Chapter 4

If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Junie Harkness.

Max was out the door of the van before Jake could stop her. He lurched out of the driver’s seat and watched in horror as his co-worker jumped on an innocent bystander in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater and took a large bite out of her neck. The woman screamed in terror and pain as Max rode her to the ground and ravaged her.

Jake threw caution to the wind and grabbed Max from behind, pulling her off, but it was too late: the woman was already dead, a look of horror frozen on her face. Max growled at him, but didn’t move, sitting on the ground and staring up at him with dead eyes. When her lips pulled back from her teeth, Jake could see tendon between them. He cringed and suppressed his gag reflex.

The people standing around them recoiled; there weren’t a lot of them. The alerts had just started and but there were some who hadn’t heard or who thought it all a hoax. Nonetheless there was probably an uneasy feeling permeating all of Southern California right about now, and no wonder. Jake looked down at Max and realized that if this is what was happening everywhere, SoCal was fucked.

And he wanted no part of it.

“Max, get back in the van,” he muttered. A man had finally gotten the nerve to examine the attacked woman, and he looked at Max, appalled. He had brown hair and eyes and wore an unnecessarily tight muscle shirt for a man who looked like he was in his in mid-fifties.

“She’s dead,” he pronounced, sounding oddly surprised considering the woman’s throat had been gored out.

Max’s eyes cleared and she gave the man a withering look. “How could you tell, shit-for-brrrrr-“

Jake held up a warning finger. “Don’t say it, Max. Don’t you dare say it. Just get in the van and let’s go. I don’t think this is going to go well from here.”

The muscle-shirted man stood. “You can’t just leave. Your friend here just ripped a woman’s throat out!”

“And I’ll do the same to you,” Max snarled. Without another word, Max threw herself teeth first at the good Samaritan. A black and white blur came out of nowhere and took Max down in a blaze of flying fur and growling.

Everyone gasped in fear, their nerves rattled and not about to underestimate this new development. The new development looked up at them all from where he stood on Max’s chest, who appeared too shocked to fight off the Australian Shepherd. The dog’s tongue lolled out of his mouth and he looked inordinately pleased with himself, his one blue eye winking.

Jake cocked his head to one side. Was that the same dog he’d almost hit in San Diego? No, it couldn’t be. Could it? He was travelling with a zombie so stranger things had happened. Stranger things had happened just that day, for Pete’s sake. But how on earth could that same dog have gotten from San Diego to LA this fast? Jake shook his head, and though he didn’t recognize it this way, his brain was just flat out refusing to acknowledge any more weirdness for the day.

The dog looked at him, strangely focused, like he was waiting for something. Hesitantly, Jake approached and took the still shocked Max by the hand, making to pull her to her feet. The dog hesitated, like he wasn’t really sure he should give up, but upon a quick sniff of Jake’s pants leg he backed off of Max’s chest; Jake had the uneasy feeling that the dog had sized him up and reluctantly decided his intentions were pure. He watched closely as Jake led Max back to the van and placed her inside, then shut the van door firmly. The dog shook his whole body, sniffed once, and was gone.

Everyone around was still frozen in place. Jake climbed into the driver’s seat and rolled down the window.

“Go home,” he called to the crowd. “All of you should go home. If you haven’t heard the alerts, turn on your radio. If you have, believe it.” No one moved. Jake pointed to the gored woman lying in the street. “She’d still be alive if she’d believed it.” Without waiting to see whether anyone followed his advice, he put the van in gear and drove away.

North, he decided. Maybe this hasn’t gotten north. He had family in Canada, and Canada was way too polite to have zombies. In his fear, that made sense, and he headed back to I-5.