Rudie groaned louder. He tried to sit up as they dragged him through the doorway. He waved his hands around, fingers up in the V for victory sign. Lance laughed hysterically at the sight.
They dropped Rudie’s ankles and rushed for the door. Rudie took a swipe at Brody and he yalped, jumping out of the way, one hand forward like he was chugging for the end zone. They stumbled inside and Steve slammed the door shut. All as one, the five giggling survivors piled up at the barricaded windows. They peeked through the gaps in the boards, watching as the zombie in the Richard Nixon mask lumbered to its feet.
6
“You guys want to make a run with me?” Brody asked from the doorway.
Vince and Mary looked up from Vince’s bed. Both of them had books in their hands, Vince a psychology textbook, Mary a Stephen King paperback. They were sitting on opposite ends of the bed, their legs interlocked, their backs braced against the headboard and footboard.
“What are you guys doing?” Brody asked, looking perplexed. His hair was getting long, brown bangs hanging in his eyes, sideburns curling over his ears. He hadn’t shaved in several days either and was transitioning from whiskers to beard.
“Reading. What’s it look like?” Mary answered. It was a smartass reply, but she said it with a wink.
“I can see that,” Brody said, folding his arms and leaning against the doorframe. He was dressed in faded denim jeans and a baseball jersey, the fabric stretched taut across his bulging pecs. “I was just wondering why.”
“We like reading,” Vince said. “It’s enjoyable.”
“If I had a girlfriend, I wouldn’t be spending my last few days on earth reading,” Brody said.
Vince and Mary exchanged a glance but didn’t comment.
“So you guys wanna come or what?” Brody asked.
“Yeah, I’ll go,” Vince answered, closing his textbook with a snap and setting it on his bedside table. He extricated his legs from Mary’s and swung his feet to the floor. “What do we need?”
“Whatever we can get. Bottled water. Food. Maybe some beer. We’re out of beer again.”
“You’re always out of beer. You guys drink like fishes.”
Brody grinned crookedly. “Nothing else to do.”
“Well, I want to go, too,” Mary announced, putting aside her paperback. Vince started to protest, but she overrode him. “I want to get out of the house for a little while! I get bored, you know. And I need some fresh air. This house smells like dirty tennis shoes and dick.”
“All right!” Vince relented. “Just don’t let any zombies eat you.” He leered. “That’s my job!”
Mary slugged him on the arm as Brody guffawed. The trio walked downstairs to the foyer, where Lance was adjusting the straps of his bike basket. He had rigged a milk crate to the handlebars of his Diamondback mountain bike with zip ties. It was awkward, but it would hold a lot of supplies.
They had all rigged their bikes up with baskets or crates or, in Mary’s case, a couple saddlebags made of two large women’s duffle bags. There were only five of them now, but five people still went through a lot of food and drink. The more they could transport at once, the less often they had to venture out.
The bikes were fast enough to outrun the zombies, and they were quiet. The deadheads were attracted to loud noises—and artificial noises like car engines or gunshots drew them in groves. That’s how they’d lost nearly half their group a couple weeks ago. There had been twelve of them then, but half their gang had run afoul of a huge herd of deadheads while attempting to get supplies one afternoon. They had gone in a van. One with a loud muffler. Steve was the only one to make it back alive. He was playing lookout. Bailed when the swarm of howling zombies came racing around the street corner. He had panicked, really, took off running on foot. The others had dived into the van.
They might still have been okay, might have made it back alive, if there hadn’t been so many of them. But the torrent of starving deadheads had smashed into one side of the vehicle like a wall of roaring floodwaters. One of the windows gave in. Last thing Steve saw, he told them, was the zombies wrenching off the passenger side door. He didn’t see their friends get eaten, but he heard their screams. And he heard those screams die. He still refused to go on supply runs with his frat brothers, but they let it slide. Almost getting eaten once by a herd of diseased cannibals was enough for anybody.
They finished prepping their bikes. Mary went to the door and gazed through the peephole.
“See any zombies?” Vince asked.
She shook her head. “Looks clear.” She unlocked the door and cracked it, peering out cautiously.
For a few days after he reanimated, Rudie-Patootie had wandered around the yard of the Epsilon Omega chapter house in his Richard Nixon mask, as if some dim part of his brain still associated the place with security. It was kind of sad to see him shuffling around out there. Funny, but sad. He reminded Vince of an elderly neighbor he used to have when he still lived at home with his parents. Mr. de Boer was his name. He was eighty-seven years old and suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Before his kids put him in the nursing home, he would often shuffle around his front yard like that, sometimes dressed, sometimes not, but always with the same expression on his craggy face—the look of a child who has lost his parents in a crowded shopping mall. On the fourth day following his death and reanimation, the gang had checked outside to see if Rudie was still wandering around the yard, but Rudie had gone, rambled off with his Richard Nixon mask and peace signs fingers, and they hadn’t seen him since.
“No deadheads,” Mary said. “Let’s go.”
It was still warm out. Vince’s grandmother would have called it an Indian summer. But the warmth and bright sunshine had a fragility about it. Autumn had been stretched into a thin, almost translucent membrane. You could see winter through it, grim and bluish gray, and Vince worried what they were going to do when that thin veneer of good weather finally popped and winter came barreling through. They had already had a couple brief cold snaps, and the frat house had gotten uncomfortably chilly. It was an old building, with high ceilings and lots of big, uninsulated windows.
They glided down the street on their bikes, rolling past the hilly grounds of Westland University. Those lawns had been neat and trim and green only a month ago—so neat they could have been golf courses if it weren’t for the mobs of students walking to class, lounging under the big oak trees studying, playing Frisbee. Now the grass was knee high and gone to seed. The students were all gone-- either fled or undead or eaten alive by their classmates. The only sounds were the whir of their bike wheels and the hissing sound of the wind blowing through that unmown grass. The grass swayed as the wind blew across it, looking like slow amber waves.
“We’re going to the Pack ‘N’ Tuck, right?” Mary called, the wind blowing waves through her hair as well—red ones though, not amber.
Vince nodded.
The Pack ‘N’ Tuck was a big convenience store that sat just at the perimeter of the campus. They’d been raiding it for food and drinks for weeks, and its stores still weren’t depleted. They’d put a pretty sizeable dent in its beer cooler, though.
There was a Burger King attached to it, too, like conjoined twins. Although most of its foodstuffs had gone bad pretty quickly, they had gotten a few good cookouts from its stores. That was before all the hamburger patties and bread started stinking and growing blue fuzz.
They kept a wary eye for zombies as they whirred down the campus lane. The streets were deserted, however. Not a walking dead person in sight.
It was a lot different when the Phage first rocked into town.
When the Phage first showed up in Westland and everybody was dropping like flies, you couldn’t stick a foot outside without attracting the attention of half a dozen zombies. They were everywhere. Wandering in the streets. Shuffling around the parking lots. Stumbling around in their yards. They seemed drawn to the places they had frequented when they were alive, like some dim echo of thei
r past selves persisted, even after death. They were sad, empty-eyed, shambling revenants, but if they had a scent, if they were after some chow, they were like locomotives with teeth, howling, implacable, unrelenting.
And if the zombies didn’t get you, your fellow survivors would.
Sensing its impending mortality, humanity went collectively insane. People looted. Mowed each other down in the streets. There were rape gangs. White mobs were running around killing minorities. Mobs of minorities were running around killing white people. The most dangerous group was the military, though. If you saw the military coming, you had better hightail it, because they were gunning down anything that moved that wasn’t in uniform.
The zombies were bad, but the violence of the living against the living was much worse. At least the zombies had an excuse. Their minds were diseased. They couldn’t be merciful or brave or honorable because those parts of their brain didn’t work anymore.
One of the frat brothers, a guy named Johnny Morris, saw a military caravan a week after the zombie plague really started rolling in Westland. He ran outside to flag them down, thinking they would rescue him, take him to some safe government facility. Vince, who had heard the military was gunning people down over the radio, tried to stop him.
Johnny had brushed him aside angrily.
“What’s the matter with your brain?” he had snarled, stabbing his temple with a finger. “Those are our boys! They’re one of us! They’ll take us out of here! They’ll take us someplace safe until the Phage burns itself out!”
Johnny ran down to the end of the yard. He started hopping and waving his arms, a big grin on his face. “All right!” he whooped. “G. I. Joe! G. I. Joe!” As the caravan rumbled by, some skinny kid floating in his camouflage fatigues stood and sprayed Johnny with bullets.
Johnny’s head had turned into an instant abstract painting. The sidewalk behind him had looked like a Jackson Pollock canvas. Zombies picked his bones clean that night, and the frat brothers buried those bones in a shallow grave in the back yard the next day.
So the military was no help either.
After a couple weeks of mindless wandering, the deadheads had started congregating. Vince believed they had an instinctive drive to cluster. It was that human reflex to come together in groups. Homo sapiens was, after all, a social animal. It should come as no surprise that their addled offspring, let’s call them Homo zombie, shared that same characteristic. They were just too dim to do it quickly, to form those vast assemblages that became so dangerous later.
Now, after a month, they traveled around in huge herds, like migrating wildebeests. On the one hand, it was a good thing, because it left a lot of the city open for them to move about in. They could scavenge for supplies, look for other survivors, with an acceptable level of risk. On the other hand, if you ran afoul of one of those herds, you better make sure you were wearing your boogie shoes, because the zombies were fast when they locked onto a target, and they acted as if they were one collective organism. A hive mind, if you will.
If you stumbled into their path and you couldn’t get away, they would roll over you like a moving wall of gnashing teeth. All that would be left of you once the herd had passed was a big red stain on the ground and a pile of picked clean bones.
Vince, Mary, Brody and Lance biked across the intersection of University Boulevard and Willam Horton Avenue to the Pack N’ Tuck at the four way. The streets going both ways were vacant, save the abandoned vehicles and a handful of gnawed on skeletons. Vince glanced up at the sky as he pedaled onto the parking lot, hoping to spot some airplane contrails. That, at least, would indicate that some level of civilization existed somewhere… but the sky was blue and blameless, not a jet contrail in sight.
He braked, swung his leg over the bike and leaned it against the brick wall of the convenience store. Mary hissed to a stop beside him and did the same.
“I’m getting some candy bars!” she said with a smile. “I’ve been craving chocolate like crazy these past few days!” She pushed a lock of auburn hair out of her face, looking very kissable in that instant. She might be getting hairy legs, but she was still one hot mama.
Brody started pushing the dumpster away from the entrance. They had parked it there to discourage any looters from getting into the store. And to keep the deadheads from wandering inside. Once zombies got inside a building, they just wandered around in circles. They didn’t understand complex concepts like inside and outside. Doors. Quit biting me.
“You want some help, Lou Ferigno?” Lance asked.
“Lean in, little man.”
Lance put his shoulder to the dumpster next to Brody. The tires of the dumpster squawked rustily.
“Ladies first!” Mary chirped, slipping past them into the shop.
An instant later, she started screaming.
7
They figured out later what had happened, but it didn’t matter later. Knowing how the deadhead got inside the Pack N’ Tuck wasn’t going to bring Vince’s girlfriend back to life. The Phage might, but Mary Caskill wouldn’t be a very agreeable young lady if that happened.
The boys of Epsilon Omega—known around campus as the Eos-- had blocked the front entrance of the Pack N’ Tuck with a dumpster to keep out any wandering deadheads. They all knew there was a back entrance for deliveries, but none of them thought they might need to secure that door as well. It was a thick metal door with no windows, just a small white and red plaque that read NO DELIVERIES BEFORE 11 AM, and besides, it was already locked from the inside.
Apparently, they weren’t the only survivors in town, because someone had forced the delivery door open with a crowbar. Why those other survivors didn’t just push the dumpster out of the way was something Vince would never know, but for whatever reason-- maybe they felt safer entering the building from behind-- they’d popped the back door open to loot the place… and left it flapping when they were done.
It was really very simple. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out.
Zombie walk in. Girl walk in. Zombie hungry. Girl die.
They tried to push in and help her when Mary started screaming, but the deadhead caught her almost as soon as she slipped through the door. It must have been standing just inside the entrance. The convenience store was dim inside without the lights. Maybe Mary didn’t see it. Maybe it was standing behind the postcard rack beside the door. None of them would ever know. But it threw itself on her the instant she walked in and bowled her right off her feet. Mary fell back against the door, shoving it closed behind her, which blocked them from following after her. They didn’t know that the delivery door was open in back. Not then. Not that they would have had time to save her if they knew. All they could do as the zombie mauled her to death was beat impotently on the door’s tinted glass.
They watched Mary wave her arms and shake her head while the zombie lay on top of her, clawing and biting. It was a big one, too. Must have been a trucker or biker back when it was alive. It was wearing a sleeveless black tank top and faded denim jeans. The half of its face that was still intact was bearded and crudely formed, with small, dark, mean eyes and a tear-shaped tattoo on its cheek. Its arms were as thick around as Vince’s legs, and bore full sleeve Oriental tats. Topless Geishas. Curvy, whiskered dragons.
“Mary! Mary!” Vince howled, slapping his palms against the glass. He yelled so loud something in his throat gave, and he wouldn’t be able to speak above a whisper the following day.
Mary screamed one last time as the big biker zombie hauled back its fist, and then it slugged her, hard, like it was beating its bitch for mouthing off once too many times.
Mary quit screaming.
It hit her again, snarling and croaking and making all kinds of happy-angry-killy sounds. The tinted window fractured on the second punch. On the third, a pattern of red droplets appeared as if by magic on the glass, then started to run.
Vince fell to his knees, sobbing.
“Oh, God, Mary,” he bawled. “
Jesus, God, Mary.”
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die. Vince couldn’t comment on that, but their life as a couple flashed before his eyes as the biker zombie tore his girlfriend apart. Meeting her at the University Library, seeing The Bell Jar in her hands and saying, “She killed herself, you know. Sylvia Plath. Stuck her head in the oven and turned the gas on.” Mary had looked up at him, a little annoyed, a little amused, and said, “That’s a terrible pickup line.” He remembered their first date, a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises at the Westland Multiplex, finding out later that a young fellow by the name of James Eagen Holmes had gone into the Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and shot twelve people to death, gunned them down in cold blood as Vince and Mary were cuddling in the crowded theater, sharing a large popcorn that was way too greasy and salty. The first time they made love—he couldn’t get it up the first time, he was too nervous, but after that… after that he had gone for three hours, and came so hard he had almost lost consciousness. He remembered the first time he realized he loved her, and the first time he said the words aloud. He had told her, “I love you. I want to have your babies.” And she had laughed, telling him, “I don’t think it works that way, bucko.” She was the yen to his mother’s yang, easygoing where his mother was fractious, voluptuous to his mother’s anorexic boniness, and sane. So very, very sane. Now she was dead, but death, he now realized, had dogged their relationship from the very beginning. The Sylvia Plath comment, the Colorado shooting, the zombie plague.
Brody turned and puked in the parking lot behind them.
Lance started giggling.
8
Brody finally managed to pull Vince off of him. “He’s not really laughing, man,” the football player yelled. “Look at him, dude! He’s flipped his goddam wig!”
Die Laughing (The Fearlanders) Page 3