“Come on, Hoss,” she whispered. “L’il help here.”
But JT did not come. No matter how many times she asked.
Dez even thought about Billy Trout. God, what a pansy-ass jerk. Even so, she wished that he were here. Dez could make a long, long list of Billy’s faults—too much emotion for one thing, that was top of the list—but if he opened that car door right now, she’d drag his ass to the nearest chapel. If Billy could figure out how to pick the lock on a pair of cuffs, she’d bang him blind, maybe even squeeze out a kid or two, just like he wanted. She promised it to Jesus and the saints as she lay there in the wet and cold.
She closed her eyes and remembered how warm he always was. His skin always felt like sunlight was shining on it, even when they made love in the dead of winter. Dez remembered doing that. Clinging naked to him as snow fell outside, her arms and legs wrapped around Billy’s suntanned limbs, the heat of their breath as they gasped and panted into each other’s mouths. The heat at the core of her as Billy moved his hips and she moved hers, creating a friction as old as the world and as fragile as a snowflake. She remembered the heat as he came inside of her, crying out her name as if it was the single word that would buy his way into heaven. And the heat after, as he held her close, stroking her hair, whispering promises to her deep into the night as all around them the world froze into perfect whiteness.
Then she remembered the heat in his eyes on that last day. When he’d come into her trailer with the flowers and the ring, and Big Ted was there. Billy’s eyes had filled with blue fire, and Dez imagined that she could feel the flare of heat as the furnace of his heart burst apart.
Billy. He was the last heat in the world that she could remember.
“Billy,” Dez called out, her lips tasting the shape of his name. “Billy … I’m so sorry.”
But Billy Trout did not come either.
“Damn you,” Dez said to the storm, pretending that her tears were rainwater.
No one came for her. No one at all. Not JT, not Billy. Not the state police.
But …
Dez’s eyes snapped open.
Why?
Why had no one come?
Why had the dead not come?
She wanted to move, needed to move, but Dez needed to understand that even more. Saunders had left her and they had torn him to pieces. Dez had screamed, and the dead had come shambling toward the car. Toward her.
Only … they hadn’t done that. The front door of the car was wide open.
Dez took the risk. She knew before she moved that it was the most dangerous thing she had ever done. The most foolish, which was saying a lot.
She straightened her left leg.
The muscles began to cry out in a long, slow voice of pain as she flexed her thigh and straightened her knee. Then she froze as a new and awful terror struck her.
Her right leg was dead. She couldn’t even feel it.
Oh God! Her thoughts rang inside her head like a scream. They did get me. I’m dead … like them. I’m dying.
These thoughts collided and cracked apart like billiard balls, all logic gone. She rocked sideways, trying insanely to get away from the dead side of her body.
Then there was a sudden and intense flare of pain all along the dead leg and hip—and that fast she realized that panic was making her stupid. Nerve endings burst awake with scattershot pins and needles as blood flowed into muscles that had been crushed to numbness by a hour laying on her side in the cold.
“You stupid bitch,” she told herself, keeping her voice almost silent but loading it with enough scorn and venom to strip the bluing off a gun barrel. “You stupid pussy-ass fucking idiot.”
Scorn was a good lash for Dez. It made her angry, and for her, anger was the only thing that could outfight fear. Anger was an old friend. An ally since she was in the second grade. It made her want to hurt something. Herself, or the first thing she could find that would scream.
Even so, she moved cautiously. Slowly. Unfolding her cramped limbs, even smiling with the rictus grin athletes often wear during physical therapy. Loving the pain. Hating the weakness. Forcing strength back into the body. At the same time listening for changes in the ambient noise. Listening for the moans.
Nothing.
She sat up. It took five minutes. Her wrists were bruised and raw from the cuffs, but she thanked God that Saunders had been compassionate enough not to have cuffed her behind her back. That would be a death sentence. In front … there was at least a chance.
She could not see out of the window. She was too short and the window was fogged with condensation. That meant that she had to get up onto the bench seat.
“Come on, you lazy cow.”
She reached up and threaded her fingers through the mesh of the wire cage that separated the front seat from the back. Her fingers ached from the cold, but Dez fed that pain to the furnace of anger that she was stoking in the center of her chest. She set her teeth and pulled, pushing with both legs. It felt like hauling a transmission out of a pickup truck, but her body moved.
Then she was on the seat.
She immediately lay back down, stretching herself on the seat as she listened for moans. Listened for anything that might be reacting to the noise of her movement.
The wind and the rain did not change in pitch or tone.
Dez slowly sat up again.
She leaned and tried to look out through the open driver’s door, but the angle was bad. All she could see was a bit of blacktop and tiny waves of runoff cascading toward the shoulder.
She shimmied over to the left-hand rear window and used her sleeve to wipe away the condensation. Everything outside was still a blur, the shapes smeared by the constant rainfall. Even so … those shapes were constants. Unmoving.
What had happened to the damn dead?
It didn’t make sense.
Until it did.
The hammering of the rain on the roof was half the answer. Noise. And the smell of the rain—charged with ozone and rich with earthy odors from the flowing mud—was the other half. The dead could not hear or see her. Not in that downpour. Not hidden in the back of the cruiser, not through those same smeared windows.
“Well fuck me blind,” Dez said out loud.
She grinned. A real grin this time.
Then she looked down at the footwell. At where she had been. At what she had been down there. Small. Broken. Weak. Abandoned.
Her head abruptly rose and snapped around like a spaniel, her eyes focused to the east as if she could see through car and storm and buildings all the way to the elementary school.
Where the kids were. Where the old folks had been taken.
Were they trapped there? Abandoned by parents who could not get through the storm to pick them up? Or, by parents who had encountered some other problem? Like Saunders had.
“Christ,” growled Dez. She patted her pockets in the vain hope that Saunders had somehow overlooked her handcuff key. Not a chance.
Damn.
The cage was heavy-gauge wire and she was never going to kick that out of its frame. The doors had no handles inside.
But the windows.
Dez sneered at the glass. She’d knocked in her fair share of car windows in her time. With her baton and the end of her flashlight. With a standing kick more than once. And even with the head of Rufus Sterko after Dez had busted him for beating his wife with an electrical cord. Side windows weren’t that tough. Safety glass was made to shatter under the right kind of impact.
The problem was going to be one of angle and resistance. She couldn’t stand up, and that was the best angle. And lying down meant that there was nothing to really brace against. This was going to have to be all muscle and speed. Snapping speed.
She turned and lay down on the seat and scooched down so that she could place her heels on the window with her knees bent. Then she wrapped her cuffed hands in the nylon seat-belt strap, took a deep breath, and kicked.
Her heels hit the glass and rebounded and Dez knee-punched herself in the mouth, smashing her lower lip against her teeth. She tasted blood as pain flared along the inside of her lip. The glass remained unbroken.
“Motherfucker!” she snarled, her anger stoked all the way up to white-hot rage and she kicked out again. And again.
And again.
There was a sharp crystalline pop, and then her heels shot through the disintegrating window out into the rain; however, the jagged teeth of the window raked her ankles and calves.
Dez jerked her legs back into the car, her chest heaving in anger and pain. Hot blood trickled down the back of each calf, but cold rain slanted through the window, driven by stiff wind.
She froze and listened once more to the sound of the storm.
Still no moans. No scuffling feet on the wet blacktop.
Dez leaned forward and cautiously stuck her head out the window, looked left and right.
The bus was still there, but that was it. None of them. Not even the remains of Saunders. Had they totally consumed him, flesh, bone, and clothes? No, that was stupid.
He was one of them now. Dez knew that for sure. The way you know bad things when the shit is really coming down around you. Saunders was out there somewhere, half torn apart but walking. Hunting for food.
Her stomach did a sickening spin.
Stop mooning around, you cow, screeched Dez. Get out of the car. Get out … get OUT.
Dez reached her hands through the shattered window and fumbled for the door handle, found it, hooked her cold fingers in it, clumsied it up, and felt the lock pop open. She shoved the door with her knee, and then she was out of the car, moving as fast as she could, and then dropping into a low crouch, studying the road.
Nothing moved but the wind-blown rain.
Dez crabbed sideways down the car to the open driver’s door, found the trunk release, jerked it. Then she duckwalked to the back of the car, making maximum use of cover, peered around, and saw that the coast was still clear. She straightened and pushed the trunk hood all the way up.
And smiled.
Her hat was there. As was her gun belt, her Glock, and her ring of keys.
Dez grabbed for the keys, fumbled the small cuff key out and worked it into the lock. When they clicked open she turned and threw them as far away as she could, her face twisted into a mask of disgust.
