At long last we made it to a stretch of blacktop. Abandoned vehicles filled the road and we cautiously threaded our way around them. Each vehicle was rusted or gutted, and most of them had corpses for passengers. The Damned turned their rotting heads to watch us pass, reaching weakly out to grab us.

Dead weeds stuck up wherever they could find purchase in the cracks. We found that the road had been melted, cooled, and reformed. Several Damned had been submerged in the asphalt, arms outstretched as if surfacing from beneath a pool of black oil. Their cries were muffled but still audible. There were impressions left behind in the asphalt after it had released its prizes to the scavengers who came later.

“Hey, do you hear that?” Jackie asked.

“Hear what?” said the New Kid.

“Sounds like something scraping on metal. Listen. It’s coming from over there.”

Obscured by the tinted windows of a camper shell, something moved in the back of a rusted pickup sitting up on cinder blocks. The New Kid crept slowly up to the back of the truck and dropped the tailgate.

A sleek, obsidian hound with a human head launched itself out of the back of the truck. Its fur was black and glistening, with a body built for speed like a greyhound but with the face of a man. It opened its disjointed jaw and roared like a mountain lion, revealing rows of serrated shark teeth.

Like a heat-seeking missile, it hurtled itself at the Kid with every intention of clamping its jaws around his throat. He brought his arm up to block the hound’s attack and the beast locked its fang-filled maw around his limb.

The creature snarled, shaking the Kid like a rag doll, intent on tearing his arm off in a gout of blood. Claws tore his clothing, and the Kid screamed in pain as triangular teeth began to puncture holes in the flesh of his arm.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a short length of wood. He scrambled for it in the dust with his left hand while the dog savaged his right arm. The New Kid finally managed to wrap his hand around the sturdy board and brought it down on the canine’s square-shaped head in a sweeping arc. There was a loud crack as the board connected, but he could’ve been smacking it with a flyswatter for all the good it did. He struck the sharkdog in its human-shaped face with the board over and over again. The New Kid tried shoving the end into the monster’s mouth to pry it open, but the beast refused to release his bleeding arm.

The moment I saw an opening I shoved my old Ka-Bar knife right into the side of its head. The beast shuddered and died, collapsing in a heap on top of the Kid. He wiped blood and gore off his face and looked up with bleary eyes.

“Told you not to use the H-Word.” I said.

We stopped beside a rusting Quonset hut for a quick break. Jackie dug around in her backpack for a pack of smokes and her lighter. Felix went to take a leak on the other side of the building.

I took a swig from my canteen. The water in the canteen had a sharp taste of iodine from the purification pills I’d dropped in: not unexpected from reclaimed water, but always tough to stomach.

Vasquez sat the package down beside the Quonset and removed her hood long enough for me to give Laura a drink of water. She gulped it down gratefully before we replaced the hood on her head.

I mentally inventoried the remaining water. We all had plastic bottles in our packs plus had the canteen on my hip. I’d read somewhere that the best place to store water was inside ourselves. While I understood that intellectually, I couldn’t help but be daunted at the prospect of making our way across the desert without any water tucked away for later.

Rations were running low too.

We were still many miles away from an exit Topside, and the Bad Place was always full of surprises.

“Hey Garrett. Got a minute?” Vasquez beckoned me over to the side of the building. “You know what I just realized?” he asked.

“That simultaneous revelations aren’t a thing?”

Vasquez leaned in to whisper in my ear. “We are now standing in the Tollway.”

“Route 666?” I asked.

He nodded. “I didn’t recognize it before because there’s no tollbooth and no signs. But one of us is going to pay the toll. You know who I mean.”

I looked over at the New Kid. He was nursing a knot on the back of his head and his face was still all scratched up from Laura’s fingernails. The New Kid removed the sopping bandage wrapped around his arm. The wound where the sharkdog had bit him was black with infected tissue.

Together, we coldly calculated his chances of survival and came up short.