The guy in the van
1823 Words
They'd been walking for three hours before either of them said anything real.
Not because there was nothing to say. More because the city said enough on its own. Overturned transit pods. Storefronts with their windows punched in from the inside. A child's shoe in the middle of an intersection with nothing around it to explain how it got there. The kind of details that your brain registers and your mouth decides to leave alone.
David kept his eyes moving. Lia kept close.
They were somewhere in the outer district of New Meridian when David spotted the car.
It was a decent one — sleek, civilian, nose first into a concrete divider like it had been going fast when it stopped being driven. The door was hanging open. Inside, slumped against the steering wheel, was a man who had clearly been there for a while.
"Don't," Lia said, already moving toward the door.
"I wasn't going to touch him—"
"You were absolutely going to touch him." She crouched beside the open door, two fingers to the man's neck, professional and quick. A pause. "He's gone. Accident, not a bite." She stood. "He's clear."
David had already spotted the bag on the backseat. He leaned in carefully — chocolate bars, four of them, and two sealed bottles of water. He grabbed all of it without guilt.
"Our ration was going to run out anyway," he said, before she could say anything.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were making a face."
"I don't make faces."
He handed her a chocolate bar. She took it immediately. They walked.
They were maybe twenty feet from the car when the sound came.
Both of them stopped.
Movement. From behind them. Slow and wrong and unmistakable.
They turned at the same time.
The man who had been slumped against the steering wheel was standing beside his car now. Head tilted at that horrible angle. Eyes open and empty and already finding them across the distance.
Lia raised the gun and fired twice.
Both shots center mass. The thing stumbled back but didn't go down — just straightened again, slower, then started moving toward them.
"Head," David said.
"I know—"
"Lia—"
"I know," she said, and shot it in the head.
It dropped.
Silence.
They both stood there for a second.
"So it has to be the head," she said, mostly to herself, clinical and calm in that way of hers that David was still getting used to.
"Has to be the head," he confirmed.
She reloaded. They walked faster.
They heard the growling before they saw them.
It started low — the kind of sound that bypasses your ears and goes straight to somewhere older and more animal in your brain. David felt it in his chest before he processed it consciously. His feet slowed. His hand went out instinctively, stopping Lia beside him.
"Four o'clock," she said quietly.
He looked.
They were coming around the corner of a building about two hundred metres away. Not one or two. Ten, maybe more, spilling out into the street with that mechanical urgency they had — fast and purposeful and completely without hesitation.
"Run," David said.
"David—"
He was already taking the gun from her. "I said run." He met her eyes. "Go. Fast as you can. Don't stop."
Something moved across her face. She wanted to argue — he could see it — but she looked at the things coming around that corner and made the calculation.
She ran.
And she was fast. David filed that away somewhere and turned to face what was coming.
He shot the first one at fifty metres. Dropped it clean. The second at forty. The third tried to go wide and he caught it mid stride. The fourth and fifth came together and he took a breath, found the gap the way Brian had taught him, and dropped them both in two shots.
The sixth one was almost on him when he pulled the trigger and heard the worst sound a person can hear in that situation.
Click.
Empty.
He ran.
The problem with blinkers — the thing that made them genuinely, deeply terrifying beyond the obvious — was that they didn't tire. They didn't slow down when they were losing. They didn't recalculate. They just came, at the same relentless pace, and David was nineteen with four recently healed ribs and they were gaining on him with every stride.
He could hear them. Too close. Way too close.
Take another path, something in his brain said. Go a different direction. Get them away from where Lia went.
He cut left, hard, down a narrower street, and they followed, and he ran harder than he had run since the academy and it wasn't going to be enough—
The van came out of nowhere.
It hit the cluster of blinkers behind him like a blue metal wall — solid, fast, no hesitation — and the sound it made was something David chose never to fully think about again. He spun around breathing so hard his vision was spotting at the edges, and watched the last few scatter and drop and go still.
He stood there.
Just stood there in the middle of the street with his hands on his knees and his lungs screaming at him.
Whoever was in that van had just saved his life. Completely. Unconditionally. He owed that person everything up to and including his continued existence on earth.
The van door opened.
A boy got out.
He looked young — sixteen, maybe, with a face that hadn't decided to be serious yet and probably never would. Shorter than David by a few inches. He was wearing clothes that had seen considerable action and he was looking at David with an expression of such complete casual amusement that it was almost offensive.
He spread his arms wide.
"Heyy," he said. "What are you doing playing with blinkers all alone?" He shook his head slowly. "Don't you know you could get hurt?"
David stared at him.
"Lia." The word came out before he'd finished the thought. He straightened up. "Did you see a girl? Came this way, she was—"
"Is she your girlfriend?"
"Did you see her or not—"
"Because if she is that's actually really cute, running toward the blinkers to buy her time—"
David was already moving, heading in the direction Lia had gone, because standing here was not helping anything. He heard the van door and then the slow rumble of the engine pulling up beside him, keeping pace.
He looked over.
The boy was driving with one hand on the wheel and his elbow on the window frame, completely relaxed, like this was a normal Tuesday.
"Don't you want to get in?" he said. "Van's faster. Also—" He glanced at the gun in David's hand. "You're out of ammo. In case you forgot."
David looked at the gun.
Looked at the van.
Looked at the boy.
"I'm grateful you saved my life," he said. "But you're being a little annoying."
The boy grinned like that was the best thing anyone had said to him in weeks. "My name's Tobey by the way." He said it like they were meeting at a party. "What's yours?"
"David."
"Nice to meet you David." He reached across and pushed the passenger door open from inside. "Get in. Let's go find your girlfriend."
David looked at the open door.
He didn't want to need this. He genuinely didn't want to need this. But the van was faster and he was out of bullets and Lia was somewhere out there still running and he was standing in the middle of a street arguing with a teenager in a blood stained blue van about whether or not to get in.
He got in.
"Direction?" Tobey said, already moving.
David pointed.
They drove.
They found her two minutes later, still running, coat flying behind her, not looking back — the focused no nonsense run of someone who had been told to go and intended to keep going until told otherwise.
Tobey honked twice.
Lia slowed. Stopped. Turned around with the gun already raised.
"David?" Her voice carried down the empty street.
He pushed the door open and stepped out. "It's me."
She crossed the distance fast and the hug happened before either of them consciously decided on it — her arms around him, his around her, brief and tight and real. The kind of hug that means I wasn't sure and now I am.
"I KNEW she was your girlfriend!" Tobey announced from the driver's window, delighted with himself.
Lia pulled back quickly. Something moved through her expression that she immediately neutralized into professionalism, straightening her coat, checking her bag.
David was annoyed. Not at her. Mostly at the situation. Slightly at himself.
"She's not—" He stopped. "This is Lia. Lia, this is Tobey. He drives a van."
"I also saved your boyfriend's life," Tobey added helpfully.
"He's not my—" Lia started.
"He ran toward the blinkers for you. That's literally a whole thing."
"Tobey." David's voice was flat.
"I'm just saying."
They both looked at him sitting there in his blood stained blue van, arm out the window, grinning like someone who had not spent a single second of the apocalypse being stressed about it.
"Who are you exactly?" Lia asked.
Tobey shrugged. "Street kid. Know a lot of stuff. Useful to have around." He said it simply, without self pity, the way people state facts. "I've been moving around since it started. Picking things up."
David looked at him for a long moment.
"We don't trust you," he said.
"Fair." Tobey nodded easily, not offended at all. "But look—" He held both hands up off the wheel. "You've got a gun. I've got nothing. You've got the advantage here. Completely." He put his hands back. "So what do you have to lose?"
David stood there in the empty street.
Looked at Lia.
She gave him the smallest shrug — your call.
He looked back at Tobey. Sixteen years old with a carefree face and a blood stained van and absolutely zero apparent fear of anything. The kind of person who drives a vehicle at full speed into a crowd of blinkers and gets out afterward to make jokes.
David smiled. Just slightly. Against his better judgment.
He liked him. He couldn't help it. He just did.
"Get in the back," he told Lia.
He climbed into the passenger seat.
"So," Tobey said, pulling away from the curb. "Where are we going?"
"North," David said. "I'll explain on the way."
"Cool cool cool." Tobey drummed his fingers on the wheel. "Are you two actually not together or—"
"Drive the van Tobey."
"Driving the van. Yep. Driving it right now."
- Writer
