Chapter 8: Sarah’s Wound
The minivan fishtailed onto the street, the smell of burning rubber and gasoline filling the cab. Quinn did not look in the rearview mirror. He could not. Looking back meant seeing the house, seeing the memory of Mark’s last moments framed in the back window. He pushed the accelerator to the floor, weaving around an abandoned sedan that sat parked in the middle of the road, its driver-side door wide open.
The world outside the van’s windows was a blur of motion and terror. Figures stumbled across lawns, some shambling with a slow, disjointed gait, others running with a frantic, unnatural speed. A plume of thick black smoke rose from a few blocks away, staining the gray sky. The organized sound of sirens was gone, replaced by a more intimate and horrifying chaos of individual screams and the sharp percussion of breaking glass.
"Where are we going?" Sarah’s voice was a dead thing, a monotone devoid of emotion. She was staring straight ahead through the windshield, her eyes glassy with shock. In the backseat, Lily’s sobs had subsided into hitched, terrified breaths. Tom was completely silent, his small face a pale mask.
"Away," Quinn said, his voice tight, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. "Just away."
He turned a corner onto a main thoroughfare and his foot slammed on the brake. The van skidded to a halt, its nose inches from a pile-up of cars that blocked the entire intersection. There was no way through. In the rearview mirror, he saw two of them, two of the infected, turn their heads at the sound of the screeching tires and begin jogging toward the van.
"Out. Everybody out, now!" Quinn commanded, killing the engine and grabbing the iron poker from the passenger seat.
He threw his door open. He wrenched open the sliding door on the side of the van and practically pulled Sarah and the kids out onto the asphalt. The air was cold, thick with the smell of smoke and something else, something metallic and sweet that his mind refused to name.
"This way! Between the houses!" he yelled, pointing to a narrow gap between two tall wooden fences.
He pushed them forward, keeping himself between his family and the two approaching infected. They scrambled through the gap, the splintered wood of the fences snagging their clothes, and emerged into the relative quiet of a stranger’s backyard. The change was jarring. The yard was eerily pristine. A child’s swing set stood perfectly still on a patch of neat green grass. A pink flamingo lawn ornament stared at them with a single black plastic eye. For a heartbeat, it felt like a sanctuary.