Chapter 3: Laugh it Off

Cords of heat tensed around Kody's veins as he flexed and scraped the iron along the ground. Shards of glass jumped and skittered away. One by one, his fingers released and then rewrapped around the tire iron.
            His eyes were wrong, dull and distant, like he was looking at something far away. He narrowed his eyes.
           Skid.
           Scrape.
           Kody snapped his eyes back to Justin. "Hey."
           Justin hesitated. "Yeah?"
           Kody flung the tire iron up, right beside Justin's right ear. He pointed past Justin like a judge declaring his verdict.
           "I think we're about to get fucked." In the distance, dark figures broke over the horizon. Justin's eyes traveled up the metal to Kody's hand and then he chanced twisting around to look up the hill.
           "Are we going together or what?" Kody pressed and Justin had to make a choice right now. He looked back to his group and they looked to the ground with worrisome frowns, all except for the one new face in the crowd.
           This month, Thai had an eighties afro and a retro floral headband. Despite always being the best dressed, most colorful girl on campus, she had always worn a hardened frown, like she understood what she was at university to do. Like she alone understood what was beyond the glass walls of their comfortable fishbowl.  She caught Justin's gaze boldly and jerked her head. It was a tiny expression. A tiny no.
           "We're going to Pickens," Justin answered. "I don't want to put you guys through unnecessary danger."
           Kody peered at them. "All of you?"
           "Not me," Abby piped up. She darted from behind them and joined Lauren. Green vixen eyes met each person in Justin's group. "I don't have any reason to go to Pickens either." She glanced at Jennifer and faltered, but Jennifer smiled.
           "You'll be safe with them."
           The wind picked up and shook them with dread. They began to scurry, gathering everything they could think to grab before they had to hurry to the cars. They tread around Jose with care, preferring to pretend he wasn't there. Thai surprised them all by suggesting, "We can meet up somewhere else though."
           The scent of Jose's blood was still ragged on Kody's weapon. Most of them had ignored Thai, afraid to look into her eyes and apologize for what Kody had done. Afraid to face the wrath they imagined teeming beneath her hazel eyes, hidden behind pursed lips and a straight back.
           Kody looked back over at Lauren and Kyle. He hadn't really discussed it with them. "I guess we're headed to Dobbins first. Maybe over to Athens if that's a bad idea."
           "We're going to UGA after Pickens. We'll meet you there, if it's safe."
           The figures lost their shadowed masks and emerged into the lamplight. Kody and Justin accepted their pact wordlessly and hurried to the cars before the pack of undead could lope after them.

                                                              *            *            *

           Virginia's car was meticulously clean. No trash cluttered the floorboards, no clothes or textbooks had been hastily stored in the backseat, and even the windows were unblemished by bug intestines and free from dirty fingerprint smudges.
           Only two places in the car betrayed that anyone less than a saint had ever been there. Two years ago, Virginia broke her no-food-or-drink-in-the-car rule for Justin. He needed a ride to work and she'd volunteered. Didn't even ask for gas money. He didn't have enough to time to eat beforehand, so he brought his meal with him. As soon as he jumped into the car, he spilled all 32 ounces of cherry Icee onto the passenger side floor mat. He apologized profusely but she just smiled and told him it was okay.
           Later, she and Kealey were going into town and he asked if he could have a cigarette. She had a rule for that too, but she broke it. Just this once. Just because it couldn't hurt. He hadn't had the cigarette between his lips for more than two minutes before it fell out in a fit of laughter and burned a black smudge into the clean tan interior paneling.
            She just laughed and said it was okay, but he couldn't smoke around her anymore. She was trying to save his life in her own way.
            "Fuck, I need a smoke," Kealey thought. He took a hand from the steering wheel and reached into his back pocket for a cigarette, but his fingers met an empty carton. Calloused and dirty, he poked the burn and surrendered to nostalgia.
           New blue and green fingerprints now accompanied the burn from Kealey's cigarette. Before jetting off towards Pickens, Kat and Jennifer had both clamored to leave a message on the gym wall. The flock of undead shambled after them and they only managed to messily spell out "Go 2 UGA." They panicked when the first paint can ran out halfway through the 2 so the UGA was sloppily applied. A few good rains would wash it out and it would be unreadable, but at least it was readable from the highway.
           Without so much as a goodbye or even a wave, they scrambled away from the small group of zombies that had shuffled after them.
           Kody, Kyle, Lauren, Kat, and Abby went one way.
           Justin, Jennifer, Greg, Bo, Kealey, and Thai went the other.
           They had confidence in their large group, but once the cardboard colored Explorer pulled away from the white Ford 500, they felt small. They were mortal – a small untrained outfit against the undead battalions. Once the panic wore off from their close encounter at the graffiti wall, they were alone.
           The road droned on beneath the car's uninterested tires and the scenery passed with indifference. The silence in the car had become suffocating. As if sharing the same thought, Bo brought out his phone and tried to look up a song. It seemed that the internet was still usable. After several moments, a soft, sad voice filled their little white car. When the sun runs out and there's no one to save you –
           Jennifer smiled in appreciation.
           Greg pressed his hands against the glass of Virginia's windows and looked out over the eerily empty fields.  In the last twenty minutes he'd seen maybe ten silhouettes lurking against the smoky sunrise.
           "I thought there would be more 'zombies.'" There had certainly been more the further north they traveled, but their sparseness made them seem like a distant threat.
           "Don't sound so disappointed," Justin teased.
           "Do you remember when you used to say that if you had a wish, you would wish for the zombie apocalypse?" At the end of, at the end of the world –
           "I didn't exactly get a genie."
           "I'm not saying it's your fault. Just saying – it's kind of ironic."
           "That was more of a wish against boredom, though I think a zombie video game would have sufficed." Will you find me–
           The conversation lulled as the music cut out. "No more internet," Bo announced.
           It was strange how quiet the world was without internet, without millions of people behind the same device accessing the same information. With it gone, there was no more unity between anyone.
           "Will you find me? So that we can go together?" Jennifer sang softly.
           Justin asked Jennifer, worried for the weakness in her voice, "What are you going to do about your brother?" She paused and spoke into her lap. "I sent him a message on Facebook. Neither of us has a phone, and you know Kevin. He doesn't stay in any one place for very long." She added quietly, "I just hope he got my message before the internet died." Before further discussion could ensue she asked, "What about your sisters?"
           Justin shrugged and looked out the window, watching a small group of undead mow down a couple in the parking lot of a passing mom and pop restaurant. "I just have to trust that they're alive."
           His words fell over the car like a blanket smothering a fire.
           "Well that's fucking depressing," Greg muttered. Kealey and Bo smirked and caught each other's gaze, then returned to ignoring each other.
            "Isn't it 'Will you find me so that we can both go together?" Bo imposed.
           "I thought it was 'we can go together."
           "No. It's 'so we can both go."
           "Well, I'd say to look it up, but I guess we'll never know."
           And that seemed strangest of all. In their sleepy preexistence, there was no such thing as the unknown. If you didn't know something, you could look it up. Eventually, they'd forget the words to songs, and then they'd forget the melodies.
           "We'll never know how Game of Thrones ends," Jennifer lamented.
            "And we'll never know how your zombie story ends," Kealey joined in.
            "I never learned to properly waltz or wobble."
           "I could teach you."
           How the mighty had fallen: from a wealth of information on the infinite internet to whatever information was available in the car.
           Justin poked Jennifer in the side. "You're the smartest person in the world now," he teased. She flashed him a wolfish grin and her narrow eyes glinted with satisfaction. "Finally! My dastardly plan to become the smartest girl in the world has succeeded! I should have thought of zombies sooner."
            Greg crushed their reprieve with poignant realism. "We don't really have a plan, do we?"
            Jennifer sat up and untangled herself from Justin. "We're going to Pickens to get Juan and John, and all the others. I'm sure they have guns there."
            "Why? Just because it's Pickens?"
            Justin chimed in and Jennifer fell silent. "Because it's Jesse, and Jesse would have guns."
            "Jesse barely qualifies as a redneck. He wouldn't know what to do with a gun if he had one."
            "Even if he doesn't know how to use it, it would be better than not having a gun. At the least we'll pick up more people. I don't think anyone in this car has any real survival skills." He stared Greg down. "Do you have any idea how to feed yourself without looting or scavenging?" Kealey continued to stare forward and drive. "And what about you, Kealey? You might be able to put a Band-Aid on a cut, but what are you going to do if one of us gets laffy-taffied?" Jennifer shifted uncomfortably, anticipating the oncoming scrutiny. "Jennifer can tell us all about nitrogen depo-whatever it is, but I can't fish or hunt, and neither can she. I'll probably end up wiping my ass with some kind of poisonous plant and die. We don't have the tools to deal with any of this!"
           "Then we're putting ourselves in more danger by going out of the way to pick up people just as unprepared as us. We're wasting time. We don't even know if it's safe in Pickens."
           "And we don't know if it's safe if we go straight to Athens. Every destination is a gamble. Or did you have any other place in mind?"
           Greg didn't answer so Justin steamrolled on. "Then we're going to Pickens."


                                                            *            *            *


            Kody's Explorer was always likened to cardboard for a reason. After the rain, it struggled to wake up, as though it were a sad cardboard box sagging after a soggy evening. The tires were beginning to bald, the air conditioner didn't work, and the dash lights were so dim that a small jar of fireflies might have been more useful for lighting it than getting the fuse fixed. After the panic had settled following the close encounter at the graffiti wall, Kody squinted and leaned forward, peering at the dash. The needle was tiptoeing over E.
            Luckily, he knew of a gas station up ahead. The farther they went along the road, the more he noticed that the once teeming-with-zombies road was now sparsely speckled with roaming cadavers. They'd been on the road for an hour and most of the others had fallen asleep. Kyle and Kody were the only ones still awake, though they shared their consciousness brooding. An iPhone plopped on Kyle's lap and Kody half-whispered, "Can you look up how to siphon gas?"
            "Yeah sure. What's your password?" Kody spelled out four numbers. 7192. Kyle muttered softly, "Your birthday." It surprised Kody that Kyle knew that, but then again that made sense for Kyle. He punched in the numbers and flipped the phone sideways, using it like a computer. He managed to load half the page before the internet cut out. He quickly read what he could then showed the half-screen to Kody.
           "Tits. We should have thought of it sooner," Kody said. Kyle approached the next sentence cautiously. He opened and closed his mouth several time, searching for the right word to begin. Instead he just settled with a tactless, "That was really uncool what you did back there."
           They shared an uneasy calm for another fifteen minutes. "Yeah I know. I lost my head."
           "Thai probably wants to kill you."
           "She wouldn't do that."
           "And you wouldn't bash Jose's brains in for no reason." Lauren and Abby stirred in the backseat so Kyle lowered his voice. "You probably shouldn't do something like that again in front of Lauren, Kat, and Abby."
           As they wound around the bend and zipped past a chicken farm, they saw a beam of light probing over the hill. Kody honked his horn, hoping to get the stray traveler's attention, but he startled Lauren, Kat, and Abby to waking.
           There was a maroon car in the valley. They topped the hill and realized the lights were stationary. Kody kept his eyes on the road, though the lure of the bright lights fought to detain his attention.
           Lauren sleepily harped, "Go back!"
           Once they got closer, they could see that the car was overturned and its roof was caved in like a hard chocolate yielding under the pressure of teeth. Tendrils of fog snaked across the valley with jealous custody.  Kody pulled straight into the field through the demolished fence where the maroon car barreled through to roll on its side. Lauren flung open the car door and hobbled awkwardly to the wreckage. The points of her heels sunk into the earth, moist from a late-night mist that blunted every blade of grass with a soft drop of dew. Abby, Kat, Kody, and Kyle followed cautiously.
           The engine still thrummed gently, but the chorus of crying crickets surrendered to their crunching footsteps. A figure was slumped against the door that hung ajar, its face jammed in the small wedge. Its arms were twisted beneath its motionless body and its head grotesquely twisted backward. Rigor mortis had contorted its legs awkwardly behind it and kept its jaw rigid. The fingernails were filed down to raw nubs. Most overwhelming was the overpowering stench of pus and fresh blood. A single bullet hole tunneled through its head.
           Abby leaned against the window and excitedly tapped it, looking back to Lauren. "There's a woman still in there. She's moving." Kody wrenched open the door and the woman turned her head toward Abby slowly as though she'd been startled from rest. Her soft blue eyes lit up. A small raspy grunt escaped her throat, probably raw from screaming when the car had flipped.
           Another grunt and another, firing from her lips like shallow gunfire.
           Like laughter.
           She writhed, trapped by the seatbelt. She unlatched each stiff finger from the steering wheel and groped around the seal blindly. Aurulent hair hung in silken waves, matted in splotches with streams of now-clotting blood that coursed from her laughing mouth. In life, she could have been really pretty. Now she was a giggling banshee. Gaunt and open-mouthed, she opened and closed her mouth in a slow chuckle and fumbled for Abby.