The Twelve by Justin Cronin

as it failed to note other troubling details: the smashed front windows of the hotel; the highway on which not a single vehicle could be seen to move; the vacant filling station across the access road, its windows smeared with red, and the body of a man slumped against the pump in the manner of an impromptu siesta; the wrecked McDonald’s, its chairs and tables and ketchup packets and Happy Meal toys and patrons of various ages and races hurled through the windows in violent disgorgement; the plume of chemical smoke from the still-burning wreckage of a tractor-trailer two miles away; the birds. Great wheeling clouds of large, black birds, crows and ravens and buzzards, the scavengers, idly spinning overhead. All of it suspended like the aftermath of a terrible battle, bathed with pitiless summer sunshine.
    Do you see, Grey?
    “Stop it! Shut up!”
    He stumbled on something soft. Organically damp and squishy, under his feet. It sent him crashing to his hands and knees, skidding on the blacktop.
    See the world that we have made
.
    He squeezed his eyes shut. He was heaving for breath. He knew without looking that the squishy thing was a body.
Please
, he thought, not sure whom or even what he was addressing. Himself. The voice in his head. God, whom he’d never quite believed in but was willing to believe in now.
I’m sorry for whatever I did. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry
.
    By the time he finally looked, all hope had left him. The body was a woman. The flesh of her face was sucked so tightly to the bones it washard to tell how old she was. She was dressed in sweatpants and a scoop-necked T-shirt with a little frill of pink lace at the neckline; Grey supposed she’d been in bed and had come out to see what was happening. She was splayed on the pavement, her back and shoulders twisted. Flies were buzzing over her, dipping in and out of her mouth and eyes. One arm lay outstretched on the pavement, palm up; the other was bent across her chest, the tips of her fingers touching the wound at her throat. Not a cut or gash, nothing as tidy as that. Her throat had been chomped away, down to the bone.
    She was not the only one. Grey’s vision widened, like a camera lifting over the scene. To his left, twenty feet away, a Chevy half-ton was parked with the driver’s door open. A heavyset man in suit pants with suspenders had been pulled from his seat and now hung half in and half out of the truck, dangling head-down over the running board, though his head wasn’t there; his head was somewhere else.
    More bodies lay near the hotel entrance. Not bodies, strictly speaking—more like a zone of human parts. A woman police officer had been eviscerated as she’d stepped from her cruiser. She rested with her back propped against the fender, pistol still clutched in her hand, her chest opened like the flaps of a trench coat. A man in a shiny purple tracksuit, wearing enough gold around his neck to fill a pirate chest, had been hurled upward, his torso lodging like a kite in the limbs of a maple tree; his bottom half had come to rest on the hood of a jewel-black Mercedes. The man’s legs were crossed at the ankles, as if the lower half of his body hadn’t heard it was missing the rest.
    By this time, Grey knew himself to be in something close to a trance. You couldn’t look at something like this and allow yourself to feel anything.
    The one that finally did it was the one that wasn’t there. Two vehicles, a Honda Accord and a Chrysler Countryside, had collided head-on near the exit, their front ends crumpled into each other like the bellows of an accordion. The driver of the sedan had been shot through the windshield. The sedan was otherwise untouched, but the minivan looked ransacked. Its sliding door had been ripped away and hurled across the parking lot like a Frisbee. On the pavement by the open door, in a plume of debris—suitcases, toys, a jumbo pack of diapers—lay the prostrate body of a woman; just beyond the reach