by Frank Tayell
There was a trace of tape around the wrists of the closest zombie. Had that been to keep gloves on, or because the person had been tied up? Had he been tied down after being infected? The zombie was now ten feet away. Tom swung low, a great scything sweep of the axe. The head smashed into the zombie’s leg, ripping away a chunk of decaying muscle. The zombie fell, hitting the concrete jaw-first in a spray of teeth and gore. Tom took a step back, shifting his grip, and then took a step forward. He back-swung the axe into the legs of the second zombie. It fell, toppling onto the first. The third was still twenty feet away. Tom swung up, down, up, and down again, swiftly crushing the skulls of the two fallen zombies, before side-stepping them and walking toward the last. An overhead swing, and he crushed its skull.
“Easier than shooting them,” he murmured. And almost as quick, but the axe was now covered in brown-black gore, and he had nothing with which to clean it. He dropped it on the road, climbed back in the truck, and drove on to the checkpoint.
The metal sheeting was easily pulled back. There was no one beyond, though the presence of disposable paper cups suggested that there had been.
“Recently, too,” he murmured. “I’m no detective, but there’s coffee still in that cup.” It had been watered down by rain, but the cup was only a quarter full. He stared at it for far longer than was necessary.
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re no detective, and you’re not going to leach out any more meaning than that.”
He drove the truck through the barricade and stopped again to drag the metal sheets back into place. It wasn’t for his own protection, but someone had decided the road needed to be blockaded. Was that to keep the zombies out, or perhaps to keep something in?
The road was quickly bracketed by houses. Some doors and windows were open. Clothing and other possessions littered the driveways, suggesting the inhabitants had fled in haste. He saw no one by the time he reached the square at the center of town. Ringed with benches, it was dominated by the statue of a man in a frockcoat and three-cornered hat. On the far side of the square was a grey-stone and white-paint municipal building signposted as being shared by the police, fire service, and mayor. He pulled the truck to a halt by the public entrance and got out.
He resisted the urge to shout and yell. If there’d been people in the town, they would have heard the engine. So where had they gone?
A bloated crow flapped down from a streetlight and landed on the roof of the SUV. It twisted its head so that one beady eye, then the other, could give him an almost curious examination.
“What have you been eating?” Tom asked, and then wished he hadn’t. There were no bodies, at least that he could see. Nor were there bullet holes or other signs that the town had been overrun. He told himself that if the buildings were full of the undead, they would head toward the engine. Even so, he wanted to get out of the town as quickly as possible.
He looked again at the crow. There was another possibility, another method by which all the townsfolk could have died. The presence of the bird was slim comfort against the dread that he’d walked into a hot zone.
“Find the Geiger counter, and get out,” he murmured, repeating it to himself as he headed to the firehouse. The shutters were down, and the door near it was locked, but easily broken. Two gleaming fire trucks were inside. Next to the nearest were buckets and rags from where someone had been cleaning it before their abrupt departure.
He found the Geiger counter in a locker on the furthest truck. It looked unused, almost forgotten. The display was digital, suggesting the municipality’s concern was for accidental spills rather than thermonuclear war. It worked, and that gave him comfort as he deciphered the reading. It was a little above normal. He waved it over himself, then went back outside, and tried the SUV. The reading didn’t change. He aimed the device at the crow. The bird flapped its wings and managed a ponderous few feet of flight before landing heavily on the road. The display stayed the same.
As he relaxed, he realized how tense he’d been. That only left the mystery of where the townsfolk had gone. The desire to leave was still there, but it no longer had the urgency of earlier.
The doors to the police station were unlocked. There was no one at the desk, or inside the small office behind. From the chairs, he doubted the town had more than twenty officers. From the shuttered stores on Main Street, he guessed a population in the low thousands. They hadn’t died from radiation, or all been infected. What did that leave? What if there was something else, some chemical weapon that had been used? And why not? Why would any nation, on having made the decision to unleash the zombie virus, and then a nuclear war, not use everything else in their arsenal?
He grabbed at papers on the desk, rifling through them, scattering them on the ground as he searched for some answer, some vague reassurance. There was nothing. He kicked a bin. It skittered across the floor. After it had come to rest, he heard a sound. Something faint. He raised the carbine, turning, looking around the room, but it was empty. The sound was still there, a beating noise that came from behind a door. And was that a voice?
He crossed to the door. Even without the cautionary signs, he would have known it led to the cells. On the nearest desk were a bundle of keys. He checked the door with the Geiger counter before he unlocked it. Carbine held awkwardly in one hand, he swung the five-inch-thick door open. The smell hit him first. Then the heat. Then the voice.
“Mitch, please, let me out. You’ve got to let me out!” It was desperate, male, young, and beyond terrified.
He propped the door open and retrieved the keys before taking two steps down the corridor. The first three doors were closed and led to sealed rooms. Just beyond, and on opposite sides of the corridor, were two larger, old-fashioned cells with floor-to-ceiling bars. Arms stretched out through one.
“Please, Mitch!”
“Step back from the bars,” Tom called.
“I’m not near them. Who are you?”
“Step back.”
“I’m not by the bars!”
Tom took another step, and a third. He glanced through the small window of the sealed room, but only long enough to confirm it was empty before he returned his attention to those arms. They were causing the knocking. As he got closer, he saw where the skin had been worn away. On the floor, underneath, was a drying brown-red pool.
“Please. Whoever you are, you have to help me!”
“Stand back!” Tom called, not talking to the young man, but to the other figure. He didn’t expect a reply, and as he took another step, and saw her face, knew that she couldn’t.
The zombie turned its sightless eyes toward him. The arms moved more frantically. No sound came from its mouth. Its jaw hung loosely from a wrecked face it had beaten raw against the bars. He glanced at the other cell. A young man in sweat-stained clothing cowered in the corner.
“Stay back,” Tom said as kindly as he could manage. He fired a single shot into the head of the zombie. The creature collapsed.
“Thank you. Thank you,” the man said. “Please. Please let me out.”
“Sure,” Tom said. He took a closer look at the man as he made a production out of finding the correct key. He was unshaven, unwashed, and around twenty-five, with a once-broken nose, and a star-shaped tattoo on the inside of his wrist. His accent wasn’t strong, but nor was it out of place. In his cell were two pallets, one of water, the other of canned food. It was the same in the cell across the corridor. From the abrasions on the bars, and the broken can opener, the man had tried to cut his way out with the kitchen implement.
“What happened to the town?” Tom asked. “Where’s everyone else?”
“They took shelter,” the man said. “Because of the bombs. To avoid the radiation.”
“Where?”
“The old mine.”
“A mine?” Addison’s guards had said something about a mine, but surely this was too far north. There were plenty of mines in America. “Why didn’t you go with them?”
“Because I’m not from around here,” he said. “That’s all. She was the same. They left us here to die from radiation.”
Tom tried a key he knew wouldn’t fit. “There’s no radiation here.” He tapped the Geiger counter.
“Then the bombs didn’t fall? They were lying?” the man asked.
“No, they fell. At least two of them,” Tom said. He tried another key that was the wrong shape and size. He wasn’t sure if he should let the man out. It wasn’t the mention of a mine that was making him hesitate. It was the presence of the water and food in the cell. Whoever had locked the man up hadn’t wanted him to starve, yet didn’t want him to come with them to safety. Equally, they hadn’t simply let him go. The only alternative to freeing the man was to find the mine, and the people therein. Assuming they were alive. Assuming they weren’t all undead.
“She wasn’t a zombie when they locked her up?” Tom asked.
“She turned. Please. Please let me out.”
If she was infected, others probably were, too. They had gone into a mine when they heard some warning about the bombs. They had been infected, and that would explain why they hadn’t emerged. He might be wrong, but he wasn’t about to unleash thousands of undead from some underground tomb. That left him with a decision about whether he should free the young man, but it wasn’t really a decision at all. He opened the cell.
“Thank you. Thank you,” the man said.
Tom shrugged away his thanks and walked back out into the police station, then out into the street. He wanted to feel the fresh air again.
“Thank you,” the man said again, following him outside. “I’m Rufus Greenwald.”
“You said you weren’t from around here, so where were you heading?” Tom asked.
“North. To Canada,” Rufus said.
“I wouldn’t,” Tom said. “I met some soldiers yesterday. They said they’d seen a mushroom cloud near the border.” Although, now he thought about it, they hadn’t said where along the border. “Me, I’ve come from the south. There was at least one bomb dropped somewhere in New York or Pennsylvania.”
“Where are you going now?”
“To the coast. So what happened here?” Tom asked.
“I was driving through. I stopped, asking for gas. They locked me up. They said that bombs had fallen on Houston and L.A.”
“How did they know?”
“The emergency broadcast system, I guess,” Rufus said. “I don’t know. Said they were going down to the mines until the radioactivity had passed. Left us locked up.”
“Who was the woman?”
“I don’t know. She died before she could tell me.”
“Where’ll you go now?” Tom asked.
“Home, I guess. I mean, I don’t know. Pennsylvania, Canada, Texas, California. It’s the end of the world, right? I’m going home. If I have to die somewhere, that’s where I want to be.”
“You might find another Geiger counter in the fire station,” Tom said. “Good luck.”
“Yeah. And you.”
Tom got back in the SUV and drove to the edge of town. There was something about the man that made him regret what he’d done. He couldn’t place what, but it was that instinct that he’d developed growing up on the streets, and honed during his years manipulating the paths of power. It was why he’d not told him where he was heading, and why he’d not told the man his name. He reached the edge of town, and another barrier across the road.
On the far side were the undead. He picked up the carbine, climbed onto the roof of the SUV, and picked the zombies off, one by one. When they were lying motionless on the ground, he turned to look back at the town. There was enough death in the world; he’d done the right thing letting Rufus out. He jumped down, opened the gate, and drove through. Pausing only to close it again, he continued east.
Chapter 20 - No Bed, No Breakfast
Crossfields Landing, Maine
Crossfields Landing was on the southern side of a crescent bay. One good road led from the west into Second Street. A far more neglected one ran north to south through Main Street, following the coast. Tom’s cottage was off an unpaved, seldom beaten track on the northern edge of the bay. To the north of the bay and south of the village were a pair of decrepit bridges whose repair had been promised for the last eight election cycles. Anyone driving anything larger than a pickup along the coastal road had to divert ten miles inland. This had kept the developers away, but not the tourists. There were a handful of guesthouses and bed-and-breakfasts inside the village and out. During the summer, they’d fill up, but the population of Crossfields Landing was as seasonal as the income. As soon as the leaves began to turn, the tourists would depart, and the majority of the residents went with them. The few that stayed survived on pensions or savings. There was no school, no police station, no nearby industry. It was a place where people scraped by, retired to, or used as a temporary refuge from the rat-race further down the coast.
Tom had fallen in love with the village the moment he’d stumbled across it. When he’d first arrived in America, he’d spent eighteen months drifting from place to place, masquerading as a university student on a year abroad. It wasn’t so much that he was searching for a home as that he was seeking a new identity. He tried Los Angeles and Las Vegas, New York and New Orleans, the Floridian delta and the Blue Ridge Mountains, and anywhere else he’d heard mentioned in song or film. He took to hitching and hiking, and by accident had stumbled into Crossfields Landing. Quite literally. Having spent his entire young life in a city, he’d been unaccustomed to reading a map or using a compass. He thought he was heading west, so when he caught sight of the tempestuous Atlantic, he assumed it was the Pacific, and was baffled by how he’d traveled so far so quickly. That had caused some amusement when he’d said as much in the only restaurant that was open during that stormy November afternoon. He’d booked a room for the night and stayed for a month. He would have stayed longer, but there were too many questions he didn’t know how to answer.
It was a decade before he’d returned, this time with an American accent. If anyone remembered the geographically confused student, they didn’t connect him with Tom. He’d bought the cottage, and dreamed about being able to live there permanently. His fantasies were always muted by the knowledge that the world would have to be turned upside down before he could ever retire. The world had changed, but the idea of retirement had been forever lost along with so much else.
He slowed when he reached the sign marking the village as ten miles ahead. In strident lettering was the familiar admonishment that heavy vehicles wanting the coastal route would have to take a different road at the next intersection. Over that was a new, hand-painted message. He couldn’t quite make out what it said because of the zombie standing in front of it. He brought the SUV to a halt. The creature staggered out into the road. It appeared to be alone, but he checked and double-checked before getting out of the vehicle. He grabbed the carbine. The zombie lurched another step, moving more erratically than the undead usually did. As it drew nearer, he saw why. It was wearing cowboy boots, high-heeled with pointed toes. Now he was looking for it, he saw the shirt’s rhinestones occasionally glittering amidst a layer of dirt.
“Were you a singer? Or at some fancy dress party? Or do you always dress like that?” Then he silently berated himself for asking questions that could never be answered. He fired. The zombie fell. The shot echoed across the landscape, and he wished he had a quieter weapon.
“A sword would be good. Or something medieval. A pike, that’s the—” He stopped, as he saw what was written on the sign. Warning. Quarantine Zone. Do Not Enter.
There was something achingly familiar about that sign. Before he could work out what, he heard a shot. It wasn’t close, and he couldn’t pinpoint its direction. There was another. Then a third. Then silence. Was it a hunter? Or a survivor needing assistance? He climbed onto the roof of the SUV, taking in his surroundings. He saw no one, and no more shots came.
Agitation gr
ew as he got back in the truck, but he’d only driven a hundred yards before he thought he heard more shooting. He stopped. Got out. Listened. His stomach twisted in knots. There was a person, somewhere close. Were they trapped by the undead? He could imagine their fear all too easily, and that blossom of hope when they heard the engine. He could also imagine how that hope would fade as the sound of the truck receded into the distance. He grabbed the carbine and fired a shot into the undergrowth. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. A minute. No reply came. Reluctantly, he got back in the SUV. More slowly than before, with the window wound down, he drove on.
After a quarter mile, he saw the intersection with the roads that ran north and south for vehicles that had to bypass the broken bridges. On the far side of the junction, two bed-and-breakfasts loomed at one another from opposite sides of the road. One was painted red, the other blue. There was a story about the buildings, how they’d once been owned by two families whose rivalry put the Hatfields and McCoys to shame. His mind wasn’t on that, but on the smattering of corpses by the buildings, and the pack of zombies in the road between the two properties. They’d heard the sound of the engine and were drifting toward the road. Someone inside the red-painted house had heard it, too. A bearded man had opened the window and was waving at him.
Tom did a quick calculation and came up with an estimate of between thirty and fifty zombies. They were getting nearer. He stuck the SUV into reverse and drove back thirty yards. Balancing the carbine on the open doorframe, he took aim. He fired one careful shot after another. Not all hit, and not all those that did were fatal. A zombie collapsed, but it was only when it stood up again that he realized the bullet had taken it in the chest. When the magazine was empty, twelve lay unmoving on the road. The rest were heading toward him, the nearest now less than a hundred yards away. He drove back another fifty yards. He reloaded, took aim, and began firing again. He downed five before he had to drive back another four dozen yards. Three of the slower-moving creatures had turned back to the house. He fired. Aimed. Fired. Reversed. Reloaded. Fired. Twelve zombies were left, and they were all heading back to people trapped in the house.