The key wouldn’t turn.
As he fumbled with the next one, a terrifying thought crossed his mind—what if Maggie’s car was actually parked across the street? Or up the curb a little ways? It’s not like she ever had to drive it.
Then I will be eaten alive in this Jeep.
A slashing behind Ethan.
He glanced back as a black talon tore through the plastic rear window.
The view through the old, dirty plastic was blurry, but he could see enough of the monster to draw a bead.
He shot through the window.
Blood spattered across the plastic and the pistol’s slide locked back.
Empty.
With only one magazine, it would take him a minimum of thirty seconds to dig out the box of .50 cal rounds, reload it—
Wait.
No.
He hadn’t brought extra ammo for the Desert Eagle.
Only the Mossberg.
The abbies were closing in. He could see a dozen of them through the windshield and hear more heading toward him from Maggie’s house.
He grasped the second key, thinking, How strange that whether I live or die comes down to whether or not this key will turn.
It went into the ignition.
He jammed his foot down hard into the clutch.
Please.
The engine turned over several times—
And sputtered to life.
The gurgling noise of it was life.
Ethan popped the emergency brake and wobbled the gearshift, which operated a three-speed manual transmission.
He shifted into reverse, then gunned the gas.
The Jeep lurched back and crashed into the station wagon, pinning a screaming abby to the bumper. Ethan shifted into first, cranked the wheel, floored the pedal.
Out into the street.
Abbies everywhere.
If he’d been driving something substantial he wouldn’t have hesitated to plow right through them, but the Jeep was compact, with a narrow wheelbase that made it prone to rolling over.
He doubted it could sustain a head-on collision with even a modest-size bull.
It felt so good to accelerate.
He took a sudden left turn to miss an abby, the Jeep leaning over on two wheels.
Brought it back down, four coming straight at him, undaunted, no signs of deviating from their kamikaze course.
He turned hard, drove over the curb, plowed through a picket fence at thirty miles per hour, through the front yard of a corner lot, and punched through the fence again on the other side, the Jeep taking a thunderous jarring as it came back off the curve and hit the road, tires squealing as he straightened out the steering wheel.
The road ahead was clear.
Rpm maxed.
Ethan shifted into second.
Whatever was under the hood of this thing had some meat on its bones.
Ethan glanced in the side mirror.
A swarm of abbies, thirty or forty strong, was chasing him down the middle of the street, their screeches audible even over the roar of the eight-cylinder engine.
He hit sixty blasting through the next block.
Passed a toddler park where a dozen baby abbies were feeding on a pile of bodies in the grass.
Must have been forty or fifty bodies. One of the doomed groups.
Sixth Avenue was coming to an abrupt end.
The forest of towering pines looming in the distance.
Ethan dropped a gear.
That jerked her back into full consciousness.
“How many?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Why’s everyone leaving the cavern?”
“They don’t think the doors can handle another attack. Come on.” He took hold of her hands and pulled her up onto her feet.