He had opted to take over the driving.
After narrowly avoiding a plunge into a leveled, government-purged city, Ellis was in no mood to drive. Or talk. Or much of anything really.
Not that he could blame him. Nick felt bad himself; he could only imagine how the poor kid was feeling. And after he'd encouraged him so much to push the journey to Starke… goddamn it, he felt like an ass. If he'd left it be last night, instead of trying to use it as some way to 'get closer' to the kid… He ran a hand through his hair with frustration.
He guessed he shouldn't have expected any good news to befall them from the map, which Ellis had angrily crumpled up in his hands and thrown somewhere under the seats before curling into an miserable ball in the passenger's seat.
God the kid was taking it hard.
At least Rochelle seemed happy. Or busy. It was difficult to determine the difference, with as frantically as she scribbled at her notepad and the hasty flipping of pages as she went through the little diary she'd found in the control tower.
And Coach… well, Coach seemed a little too… okay with it for Nick's tastes. And he had a pretty strong hunch there was something the older man wasn't telling them. From the way Ellis had been acting ever since they'd ducked into the dealership to 'have a word', there just wasn't any other reasonable explanation.
He didn't dwell on it however. He had to keep a sharp eye on the road. Or… what he thought was the road. A few times the banks and curves had him momentarily with the wheels in the mud, and he'd been quick to correct it. Nick had never driven in conditions as severe as this– to be honest it unnerved him, used to the tame climates offered by Southern California and Nevada– and he kept an unnecessarily tight grip on the wheel as result. Eventually he pegged out the speed of the wipers, which bat back and forth so frantically he swore they'd snap from the stress. The engine, too, was suffering– the extra exertion of driving the wheels through over a foot of water was gradually causing it to overheat, the temperature gauge on the dash slowly creeping towards the H. However the vehicle remained stalwart in the face of the brutal environment.
Nick tried a few times to roust the young mechanic during the drive, patting him on the back or asking him how he was feeling. By the time two o'clock rolled around, Nick forced him into sharing a couple bags of Cheetos pillaged from the snack machine, warning him of the punishment that would befall him should he touch his suit with the orange-coated fingers– that at least cracked a smile on Ellis' features, and he became a little more responsive afterwards.
The drive, however, was far from fun. It took them three times as long to get to I-10 as it should have. And when they did, the sight that met him made his jaw hang.
"Fucking shit!" Nick exclaimed, bringing the SUV to a halt on the onramp.
The freeway was packed solid with zombies, shambling, crawling, pushing past one another in the most gruesome form of gridlock anyone had ever seen. It was like rush hour… for the living dead. Infected scrambled at the steep inclines of the raised interstate, climbing through the muck and weeds in attempt to join their counterparts at the top. Some were even pushing one another off the embankment to assert their claimed positions jostling for a dry patch. His brain buzzed. It had to be because it was the most elevated area around for miles… shit, the whole state was practically at sea level, and with the flooding rains all the infected had sought higher ground– no wonder they hadn't been coming across any zombies all day! They were all here, wandering the major interstate, keeping their goddamn feet dry.
"Mother of Christ…" Ellis whispered, leaning forward onto the dashboard, practically pushing his bulbed nose against the glass. Rochelle and Coach did their own double-takes, in a state of awe at the spectacle and the sheer number of zombies before them. They'd never seen this many in one place at one time– it made the horde at the NAS seem paltry.
And their little SUV a lot less safe.
Nick quickly cut the headlamps before they were noticed. He licked his thin lips. "Well, now what do we do, lady and gents?" he said, cynicism dripping from his voice.
Ellis was, naturally, the first to speak. "Well, I sure as heck don't think we're gonna roll down the windows an' start gunnin' 'em down," he said with faux-seriousness, shaking his head from side to side. Nick gave a short-lived laugh at the imagery, despite their predicament.
"Maybe we could drive alongside the freeway?" Rochelle offered a little more helpfully than the youngest survivor.
Ellis shook his head. "She ain't made fer off-roadin', least not in this much mud, I reckon anythin' short of a Jeep'd wouldn't make it; we'll get her stuck."
"I'm inclined to agree," Nick mumbled, eying the slippery banks.
The girl nodded her understanding.
"There's gotta be more surface roads further up," Ellis said, making the second suggestion. "At least one of 'em has tuh go west. Might have tuh deal wit' a few switchbacks, but…" he let the statement hang.
Nick grimaced. "I can't drive on something I can't see. I barely got us up here. The visibility is shit." He didn't really want to shoot the kid down, but they were just as likely to end up stuck in the mud driving on windy road as they were to saying screw it to roads entirely.
The southerner stroked his stubbly chin. "Yeah, an' we been stressin' her engine purdy hard… dunno how long she'd go doin' what we been doin'. So scratch that, sorry," he apologized, tugging on the brim of his hat anxiously.
"I don't see what the problem is," Coach spoke up, motioning an arm. "Drive through the bastards."
Nick lifted an incredulous eyebrow, even turning around in his seat to look at the big guy. "You want me to 'drive through them'? Are you even listening to yourself?"
"You ever watched a football game, Nick?" the man shot back. "Anyone who don't wanna get steamrolled don't try to take on the biggest linebacker on the other team."
The gambler remained unconvinced. He had seen football games, mostly playing on flat-panel televisions at sports bars and other places he could earn a quick buck. And from what he had seen, there was a lot of colliding and chaos and definitely not a lot of progress to the goal at the end of the field. Not to mention injuries galore. He squeezed the wheel, eying the mass of bodies in front of them so solid it was like a wall, imagining all those linebackers waiting for the whistle to come at them with a lot worse in mind than tackling.
"They'll either get outta the way, or get run over," Coach went on. "An' it ain't no never mind to us which they pick."
"What other options do we have?" Rochelle asked quietly.
Nick ground his teeth. They could find somewhere safe and dry to huddle up for the night, wait for the storm to pass and the water to recede. Though, of course, who knew how long that could take in 'Swamp City, USA', home to the world's largest mud puddle. It wasn't even done raining. He shook his head. "I'm not doing it," he settled the matter.
"Then I will," Coach asserted, unclicking his seatbelt. "Move over."
He hesitated his hand at his own seatbelt release.
Ellis spoke up beside him. "I dun think that's such a good idea…"
The football player narrowed his eyes at him. "Boy, I don't wanna be hearin' one word from you what is or isn't a 'good idea'."
Nick was about to issue a retort, tired of hearing him rag on the younger man, but Ellis turned out to be faster. The mechanic twisted around and his fist shot out from his shoulder, clobbering the eldest man right in the face.
"Ellis!" Rochelle shouted, throwing her hand over her mouth in shock; even Nick blinked a few times with disbelief at the southerner's reaction as Coach fell back into his seat, now bleeding freshly from the nose. Ellis' form was literally swelling with rage, shoulders rising and falling, and he pointed an accusatory finger at the man he had struck.
"Yer leavin' the decisions tuh me, Nick, an' Rochelle from now on," he swore. "We'll get there when we damn well get there! An' tha's final, ya hear?"
And despite what Nick would have expected out of the big guy, Coach didn't argue back, falling into stoney silence.
He didn't know what the hell was going on here, and he was nearly inclined to make the both of them come clean right now because he was pretty fucking sick of being left out of the loop on whatever shit it was. His eyes flicked back to the ambling horde on the freeway.
But it would wait a few minutes longer. Now was not the time or place to talk. He put the SUV in reverse. "I'm finding some place to stay for the night," he established, voice rough.
And since no one objected or punched him in the face, that's what he did.
