calm down, Alicia.” He said. “We just need to get out of here right now and figure out where to go from there.”

  She cast a sideways glance at him, shock registering across her face. She was sure he’d just called her by his wife’s name but decided not to mention it because there was enough on his mind already. This was a time when they both needed to be strong for each other.

  She slid her left hand away from her mouth and brushed it across the middle console toward his right thigh. When her fingers grazed the leg of his jeans, she jerked her hand back, her face flushing. Wrong place, wrong time.

  Colin merged left and sped through a wide berth between an overturned motorcycle and a dead brunette woman in a black leather jacket and assless jeans. He followed Mannion Avenue through four blocks of one and two story stucco and clapboard houses sitting back from the curb on postage-stamp lawns that were reduced to scenes of horror and devastation as puddles of blood and fresh corpses lay everywhere. He cleared Mannion in a few minutes, flew past another stretch of suburban homes and turned east onto Interstate Thirty-Three.

  Danielle tightened her grip on the armbar and leaned back further in her seat. People fled across the street, spilling out of parked and/or overturned cars or fled from one of the many brand-name restaurants, gas-stations and other establishments, their faces twisted under a mixture of horror and shock only to be tackled by the walking dead. Towers of thick black smoke and funnels of bright-orange flame spewed from the windows of The Sagaskie Motel as guests spilled out from the top floors and fell nine stories to their deaths; an old man with bedhead white hair guided his frail hump-backed wife across the road when three zombies dressed in tattered football uniforms surrounded them.

  The old man flinched and threw his arms out in front of him as they closed in on them. Blood pumped at the air in wind-blown geysers. His wife’s stockinged legs jutted out from between the dead, gave a final twitch and slumped onto the pavement.

  Colin sped up, weaving through more debris and scenes of violence unfolding around them, when something flew past them as if they were standing still. A bright-red pickup truck flew across the neighboring lane, weaving drunkenly through the sea of zombified faces. He drove past The Salter-Greene Mall sitting below the highway beyond a scarred metal guardrail; people rushed out of the flat-roofed brick building in a wave of panic like stick figures seeking shelter.

  A loud screeching sound scraped at the oscillating chorus of alarming screams. His chest tightening with fear, Colin’s left hand flinched around the top of the steering wheel.

  The red pickup bounced over a chunk of concrete and landed back on all fours. A thunderous report pounded across the interstate as the rear passenger tire exploded and sent the truck drifting toward the right shoulder of the road. It swerved twice, the punctured tire slapping at the undercarriage and struck a leafy oak tree with a loud hollow thud and the shriek of metal rubbing against metal.

  Another broken chain of deserted vehicles streaked through the middle of the interstate, etching a makeshift trail easy for Colin to weave through. Zombies knelt onto the hot bloody gray asphalt, gnawing on severed limbs or chunks of torn flesh; some victims were either splayed across the street or draped over the driver and passenger doors of their discarded vehicles. Two more towers of black smoke coasted above town, carrying the mingled cloud of burning flesh and hot blood in the breeze.

  Danielle glanced out the passenger window and pouted. Her chest tightened. Her cheeks reddened as tears brimmed in her sunken dark eyes.

  She looked away, leaned forward in her seat and turned the round black knob on the right side of the radio. She thumbed the tiny orange hashmark in search of a clear station, only to catch quick sporadic bursts of static. A sobbing, drunk Southern Baptist bawled about the world being freed from the shackles of its sins bellowed from the radio.

  She sighed. Colin sped up, flying past another chain of brand-name establishments, gas stations and local Mom-and-Pops.

  “If you’re out there please,” A somber male voice said. “lock your doors and stay off the streets. We don’t have all of the details but all we know is that an army of creatures are wreaking havoc across all major metropolitan cities. There are confirmed reports that…”

  Static crackled from the speakers, cutting him off in mid-sentence.

  “has been fully upgraded to a phase six pandemic and has been fully upgraded by The CDC and The WHO has a phase-six pandemic. I don’t know how long I can stay on the air but I suggest that you seek shelter until–”

  Colin caught the wounded look on Danielle’s face out of the corner of his right eye and sighed. He reached across the middle console and killed the radio. She leaned forward in her seat, buried her face in both hands and sobbed.

  Colin cut his Explorer across a straight stretch bullied by a McDonalds on the right and a video store called K&G’s on the left. He glanced out of the corner of his eye and saw a trio of zombies pulling a young blonde woman kicking and screaming from the busted driver-side window of a white Mini Cooper wrapped around a telephone pole.

  Three towers of black smoke rose in the distance like smoke signals from Hell, painting thick dark smudges across the clear blue sky. The wind sighed in the treetops; the colorful plastic streamers hanging above the parking lot outside of Jackson Chevrolet whipped at the air.

  Colin sped up, his heart beating against his chest like frantic cattle, and watched the ravaged city shrink in the reflection of his rearview mirror. He spun the wheel toward the right, climbed onto a side road flanked by a brand-name auto parts store and a Steak N’ Shake. Danielle felt the SUV’s tires shuddering beneath them, raised her head, leaned back in her seat and glanced out the front windshield with childish puzzlement.

  “Where the fuck are we going?”

  “The only safest place I can think of right now.” Colin said.

  He drove straight for two miles, passing an empty storage facility on the left and a sporadic row of rural houses sitting back from a thin graveled curb on spacious manicured lawns. Humpback hills and verdant green trees stood in the distance like a background in a nature documentary. He followed a steep gravel incline through an encroaching forest that consisted of thick shaggy pines and leafy oaks.

  Tree shadows and sunspots slid across the front windshield and out of sight. Danielle could just imagine how cool the breeze must’ve felt and fought the urge to roll down her window to bask in it. As pretty as it all looked, she didn’t know for sure if anything would ever be as safe as it used to be.

  Colin followed a sharp bend in the road, cutting the SUV around a tall dirt mound shrouded in trees and fallen twigs and sped down another incline toward a wide open parking lot. A burnt-orange pickup truck sat on the far right corner of the lot, its gap-toothed front grille glinting under the warm mid-afternoon sun. A large T and U-shaped wooden dock jutted out from the midst of a tall grassy hill overlooking a wide lake hugged by a tall varied partition of leafy oaks and shaggy pines.

  He parked the SUV in the middle of the lot, unclipped their seat belts and rammed his door open with his left elbow. He climbed out and, shutting the door behind him, peered across the mirrored blue surface of the lake. A trio of deserted pontoon boats were tied to the dock, floating along the water in a slow fluctuating rhythm.

  Danielle shut the passenger-side door and hurried around to the front of the SUV. She extended her left arm and held her hand out to him. He ignored it and signaled for her to follow him with a beckoning wave of his right hand.

  She froze and glanced at him, her face cold and motionless. She followed him across the parking lot and down a small flight of concrete stairs that would’ve fell apart with the next breeze.

  “Which one?”

  “This one.” He said, pointing across the dock.

  The dock shivered with every step they took, sending large concentric ripples quivering through the lake’s murky brown surface. He led her across the dock, his shoes and her sandals thudding against the beams. They stopped beside of a large green pontoon boat floating along the right corner of the pier.

  Colin climbed onto his boat and walked under an arched aluminum awning stuffed with the skeletal stalks of dead wasps and other creepy crawlies, blocking himself from the harsh rays of the sun. He hurried over to the steering podium, swept his eyes across the slanted dashboard of gauges, buttons and other doo-hickeys and tapped his thumb against the fuel gauge. Danielle made a half-step toward the boat, sighing with relief when he stretched his right arm out and snapped his fingers.

  “I need you to untie the boat from the dock.” He said.

  “Won’t the boat start to drift away?”

  “It won’t move.” He said in a reassuring tone. “The thing’s anchored. I won’t pull it up until you get inside.”

  She flicked her gaze from her feet and back to him. “How do you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That we’re going to be safe or not?” She said.

  “As far as I know.” He sighed. “Zombies can’t swim.”

  She sighed, wiped a tear from the middle of her cheeks with the back of her hands and did as he asked. Colin hurried over to the bench seat, crouched in front of it, slipped his fingers under the front edge of the seat and raised it. He peered inside and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the duffel bag sitting between three cans of gas, a first-aid kit, a clear plastic case with a bright-orange flare gun along with four flares and two life preservers.

  He unzipped the duffel bag to check his provisions when he heard a loud grunting sound from behind. A loud childish yelp erupted across the dock and sent a flock of birds exploding from a nearby treetop. He flinched, spun around and drew a deep breath.

  A tall broad-shouldered zombie in an orange shirt, blood-soaked jeans and a khaki-colored fishing vest clutched Danielle’s left arm. Her feet planted onto the dock in a cat stance, she scowled between tightly-clenched teeth and tried to jerk her arm back. She gave a heart-rending cry as the zombie lowered its face and opened its mouth.

  Fear seized him, squeezing a low pneumatic gasp from his lips. She squeezed her eyes shut, swiped her right hand across the ravenous fiend’s face and looked away. The zombie gave a pleasing grunt and sunk its rotten black teeth deep into the middle of her forearm; small geysers of blood pumped at the air, spewed from between its teeth and spilled across the dock.

  It held on, jerked its withered gray head back and tore a large chunk of skin and soft red flesh from her arm. She screamed again, clamped her right hand across the wound and stumbled back. She collided with the pillar beside the far-left corner of the hull, her face furrowed under a mixture of pain and sadness and sat down onto the dock.

  Colin shook the tendrils of fear coiling around his back, reached inside the duffel bag and found his Colt .45 1911 lying between three boxes of pre-packed provisions. He thumbed back the hammer, raised the pistol at shoulder-level and aimed it across the boat.