I never liked Chicago, thought the big city life was too much for me—not to mention too expensive. If it wasn’t for Darlene’s job downtown, I would’ve lobbied to live somewhere in the suburbs. Maybe buy a house, white picket fence, backyard, two car garage—you know, the works. But as much as I disliked Chicago, I can’t help but think of all of Darlene’s stuff in that apartment, all those sweet reminders of her, all those pictures, mementos.
If I could just see it one more time—
“Jack?” Abby says. “Did you hear me? Are you all right?”
I shake my head. “No, sorry. Spaced out. Car accident before we got taken hostage.”
She arches an eyebrow at me.
“I love how you say that like it’s not a big deal. Never been in a car accident in my life until I got into a vehicle with Jack behind the wheel,” Lilly says.
Abby chuckles. For a second, she’s the old Abby like I’m the old Jack Jupiter. Nothing has changed. Everything is good.
Except it’s not. Never will be.
“I said,” Abby says, “long story short, I pretended to be brainwashed. Worked my way up to the top. Couldn’t let myself get killed.”
“Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em type of thing?” I ask.
“Was at first,” Abby says. “But I’ll admit, Jack, I was too scared to stand up to them. They’re insane.”
I nod. I know all too well.
I’m looking out of the window. The apartment building is right there, tall, twenty stories, green glass shining in the sunset.
“Jack?” Lilly asks.
I can’t do it. I can’t drive by the old apartment and not see it, not when I’m this close. “Can you take this exit?” I ask, pointing ahead.
“Exit? Jack, you can’t be serious,” Abby is saying. She’s slowed the truck down considerably.
“I used to live there,” I say, pointing at the building. “With Darlene. That’s where we lived, in those apartments.”
“Jack,” Abby says but I barely hear her, “I know how you feel and all. I lost Mike, but we can’t stop. Not yet. They’ll be scouring the city for us. Probably have eyes on the truck right now. They’re crazy, Jack. Crazy.”
Lilly leans forward. Her scratched up arm rests on Abby’s shoulder. In a soft voice, she says, “I know stopping is dangerous and stupid as hell, but he needs this, Abby. He needs this more than anything.”
Abby sighs. I’m still gazing dreamily at the old apartment building as it slowly rolls by, out of my life forever.
Abby cuts the wheel, jerking me out of this fugue state I’m in, and then we’re going down the exit ramp.
Thirty-Four
The apartment is just how we left it. Fifteen years ago. The smell is even the same. Faint, but there. Strawberry shampoo, vanilla-scented candles. I think there’s a lingering hint of the spaghetti I cooked for Darlene in the days leading up to our departure to Woodhaven.
I’m probably just imagining all this, but still, the memories and phantoms smells are as sweet as ever.
Tears roll down my face, but I’m not sobbing. Abby and Lilly are outside of the door. The apartment is on the second floor. There was a dead guy in the stairwell. He looked vaguely familiar, but had rotted beyond certain recognition, like a neighbor or a landlord. I guess I’ll never know.
Here is a picture of Darlene and I in San Francisco sitting on an end table by the floral couch. I’m holding my necklace as I look at it. The picture shows the time we visited her parents on winter break in college, when we were both starry-eyed students at Ohio State. We are posed in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. She wears sunglasses. I wear a stupid hat I thought was cool at the time and a puka shell necklace. God, I was so lame.
I swipe the dust away from the frame, and there’s her beautiful smile beneath it. There’s the love in my eyes, the total blissful happiness.
A tear falls on my wrist.
Here’s our bedroom. My feet move, but it feels like I’m walking on clouds. Our molded sheets, the bed unmade. Here, Darlene was not a firm believer in the making of beds. I chalked it up to laziness; she said it was because no one cared if our bed was made or not. Back in Haven, she always made the bed, said it was a good thing for Junior to pick up, said he wouldn’t do it unless he saw Mom and Dad doing it. Lead by example. The thought brings a grin to my face.
Then I see a smutty romance book lying face-down on the nightstand, and my grin gets wider. A muscle-chested stud stares back at me from the cover with a buxom lady clutching his arm. I pick it up. She left off on a dog-eared page 138.
In this moment, everything is in a type of stasis, everything is waiting for us to come back, and knowing that Darlene and Junior never will hits me harder than ever. A Mac trunk barreling toward my heart, plowing through it, then backing over it.
Again. And again. And again.
The tears come with a noise this time. I’m sobbing despite trying to keep control of myself.
Outside of the apartment, through the cracked door, I hear a raised voice. A spike of fear sends a chill up my spine, and my hand automatically goes to the gun hanging on my side. I lost my sword, but I’ll never lose a gun for long.
The voice registers. It’s Lilly.
“Are you serious?” she says. “You need to tell him this. Like right now!”
“No, I’ll tell him after,” Abby replies.
Footsteps. The door creaking open. More footsteps.
“Lilly, wait!” Abby is saying.
“Jack!” Lilly says. She stands in the threshold of my old bedroom, where a pile of my old dirty underwear and clothes sits in the corner by the dresser, where the bed Darlene and I once made love on sits behind me. I’m holding the picture in one hand and a smutty romance novel in the other with bleary, bloodshot eyes. I can’t imagine how this looks.
But Lilly pays it no mind. She has a smile on her face and hope in her eyes.
“Jack,” she says, “Abby knows where your brother is.”
“What?” My brother, I’m thinking, I don’t have a brother. But I’m tired, I’m heartbroken, I’m scared. It takes me a moment, but of course, I do have a brother.
“He’s alive?” I say in a whisper so quiet it’s barely audible.
Lilly nods.
In comes Abby. “I do know where he is, Jack,” she says, “yeah. But he’s brainwashed. Worse than them all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s the Overlord’s right hand man,” Abby says. “The Shadow’s shadow.”
My mouth goes dry. I’m backing up, trying to speak, but my throat seems to be swelling shut. “You mean…”
“He may not be able to come back from it,” Abby says. “He may be gone for good.”
I’ve heard that before, haven’t I?
In this moment, I feel Darlene’s presence. She’s here with me in this room. So is Junior.
Hope, they say.
Never give up hope, Jack.
Never, Dad.
I shake my head. “No. We can save him. I know we can.”
Lilly still smiles. Abby doesn’t. I’ll have to convince her, I know I will, and I know I can. Suddenly, my heart pounds, my blood pumps. I’m alive. I’m alive and I can make a difference in this world even if it is beyond repair. Just like Darlene would want me to. Just like the old Jack Jupiter thought he could.
“Ohio,” I say. “We’re going to Ohio.”
Abby sighs. “I see there’s no convincing you. Same old Jack. Never change.”
I offer her a grin as I look around the room.
My time here is done. I have the picture in my hand and the locket around my neck. It was good to come home, to see all of this, but I know it doesn’t matter. It won’t bring Darlene or Junior back from the dead. And the more I think about it, I could leave all of this stuff—the picture, the book, the locket, everything—because I know they will be with me wherever I end up.
I raise my hand and touch my chest, right above the heart I thought died a long time ago
. Darlene and Junior will always be right here.
I look down at the romance novel, close it, set it on the nightstand.
The story has ended for now. But I’m still chasing my happily ever after, and I won’t stop until I get it.
Dead Judgment
Jack Zombie #7
“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
One
Rewind a month ago and ask me if this is how I’d expect the day to go.
My answer: It’s not.
But life is full of surprises, isn’t it?
I’m walking down a hill with a flare in my hand—a lit flare in my hand. Behind me, a swarm of the dead follow. The sight of fresh meat reinvigorates them.
I agreed because we need gasoline, otherwise our trip was going to be cut very short. I’m somewhere in Indiana, near the Illinois border. That’s how far we got before Abby’s truck started to warn us that we’d be walking soon if we didn’t find a Speedway somewhere to fill up.
The problem? There’s no Speedways anymore. No Circle Ks, no BPs—none of that stuff.
Luckily for us, Abby had joined a murderous cult called the District, and they have their own gas operations in nearly every state on the East Coast. I felt like dying when Abby told us this. Nearly every state? The whole East Coast? The District is much bigger than I thought.
Now we’re outside of one of these operations. It’s dusk, the sun is sinking behind leafless trees. A chill in the air prickles my skin…well, that, or the fact I’m currently shepherding a horde of zombies to the front gates of this place.
Talk about a suicide mission.
Oh well. It’s all in the name of revenge.
I walk backwards now, the flare held low so the lead zombies can see it. Get them going, and the rest usually follow. I can’t risk thrusting the flare above my head and getting spotted by District snipers, shot dead before I’m even a hundred feet from the gate. That is, if they haven’t seen me already. No shots yet though, so maybe not.
Lilly charts my progress from the tree line with the scope of her rifle. Abby is in the truck, a ways from the entrance of the place. As soon as I’m close enough—
The truck revs to life, and the plan is in motion. There’s no going back now.
“Shit,” I mumble, and nearly trip over my own feet.
If I did, the zombies would be all over me. I catch myself and turn toward the gate. I’m running now. The truck blasts by, a burst of cold wind blowing my too-long hair from my brow. Abby’s ride is a behemoth, one of those Ford F-150s they used to advertise nonstop during football games and the like, the kind that could tow a hundred dead elephants, and still somehow get thirty miles to the gallon. The gates are thick metal, but that’s not a problem for Abby’s truck. It plows through them, ripping them off their hinges with a shriek of steel.
I’m grateful for this, because the zombies turn their attention to the chaos ensuing behind me. Voices shout from inside the gates. I think I hear a gunshot; can’t be sure, though, there’s too much going on.
This is my cue.
“Hey, assholes!” I shout at the zombies. “Hey!”
Slowly, their heads turn in my direction. Yellow eyes glow in the darkness, and in these yellow eyes, I see hate and pain and hunger. It’s my worst nightmare.
Every day in this apocalypse is my worst nightmare.
“Go get it!” I throw the flare into the compound and run away from the horde.
As I’m running, of course I trip, and as I trip, a straying zombie thinks I look mighty delicious. Maybe this one has evolved beyond falling for cheap tricks such as the old flare routine. I don’t know. What I do know is that he’s on me quicker than a dead bastard like himself has any right to be.
I kick upward, hit him in the soft belly with the sole of my boot. The flesh there squishes and threatens to pop. I really don’t feel like finishing this mission in a pair of gut-soaked socks, so I decide my best course of action is to draw my revolver. As I do this, gunshots burst to my left. Bullets take the zombie in the head, sending a spray of brains to my right. He drops dead, his skull mutilated.
I raise my hand to the trees, toward Lilly’s vantage point. “Thank you!” I shout.
Then I’m scrambling up and following the rest of the zombies into the compound.
It’s chaos inside. Men and women are running from their posts, guns in their hands. It’s amazing what fifty or so zombies will do to a group of people. Dust kicks up on the path ahead. That’ll be Abby’s truck.
I take cover behind the thick support beams of a nearby watchtower as gunfire erupts, going off like bombs. A man falls near the opposite tower and screams as a zombie pins him down. His throat is ripped away in meaty shreds. Another zombie sees this opportunity of flesh and doesn’t hesitate. Soon, five or so of the dead bastards are feasting on this District soldier. I can’t see it so much as I hear it. The gush of blood, the ripping of hair, the cracking of bones. Now the silence of death.
I shake the queasy feeling from my gut. It’s not an easy task. I have to move; if I don’t move soon, Abby will be pinned down.
Who am I kidding? Abby can handle herself.
I spin out from the shadows of the watchtower and scan the camp. Large drilling rigs are set up all around this fenced-in piece of land. I wonder if the District knows what they’re doing when it comes to drilling for gas. Doubt it. The groundwater around here is probably contaminated from their ignorance. But I guess it doesn’t matter as long as they get what they need. There’s not many people left to drink the water, anyway.
Past the drills is a long building. A few guards are fighting off the oncoming wave of zombies there. This is where the gas is kept, Abby told me.
I make my move toward it, running fast, keeping my head low. I’m maneuvering through the battlefield, just waiting to be shot down.
As I approach the building, I catch the faint whiff of gasoline. It reminds me of the old world, of filling up at the local station, and this faint smell brings on a strong sense of nostalgia.
Then a guy’s getting his scalp chewed off, and that about slaps me in the face and reminds me that shit has changed.
Shit has changed a lot.
Two
Everything I do, I do for my lost son and wife.
“Hey!” a man shouts.
He’s running at me fast, stomping through spilled guts and flayed flesh. It makes this terrible noise that churns my stomach.
Everything I do.
Even when I kill.
Up comes my pistol. Two quick squeezes of the trigger, the power in my palm, the jolt up my arm. The first shot hits him in the chest. Slows him down. Only slows him down. I see that he is wearing a bulletproof vest beneath his button-up shirt when the bullet tears the cloth away and leaves a smoking hole. The next shot misses because there’s a zombie on my right. Out of my peripheral vision, the zombie’s tongue hangs from its mouth all the way past its clavicle, as if someone got a grip on it and tried yanking it free without much success.
Now this is a bad enough sight on its own, this zombie’s dead, lolling tongue, but you add a pissed-off District soldier to the mix, and that makes things worse.
A lot worse.
He raises his weapon, some sub-machine gun that could tear me to shreds in a blink of an eye, and I know I have to act fast.
My blood is boiling, the adrenaline is pumping. Thinking fast is exactly what I’m good at. Of course, I haven’t always been. Many years in this fucking nightmare have sharpened that particular aspect.
So what do I do?
I think fast and grab the zombie’s tongue. It’s cold as ice, cold as you’d expect a corpse’s tongue to feel. It squishes between my fingers like putty.
Since I’m basically out in the open without any cover, I pull—the most dangerous part of a zombie, mind you—toward me and drop to the ground.
Bullets eat away the rotten flesh, spray me with col
d, gelatinous blood.
But I’m still alive—in desperate need of a shower, yeah, but alive.
This idiotic District guard wasted his whole clip on the zombie. He fumbles in his pocket for another one. Before he can even get it out, my pistol rips a hole in his head. Right between the eyes. No body shots anymore, I tell myself.
Surviving in the wasteland is all about adaptation.
The zombie grunts something that might be: ‘Hey man, what about me?’
I swear I’m going crazy, because that’s what I’m imagining in my head. What’s even crazier is that I reply to the dead bastard.
“I didn’t forget about you.” I squeeze the trigger again.
His head explodes like a squeezed grape. This close, shooting a zombie is never fun. You get covered in its brains and diseases.
The zombie drops.
Across the way, Abby’s Ford is getting eaten alive by bullets, but the rounds bounce off the metal, barely leaving a ding in the paint job. The thing is armored, and I’m thinking to myself, Fucking District.
The door opens. Abby has an assault rifle. She sprays at a wave of zombies. They drop, and behind them, a group of soldiers trying to keep the building from being compromised eat the rest of the bullets.
“Jack!” she shouts. “C’mon.” She waves me in with her hooked hand.
In case you’ve forgotten, Abby had her left hand cut off right around the wrist. She was bitten. One of the few people I’ve known that’s been bitten and still lived to tell the tale. She may have lost a hand, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the other option.
I look down at the zombie I just killed, step over it.
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