Chapter 3: Collapse and Contact
The polished concrete of the service bay was cool and slick underfoot. Twenty yards. That’s all that separated them from the hulking, sand-colored Hummer on its raised display platform. It looked less like a vehicle and more like a slab of fortress, its flat angular surfaces promising solidity, safety, miles per gallon be damned.
Julian’s progress was a tortured rhythm: a solid step with his good right leg, a painful drag of the left, the tap of the conduit pipe. Each movement sent a fresh, hot wire of agony from his knee up into his groin. Sweat beaded on his temple, cold and slick. Alistair walked slightly ahead, his own gait unsteady but purposeful, his head twitching slightly with every muted sound from outside the bay doors.
Fifteen yards.
The bay was a cathedral of silent, expensive machinery. A lifted pickup on hydraulic lifts, a sleek coupe with its door open as if the owner had just stepped away. The flickering fluorescent lights overhead buzzed, then died with a final pop, plunging the vast space into the greenish, submarine glow of emergency exit signs. Their footsteps echoed too loud.
Ten yards.
Julian’s left leg buckled. It wasn’t a stumble. It was a complete, catastrophic failure of sinew and will. The joint simply gave, folding sideways with a soft, sickening pop he felt more than heard. A white nova of pain erupted in his vision. He cried out, a sharp, bitten-off sound, and pitched forward.
Alistair reacted before Julian hit the ground. He turned, his movements blurred by concussion but fueled by pure instinct, and caught him under the arms. Julian’s full weight slammed into him, driving him back a step. They swayed together, a chaotic, four-legged creature on the verge of collapse.
For a moment, there was nothing but the shock of contact, the shared gasp of pain and effort. Alistair’s body was solid, a wall of tense muscle beneath his torn shirt, hot against Julian’s chest. Julian’s face was pressed into Alistair’s shoulder, smelling blood, sweat, and the faint, incongruous scent of his expensive cologne. Alistair’s arms were locked around him, holding him up, their grips desperate and punishing.
“Move,” Alistair gritted out, his voice slurry with pain and focus. “Now.”
He half-dragged, half-carried Julian the remaining distance. Julian’s left foot scraped uselessly across the concrete. Every jolt was agony. Their breathing was ragged, synchronized in a panting duet of survival. The intimate, forced proximity was a brutal parody of embrace, all strained muscle and grunted curses.
Behind them, metal groaned.
The large service bay door, the one they’d entered through, shifted. A dark shape slammed against it from outside. Then another. The heavy door, designed to be opened electronically, budged an inch with a grating shriek of tortured metal.
From the deeper shadows between the rows of parked luxury cars, figures began to detach. They moved with a slow, liquid certainty, drawn by the sound of their struggle. A woman in a shredded pencil skirt. A man in a mechanic’s coveralls, one side dark with old blood. Their faces were pale smears in the gloom.
“Keys,” Alistair hissed, shoving Julian against the driver’s side of the Hummer. Julian fumbled the black fob, his good hand slick. The lock clunked. He yanked the heavy door open and practically fell into the high leather seat, dragging his destroyed leg in after him.
Alistair threw himself into the passenger side, the go-bag landing between his feet with a thud. He slammed his door just as a hand, palm slapping against the window, appeared beside his face.
Julian shoved the key into the ignition. The dashboard lit up with a soft, reassuring glow. He turned it. The engine roared to life, a deep, guttural vibration that shook the entire frame. He shoved the transmission into drive.
The things were converging, a dozen or more, shuffling from between the cars, shambling from the breached service door. They stumbled over curbs, bumped into fenders, a slow-motion tide of hunger.
Julian didn’t wait. He stomped on the accelerator.
The Hummer lurched forward with terrifying force, crushing a metal display sign under its massive tires. He aimed for the closed rolling door at the far end of the bay. It was their only way out.
“You’re not going to—” Alistair began, bracing himself.
“Seatbelt,” Julian snapped, and gunned it.
The Hummer hit the thin aluminum door like a fist through rice paper. It exploded outward in a shriek of tearing metal and shattering glass. Daylight, gray and washed-out, flooded the cab. They burst onto the side access road, the wreckage of the door scraping along the Hummer’s flank.
Figures were everywhere now, drawn by the monstrous noise of the engine. They swarmed from the car lot, a converging wave of ruin.
Julian didn’t slow down. He wrenched the wheel left, then right, the vehicle’s monumental weight feeling both unstoppable and dangerously clumsy. A thud against the front fender. A heavier impact on the side, a body spinning away. He didn’t look. His world narrowed to the gaps between the walking dead, to the open road beyond the dealership’s entrance gates.
He found a path, a slalom of broken things, and punched through the chain-link fence like it was cobweb. They were out, onto a wider street littered with abandoned traffic.
The city unspooled before them in a panorama of collapse. Smoke plumed in the distance. Abandoned cars created a twisted metal maze. Julian drove with a focused fury, mounting curbs, bouncing over median strips, using the Hummer’s brute strength to create its own road. The ruined knee screamed with every jolt, a white-hot counterpoint to the adrenaline flooding his system.
Beside him, Alistair was silent, his head leaned back against the rest, his eyes closed. His face was chalk-white, a tight mask of suffering. The bandage on his temple was seeping a fresh, bright red.
They crossed a bridge, leaving the dense downtown core. The buildings grew lower, spaced further apart. Then they were past the last gas station, the last strip mall, the city limits sign a bullet-riddled blur.
Julian found a state route, then a county road, then a backroad that curled into wooded, rolling hills. The sun was a pale disk behind a blanket of cloud. He drove until the shaking in his hands matched the vibration of the steering wheel, until the only movement in his peripheral vision was the flash of pine trees and the occasional deserted farmhouse.
He pulled over onto a gravel forestry service road, driving a hundred yards into the trees until the Hummer was concealed from the main road. He killed the engine.
The silence was immediate and profound. It pressed in on them, heavy after the hours of roaring engine and crashing debris.
Alistair stirred, opening his eyes. They were bloodshot, the blue turned to a cloudy gray. “Where…”
“Nowhere. Somewhere.” Julian leaned his head back. The pain in his knee had settled into a deep, persistent burn. “You’re concussed. You need actual sleep, not just passed-out trauma naps.”
“I need to navigate,” Alistair mumbled, already fumbling for the map in the go-bag.
“You need to not die from a brain bleed.” Julian reached over, stilling Alistair’s hand with his own. The contact was brief, deliberate. “You’re useless to me like this. More than useless. A danger. Sleep. I’ll watch.”
Alistair stared at him, a war playing out behind his clouded eyes. The ingrained need for control, for vigilance, battled against the blunt, physiological truth. He was broken. He was spent.
He blinked slowly, a long, heavy-lidded movement. “Two hours,” he said, the words slurring. “Then we switch.”
“Whatever.”
Alistair didn’t even recline the seat. He simply turned his head toward the window, his body going slack against the restraints. Within a minute, his breathing deepened, the harsh lines of his face smoothing into something younger, more vulnerable.
Julian sat in the driver’s seat, the keys still in his hand, and watched the quiet woods. He listened to the wind in the pines, to the creak of the cooling engine, to Alistair’s steady breaths. He checked the mirrors, seeing nothing but trees and gravel and stillness.
He pulled the map from Alistair’s loose grip. It was marked with a precise, architect’s hand. A route. Grid coordinates. A final destination in the remote wilds of Wyoming, circled in dark ink.
He looked from the map to the sleeping man, then out at the gathering dusk.
Two hours. Then they’d move again, toward a promise of safety that felt, in the heavy quiet, more and more like a ghost.
Then they’d move again, toward a promise of safety that felt, in the heavy quiet, more and more like a ghost.
Julian watched for eight hours.
He watched the light bleed from gray to black through the canopy of pines. He watched the stars emerge, cold and sharp in a sky empty of city glow. He listened to the sounds of the forest—the scuttle of some small creature in the brush, the distant call of an owl—and separated them from the unnatural silence of the road behind them. His knee solidified into a stiff, throbbing monument of pain. He didn’t move to adjust it. He just watched, the 9mm heavy in his lap, Alistair’s slow breaths the only proof of life in the world.
Alistair woke with a sudden, sharp inhalation, his body jolting against the seatbelt. He blinked, disoriented, his eyes sweeping the dark cab before locking onto Julian’s shadowed profile. The haze was gone. His gaze was a clear, focused laser in the dim light from the instrument panel.
“What time is it?” His voice was rough from sleep, but the slur was gone.
“Doesn’t matter.” Julian didn’t look at him. “You needed it.”
Alistair checked his watch, its face illuminating with a soft green glow. His expression tightened, a muscle feathering in his jaw. “You let me sleep for eight hours.” It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation, low and flat.
“You were concussed. You’re welcome.”
“We lost daylight. We lost distance.” Alistair unbuckled his belt with a sharp click. “That was a luxury we can’t afford.”
“Driving off a cliff because you passed out at the wheel isn’t a luxury either,” Julian shot back, finally turning his head. “You’re clear now, aren’t you? The eight hours bought that. So stop bitching and let’s use it.”
Alistair stared at him, the emergency glow casting hard planes across his face. The anger was there, a cold fury at the loss of control, at the dependency. But Julian saw the calculation return behind his eyes, sharp and assessing. The man was back.
“Give me the keys,” Alistair said, his hand outstretched. “You’re barely conscious.”
Julian dropped them into his palm without argument. The pain was a grinding stone in his joint, and the idea of not driving was a profound relief. “We’ll need gas soon. The gauge is dipping toward a quarter tank.”
“I know.” Alistair started the engine, the roar shattering the forest silence. He reversed them down the gravel track with precise, efficient movements. “There’s a town ahead. Elko. We’ll pass through the northern outskirts. Assess. Refuel.”
He pulled onto the empty two-lane highway, the Hummer’s headlights carving a tunnel through the absolute dark. Alistair drove differently than Julian had—smoother, more measured, but just as fast. He was a processor, absorbing data from the road, from the map in his head, from the quiet world.
Dawn found them on a long, straight stretch of road, the land opening into scrubland and distant, dun-colored hills. The town appeared as a smear on the horizon, a clutter of low buildings dwarfed by a few grain elevators. As they drew closer, the details resolved into something post-mortem.
Windows were dark, shattered eyes. Abandoned cars sat at odd angles, some burned down to scorched metal skeletons. A windblown plastic bag caught on a fence whipped in a frantic, lonely dance. No movement. No lights. No signs of life at all.
“Seems clear,” Julian said, his hand resting on the gun in his lap. His knuckles ached.
“Seems,” Alistair echoed, his tone neutral.
He turned off the main highway, the tires crunching over broken glass on the frontage road. A low cinder-block building came into view, its sign reading ‘PACIFIC PRIDE’ in faded letters. Two of the four pump islands were clear of wreckage.
Alistair pulled the Hummer up to the farthest pump, positioning the tank on the side away from the building’s dark, gaping door. He left the engine running.
“You cover from here,” he said, unbuckling. “I’ll fill the tank and the two jerry cans from the back. Sixty seconds.”
Julian just nodded, rolling down his window. The morning air was cold and smelled of dust and dried sage. He scanned the building’s roofline, the overturned pickup truck twenty yards away, the silent road. His knee screamed a steady protest as he shifted to keep his sightlines clear.
Alistair moved with swift, economic grace. He was a silhouette against the pale dawn, inserting the nozzle, squeezing the trigger. The gulping sound of gasoline filling the tank was obscenely loud in the silence. He kept his head on a swivel, his eyes constantly moving.
The main tank clicked off. Alistair replaced the nozzle with a sharp, metallic clang and moved to the back of the Hummer. Julian heard the tailgate open, the clunk of the first metal jerry can being set on the asphalt. The liquid sound of filling began again.
Julian watched the road. A tumbleweed bounced lazily across it. A fly buzzed against the inside of the windshield. He glanced at Alistair, who was capping the first full can, hefting it back into the vehicle with a solid thud. He moved to the second.
The sound arrived first—a low, growing rumble that was not the wind. It was engines, poorly tuned, coming fast.
Julian’s spine straightened. “Alistair.”
He saw him freeze, the nozzle still in the second can. Both of them looked east, down the road leading deeper into town.
Two pickup trucks roared around the corner, kicking up a plume of dust. They were old, rust-flecked, and moving with reckless speed. They skidded to a halt, blocking the road thirty yards away, one angled across each lane.
Doors flew open. Men spilled out. Six, maybe seven of them. They carried hunting rifles, shotguns, one with what looked like an old military-style rifle. They didn’t move like the hollow things from the city. They moved with coordinated purpose, spreading out, using the trucks for cover.
Their weapons came up, a unified, practiced motion. The black circles of the muzzles were trained, unwaveringly, on Alistair, who stood exposed by the pump, and on Julian in the open window of the Hummer.
A man stepped from the passenger side of the lead truck. He wore a faded denim jacket and held a scoped rifle loosely, pointed at the ground. His eyes, squinted against the morning light, scanned from Alistair to Julian and back.
“That’s far enough,” the man called out, his voice carrying flat and clear across the station lot. “You just stand right there. Hands where we can see ‘em.”