Chapter 11Hell

Chapter 11

Hell

The Bay Bridge loomed ahead, a twisted mess of steel and concrete snarled with the carcasses of countless cars. I eyed the chaos, my gut tightening.

"Not gonna happen," I muttered, throwing a glance at the others. Resigned, I killed the engine and spun the wheel hard, leaving the car nosing away from the bridge.

Escape plan, check.

"Walking it is, then," Dante said, sounding about as enthusiastic as I felt.

We clambered out, boots crunching on gravel and glass. The bridge was a graveyard of vehicles, mashed up together bumper to bumper in a complete gridlock. We wove through them, stepping over what we hoped were just rags and shadows.

There was movement from several closed cars. hands dragged along windshields, and the sound of moaning filled the air.

"Shit!" Nina's shouted curse punched through the stillness like a bullet. My head snapped in her direction, heart galloping.

"What the--" But the question died on my lips as I skidded to the railing, staring down into what had to be the seventh circle of hell itself.

Zombies. Thousands of them, bloated and grotesque, bobbing in the water below us. They reached skyward, grasping for something, anything. Their teeth clicked together in hungry anticipation.

It almost seemed as if the water itself was made of bodies. They undulated to and fro with every slosh of the waves. Their moans reached my ears all at once, and it sent chills over my entire body.

"Christ..." Dante's curse was a whisper as he made the sign of the cross.

"We… we should just keep moving," I said, my voice shaking. "Don't look down." If we waited too long, the sun would set before we'd make it to the ship.

We edged forward, testing each step on the bridge's treacherous spine. Beneath us, the dead moaned their endless hunger.

Fear clawed at my throat, but I pushed it down, down where it couldn't choke me. I kept glancing over at them, and the strangest sensation crept over me. I knew what it was.

In the military, we referred to it as the call of the void. Many of us felt it while on late-night patrols atop cliffs, gazing out into the emptiness of the darkness, or even right before we were supposed to pull our parachute strings. There was a moment when my mind urged me to simply...leap. To plummet into the unknown, just to satisfy my curiosity.

"Look at 'em," Dante murmured, his dark eyes haunted as he too kept glancing over the writhing waters. "They're staying afloat because they're bloating. Once they rot enough, they'll sink."

That meant eventually, the bottom of the bay would be littered with thousands of skeletons. It was a macabre thought. I briefly wondered what they would make of it tens of thousands of years from now. I mused as much aloud as I nudged Dante playfully.

He laughed, but there wasn't much humor in it. His gun was up and ready for anything, but his pace was leisurely. "It's too bad we'll never know for sure. Unless one of the survivors decides to write everything down."

"I always had this theory," Nina said, coming up behind us. "That every few hundred thousand years, the world goes through some kind of cataclysm and resets."

Alex huffed a laugh from beside us as he hopped over the hood of a sedan. "That's nuts."

"Not really," Dante said, looking at Nina. "I think you're right. How else do you explain how we have almost zero records of human civilization before a little over ten thousand years ago, when we've found human fossils that are much, much older."

"So you think this all happened before?" I asked, my mind spinning.

"Maybe not exactly this," Dante said, gesturing around to the zombie-filled cars. "But something bad enough to press the reset button on society. In another few hundred thousand years, who knows what'll take our place. They might find ruins of our cities under sediment and wonder how the fuck we all died in one singular moment."

The thought was staggering.

"When Hell was little, she went through a phase where she was fucking obsessed with Ancient Egypt," Scottie said above the din of moaning zombies. I cast him a bland look over my shoulder that he couldn't even see behind my mask. "She would draw pyramids and shit all over her school notebooks."

"It wasn't an obsession…" I countered, lying through my teeth. "I think we all liked ancient Egypt back then. It was mysterious and shiny and everyone wore eyeliner."

"They did have amazing eyeliner," Missy said, coming up beside Nina.

"See?" I said, dramatically looking at my brother again over my shoulder.

"Whatever you say, sissy."

"Well, I think it's nonsense," came a nasally voice that made me want to punch someone. "Everyone with a brain knows that the earth is only like six thousand years old. They told me so in Sunday school when I was a kid."

There was a beat of silence before myself, Missy and Nina couldn't take it anymore and openly laughed, with snorts and all.

"And you're obviously the pinnacle of anthropological knowledge," Missy snarked.

"I don't believe in astrology," Jessa said in full seriousness.

I couldn't stop laughing, despite the discomfort of the gas mask pressing against my face and making it harder to breathe. My stomach began to ache, but the burn actually felt nice.

"Y'all picked a good one, guys," I said to Wyatt, Dante and Alex. "A real winner."

Jessa threw me a glare.

"I blame it on teenage hormones," Wyatt muttered.

I stifled another laugh, knowing Wyatt was right. We'd all made questionable choices as horny teenagers, driven by raging hormones instead of common sense. But as I glanced at Jessa's pinched face, I couldn't help but think some mistakes followed you longer than others.

The road groaned under our weight, a behemoth stirring in its sleep. The bridge seemed to stretch on forever, a never-ending gauntlet of abandoned cars and rotting corpses.

Ethan's scream sliced through the fetid air, a high-pitched terror that snapped my head around. A decayed hand, skin sloughing off like wet paper, had shot through a shattered car window, its grip iron on Ethan's thin wrist. The kid was pulling back, eyes wild with fear, but the zombie was relentless, hauling him closer to its gaping, rotten maw.

"Shit!" I cursed and surged forward, but Missy was quicker, a red-haired fury with her dagger already plunging down in a blur of motion. The blade sank into the zombie's skull with a sickening crunch, blackish fluid oozing out as it released Ethan and slumped backward into the car's shadowed interior.

"Get back!" I barked at him. The boy nodded, scuttling away from the death trap on unsteady legs.

I turned, ready to push the group forward, when my boot slipped on a jagged piece of metal, hidden among the debris. My arms windmilled, a desperate grapple for balance, but gravity was a cruel mistress. I caught the bridge railing with a jarring thud, the impact shooting pain up my arm.

"Helana!" Dante's voice was distant, worry etched into every syllable.

Before I could right myself, a hard shove with the weight of a whole body behind it hit me between my shoulder blades and catapulted me forward.

The words bye bitch , echoed in my head as my fingers scrabbled against the rough edge of the railing.

Jessa.

Fucking Jessa.

Her laugh, sharp and mocking, was the last thing I heard as I sailed right over the side of the bridge and towards the undulating ocean of the rotting dead.