Bentley Little - The Burning

She did not even have to explain what she meant. "I was thinking the same thing," Derek said. He turned onto Aspen, planning to head back the way they'd come, but several streets ahead they could see red and blue flashing lights and striped barricades cordoning off the block containing the hotel, so he drove down to the highway, intending to come at it from another angle. There was a traffic jam on the old Route 66, however, cars and trucks completely stationary in front of them, and Derek pulled into a Wells Fargo parking lot and backtracked to an alley, driving between the old buildings toward the hotel.

There were neither sawhorses nor police cars blocking the alley on any of the side streets, and they crossed Beaver and Leroux without interference before hanging a left on the street in front of the barricades. They could have continued down the alley, entering the hotel parking lot the back way, but obviously the sight of those animated corpses had frightened Derek as much as her and he did not want to get too close to them.

Thank God.

But ... where were they?

And what had happened to the police? And the people?

Derek slowed the car as they passed by the barricades. The lights of the patrol cars were on and flashing, but it appeared at first as though the cops had run away or disappeared. Then Angela saw them, along with the onlookers who had come out from the various stores, offices and restaurants. They were lying on the ground, their faces covered with black mold that had started to creep onto the asphalt and cement beneath their dead bodies.

"No," she said, shaking her head. Her voice was small and frightened. "No. No ..."

"Where did they go?" Derek asked. His voice was louder but just as scared. He stopped the car for a moment, so they could look, but nothing was moving on the street or sidewalk. There were only the bodies of the policemen and the onlookers dead on the ground.

And then a desiccated corpse jumped out from the open hotel door and landed on all fours, its head swiv-eling around like that of a demented lion searching out prey. Angela screamed, but the windows were up and the creature couldn't hear her. If it even could hear. Naked and brown, it was so dry and emaciated that even its sex could not be determined, and its ears either had been cut off or had shrunk so small that they could not be seen. The corpse jumped again, this time into the street, hopping over the blackening body of a policeman, then past a dead woman in a red dress, then down a walkway between a frozen-yogurt shop and a travel agency.

"Follow it!" Angela ordered. She was terrified, but from some inner reserve came a strength of purpose that trumped her fear. There was no one afive here but them. If they didn't track this creature, the monsters would get away and no one would know where they were.

Monsters.

It was amazing how quickly such a childish word had become part of her lexicon, how fast her mind had adapted to a world in which there were monsters.

She could see that Derek wanted to argue, that he didn't want to go, but she shouted at him again to follow the escaping corpse, and with squealing tires he swung the car around and rolled down the street parallel to the track that the mummified body had taken. They looked between buildings, down the alley, between more buildings, down a street, until they finally saw the rotted carcass jumping out from behind a soap boutique. Even from this far away, the sight was terrifying and disturbing.

"I think it's headed for the highway," Derek said, speeding up. There was still a massive traffic jam ahead of them, but he stopped only for a second at the corner, then turned left, going east on a westbound lane.

Angela cringed instinctively, and one car heading toward them honked as it switched lanes and passed by on the right, but there were remarkably few vehicles on the road, and Angela saw that it was because a multicar collision had blocked the westbound highway about a mile up ahead.

At about the same spot where the eastbound traffic jam started.

She didn't like that.

Derek slowed the Hyundai and stopped, and only a few yards in front of them the corpse leaped out, jumping across the highway between the cars and toward the adjacent railroad tracks. It was impossible to see where it went after that, so Derek quickly shifted the transmission to park, got out of the car and climbed onto the hood so he could see over the other vehicles. He hopped down almost immediately and got back in. "It's heading down the tracks, not over them."

He put the car in gear and continued eastward. A few other drivers had broken ranks and were driving on the wrong side of the highway as well, but Derek remained in the left lane in an attempt to avoid them as much as possible.

"Where do you think the other-?" Angela began.

And then she saw it.

A black train on the tracks.

How could they have not noticed it immediately upon entering the highway? Not only were the engine and its dark cars large and clearly visible above the line of vehicles on the road, but they were decidedly unusual, though not for a reason that was readily ascertainable.

Maybe the train hadn't been there before.

That was a definite possibility. Indeed, there was an air of otherworldliness about the train, a phantom aspect. The locomotive and its railroad cars seemed strangely fuzzy and indistinct, as though made from a material not familiar to the human eye.

They reached the end of the traffic jam, another multivehicle collision, and it was instantly apparent that both accidents had occurred this close together so as to provide the corpses from the tunnel a safe corridor they could use to cross the highway.

There seemed to be a lot more of them now than there had been in that one underground passage. Edna Wong had said there were other hidden sites around Flagstaff that had been built to provide sanctuary, and Angela wondered if they were emptying out, too, if the train had arrived for them as well, some undetectable whistle from the locomotive calling them forth. For although many of the ambulatory dead were undoubtedly on the train already, she could see others atop the gravel embankment, the decaying twisted bodies making their freakish way toward open doorways in the black cars. It had been a sunny day, but clouds now blocked the sun, and though the clouds were white, they still cast a dark shadow over the city below. The corpses' tattered remnants of clothing fluttered in the slight breeze.

Down the tracks, the mummified figure they'd seen hopping out of the hotel leaped into sight.

"We have to follow the train," Angela said. She knew instinctively that if they were ever to find any answers, if they were going to get to the bottom of all that had been happening lately, they had to see this through. The dead were leaving for a reason, and where they were going might tell her what she needed to know. "How much gas do you have?"

"Half a tank."

"Fill up fast." She looked down the highway for an open station.

"I have to get my mom and my brother. I can't leave them here. Not with everything that's going on."

Angela understood-and agreed-but they would have to do it fast or they might lose the train. There was no telling when it might leave.

Derek was already speeding around the crash and the gaping spectators who'd been the victims of it; he intended to cross the tracks at the next intersection and circle back around to his neighborhood. Angela took out her cell phone, dialing 911, and as he zigzagged through the back roads of Flagstaff, she told the dispatcher about the dead police and the fleeing corpses. She didn't expect to be believed, but they'd find out the truth when they sent someone out to investigate. She wasn't sure how many other officers the Flagstaff Police Department had, but if they needed to take cops off another case, she hoped it would be from the high school and not from NAU. Edna deserved at least that much respect.