Destiny Nowhere

by Matthew Hollis Damon

  I start thinking that the best thing I can do is pop up and begin shooting people. They will get me, of course, but at least I will take a few of them with me. Maybe some of my friends will get away.

  WHAT? I catch myself abruptly: exactly how many moronic Hollywood clichés combined in my head to create this glamorous martyr fantasy? Endless news articles about “American Patriots” giving their lives for freedom, crammed into my skull by the media. Programming through repetition.

  “Breathe,” I whisper to myself, not meaning to say it aloud but just suddenly feeling like I’m losing control. Charisse. Just hold on, baby, I’m coming. Somehow, I’ll make another plan; I’ll get to you. She was my last hope as much as I was hers, I realize.

  I remain crouched, even loosening my grip on my rifle. I don’t know how to drive a tractor trailer, or else I could easily save myself. But no—instead of learning anything practical, I spent my life jailed away in academia, scrutinizing the behaviors of human beings. Not because I actually have a passion for it, but rather because I am horribly inept at socializing and wanted to understand myself and why I’m different. My entire life, a sham. And here I am, useless and trapped, wishing I could save this wretched skin. Why do I even want to save it? It crosses my mind that being a zombie would be a relief from the hell of being Sam Bland.

  A loud commotion ensues, the now-familiar pop pop pop of distant gunfire. Shadows with guns dash across the parking lot in a mad panic toward the building. I sit tight, I watch. I think about helping, but I’m frozen in my own uselessness. The coward always survives until the moment they try to screw over someone good! That’s the plot device, right? If I run, I become Paul Reiser in Aliens. A goner. Should I shoot the snipers on the roof? If I do, the muzzle flash will give away my position. The silencer on my gun isn’t really silent, like in the movies. It’s actually pretty goddamn loud.

  I peer through the slit, and it looks like twenty men just ran across the parking lot for the entrance of Mavmart. Either Doyle made his move, or my captured friends are fighting to escape.

  I wait.

  Pop pop pop pop pop. The popcorn machine of death, at the Mavmart nearest you! It’s so far away I can’t even tell what side of the building it’s coming from. I sight down my scope, and because of all the motion lights that went on in the parking lot, it’s easy to see the sentries on the roof. They’re milling around, as well. I track one as he peers over the edge of the wall in front of the building with his rifle. I squeeze the trigger before I even think about whether I’m going to help or not.

  Chack! Says my “silenced” rifle, echoing faintly off the neighborhood. His body drops to the roof. Sure it isn’t as loud as a gunshot blowing your eardrums out, but it’s still loud.

  That was a living, breathing human I just killed. And I feel nothing. It’s no different than all the zombies I had killed. I search for some feeling inside, but I have none. These people are bad. They rape women. It doesn’t matter if they die.

  I listen for any sounds of Mavreides’ men nearby who went searching into the neighborhood, but there’s nothing. I scope another sentry on the roof; he’s aiming at something and then chack, he goes down. My senses are so alive I can feel the cold in the air like icicles dancing across my neck hair. Every breath I take is slow and deliberate. I can hear my own heart, and I feel electric.

  I’m scoping another sentry when there’s a shout nearby. “Over here, I heard something.”

  Fear grips me. I feel safe and unsafe in this turret, and this is the only moment. Like when I saw the cop car heading for the Sunoco. I throw my rifle down and leap over the gunwale, skid onto the hood of the truck, then flop off the side and hit the ground. I land with a thud and fall heavily, skinning my elbow. In the darkness, there’s nothing but blocky shadows of houses and fences and pools and trees.

  “Who’s there?” a voice shouts from the darkness, some distance away. Someone must’ve spotted me.

  I charge into the backyards, running blindly, terrified of the night.

  Since I have no destination, gravity takes me downhill like water. One moment I’m in a residential suburb vaulting chain-link fences, the next I’m emerging into a tiny parking lot, passing dumpsters. Genesee Street is an automotive graveyard, cars strewn like sarcophagi, with retail mausoleums lining the road. I don’t even process this; I just run straight into the night.

  I hear the popping sound of that Horseman of Apocalypse, Orville Redenbacher at my heels. Is it coming toward me? It feels like yes. Pop pop pop pop pop pop pop. A never-ending, steady stream of gunfire, but it’s receding.

  I run, the wind bites my face, Charisse waits in the night behind me. I think of her and the act of fleeing is like saying a big “fuck you” to her.

  “Fuck you, Sam,” I mutter to myself.

  Chapter 12: Then

  The cop car accelerated onto 481 without pause, taking the sharp turn so roughly that I bounced off the door and crashed into the cop’s shoulder before I had a chance to grab my seatbelt.

  “Slow down!” I growled, an ingrate of the highest order, pulling my knives out of my belt before I was impaled by them, and setting them on the floor so as not to upset the officer.

  The cruiser slowed as his foot came off the gas.

  “Were you bit?” the cop said.

  “No.”

  “Good thing.”

  He held up his radio, accelerating across the train bridge. “Unit 468 here.”

  I took the cloth off my face so I wouldn’t look like a wild west train robber.

  “Copy 468, go ahead.” His radio buzzed.

  “I’ve got a code six at 6673 Kirkville Road. Repeat, code six. Hostile mob assembled, keep all units out of area. Possible ten-eighty, the building is on fire…” He trailed off and turned to me. “We don’t even have codes for this shit.”

  “Ten-four, 468,” the dispatcher responded. “Proceed to Com-Post at 3649 Erie Boulevard, Shoppingtown Mall.”

  “Negative 468!” a male voice shouted into the scanner. “Com-Post 3649 has fallen. Everything’s gone to shit.”

  We drove in silence, slowing and getting off at a hidden off-ramp on 481 and taking a gravel road under the highway and onto Butternut Drive. The police radio chattered with voices and numbers and yelling I didn’t understand. We were in sight of the police station and courthouse, and there were shadows wandering across the lawn. I knew immediately what they were.

  “What the fuck,” he said.

  “I don’t think we should pull in there,” I said.

  He slowed, stared at them as the walkers headed for his car, and decided at the last minute to keep going past.

  “MacDougal,” I said, reading his name plate.

  “What?” he growled.

  “I’m not kidding, it’s really a zombie plague,” I said, not even feeling ridiculous.

  “I fucking see that, man,” he said. “It’s just not fuckin’ possible. Jesus Christ, dead people don’t just fuckin’ get up and walk around. It’s gotta be an attack, germ warfare, or bath salts or somethin’.”

  “Bath salts? You think everyone in the city just smoked bath salts?”

  “Snorted,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You snort bath salts. Not smoke.”

  “Okay whatever—do you think everyone in Syracuse all the sudden snorted bath salts while we were asleep?”

  He didn’t answer. At Kinne Road, he turned right.

  “Um, the mall is probably a bad idea,” I said, referring to Shoppingtown Mall, which was coming up on our left. It loomed quiet and brooding in the night with the parking lot lights blazing like a magnet for every zombie within ten miles. The words of George W. Bush on 9/11 came into my head: We need America strong in this time of crisis, so keep shopping. I saw it on CNN somewhere around 3 in the afternoon the day the twin towers fell. If Bush were still the Prez, would he tell everyone to keep shopping now? I’m sure Trump wants us to keep grabbing pussies!

  The Shoppingt
own Mall parking lot had a lot of suspicious people wandering aimlessly in it. “I bet this place is a deathtrap.”

  “Um, yeah,” he said, pulling into the parking lot anyway. “They had established a command post here. I just want to check it out.”

  “Didn’t you see Dawn of the Dead?” I asked, cracking an awkward smirk. Nothing had been smile-worthy in the last hour.

  “Yeah yeah, I saw that.” He ran over a family of zombies, children and all. “Oh Jesus Christ!” he shouted as a teenage girl with a torn face and skull tumbled over our car and smeared her cheek across the center of the windshield.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “She’s already dead.”

  The gooey smear on our windshield looked like an L, and he hit the wipers and smeared it more. Then he hit the windshield fluid and streaked her blood across the driver’s side. The more it wiped, the more it smeared.

  “What the fuck!” he screamed, slamming on the brakes in the middle of the back parking lot near the Fun Zone entrance. He scrutinized me, unblinking, like a suspect. “Wait here.”

  He hit the trunk lever, and before I could protest, he got out and ran around to the back of the car, leaving his door wide open. The safe, cozy feeling of being in a police car was immediately lost--that open door glared at me like a hole in the fuselage! I looked around in wild panic at the slow moving people in the parking lot. None were particularly close, but all of them had noticed us and were ambling in our direction.

  “MacDougal--they’re all headed our way.”

  “I fuckin’ know that!” he yelled, charging to the front with a big snow brush in his hand. He flipped it to the squeegee side and began scraping the gore off the glass. The gore drooled into pinkish ooze down the side of the windshield.

  A sickly kid, moving faster than all the others, scuttled up to MacDougal. The officer whipped out his baton and struck as fast as a cobra, sending the kid’s body bouncing across the asphalt.

  “MacDougal, quit fucking around!” I yelled, counting four more who were getting close.

  “Shut the fuck up, civilian!” he barked back, drawing his gun.

  There was all kinds of shouting on the scanner: people calling out numbers like a Sotheby’s auction. Gibberish to me. Sometimes I made out a coherent sentence like, “Army National Guard 427th Brigade Support Battalion is mobilizing. Deployment at O-six hundred hours. All units will assist.”

  That sounded promising. It was only two and a half hours away!

  MacDougal’s gun rang out loud as he shot the closest walker. Yes, walker! I’m plagiarizing Robert Kirkman. I can do that, because he’s probably dead. And if he isn’t, man does he have something to write about now--The Walking Dead will be the Bible of all future generations, and Kirkman will be the new prophet, headquartered in Romero City!

  This mall is where I bought all my comics and played all my Warhammer 40K. Cloud City Comics is a holy shrine to geek culture in Syracuse; the last bastion of my pre-digital childhood, hanging on by a thread.

  Another gunshot and another body dropped. There were a lot of child zombies in the parking lot, and they really did move faster than the others, swarming towards us and rapidly outdistancing their parents. They weren’t like fast zombies in the movies, but they had a spryness the others lacked. Shoppingtown Mall had economically died when the Infinity USA Mall was built, and they’d turned it into a kid-friendly zone, complete with skate park, gymnastic center, martial arts and dance schools. And my comic shop. I wanted to go there now, just lock myself in and read comics until the Army came and fixed everything.

  MacDougal seemed to be hesitating a lot. I watched him fire, then stop and scratch his head. Sweat gleamed on his face in the glare of the bright halide lights, and he fired again before distractedly scratching himself. What was he doing? Something was off about him.

  “Come on, you fucker!” he shouted, running up and kicking a child zombie, knocking it to the ground. He then started stomping its head with his boot. “How you like that, you little fuck? You want some more.” Wham wham wham, his boot came down on its head until it was just a sick pile of disfigured mush. I could see the skin of its mouth, but it had shifted to where the cheek used to be, because there were no bones to hold it in place anymore. Sickening.

  MacDougal stood there in some kind of ridiculous karate stance, ready to take down the next one.

  “MacDougal, there’s at least thirty headed our way now. The scanner is spazzing out, and the Army is coming. Let’s get out of here.” I was trying to be assertive but unthreatening. Somewhere, I’d read that’s the way to handle cops.

  And it worked. He backed slowly around to the door, fired one more shot that only tagged one of the creatures on the shoulder, then got in the car.

  “What are you, some kind of fucking cowboy?” I said, realizing halfway through the sentence that he was pissed off. I gave a weak laugh at the end, trying to smooth it over and keep things light.

  MacDougal stared hard at me, and I shrank beneath his fiery eyes.

  “Unit 464,” said a voice on the scanner.

  “Copy 464, go ahead.”

  “We’ve got a 10-80 at 6789 East Genesee Street, 904-B spreading out of control, request immediate assistance from all available engines, this is a priority one situation…due to, ahhh, the resources on site. Request to reassign all--”

  MacDougal switched off the scanner without looking at it. The scanner voice was still talking on his lapel walkie, and he lowered the volume so it was barely audible. He was glaring at me. “Are you a superior ranking officer?” he said, his eyes burning into mine.

  “No.”

  He nodded. “Right. Are you a police officer?”

  “Um, no sir.”

  “Alright then. How ‘bout you let me do my job and don’t question it? Do you think you can handle that?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Are you sure? Because if you don’t want to cooperate, I can always leave you in charge of this parking lot.”

  A shadow loomed between me and the nearest lights. There were a lot of the walkers surrounding us, shambling up with their gaping mouths and gaping wounds and lifeless eyes. They were creepier than any zombie you’ve ever seen in film. Some moved really really slowly, and others moved like marionettes who were trying to power walk, lurching their arms to propel them in this stilted way. It’s almost as if each one had its own way of walking.

  And now they were bumping against the car, their hands thumping the glass, lamprey mouths and teeth pressing on it and making clicking sounds like giant insect mandibles. MacDougal grinned. “It’s lookin’ good out there, buddy. Sure you don’t want to be promoted to Parking Lot Lieutenant?”

  “No, officer. I’m sorry,” I said, not because I actually was, but because he wanted an apology and I was terrified he was going to kick me out of his car.

  “Okay,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Sam.” He stared at me expectantly. “Sam Bland.”

  “Okay, Mr. Bland. The last safe zone in Dewitt was on the roof of this mall, where a whole bunch of civilians are waiting for helicopter evac. Problem is, we lost the command post, so there’s no way to safely get you onto the roof unless we can find some outside rope or ladder. This whole place has gone to shit.”

  “Maybe there’s zombies on the roof,” I said.

  “Zombies,” he said, snorting and giving me another jerk-faced look. This guy had lost it. He was not in a balanced, rational state. I could see his training there--both sides of his good cop/bad cop routine, first hostile then friendly. When confronted with a situation outside of all procedures, his own training trapped him in this weird psychological limbo.

  I’d once taught a class on the Psychology of Interrogation and covered all that Reid technique shit, and the other compliance-gaining methods cops learned. I suddenly realized it was like brainwashing—he couldn’t stop being that person, and that person wasn’t capable of handling critical thought.

  He finally took
his creepy stare off me and spoke into his lapel radio, “Unit 468.”

  “Go ahead 468.”

  “What’s the status on evac station 3649? I’ve got a 10-12.”

  “Copy 468. Evac security compromised.”

  “Compromised? Is the roof safe?”

  “No further information available.”

  Officer MacDougal was quiet and seemed almost oblivious to the considerable crowd that had assembled around the car.

  His face suddenly softened and he looked at me with kindness in his eyes. “Where’s your family?” he asked softly.

  “My parents live in California,” I said, my eyes nervously straying to the blond kid who had crawled onto the hood of the car.

  “Look, it’s Home Alone,” MacDougal joked, smiling in a really child-like way. His eyes were crazy, like his thoughts were moving too fast. He wasn’t all here. “McCauley Culkin.” He paused. “You got any wife or girlfriend? Any kids?”

  “No.” I felt like the ultimate loser admitting that, but his eyes weren’t judging.

  “Well,” he said. “I don’t know where to take you. Where do you work?”

  “Syracuse University. I’m a professor.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I know some guys on the force up there.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “They’re a real police force, you know,” he told me. “They’re not rent-a-cops. We bust their balls anyway and call them security guards.”

  “Yeah?” I said again, really distracted by the ten mangled people who were trying to get into the car.

  MacDougal noticed me watching them. “Don’t worry, they can’t break this glass. It’s reinforced.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re pretty weak. One on one, they’re not a problem. It’s when they trap you or sneak up on you that you gotta worry.”

  I nodded. Then we had nothing to say and just listened to the chittering of zombie teeth trying to chew through glass.

  “Too bad you don’t have any beer,” I said, just to say something.