Free Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman Page B

Mall they see a cluster of dark figures hunkered down in a ditch, apparently feasting on some sort of roadkill, either animal or human, impossible to tell in the flickering darkness. But that has been the extent of it—for five miles, at least—and Philip keeps his speed at a steady (but safe) thirty miles per hour. Any slower and they risk hooking a stray monster; any faster and they risk sideswiping the growing number of wrecks and abandoned vehicles cluttering the lanes.
    The radio is dead, and the others ride in silence, their gazes glued to the passing landscape.
    The outer rings of metro Atlanta roll past them in slow motion, a series of pine forests broken by an occasional bedroom community or strip mall. They pass car dealerships as dark as morgues, the endless ocean of new models like coffins reflecting the milky moonlight. They pass deserted Waffle Houses, their windows busted out like open sores, and office parks as barren as war zones. They pass Shoney’s, and trailer parks, and Kmarts, and RV Centers, each one more desolate and ruined than the last. Small fires burn here and there. Parking lots look like the dark playrooms of mad children, the abandoned cars strewn across the pavement like toys thrown in anger. Broken glass glitters everywhere.
    In less than a week and a half, the plague has apparently savaged the outer exurbs of Atlanta. Here, in the rural nature preserves and office campuses, where middle-class families have emigrated over the years to escape the arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, and high-stress urban life, the epidemic has laid waste to the social order in a matter of days. And for some reason, it’s the sight of all the devastated churches that bothers Philip the most.
    Each sanctuary they pass is in a progressively worse state: The New Birth Missionary Baptist Center outside of Harmon is still smoldering from a recent fire, its charred ruin of a cross rising against the heavens. A mile and a half down the road the Luther Rice Seminary features hastily hand-scrawled signs over its portals warning passers-by that the end is nigh and the rapture is here and all you sinners can kiss your asses good-bye. The Unity Faith Christian Cathedral looks as though it’s been ransacked and scoured clean and then pissed upon. The parking lot at the St. John the Revelator Pentecostal Palace resembles a battlefield littered with bodies, many of the corpses still moving with the telltale, somnambulant hunger of the undead. What kind of God would let this happen? And while we’re on the subject: What kind of God would let a simple, innocent good old boy like Bobby Marsh die in such a way? What kind of —
    â€œOh shit!”
    The voice comes from the backseat, and it shakes Philip out of his dark musings. “What?”
    â€œLook,” Brian says, his voice weak from either his cold or the fear, or maybe a little of both. Philip glances at the rearview mirror, and he sees his brother’s anxious expression in the green glow of the dash. Brian is pointing toward the western horizon.
    Philip gazes back through the windshield, instinctively pumping the brakes. “What? I don’t see anything.”
    â€œHoly crap,” Nick says from the passenger seat. He is staring through a break in the piney woods off to the right, where light shines through the trees.
    About five hundred yards ahead of them, the highway banks off in a northwesterly direction, cutting through a stand of pines. Beyond the trees, through clearings in the foliage, flames are visible.
    The interstate is on fire.
    â€œGod damnit, ” Philip says on a tense sigh. He slows the vehicle to a crawl as they make the turn.
    Within moments the overturned tanker truck comes into view, lying jackknifed in a cocoon of flames, like an upended dinosaur. The truck’s carcass blocks the two westbound lanes, its cab detached and lying in pieces, tangled with three other cars across the median and both