“Better check this out,” Zack says. He starts walking toward the chaos. It’s funny to see this old man — who reminds me of Tony Richards — go through the people because they seem to subconsciously move out of his way. He has this presence. I hope I’m half as bad ass as this guy when I hit his age.
“Should we check it out?” Abby asks. She sounds tired. Tired of zombies.
“No, they’ll handle it,” Tim says. “Best leave it up to the professionals.”
Norm makes a noise like pshh and says, “You don’t know who the professionals really are.” He looks at me. “Little bro?”
I’m quite curious. I shrug.
Abby says, “It never ends.”
“Zombies, people, goblins and ghouls,” Tim says, “it doesn’t matter. Nobody is getting through that gate.” Someone rushes by and shoulder checks him. He goes spinning around and almost falls, but Norm snags him. He rubs his shoulder and grimaces. “I wish people would understand that.”
“Better check it out just in case,” I say.
Then something peculiar happens. In all the pandemonium and chaos, I get this feeling. You know exactly the feeling I’m talking about. It’s that feeling you get when it’s the middle of the night and you’ve just watched a scary movie and the lights are off and the house is quiet. You hear a noise — or rather, you think you hear a noise. So you double-check that the doors are locked and the blinds are drawn, and as you do this, you feel like you’re doing it for an audience, an audience of one. A serial killer, a psycho, a demon, a troll, a ghost. Whatever it may be, it’s watching you, waiting for you, biding its time.
That’s the feeling I get. Except, it’s no ghost or ghoul; it’s a very deformed and creepy-looking merchant who peddles human organs as souvenirs of the old world. He sees me look at him while people race across the road. His one eye glitters with glee. He holds up a hand and waves.
This feeling of dread coils around me. I can’t move. My blood doesn’t pump, heart doesn’t beat.
He puts the hand down and pushes his cart into the street, going into the flow of the chaos. He doesn’t stand out to anyone except me. He looks like another curious citizen of Haven.
“Jack?” Norm says. He reaches up like he’s about to slap me. “What the hell are you looking at?”
“That merchant,” I say.
“What — ” Ken begins to say.
I cut him off. “The one with the cart.”
Dread settles in my chest. I don’t know why. There’s something about him…
Meanwhile, a scream comes from the gathered crowd. Then the rolling wave of death rattles wash over me. The smell next — the actual smell. All of us bring a hand up to our noses.
I point to the spot, but Ken is too invested in what’s going on down the street near the gates.
Then there’s a scream. And a gunshot. More screaming after the shot. I look down to the sea of people gathered around the soldiers with their guns drawn. People start to run toward us. No one runs into the chaos anymore; they run away.
But they’re not fast enough. Because the one person who isn’t running is the merchant. He raises his hand again, death showing in his grin, and shouts, “FOR THE KING!”
This time, his hands are not empty. No, they’re holding two grenades.
“Holy sh — ” Tim starts to say.
Fifty-Four
An explosion follows.
Now, I lay in the dirt, my ears ringing, my vision blurred, the taste of earth in my mouth, the smell of singed meat in my nostrils. I can barely move, but I will have to soon. Just five more minutes, Mother. Please.
I’ll have to move because the zombies who weren’t torn to pieces from the shrapnel and the grenades are making their way into the camp. There’s an abundance of already cooked meat waiting for them. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth. It’ll buy me more time — Us more time, Jack.
I look up and see a wave of people running toward us. Ken is in the dirt, trying to stand up. The people hit him and he is lost in a wave of stomping legs, flailing limbs.
Norm to my right, shaking his head, helping Tim up. Abby grunts to my left. I’m disoriented.
“Outta the road,” I try to say, but the words come out thick and slurred as if I’ve been slugged in the mouth or I’ve had too much to drink.
They listen anyway.
Carmen seems to be the most untouched out of all of us. The knees of her jeans are dirty and her red hair is still in a tight ponytail, but her face is a mask of horror as she looks on to Ken. The stampede of people have left him in the middle of the road broken and twisted. He twitches, tries to put his head up.
The fence ripples with fire. Metal screams. I saw a man posted in the crow’s nest launched thirty feet into the air. His limbs and blood rained down on the crowd, sizzling when it hit the fire, and his clothes floated down like snowflakes. The other crow’s nest hangs crookedly into the sea of oncoming zombies. I hear the man who was sitting up there scream as the dead swarm him.
I push myself up. My knees clack against one another. A warm stream of liquid rolls down my brow. I must’ve barked my head on a rock or something.
Norm pulls Tim up. Abby searches the dirt for her weapon. Mine is still in my waistband.
“Ken!” Carmen screams.
I can’t believe my eyes. Ken’s taken quite the beating — one arm hangs from its socket like a rag doll and his left leg twists backward. The white shirt he wore is stained red and brown. His sunhat is gone. But through all of this, he’s getting up.
We have to save him.
The zombies file in through the opening. The road burns, making the very air shimmer in waves. Ken faces the oncoming tide. They limp and scratch and claw their way forward. Some are on fire, their yellow eyes muted by the orange flames.
Intermittent bursts of machine gun fire rip through the air, but the forest of zombies is dense. We’ll need more than one machine gun.
“Let’s clear house,” Norm says. He picks up his rifle, smacks the bottom of the magazine to make sure it’s in all the way. We look at each other, understanding in our eyes, and I nod at him.
Carmen charges forward. We follow her.
Fifty-Five
As she stops short of Ken, a zombie lays into him. I pull the trigger on my pistol and brain the creature, but it makes no difference because another zombie falls on him, then another after that. His screams are choked out by a burst of blood from the soft spot at the base of his throat.
“Oh, God!” Carmen yells. She wails and screams.
I grab her roughly by the arm, the fear and thrill of battle pulsing behind my head like a brewing migraine. “Go back!” I shout at her. “Go back and get the others to safety.”
She just stares at the zombies limping toward us, at the beasts ripping Ken apart into shreds. I don’t have time to feel guilty, but I do. I always do when there’s death. I saw the one-eyed merchant; I had a bad feeling about him, and I ignored it until it was too late and his hands were full of explosives.
FOR THE KING!
Chills go up my spine despite the heat.
Norm rushes past me with Tim at his side. For a second, they’re their teenaged selves, playing with air-soft guns in the overgrown backyard of our house or through the playground at the park just down the road. Their guns vomit out a barrage of bullets. Heads pop. Faces cave in. Bodies drop into dead heaps of already dead meat. The streets of this safe haven run with blood.
Carmen doesn’t listen to me. She watches the carnage unfold. She stares at the mutilated corpse of Ken.
Abby rushes past us, blows the scalp off of a zombie who was much too close. She glances at us over our shoulder with wide eyes.
I grab Carmen again and she shakes me off. The zombies keep coming, closer and closer. I can smell them. I can taste their death.
Norm drops about twenty. He ejects the magazine and loads another one. Tim has his back pressed against Norm’s and drops fifteen of his own. Abby rushes into the he
at of the battle. I see her kick a zombie and watch it go toppling over into a group of five more. They fall like dominoes and Abby stomps the brains out of two, buries bullets into the other three.
I can’t stand here and watch this any longer. I have to get out there and help. There are civilians limping away from the zombies with blood on their faces and burnt clothes on their backs. Carmen is unarmed. She looks at me and says, “I have to help them!”
“No, we’ll help them!” I shout back. “Get to your mom!”
She ignores me, breaks free and runs headlong into the crowd. I have to admit, she’s quite spry. She was an athlete before all of this. I remember Darlene always gushing about her softball skills. Once an athlete, always an athlete, I guess. She spins off a zombie who reaches for her, then picks up speed, hurdles a group ripping apart a burning woman and then she’s lost to the shimmering heat and chaos.
“Damn it,” I say under my breath.
A zombie stumbles into me. It catches me off guard, but I’m ready, I’m always ready. My elbow connects with the soft flesh and bone of its face, shattering its forehead. A flood of infected brains spill onto the dirt.
Norm’s gun continues barking. I drop three zombies myself — in only two shots. All the while, I scan the crowd for Carmen, for the slightest glimpse of her wildfire hair. I see her over by the downed fence. She picks up a woman and her child. A man holding his guts tries to help her, but he’s taken down by a zombie. I hear his screams from here.
“Abby!” I shout. She clubs a zombie in clown makeup (What the fuck?) and turns to me. I point down the road at Carmen.
She nods. No protest, no apprehension on her face. That’s why I love her, that’s why I love Norm and why I loved Herb. They would die for me, they would follow me to their deaths. Who wouldn’t want friends and family like that?
Norm and Tim’s guns pump lead into the crowd. They reload and reload, they shoot and shoot. The zombies thin until Abby and I feel like it’s okay to advance. I catch a glimpse at the road beyond them. It’s empty. There’s no more. We can do this. We can.
Carmen comes into view. The smell of burnt meat is sickeningly close now. It pummels my nostrils, makes my full stomach lurch and groan.
It’s odd how scared I don’t feel. How zombie killing has become second-nature. In a way, I have become Johnny Deadslayer. I really have.
Carmen limps toward us.
Something gray catches my eyes as I rush toward her, trying to help the injured woman and her child. It’s Zack.
I have to double-take. What I see is so horrible that my body weakens to the point of me having to grab Abby for support, but she’s not doing too much better herself.
Zack has been ripped in half at the waist. His entrails hang from beneath his shirt like frayed cloth. Blood pumps into the dirt. Red water from human hoses. He is facedown, head buried in the upturned grass. I follow the trail of blood with my eyes. His legs are about fifteen feet away. One leg is half-chewed. A dead zombie is nearby with a charred and burnt scalp.
“Oh, God,” I say, but it barely comes out.
His gun is still in his hands, the metal shimmering with the flames eating the fence. I pick it up. Power fills me. This gun reminds me of the Magnum Norm had given to me in Woodhaven — that weapon you’d see Clint Eastwood wielding in Dirty Harry. It makes my pistol look like a Nerf gun.
I don’t have time to mourn. I barely knew Zack, but I knew I’d end up liking him a lot. Still, the sadness war brings to the human heart is immense, and I’ll never truly get used to it. Never.
Carmen limps past Abby and I while we cover her. I sweep the blown gate with both weapons. I see the vendor’s cart, now a charred, indecipherable hunk of burnt wood. The vendor’s head scarf has caught on a piece of the jutting fence. The wind blows it and it waves like a white flag of surrender.
But there won’t be any surrender from us. No, we’ll fight to keep this place alive. We’ll fight to keep it safe.
Fifty-Six
Carmen bends down to help an older woman up. She’s yelling about her husband. Carmen looks around, scanning the downed bodies for him. My stomach clenches. All of the downed bodies aren’t moving. They’re mostly blown to bits, charred, or impaled by shrapnel. Mostly dead.
More zombies come down the road to the park’s entrance. They move slow, but they move viciously. A tidal wave. So big and unfathomable, you know you’re helpless to stop it.
We will have to use every last bullet if we want this place to survive.
Abby pops off two shots and kills two zombies that were getting dangerously close to me. I hadn’t noticed. God, what if I would’ve died right there? Idiot.
I look to Abby. She gives me a wink.
I nod back, and move toward Carmen, who is on her knees, trying to lift the old woman up. I see the woman has lost an arm. Blood spurts from the stump at an alarming rate. I start to unbuckle my belt. We’ll have to tie it off before she loses too much. I just hope it’s not too late.
For some reason, all the death and destruction and carnage makes me think of Darlene. It’s odd how she is not by my side right now, but I guess it’s also a blessing. She’s safe with her mom away from the blown gate and the zombies. She’s safe. I have to keep telling myself that.
I get to Carmen. She passes the old woman off to me. The old woman smells burnt. I see her clothes are sizzling faintly.
“Get her out of here,” Carmen says, then she turns to run back to the mass of bodies. “I’m going to check to see if anyone else is alive.”
Abby’s gun goes off. A zombie about twenty feet away from us loses the top of its head.
The old woman can barely stand. All of her weight is pressed on my shoulders. That dead weight. That heavy weight.
“No,” I say to Carmen, surveying the oncoming tide of dead. My heart beats ridiculously fast.
Carmen and I may not go way back, but she’s Darlene’s sister, which makes her family to me as far as I’m concerned, just as Eve and Tim are family now, just as Herb was family.
“I have to help them,” Carmen says.
I wish Darlene was here. She’d be able to talk her younger sister out of this.
“You can’t help them!” I shout back.
“Eugene,” the old woman moans. “Where’s Eugene?”
The flames seem to rise, get hotter. I’m sweating and I’m so cold at the same time. It reminds me of being sick, of being infected.
“I can help them,” Carmen says and she turns and runs past the confines of the gate, toward the scattered remains of the people who once lived here, toward the zombies beyond.
Fifty-Seven
I get about three steps before I hear the roaring of a car engine. I stop, look up. At the crest of the hill, two bright eyes dance on the horizon. My mouth parts in a silent scream as I think This is it, this is the big kahuna, the zombie giant.
But then the rest of the car rolls over the hill and I feel like the biggest jack wagon this side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Reinforcements? I think to myself.
Carmen hasn’t stopped. She bends down and rolls over bodies that are half-mutilated and sticky with blood. I hear her ragged breathing and soft cries over the roar of the engine — engines?
Two more cars roll over the hill. They blow through a wall of zombies.
Yes, reinforcements! I think
I stop moving altogether. No sense in getting myself killed while the heavy artillery rolls through and cleans up this mess. I even lower my gun.
What a mistake. Never lower your gun in the zombie apocalypse. No matter what. Because the lead car, which now I see is a convertible, something silver like a Chrysler Sebring, slows down as it approaches the mess of bodies and blown fences and barricades. People — people in robes, the material flapping out behind them, stick their weapons up to the sky and pop off a barrage of shots. It causes me to freeze on the inside and jump on the outside.
“Don’t think they’re friends,” Abby says
behind me. Her voice also causes me to jump. I’d been so invested in what’s going on that I’d almost forgotten she was right here with me. I turn around, see Norm and Tim coming up the rear, their guns ready.
Carmen doesn’t budge or notice what’s going on at all. She goes from body to body, screaming names I don’t recognize, her wild red hair bouncing with her movements.
“Carmen!” I shout. “Move! Move!”
The lead car barrels right to her. Zombies bounce off the front end. Some go under the wheels and the car does a little gallop like the Hummer did back at the village when Doc Klein plowed through the cannibals, other zombies stand in the road waiting to be hit and never are.
Carmen doesn’t listen to me. I have to move, I have to go get her. So I sprint, going as fast as I can. I’m dimly aware that the cars are coming in hot and I could wind up like roadkill, but I’m more aware that saving my fiancé’s sister is so much more important than me dying. I might have my priorities backward, but when death is all around you, life is the most precious thing. You have to be willing to die for it.
Someone yells “FOR THE KING” from one of the side cars, I don’t know which. I can barely hear over the roar of the engines and the crunching zombie bones.
I’m about fifteen feet from Carmen, who now looks up and sees the certain death coming for her, when the shots quit going up in the air and start coming toward us.
Bullets whine off the pavement. Sparks fly. Some of the shots bury themselves into squirming corpses. Blood sprays like rain. My ears are assaulted by all the noises: the tires screeching, Carmen screaming, Abby and Norm shouting out from behind me, the gunshots, “FOR THE KING!”
I’m about to dive at Carmen, my legs bend in preparation, but the lead car zooms through the gap, kicking up blood and entrails, dousing me.
I fall on my ass. The gun goes skittering amongst the rubble. I’m empty handed. I feel so naked.
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