I watched Rodney, my first cousin deny his death up to the moment it happened. We grew up like brothers in Center City Philadelphia. He and I went to the same school. We made music together in our teens. We even went to Temple University at the same time. I majored in Psychology. He majored in computer sciences.
He was laid up with cancer of the throat, first slow-moving, then fast after it spread into his lung and bones. Rodney told me through chicken scrawl on paper he thought he would beat it after the doctor had just told him and his family he had maybe a month or two left to live with palliative care.
Rodney wouldn’t let us do hospice to make matters worse, so we were all stuck at the hospital with him. In the end, I couldn’t stay, it was worse than bad. My situation now was nothing like Rodney’s, but my denial was just as convincing.
Thinking of him and turning my thoughts once more to Claire, I looked at the Turnpike with its dragon snarl of cars, trucks, and eighteen-wheelers smoking and piled one atop the other and picked up my feet.
Twenty minutes later, I rounded the long bend of the turnpike to discover one of the eighteen-wheelers had turned turtle and made it onto its back. Flames licked up along its sides. Without overthinking, I turned in its direction, somewhat for the warmth it would provide and also because I knew the zombies wouldn't come near it. If I still didn't see my exit, I might take a twenty-minute nap by the fire, to gather my strength.
The nap felt more like forty-five minutes long. What I wouldn't give for a wind-up watch! If I lived long enough, perhaps Claire and I could scavenge for them. Wind-up clocks didn't rely on batteries and I started to wonder about solar-powered options.
Thankfully I knew I wouldn’t need to imagine a scenario in which a bicycle wouldn't operate as intended unless this became a Scott-Card fantasy book. I hadn’t had any issues with the bike I had before Paul took it. Still, after recent events, almost nothing would feel surprising.
After a few minutes of walking (reluctantly) away from the still-burning semi-truck, I saw a simple rectangle lying on the ground next to an opened car door. I didn't think anything of the car door, but my full attention centered on the object, and if it was what I thought it was, my evening was about to get a whole lot better.
I quickened my pace until I caught up to it, I glanced inside the vehicle to be sure there were no moving bodies in there, saw nothing, and snatched up the rectangle. It was a paperback book by an author I’d never heard of before, someone named Scott Adams, the title of the book was In His Loving Embrace, and as I skimmed it, the material had nothing to do with Jesus or anything remotely religious. It was, from what I was reading, something like a graphic sex novel between two men.
As I skimmed, there were too many typographical and grammatical errors, and the content seemed shallow. I tossed it back to the ground and sighed. I hoped the author was alive and at least as well off as I currently was, but I wasn't interested in the contents of their writing.
Holding a book, knowing someone had written it for the enjoyment of others made me sad. I felt the sting of desire, Claire and I wrapped under a warm blanket, each reading our own books, loving each other as we read passages aloud when we got to a special place in whatever we were reading.
Throwing down a book, even one this poorly written, felt like a betrayal of a better life to come.
Exit 339 was in sight, which was the one I wanted. It amazed me how long walking took versus being in a car. Driving from here , I would arrive at my destination in 15 minutes. Now? Hours and hours, and the more I walked, the hungrier I got.
A small Sunoco station was right off the exit, and I knew they had things like candy bars and chips and soda, and it made my stomach growl. They probably even had beef jerky, the SlimJim variety. I would take what I could get.
A loud growling moan pierced the air from up ahead. I clenched the gun in my hand and looked around again to see if there was a metal pipe I could use to defend myself. Something about the way this new sound hit me didn't seem reasonable. It wasn't the typical sound the zombies had been making. This new noise was more defined though still incoherent.
To my left was a police cruiser on its side, the flashers pointed at me like broken arrows. Quickly I ran to the front of the car, the hood was so bulked and crumpled in on itself, that I could just barely see through what was left of the windshield. I could just make out a dead cop thrown to the passenger side, on his right. Why he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt floated to mind. Do what I say, not what I do, mothahfuckahs! His death was an honest glimpse into what his life might have been like once upon a time. Inside the cab of this cop car was my salvation. I’d need to get in and out to kill whatever was coming for me.
Jumping onto the crumpled mess of the hood, I got up to the driver’s side door and saw that the window was up and intact. Since I couldn’t pull the heavy door open and keep it that way against the inexorable pull of gravity, I’d need to break the window. I turned my pistol in my hand, barrel ominously facing me, raised my arm high over my head and brought it down on the glass hard. It made a splintering crack in the window but didn’t shatter all the way through. Goddamn SAFT-Glass! Why did the movies make shattering windows look so easy? I hammered on it over and over again, realizing now I was drawing attention to myself. A car moved to the side, was pushed to the side by the thing coming my way.
“Holy fuckin shit!” The last hard swing broke the glass inward, the window falling down on the left side of the dead cop’s face, framing him in spider webs.
An unearthly scream brought my attention to the fact that the zombie had found me and was apparently enraged that I was alive. Seeing something like this in real life made my chest and arms tingle, my heart didn’t just gallop or race, it rocketed through outer space at a million miles an hour, the drumbeat in my ears was so frenetic it spawned splotches and blooms of clear bubbles in front of my eyes. With a dry tongue and no sense of how I pushed forward, I was now inside the cop car, but not safe.
The man outside, was a zombie of epic proportions. My mind strained to define him. He was at least six feet eight inches, built like an imposing bald wrestler, and wore a bloodied butchers smock,
Looking around the small cabin I found what I thought I might, a shotgun in the lap of the cop. Had he known something like this was coming? The car began to rock back and forth as the mega-zombie pushed it and me inside it, enraged he couldn’t figure out how to climb in here with me and finish me off.
I cocked the barrel a few times and tried to carefully plan my escape back out through the driver side door that looked up to the sky when the car was shoved hard, and in my whiplash, my head first jerked back against the seat and skimmed the armrest, then flung forward and hit the steering wheel and sounded the horn.
The bleat from the horn seemed to inflame Baldy Zombie more and the car was being lifted off the ground. The clouds above zoomed and became a disorienting world, although it was right side up again
I was on my side, my legs bent uncomfortably, my knees almost in my chest like I was in the fetal position. Baldy Z (his name seemed appropriate enough) screamed and raised his beefy arms out to the sides, then in a swift slam of his arms and hands against the newly righted car’s crumpled hood sent me and the car spinning like a top. If I hadn’t been in the car myself I would have said the physics of this were simply impossible, that basically no man could be so strong. Whatever was compelling Baldy Z was beyond strong. The cop car collided with the divider wall, the driver side facing the wall, pinning me between the dead cop and the zombie. I pulled the cop down out of my shot and stuck the barrels of the shotgun through the window and took aim, waiting for Baldy Z to get closer.
The instant he was in range I fired, the shotgun pushing my shoulder back harder than I expected releasing a hot fizz bubbling through my entire arm and up into my neck. It scarcely caught my attention as Baldy Z got pushed back, his chest a pepper spray of red fountains.
He kept coming anyway.
With something
like real panic I began to kick at the passenger door after realizing the locking mechanism wasn’t going to open anymore. I may as well have been kicking at a brick wall, but I thought I heard something give (maybe it was my frenetic imagination) so I kept kicking, as hard as I could.
Baldy Z picked up his pace and then in an awkward run where sprays of blood hosed the area in front of him he got to the door on my next kick and yanked it all the way off.
At point-blank range I shot, hitting his/its crotch. An instant bloom of black dots and spreading blood filled the whole region. It paused briefly and made its garbled undulating scream. I couldn’t see the upper torso, so could only imagine its arms and hands by its sides in rage.
I pumped the shotgun again and shot again, this time aiming just below the crotch area to the legs. This was successful in making the behemoth fall to its knees and then lean back at an awkward angle. Whatever else it had become, it still adhered to the basic mechanics of human bodies. Just as Baldy Z’s head came back up into view, its cheeks yellowed and its eyes completely blackened, I shot his head, which blew open revealing a sable wriggling worm. All that was left now was the lower half of the teeth and jaw, the parietal sides of the skull flopped towards the neck, and the tongue had been eaten away. My mind could not process what it was seeing and I retched in my mouth, feeling instantly ill at seeing it.
The black thing squealed and I recognized it, feeling dumb. It was the same black ‘rope-creature’ that had strangled the tree.
“Oh, my g-g-god!” My mouth worked to form anything else, but no other words or sounds could form.
I got out of the car, cocked the rifle again and shot the black thing up close. It flew out of the corpse and onto the pavement.
The damn thing needed to be burned. Quickly I ducked back into the cop car, inspiration lighting my way.
I searched the corpse's pockets, my fingers fumbling over loose objects, grasping briefly then letting go over things my subconscious deemed less critical. The badge pinned to the khaki uniform informed me that his name was Ted Rogers, which I ardently tried to ignore. It was too close to the deceased Fred Rogers from the television show for my taste.
“I don’t want any of these assholes to be my neighbor,” I muttered.
I found what I was looking for the instant my fingers brushed alongside it. Somehow I knew the cop would have a lighter, and not just because the cabin of the cop car had an undercurrent smell of cigarette smoke, somehow I knew subconsciously that this was a man that, when still alive, had always carried a lighter. I grabbed the clipboard from the floorboard, ripped the papers off, and set it afire. When it was going well, I went to the stygian alien creature and got near it, but it tried slithering away unsuccessfully, and I burned it. It squealed as loudly as a dying raptor might. It did burn finally, and as it did, it gave off a dark pinkish purple smoke. I stood watching in fascinated horror, my knees and legs trying to give out, trying to make me sit down before I fell down. I refused my body the luxury of sitting or falling.
“What the actual fuck?” For a little while, as I stood and watched it burn, my body convulsed independent of my personal will. When finally the tremors stilled, I turned and looked to the horizon.
The sun was getting nearer the horizon, and though my stomach growled, my mind was hardly interested in food. I gathered the box of shotgun shells, and anything else that looked like it might be useful, including the cop's handcuffs and keys, an extra box of bullets, and a knife that I was sure wasn't "standard issue." I also took the cop's belt so I could place it over my torso, easy reach would come in handy. The rest I threw into an empty bag I found on the rear floorboard.
Feeling like a veteran of a terrible war, I continued to my exit.
It wouldn’t be too long before I would finally find my wife, please let her be alright.
Not long after I walked off the exit ramp, I did sit down on a street curb between parked cars, my knees up around my chin, my arms hugging my shins, and my fingers clasped in each other. I was a man shattered, looking out dumbly at a world I could not recognize no matter how familiar it appeared on first blush.
Fires and smoke filled the landscape, pillars of smoke as big around as high-rise apartment buildings filled the sky above the remaining tree line. The world was a war-zone without any bombs, yet everywhere I looked, there were little patches of wildfires. At some point, I got up and made my way across the streets to the burning forest, looking for long branches that could be set afire to carry around like a torch.
The Sunoco was further away than I remembered it. Everything is further away when you're actually walking it, and while I could see it from where I stood, it felt like it might as well exist on the other side of the world. I told my legs to move more, but they seemed disinterested in my commands.
“There’s food in there, and I need it.” It occurred to me that what helped me defeat the new zombie creature wasn’t just a survival instinct. It was an inner rage that I had long ago learned to dampen. That same rage could be tapped even now to keep me alive.
“Pick up your fucking feet and move!”
Left foot first, right foot directly after. That was my first step. I continued like this until I felt rage at the thought of Claire suffering as one of those things, or possibly (and this was worse as thoughts went) trapped inside the Diner, feeling tired and vulnerable. I hoped she had access to food at the very least.
With that quickening sense of anger, I walked faster, stiffly jouncing in my gait, moving towards the gas station that would give me what I needed to make the rest of the journey to Dans Flying Diner where I could (in theory) take a rest.
Like a shining beacon of hope, the Sunoco stood mostly unmolested by recent events. Fire burning from outside poured light enough through the glass windows to the interior, making it possible for me to walk through the open glass door and see the three aisles of chips, candy, drinks, and other snacks of questionable nature. I felt like I’d hit the jackpot lottery.
There was no clerk behind the main counter. I let my fingertips brush over several bags of chips until they seized on one end and brought it to my face.
Stutz Pretzels. I tore it open on the side, some of the less-fortunate pieces fell to the ground where they went scampering off to unknown and unseen corners.
I grabbed a handful and shoved them in my mouth, saliva flooding over my tongue and lips, but soon evaporated by the salt on the pretzels. I strolled over to the glass refrigerator, one of two in here, and chose a Deer Park water. I twisted the top off violently, water spilling over my hand and wrist in a cold splash, and doused my mouth, which still had chunks of pretzels stuck in it, and began chewing and drinking at the same time. The mixture was a little unpleasant but mostly divine.
Next, I chose a GatorAid that looked like a blue-colored floor cleaner, tore its cap off, and started drinking. Clearly, my electrolytes were off-balance, and this thought sent me to giggling. I turned, my gaze falling on the chocolate bars, I plucked a Snickers bar and dove in with gusto. My stomach growled and howled, my blood-sugar began to rise, strength began to slowly seep back into my appendages, which I now could tell were cold, sore, and twitchy from all the unusual new 'exercise.' Claire had admonished me in the past to lose at least ten pounds, but it felt like in the last couple of days, I lost at least twenty!
After gorging for a few minutes, I was too full, my belly distending a bit. I belched, long, loud, and satisfyingly..
My feet throbbed as though they'd been smashed by large hammers. Every step I took sent fresh shivers of pain through each of my toes. Sharp stitching sensations ran up my heels and spread through my ankles.
Like it or not, I would have to spend the night here and hope the zombies didn’t pay me a visit.
I lay down, my head resting on a big bag of popcorn for a pillow, the linoleum below my clothes was frozen and dirty, stuffed my hands deep into my hoodie pockets, and shut my eyes. I listened for any danger, but soon I was out.
What
felt like a few minutes later, my eyes flew open. I needed a bathroom pronto. It was a struggle to get to my feet, but when I did, I went to the desk where ordinarily a clerk would be standing and searched for keys. There was no dead body, which was a relief, and no zombie clerk either, a bonus. I glanced outside as I was rummaging through drawers and saw something I at first didn't think anything of. After a moment, I did a double-take and looked again.
Birds filled the sky in a V formation, moving away from the pillars of smoke above the tree-line. I listened carefully, the sounds of silence could be deafening when I did that, only a faint hum of tinnitus from all the shooting remained in my ears, but the birds made no sound. Not long after they passed out of view, I saw something else in the sky I couldn't identify at all.
It was a very large dark mass, like a cloud, or a black hole, with undefined edges and a semi-circular shape, spinning around like black spokes. Everything in my stomach dropped, my balls tightened, and tingled, my skin began to crawl. It seemed to hover for a second, then shot out of sight in less than a blink of an eye, as if it simply vanished from view.
My mouth went dry, and my heart rate went into overdrive. Zombies I could understand. Black slimy rope things I could somewhat grapple within my brain.
But whatever the fuck that thing was made me want to die and never see it again. I shut my eyes, but its appearance like a phantom of utter dread spread its fingers in my mind’s eye again.
Focus, I told myself. Probably just some hallucination from my overwrought imagination, and maybe I’m even dreaming.
Shivering anew, though I wasn’t cold, I continued my search for the bathroom key, which had to be around here somewhere. When I found nothing after several minutes, my bladder and bowels insisting now would be a good time, I opened the small door behind the counter. I grabbed a lighter, unwrapped it shakily, grabbed some newspapers, and lit the wad on fire.
One Way Out: A Zombie Apocalypse Novella Page 5