The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home

Chapter 4 - Okie

As it turned out, the next stop was in a bit more than five hours, and wasn't quite as well planned and intentional as Hughes, with all his cool, professional, trust-in-me stuff had seemed to indicate.

 Getting out of Queens was no biggie.  Manhattan's been clean for months – not too hard to sweep an island and then lock it down. And although I hear they still sometimes find some rabid zombie locked in an apartment at the top of some building, even that's pretty easy to isolate and contain. We took the regular blood thumb-punches at the Midtown Tunnel and didn't even have to wait 20 minutes to be cleared through. They didn't look in the back of the van.

 Mom kept quiet most of the time, only letting out the occasional whine. One time she slammed herself against the back door, growling. The security guy looked at Hughes and raised his eyebrow.

“Dogs,” said Hughes, as he passed the guy his driver's license.

“Dogs, huh?”

The guy handed back the license slowly. I saw Hughes pass him a folded up $100 bill as their hands touched.

“Dogs.”

“And you're heading straight on through? Not stopping in the city at all?”

“No sir,” said Hughes, “kid here's going to meet her grandma in Toronto.”

“They're still infested, you know. Got it pretty bad up there I hear. You sure you want to go, kid?”

I shrugged.

The security guy looked at Hughes, then looked at me, then back at Hughes.

“No stopping in the city. And make sure you have enough gas to get through the Scranton area. Dead zone. Not a place to get out of the car.”

“We've all seen it on the news,” I said, and rolled my eyes.

“Just remember.”

He waved us through.

“That's $100 extra on your bill, kid,” said Hughes, “EZ Pass tax.”

“Fine.”

I didn't want it to have been so easy. Sometime, someone's going to come through with a cargo like ours and not be so responsible and then Manhattan's going to have another outbreak.

We took the approved 'through traffic' route – through Korea Town, which is still looking pretty good, those guys took to the streets and bashed the unliving crap out of anything that moved in the first outbreak. No one seems too worried with the idea that they killed a few uninfected along with the shambling dead; everyone did what they had to do those first weeks. Then right at 6th Avenue, and through Times Square. That place is a mess now. The huge windows of the stores are mostly boarded up, with plywood lane-markers for the cars. All the lit-up signs are dead and covered in nets to catch the pieces before they fall onto the traffic. I guess after the big battle they just didn't think it was worth the effort to get it all working again. There'd been so many outbreaks here anyway that maybe the soul had gone out of the city. One infected person snacking on weiners as they walk into a theatre can translate into a whole audience full of living corpses by the end of Jersey Boys.

Me and Hughes didn't talk a whole lot as we drove along the remains of 42nd Street. The cars were moving slowly too, though there was no special reason for it. Everyone was remembering what it used to be, I guess.

Then a quick turn through Hell's Kitchen, and then we were into the Lincoln Tunnel, then the New Jersey Turnpike, which has been clean and clear for half a year now, and the open road. It was still only 4.30pm in the afternoon. Less than two hours since I'd found my mom eating my dad.