I know the look. I’ve seen it many times in the last half-year. But my mind is running a million miles an hour with confusion and betrayal. “Where is he now?” I demand.
Grady meets my eyes. He turns and heads into the bakery through the broken window. I follow him. The smell is engulfing us now. Tall glass cases stand vigil next to the counter. They are empty, one of them is shattered, the skeletal remains of the structure almost demoralizing. A cash register sits on its side, drawer open. There is no money. I imagine people rioted and looted. I think of the crushed skeletons outside. Look how far it got them. I imagine the dead eating Jacob now. From cookies and pastries to brains and flesh.
Grady finds a rag and begins to towel his face off, wiping dark blood away in streaky smears. We are quiet. I am letting the smell wash over me. I need a moment.
There’s a bang from the back room. It causes me to jump, my stomach to bottom out. Grady turns to the noise. The swinging door with a circular glass window opens. Not surprisingly, a zombie waddles out from beyond the door. It’s wearing a crooked chef’s hat. The only reason the hat hasn’t fallen off is because the flesh around the zombie’s scalp is so rotted and wet that the hat has almost been glued on. It wears an apron. Its face so emaciated, I can’t tell if it’s a woman or man. I see it’s waddling because its beige pants stained with dried icing and black bile have fallen from its waist. The flesh around its middle is gone. Chewed up or just rotted. I’m surprisingly not scared. After what happened one street over, I don’t think I’ll ever be scared again.
“The bag, Jack,” Grady says. He doesn’t sound scared, either. “Hand me the bag.”
I do. Slowly, he unzips it and pulls a handgun free. Something shiny and chrome. I hate to say it reminds me of Butch Hazard’s, but it does. Grady’s eyes never leave the zombie’s. He advances over the counter, kicks it in the knee so it falls, and bashes its head in over and over again. Blood squirts. Brains fly.
I am sickened.
But the zombie is dead, no longer a threat.
Grady keeps going, grunting and grunting.
“Grady,” I say, “it’s okay, it’s dead.”
He’s breathing fast and heavy. “I hate these things as much as anyone else. They killed so many of my friends, Jack. So many people I cared about. Believe me,” he says, wiping his forehead — which is now bloodier than it was before — with the back of his forearm, “if there was a way — a real way — to kill them all, I’d be all for it.”
He gets off his knees, the gun dripping in his hand.
“There is,” I say. I don’t know this for sure, but I have hope. You have to have hope. “The doctor. He knows a way. Trust me.”
Grady shakes his head. “No, he doesn’t, Jack. He’s crazy. You’ve never even met him. I have. He’s even crazier than he was before.”
“My friends knew him,” I say. But my voice is shaky. He’s right, I never met Doc Klein. I don’t know if he’s truly crazy or not. But hope. I have to have hope. Without it, there is no Darlene, no Abby, no Norm, no Herb.
No future.
“Jack, he attacked us. Jacob and I. He attacked us and ran off with my emergency kit. If the zombies didn’t get him…”
“No,” I say, “I’m not giving up.” But my voice sounds alien. The back of my mind is laughing at me, telling me I’m stupid to keep holding on to that hope. I look at the floor, at the flipped chairs and splintered pieces of wood. The moans of the zombies almost a block away reach us. Either they’re moving or the city really is that quiet.
“Listen, Jack — ”
A fizzling explosion.
I snap my head around and look out the glassless windows. The sky lights up with orange fire. It’s a flare from Grady’s emergency kit.
“Look!” I shout. “Look! It’s him. It’s the doctor.” I turn back to Grady. His dark pupils are filled with the same orange as the sky.
He shrugs. “Yeah, with my flare. It doesn’t matter. That’s not our mission. Our mission is to get the medicine back to camp. Our mission is to help the people we can, not the people who are crazy.”
I move toward the window and the street beyond. “I’m going,” I say. “I’m going to help him.”
Because the only way to help the people back at the village — the true way — is to save the world. So we can stop living in fear.
“You can’t,” Grady says. All good nature and cheer is gone from his voice. Now, it’s venomous. Demanding. A tyrannical leader yelling at the citizens of a country that is on the brink of overthrowing him.
“Grady,” I say, “he’s a person. We can help him. We may not be able to help the entire world, but we can help him.” I point to the flare which is on its descent. “It came from near the Hummer. C’mon,” I say.
I’m halfway out of the window when I hear it. That dramatic click-click, you know, the kind you’d hear in the movies before the bad guy shoots the good guy or vice versa. It doesn’t sound nearly as cool in real life as it does in those films. In real life, it sounds like the sound of betrayal, of a man I could’ve called a friend just one click-click ago. And here I am, weaponless, an empty M16, and a gun pointed at the back of my head. The sounds of zombies ambling up and down the street drift through the empty buildings via the wind tunnel effect. Slowly, I turn.
I can almost tell you what Grady is going to say before he says it. I see his lips part and in my head, I’m thinking I can’t let you do that, Jack.
On cue, he says: “I can’t let you go, Jack.”
Almost.
Maybe he knows what I’m going to say, too. Something like, What are you going to do, kill me? Or, you can’t kill me. My group’ll be expecting me back. So I go against all that common wisdom and dialogue you’d hear at the final, climatic scene in some cookie cutter action movie, and I say, “Fuck you, Grady. This is all your fault anyway. Sean died because you wanted to be fucking Tom Cruise and rappel off the overpass. We could’ve walked and got by the zombies. It wouldn’t have been hard if we all stuck together. It all started with you, man.”
He looks like I’ve slapped him. Eyes wide, whites glowing in the dark. But that look passes as fast as a rolling, black cloud and translates to a bursting thunderstorm of rage. “Take it back,” he says. The metal in his hand shakes, glints orange for a split-second before the flare disappears.
“You want me to take back the truth? What would Mother think of your stupidity?” It’s still weird calling her Mother and not thinking of my own.
“Shut up, Jack! Shut your mouth!” he shouts.
Zombies growl. They’ve gotten a taste of meat and they want more. The alley way echoes with their cries. My skin is crawling, heart pounding, arms shaking.
“You grabbed me when I went for Jacob. I was gonna try to save him, I was gonna pull him free, but you grabbed me and slowed me down. And when I got there, it was too late!” I shout.
“No!” he shouts. “No!”
They are closer now. Through the open window, I hear the scraping of the shoes they died in coming up the alleyway. The gurgles. The moans. My body is slowly icing over. If I don’t move now, it’ll be too late.
“I’m a good — ” Grady begins to say, his teeth bared, upper lip snarled, but he never gets to finish the sentence. The kitchen door bangs open. The circular window shatters. Grady spins around only to be greeted with a bloody mass of reaching arms. Shit. They’ve come in through the back door. They must’ve heard us arguing. I look to the window, seeing dark shadows stretching along the ruined pick-up truck’s passenger door.
They’re coming. They’re always coming.
Grady lets off two shots. The sound is catastrophic to my ears. If I’m not already going deaf, I will be now. But it beats going dead, that’s for damn sure. An explosion of light brightens the ruined bakery. Both shots are kill shots. Blood bursting from skulls. A fat zombie splatters up against the back wall and slides down the plaster, leaving a snail-trail of red. But there’s more. There’s always more.
>
Pots and pans bang, echoing in my brain. I’m frozen still. Torn. In the middle of this tug of war of morality. Do I help Grady or do I help Doc Klein and help the world?
I don’t have time to weigh my options, but I do it anyway. I can save Grady and perhaps die while doing it, and he literally just pointed a gun at me, or I could save Doc Klein and in turn, perhaps save the world. Or I can do fucking both because I’m Jack Jupiter and I’m not an asshole like the people who always seem to betray me are.
I move toward the door with the M16 pushed out. I feel like a jousting knight.
Grady shoots three more times.
My eardrums burst, but I keep going, swinging the M16 down on a teenaged skater. His backwards ball cap squirts brains and black gunk from the eyelets meant for ventilation. I kick him back into the kitchen. He lands in a heap on huge bags of sugar and flour. A metal rack topples over and almost sounds as loud as the gunshots.
I glance to the left and see more coming. So many that they are plugging up the doorway to the outside alleyway. Now the smell of old bread and baking dough is replaced with rotten guts.
Grady bashes in the brains of a woman, her hair tossing up all around her. He’s screaming.
“Grady, let’s go!” I yell as I vault the counter, grabbing the duffel bag in the process.
He turns to me with the gun aimed high.
Are you kidding me? I just saved his life and he’s still going to try to do this.
“No,” he says.
But I think that’s the last thing he’ll ever say.
Forty-Eight
The arms which grapple him are riddled with holes. Flesh eaten away. Bones and tendons wiggling like wet piano wires. One hand squeezes around his throat, the fingernails long, and at one time, manicured. Grady chokes something else out, but it’s impossible for the human ear to decipher. Maybe he’s practicing his zombie talk. That is, if he gets the chance to turn. I move to glance at the street, seeing the first sign of rotters closing in the front.
The weight of the zombies takes Grady down. The gun slips from his grip. It hits the counter, slides into the unbroken glass case and breaks it.
I’m weaponless so I have to go for it.
As I move, I see Grady’s bulging eyes light up with hope, upside down to me now, the top of his head facing the front doors and his face to the ceiling. He thinks I’m going to save him. I wish, but he is beyond saving. My goal is to get the gun and leave before they start tearing him open —
And there goes his throat. The manicured nails claw at the flesh and the tendons. I see a gleam of bone — his spinal cord. I turn away, my eyes burning, stomach doing more flips than an Olympic diver. My hand fills with warm, bloody steel and I head for the door.
A zombie breaks into my field of vision, spinning from the alleyway like a drunk. I waste no time in raising the gun, aiming, and blowing his top off.
I look back to Grady as I hover in the threshold of the bakery. “I’m sorry,” I say in a hoarse whisper and I leave, trying to ignore his gurgles and screams, trying to ignore the sounds of the zombies gnashing their teeth and ripping his insides out.
Forty-Nine
Not long after I break away from the pack, another flare lights the night sky. Zombies fill the bakery almost to bursting. This place, which I read as HEAVENLY BAKES from the dead neon sign, probably never saw this many people when they were in business. It’s a bad thought, one to get my mind off of the fact that I came here with four other people and I might leave by myself. I imagine the look on Mother’s face, her dark features frowning, her rheumy eyes staring daggers through my very soul. I imagine telling Jacob’s wife of what became of him, trying to tell her how heroic he was in the end, but stumbling over the words. Look at me, a writer who can’t say what he means. The whole village hating me, kicking us out…or worse, hanging us to die, leaving us to be eaten.
I jog up the street, the contents of the duffel bag shifting inside, bumping me on the hip. It is stuffed. The zipper looks as if it’s about to burst. With the sky faintly lit up by the flare’s afterglow, I can see cigarette butts on the concrete, trash fluttering in the wind.
A zombie stumbles out of a car, one golden eye closed. He reaches for me and I raise the weapon fast, then think I better not. The only thing scarier than being attacked by a zombie is running out of ammunition. He lunges, and I move out of the way, giving him a wide berth, gripping a cold iron pole for balance. He misses and is now behind me.
I don’t look back. Never look back.
I release the pistol’s cylinder and count only one more shot. This terrible feeling invades my stomach, this burning sensation. Almost, I imagine, worse than getting ripped apart by dead hands.
It’s guilt.
Guilt for letting them die. Letting them all die. Kevin, Isaiah, Ryan, the Richards’ family, Billy, Jacob, and Grady.
It’s only when the zombie snarls behind me, the lone zombie who’s broken away from the pack to follow me, do I realize that I’ve stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Crumpled newspapers and flyers roll across the abandoned street which once housed bumper to bumper traffic and hit my legs.
I flip the pistol around, hold it by the muzzle, and swing at the bastard, dashing what’s left of its brains against the bricks. Not far away from this new, dark stain is graffiti.
I pick up the pace because Jack Jupiter doesn’t give up, Jack Jupiter holds his head up high and he stands as straight as damn arrow.
Doc Klein, I think. Doc Klein will fix this and I’ll help him.
With a bloody gun in hand, I sprint toward the bridge.
Fifty
My lungs just about bottom out by the time I see the bridge. And it’s not the bridge I immediately zone in on at first. It’s the man standing on an overturned semi truck with a smoking flare gun in hand. He points it at the squirming masses of dead. They move like a rough ocean waves, their heads jerking back and forth. Their arms are all pointed toward the semi truck. The closest zombies bang and smash their fists on the undercarriage. There’s so many of them the only possible way through the mess is a motorboat. Float on top all the way home.
Metal lurches and screams.
In turn, the man on top of the semi’s trailer wobbles, falls to the metal, and shrieks louder. This man doesn’t wear a white lab coat as I originally pictured. He is lightly balding and though his face is screwed up in fear and possibly pain, I can tell he has a gentle way about him. He looks like your friendly, neighborhood doctor. He looks like the man I saw on the Eden ID badge Danny had shown me.
And right now, he looks like a savior.
He doesn’t see me, though, and that’s good. I don’t want him to. There’s no way I can make it to the trailer. Two steps into that mess and I’m some zombie’s midnight snack.
But there is a way.
The ropes we used to rappel down the bridge still hang from the overpass without their harnesses. They rock gently as more zombies stream in from deeper on the highway. If I can get to the bridge, I can pull the rope up and cast it off to Klein. He ties one end around his waist and I use the concrete embankment as leverage to create a pulley system, then I can get him up and out of harm’s way. He doesn’t look like he weighs more than a hundred-fifty pounds. I could do it.
I’ve done crazier things.
Well, at least I tell myself that each time I want to do something crazy. So, I guess there’s some truth to it. I know Abby is in need of medicine and Darlene is probably chewing her nails off worrying about me, but I can’t let this man who I came here for in the first place die, not even the old Jack Jupiter would do that.
I have to move fast before the yellow eyes, like dim spotlights on rotted faces, search me out. In front of me is a concrete wall, white-washed by the moon. The way it’s built is like a jigsaw puzzle, and each square of concrete is big and grooved enough for my hands and feet to find purchase. The only problem — the thing that makes the little doubtful voice in my head whisper, You’re fucke
d, Jack — is the wall is about twenty feet high. There’s no harness around me and I can’t leave the heavy bag full of medicine down on the sloping highway exit. I turn to look back up the gentle rise. The dark shadows of more zombies fill my vision. Now I’m in the middle of a zombie sandwich. Fuck.
For some reason, I think back to a day on the lake with Norm when I was about thirteen and he was closing in on eighteen. It was the summer before he left us. I was deathly afraid of the water. I couldn’t swim. No one taught me. My mother was always working. Dad left. The few friends I had would rather stay inside and play Nintendo or D&D on a pleasant Ohio summer day — which were few and far between. Norm laughed at me when I told him I couldn’t swim. We were standing on the edge of the dock. I was fully clothed, tank-top, tennis shoes, cargo shorts, and the bastard threw me in. “Sink or swim, Jacky!” he shouted. And if I wanted to live to see fourteen, I had no choice.
Sink or swim.
I swam.
The zombies’ eyes bob in the darkness. Dancing, yellow orbs.
Afterward, Norm clapped me on the back and said, “Good job, man. Maybe you’re not as lame as I thought. If you spent half as much time having fun as you did sitting around and reading and writing, you might be cool like me, man.”
Sure, it was a veiled insult, but it meant a lot at the time, and I never forgot it. Sink or swim.
That’s what I have to do, now.
I sling the duffel bag across my chest then dig in. Klein screams on top of the semi’s trailer. The dead ramp up their guttural voices as they bang and slam mushy flesh against the metal. It rocks and creaks. The Doc oddly looks like he’s trying to keep his balance on a surfboard. I glance back to the right. The dead are coming. Thick, now. They see me, their pace picking up.
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