Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling

by Meredith, Peter

  A packing crate sized suitcase sitting by the door suggested she read romance and never anything to do with the apocalypse. He was sure that inside would be more clothing than she needed, some canned food, and the things she felt were treasures. She would have to leave it all behind.

  “I’m Nichola,” she said, without lowering the bat. She did not like how his eyes were flicking around her dark apartment. Was he going to rob her? He certainly wouldn’t rape her. Not with zombies piling up outside her… “What the hell is that?” she asked, pointing at the drone, which was bopping up and down a few feet from the fire escape. It was trying to get a clear shot of the inside of her apartment with its camera.

  “It’s a drone.” He turned around and whispered to the machine, “We’re going out the other side of the building. See if the coast is clear.” The drone bobbed again and disappeared.

  “A drone? And you can talk to it? Have it call the police. Or some of you guys and…hold on. You want to go out the other side of the building? No way. It’s just like what’s out there. It’s all the same. What we need is for your guys to come here and get us.”

  He grimaced. “It’s not that easy. Nothing ever is.” A glance out the window showed him that the dead were still piling up in a great mound. It was insane. But they still had a minute or two. He turned and went to her suitcase. “You can only take a backpack. Grab some food, a lighter, some water. The rest stays. We have to travel light.”

  She darted in front of her suitcase, cutting him off. “We? I don’t even know you. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Then you’ll die. They can smell you. Hiding won’t help and neither will your bat. Not for long.” The moans were drawing closer. One of the creatures was gibbering like a monkey. The sound made his skin crawl. “You don’t have to come with me, but you can’t stay here.”

  Nichola was having trouble processing all of this. The idea that they could smell her had caused her mind to short circuit. Her dark eyes flicked to the window and out at the night. “I think you need to go. Out the way you came. Go on.”

  “It won’t matter if I leave,” he insisted. “They’re going to get in here one way or another.”

  “But…”

  He shook his head. “If you stay you die, it’s as simple as that! So make a damned choice.”

  “Where are you going? Somewhere safe?”

  “I hope so. We’re heading to the Federal Plaza, downtown. Hey, do you know where it is? All I know is that it’s south.”

  She knew; she walked past it every day to get to work. The question for her was why he didn’t know. “Yeah, sure. I know where it is. You really FBI?”

  The lie had made him feel strangely wrong. “No, but we have one with us and we’re hoping to either find a safe place with them or a way out of the city. Like I said, you don’t have to come with me, but you can’t stay here. It’s the truth; they will get in.”

  Nichola was struck hard by indecision. Over the last few days, she had constructed a lie. It was iron-clad and simple: her apartment was her safe zone. She told herself that she couldn’t be hurt as long as she kept her door locked and stayed inside. But that had never been true. And yet how could she go outside? The screams…there were so many screams out there.

  Half a minute went by without her saying a word. Finally, the drone came back. Bryce went to the window where the sickening pile of zombies was growing. One was hanging on the ladder and had a grey arm hooked over the bars. It stretched its other hand up at Bryce.

  “Up for yes,” Bryce said to the drone. “Is it clear on the other side?” It went up and then jiggled slightly. “It’s somewhat clear?” This time it went up a couple of feet. “Alright. We’ll be right out.”

  It jiggled again.

  “I’m bringing a woman with me.” It jiggled some more which he ignored. So what if they didn’t want him to bring her along. He had endangered her life. It didn’t matter that he had done so simply by climbing the ladder.

  Bryce and Nichola looked at each other in the dark, her tiny apartment the only thing between them. A week before there would have been a true gulf between them, one that might never be bridged. They were two very different people, but with the dead outside, history, culture, and ingrained mental attitudes were suddenly replaced by nothing more than ten feet of carpet.

  “Are you coming?” he asked.

  She answered, “Yeah.”

  She looked down at her suitcase. That morning she had packed it until it was bursting at the seams, then repacked twice more, careful to place in it only those things that really mattered. It weighed sixty pounds and just then, it seemed like sixty pounds of nothing.

  Hanging in her closet was a backpack she hadn’t used since school. She darted for it and was back scrambling in the suitcase in seconds. Taking his advice to heart, she took only some canned goods and a couple of water bottles. At the last second, when Bryce’s was at the door listening, she threw in some clean underwear.

  “Ready,” she said, throwing the pack across her back. “Can we tell some of the others?”

  “Others?”

  “Some of the people I know in the building. Mrs. Fran across the hall. She’s a little old but she doesn’t know anyone other than…”

  He shook his head. Mrs. Fran would have to make it on her own. “Sorry. We’ll be lucky to make it ourselves.”

  She hesitated at this, but when he went into the hall, she followed, directing him to, “Take the stairs down the hall and on our right. They open onto a lobby.” Although the hall and the stairs were dark, the lobby still had its lights on. It felt like they were suddenly thrust on stage.

  Nichola tried to back into the staircase, but Bryce grabbed her hand. There weren’t that many zombies out on the street and only a few had seen them. “We’ll be fast. Aim for the head, just don’t overcommit.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  But he was already out the doors. Instead of running from the dead, he held his spear out at the closest of them. With the shreds of its flesh hanging around it like an old kimono, it was a ghastly thing and Nichola wanted to run screaming from it. It was insanity itself.

  Her hand was on the door to the lobby when Bryce’s closed on her wrist. “If we go back, we doom everyone in the building, including your Mrs. Fran. We can fight through. Trust me.”

  It was an odd thing for Bryce to say. For good reason, he had never asked anyone to put their trust in him. That was the old Bryce. That man had been small and weak.

  “Okay,” Nichola whispered. “Just don’t let me die. You owe me that.”

  She might as well as asked for the moon. Bryce nodded, regardless.

  Chapter 35

  The ragged creature smelled of blood and reeked of shit. Its lower intestines had been torn open and the contents were still dripping out.

  Nichola gagged and backed away.

  Bryce saw it as disgusting but weak. It was missing a great deal of flesh and muscle. It was still dangerous, but only if it was part of a mob. His spear flashed up and out; the jagged point going straight into the thing’s gaping mouth and through the roof. The wood pierced its brain and it dropped on the spot. Bryce was already onto the next one; this one was large and strong.

  Strong, but slow and stupid. After facing the demon, squaring off against a single zombie didn’t frighten him as it had…in fact, it didn’t frighten him at all. That struck him as strange and oddly satisfying. I’m no longer a complete coward, he thought as he darted to his left around a fire hydrant. The creature banged its knee right off it without blinking, something that would’ve had the average person rolling on the ground with tears in their eyes.

  Hitting the hydrant did cause it to lose its balance slightly. Its right hand came down and in a flash, Bryce took advantage and jabbed with the spear, sending the point into the thing’s eye socket. The zombie did not die. The spear’s angle was wrong. It grabbed the shaft and tore half its face off pulling it free.

  It held onto its end
of the spear with a grip that Bryce wasn’t going to be able to break. If he couldn’t break the grip, Bryce decided to break the thing’s leg instead. He lashed out with a low front kick, aiming for the same knee that had hit the hydrant. The blow made a crunching sound and the zombie collapsed into the street, still holding onto the spear as it fell.

  Rather than risk breaking his only weapon, Bryce gave it up and danced back like a boxer…a trained boxer. The move was again, weirdly natural. It flowed, as did his reactions.

  A beast was charging from his left. It almost seemed as though it was moving in slow motion as it stretched long arms out to Bryce. He saw it perfectly; the torn plaid shirt, the untied All-star Converse sneaker, the old blood that ran up its arms, the torpid look in its dark eyes. He saw all this with amazing hyper-awareness, just as he saw in his periphery eight of the beasts break towards them.

  Eight was too many.

  “On your left,” he said, casually, as he took hold of one blood-covered arm and pushed outward, redirecting the charging zombie and using its momentum to plow it face-first into the side of the building with crushing force. Its frontal bone shattered like an egg and it fell.

  “On your left!” This time Bryce barked the words. The creature was only steps away.

  Nichola turned and had it been an actual person coming at her she would’ve brained it with her bat, but it was a nasty faceless woman who smelled of raw sewage. It was a horror and Nichola could only thrust her bat out uselessly. With strength that was a shock to Nichola, the thing grabbed the bat and yanked it from her hands.

  She turned to run, but Bryce was there, flying in with a kick that leveled the ghastly woman.

  “What are…” she began, but he was already moving. In a blur, he snatched up the bat, whirled and smashed it down on the head of the big beast with the broken knee. He then thrust the bat at Nichola and stooped to pick up his spear.

  “This way.”

  To her dismay, he started running at the zombies that were converging on them. “No,” she said in a whisper. There were too many of them and they were too strong. Her only choices were following him or running back inside. Her hand went to the door, but she stopped herself from fleeing. She had a moment of perfect clarity as she envisioned herself sitting in her dark apartment with her bed and refrigerator pushed in front of the door. In her vision, she had been there for a week; her food was gone and the kitchen faucet only burped at her as it spat out dribbles of brown water. Outside, the world was cold and grey, and empty.

  “God,” she said and raced after Bryce and into the middle of the crowded street. He was just leaping down from the hood of a car, his spear tearing into the upturned face of one of the dead. They crashed down, the zombie’s head splitting open as it struck the pavement.

  “Take that one!” he ordered, pointing at another zombie, one pushing between two cars.

  “Take it?” The moment of clarity passed and now her mind was on the fritz. There was only static between her ears. He wanted her to kill the zombie. “Right. Right.” She cocked the bat and let it fly right across the thing’s face, turning it halfway around with the force of the blow. But it was not dead, and now another slid over a car’s hood at her.

  It fell at her feet and she gave it a tepid whack with the bat because it suddenly struck her that she didn’t know how the monsters became monsters. Was it blood? Was it an alien parasite that filled the air with invisible spores? Were there tiny zombie worms that were even then crawling into her ears so they could burrow into her brain?

  She jumped back and wiggled a finger in an ear, a scream of fear and frustration caught in her throat.

  “Come on!” Bryce yelled. The zombies were multiplying. For every one he killed, two more would pop up out of the blue. Not far up the block, the drone was hovering over the stairs that led down into a subway station. Between it and them was a narrow zombie-free lane, but it wouldn’t last.

  They had seconds and Nichola was wasting them trying to climb over a pick-up truck instead of killing a rather weak and mutilated child zombie that stood in her way. Although Nichola was young and nimble, the truck sat on four jacked up wheels and by the time she dropped down on the other side, the lane had closed.

  “We’ll fight through,” Bryce said, hoping he sounded confident because he certainly didn’t feel it. The zombies in their way were large and whole, which made them doubly dangerous. He grabbed her leather jacket and shook her, saying, “But you have to fight. Got it?”

  He charged with his spear out before him while Nichola came behind, hoisting her bat. She had nothing that could be mistaken for an actual fighting style and it showed. To get in a proper swing, she had to set herself like a batter at home plate, but her feet wouldn’t listen. They wanted to run her out of there as fast as they could. Her body tried to accommodate both the attack and the retreat and she did something akin to a dance. She’d dart forward a few steps, hurry back a couple of steps, while juking to her right, and swinging the bat somewhere in the middle of this.

  Her first swing was too weak and she only knocked away a grey hand reaching for her. Her next was too strong. It had been less than a minute and already she had forgotten Bryce’s warning about over-committing. The bat clipped off the head of a lurching zombie and before she knew it, she was spinning around, her body playing catch-up with the bat.

  She turned three-fourths of a circle and before she could spin back, the zombie was on her. Its teeth latched onto her shoulder. The pain was intense and her fear spiked right to the edge of panic. Her body spasmed in a wild cat-like twist, which tore teeth from the zombie’s mouth.

  They fell from her leather jacket, which had held up against the bite. The zombie tried to bite her again, but now that she knew her leather was proof against the creatures, her fear dropped away. Taking the bat in both hands, she smashed the zombie square in the mouth, knocking out more teeth and sending it reeling back. Another came lunging in at her, but she ducked under its hand and ran, only to smack into Bryce.

  He had waited for her and in those lost seconds they had become well and truly surrounded.

  “What do we do?” Nichola cried.

  Bryce had no answer to that. No real answer. “Fight,” he said, and then tried to get through a sea of grey hands with his spear.

  She found herself swatting at the hands, trying to drive them back. But the dead couldn’t be driven back. They came on relentlessly forcing the pair into an ever-shrinking perimeter. Bryce’s spear became a blur, stabbing and jabbing, fast and faster, but it was not a good weapon for the situation. It didn’t have stopping power and any strike that wasn’t perfectly precise was, more or less, a waste.

  Their backs were to a delivery van and Bryce was just thinking of dropping down beneath it and crawling away, leaving Nichola to be eaten, when a scream ripped the air.

  You’ve done all you can, ghosted through his mind. It was a cowardly thing to think while at the same time, it was a perfectly human thing to think. Nichola was a stranger and her death wouldn’t really be his fault. And besides it was unavoidable, and anyone else in his position would have thought the same…

  The drone dropped down into the middle of the fight. Its presence managed to confuse a couple of the zombies allowing Bryce to kill one with an eye strike. Yanking the wood free, he turned and was just about to drop down and try to escape, when he heard a new scream…no it was a harsh yell. An angry yell.

  Bryce’s mouth fell open as Maddy Whitmore came charging out of the darkness, her climbing axe raised. Next to her was Griff, looking tall and handsome, even though his thick dark hair was standing up in odd places. He carried a giant monkey wrench. It had to be almost three-feet long and when he swung it, he needed two hands. It did terrible damage, crushing in the head of one of the grey beasts.

  And there was Wilkes with an axe. Bryce recognized him from his cold grey eyes alone. The rest of his thick, muscular body was covered in what looked like rags. On either side of him were his merc
enaries, who were also covered in rags. Behind them were Jayson and Sid. Jayson had a two-by four, while Sid had two whiskey bottles; he held them by the neck, like hammers.

  This group crashed into the dead, taking them from behind and wreaking a slaughter among the zombies. Their charge drove right through the undead in seconds.

  “Bryce!” Maddy cried. She jerked towards him awkwardly and then stopped. She had been about to hug him, but the sight of Nichola stopped her. The younger woman was tall and gorgeous, while Maddy felt sticky and gross.

  Next to her, Griff was staring at Bryce in an odd combination of nervous amazement and disgust, as if he were looking at some sort of carnival freak. “You barely look like yourself. You’re so…” Words failed him. He had thought Maddy’s transformation was stunning, but Bryce had gone from a pipsqueak to a “real” man practically overnight.

  “We gotta move,” Wilkes said in a stilted voice. He too was looking at Bryce in a strange manner. It was a calculating look. “More of them are coming.” The night was loud with the moans and cries of the dead. They were being whipped into a frenzy.

  The group ran for the closest subway where Victoria Dietch, her daughter Tessa and the Harrimans sat crouched with a few others who Bryce didn’t recognize. “Twenty more blocks,” Griff said, taking the lead. “We’ll be there in no time.”

  Bryce made to follow him; only to falter on the first step as a cold feeling went down his back. It was the cold finger of death and it made no sense. He looked into the darkness, his blue eyes straining to see what was causing this absurd feeling to sweep over him.

  “You feel it, too?” Maddy asked, her voice weak and hollow as if there was no breath in her lungs.

  It’s not just that he felt something, he knew something that he couldn’t possibly know. Death waited for them down in the darkness.