Chapter Four
Bump in the Road

"I don't suppose either of you've heard anything about all this?" Abby asked just as soon as she'd caught her breath back enough to talk without gasping. If this sort of franticness was going to turn into the norm, it was probably time to kick her smoking habit. Even thinking it had her twitching to light up, had her pulling the scavenged pack of cigarettes out from her pocket and feeling around her pockets for a lighter. Damn it all if she didn't have one.

"We've got a can of gas in the car." Rachel blurted suddenly, turning her head just long enough to stare her down and get the point across.

Abby wanted to argue that they could keep the windows down, that gasoline wasn't actually some hair-trigger explosive that ignited if you so much as breathed wrong but it wasn't her car and the simple truth of the matter was she probably didn't need to be putting any more stress on her lungs when she had no idea how much running she was going to have to do. Instead she stuffed the pack back into her pocket and turned around in her seat to stare at the two kids as best she could in the dark.

They were huddled together, the rescued Yorkshire pressed in between them.

"I'll take that as a no?" Abby said after she'd been staring them down for a couple minutes and not gotten a response. More silence was all she got. "Don't suppose you'll tell me your names at least?"

Finally, the boy spoke. "You first."

Little shit. Abby snorted, but decided it wasn't worth raising a fuss. "Abby. This lovely lady behind the wheel is Rachel.

It took another few second before he answered. "Ryan. This is my sister, Chelsea."

"I'd say nice to meet you, but I think we'd all be liars if we didn't admit that we'd rather have everything normal with no reason for us to cross paths in the first place." Since the boy was willing to talk, Abby chose to keep questioning him. "Did that guy you were with say anything to you guys about all this shit?"

"He asked if we'd been bitten, told us that's how people get infected. Mostly he was just muttering about needing to get to the safe zone and cussing a whole lot 'cause we were going the wrong way."

"So we got nothing more than we had." Abby reached out for the stereo, clicking over from the cd it was playing to scan through the FM stations. There was nothing more that she was expecting, still just the same emergency alert that had been playing for hours.

"Any of you want to listen to this all the way through?"

There was no answer from the back seat and Rachel just gave a jerky shake of her head and flexed her fingers against the steering wheel. Abby dropped the volume all the way down, sighing heavily as her chest tightened up at the uncertainty. Instead of letting it overwhelm her or giving in to the growing urge to light up, she started recapping what she knew for their benefit.

"Didn't know anything was wrong until I got off work and all I got was that emergency broadcast. The main highway was backed up, forty mile out from Springfield and I decided to find a different way home. Don't know much, but I think this shit has been building up for a while now – been seeing shit on the news, people were talking about it but I didn't hear anything about the biting thing." She paused, considering. And cocking her head towards Rachel. "What do you think? This seem like some sort of disease to you?"

"I have no idea." Rachel answered after a moment. "I've been working all day – I don't get service out here and I can't stand Country music so I never listen to the radio. I didn't even know anything was wrong until I pulled up on that wreck."

Abby nodded, "I was more interested in your professional opinion."

Rachel snorted. "I'm a cleaning lady."

"What?"

"It's the uniform. People always assume I'm a nurse. I work for an in-home care company. My job is to go house to house to clean for people who can't do it for themselves.

"Ah." Abby drawled. "Done some house cleaning before. Hated it, but broke is broke."

"Better than food service though"

"Hear, hear."

There was silence for another long stretch.

"Where are we going anyways?" Ryan asked suddenly.

Abby looked over to Rachel but the other woman just shrugged. "I'm going home." Abby answered. "This highway leads right to my town. If you guys want to keep going from there, that's fine. If you want to stick with me, that's fine too."

She looked over to Rachel again. "You going to try and get to your husband?"

"No point." Rachel said quietly. "He's deployed and all my family is in Texas."

Abby nodded, not certain that Rachel could see. She turned in the seat again to look back at Ryan and Chelsea. The girl had her knees pulled up to her chest, her face buried and Abby hesitated before asking, "You two have other family?"

Ryan shook his head, arms clenching tighter around the tiny dog until the thing was squirming. "It was just us and mom. Dad never came home from work last night and this morning when mom woke us up she was packing, said we were going to Springfield. She wouldn't say what happened but one of dad's buddies from work was there, was telling her that he'd meet us up there. They got her when she was going to see if our neighbor needed to come with us.

"You two get in the truck and go, then?"

"Yeah," Ryan whispered, "Chelsea has her permit."

"That was smart of you." Abby said carefully. "I'm sorry about your parents."

Whatever reply might have come was erased by Rachel screaming and slamming on the brakes, squealing tires drowning out everything else as something crashed into the windshield.

The car came to a jarring stop half off the road, the front end smashing heavily into hard packed dirt at the bottom of one of the ditches that lined the highway. For a long while, there were no other sounds than the creaks and groans of settling metal and the heavy breathing of the occupants. Abby whined, pinched tight by the seatbelt and struggling to get a full breath with the strap locked so tight across her chest. Her heart was pounding hard and heavy in her ears.

"Is everyone okay?" She gasped out, bracing her feet on the floor and sliding up in her seat to try and gain some breathing room, hands clawing uselessly at the seatbelt release.

Someone else moaned, a wet sound that was just as much a gurgle and she really hoped that no one had internal bleeding because she just didn't know how to handle something like that.

"We're fine." Came Ryan's voice from behind her and Abby flopped her head over to the side to look over at Rachel in the driver's seat. The headlights were out, either smashed or smothered by the dirt they were ploughed into, but there was still a faint red glow seeping into the car from the tail-lights and she could see the other woman bent forward and unmoving on the puffed up airbag.

"Rachel?"

Another deep groan, but it wasn't from Rachel and Abby struggled to press herself further into the seat away from the dash where a writhing body was speared through the glass and starting to move and struggle in earnest, lurching forward into the car and ignoring the glass that was digging into it's flesh.

"Fuck." Abby felt around her waist, still struggling to get the button for the seatbelt latch to release. The feral was inching its way further through the windshield and she had to give up on the seatbelt to wrench her .38 out of her holster. Her hands were shaking, but she managed to level the gun enough, breath catching as she squeezed the trigger.

The shot didn't crack so much as it boomed and it was like a blow directly to her eardrums. It was sharp, overwhelming – it left her reeling and she couldn't do anything for a long moment but press her hands over her ears and wait for it to stop with clenched teeth. It was a slow crawl back to manageable, the throbbing deep in her ears turning back down to a hard buzz and she could hear someone crying, muffled and faded.

It took another wait before she could get her thoughts clear enough to focus.

The creeper was dead, slumped and unmoving but she was starting to be able to hear the hood denting like something was moving on top of it.

"We have to get out of here." Abby slurred, unsure if it was her words that were slow and sluggish or just how she was hearing them. She was still stuck by the seatbelt, but managed to find the lever to drop her seat back and get enough room to wiggle free from the strap. Crouching in the seat with one arm braced on the roof, she was able to flick on the overhead light and snatch up her gun from where it had slid in between the seat and the console. Shakily, she reached over to grab Rachel's shoulder and shake. There was no response from the other woman except the flop of a head on the airbag.

The Yorkshire yipped, shrill and loud – it hurt her ears more than it should – but she knew why when the thrum, drum of metal warping got louder and she could actually see the dim outline of someone on the hood of the car trying to burrow around the dead thing in the windshield face first. She flicked the overhead back off, staring hard through the car windows and there was another one loping up to the passenger side, its full body connecting with the side of the car with a dull 'thud.'

"We've got to move." Abby repeated, shaking Rachel again without response and instead lurching into the back seat with the two kids and grabbing the dog up by the scruff of the neck.

"What are you doing?" Ryan's voice broke, high and panicked but she ignored him as she stared at the squirming, fluffy animal and decided how best to go about what she needed to do. It was small and warm and the part of her that didn't write off small, toy dogs as glorified rats couldn't help but thinking it was cute. But they were trapped and she was woozy and in that moment she couldn't think of anything else to do.

She might have been a bit mean sometimes, but she had never purposefully hurt an animal. It took more steel than she ever thought she'd have to brace the dog against her thigh and snap both its back legs, one after the other and the high-pitched squealing yelp that came from the little creature was deafening in the small space. It had been easy, like breaking apart chicken bones but she still had to clench her teeth over the unsettling, acidic clench that took hold somewhere between her stomach and her throat. The driver's side was still clear, so she pushed open the back door and threw the still screaming dog as far as she could into the woods, closing the door back behind her and waiting.

"Why would you do that?" Ryan was yelling, but Abby loomed over him and pressed a hand over his mouth.

"Shut up." Her voice was low and she could feel him trembling, could feel him crying underneath her but she gritted her teeth and watched what was happening outside. She watched the feral outside move towards the noise of the dog, heard the hood dent as another one moved down and they both lumbered off in the same direction. She could hear the dog's squeals get louder and louder, more frantic until it stopped very suddenly.

Shaking, Abby reached out to the front seat to feel for Rachel's pulse. It was there, but she hadn't so much as twitched.

"Fuck." It was a hiss, a barely there breath of word but she was already moving, shoving her pistol back into the holster and she was pushing the two kids towards the door. "Let's go."

"Is she dead?"

"Yes." It was simpler to lie. Maybe someday she would look back and wonder why it had been so much harder to hurt the damn dog than it was to leave behind another person but in that moment she had one goal in the world and it seemed less and less likely that she was actually going to make it back home to her family.

The kids crawled out of the door after her and she winced at the loud noise it made when it slammed back shut, but they were already moving back up to the road. It was dark and she was going to have a hell of a time guiding them as she belatedly realized she hadn't checked to see if the flashlight was on her before they'd left the car and it was too late to turn back when she realized that her bag was also still somewhere in the car.