by Jack Hamlyn
PANIC LIST
Okay. As far as I know here’s how things are looking for the neighborhood:
Rommy Jacob is dead, but zombified.
Bill DeForest, dead
Carty, dead
Mrs. Hazen, dead but possibly zombified
Mitzy Streeter, unknown
The Castleberrys, unknown
Same for the Feldhuesens, Myers, Sweeds, Baxters
I don’t know the other people on Holly St.
From what I saw upstairs (other than Rommy), the street looks empty. But is everyone hiding? Have they left? There’s supposed to be National Guard camps set up or being set up—did they go there?
I think we’re safe in the basement (for now)
I wish Jimmy LaRue would join us
Food, water, general supply status is good
I’m worried about Ricki and Paul, I have to keep them safe
I will kill if I have to, I will not let them come to harm
Pessimistic thought for the day: What happens if one of them gets the germ? Will I be able to do what I did with Carty and Bill?
THE NIGHT BRIGADE
It started just before eleven.
Jimmy LaRue called and said: “Here they come.”
And really, he didn’t have to warn me because we all heard them: the drumming, marching sound of hundreds and hundreds of feet. I heard people screaming and crying out. The dead were assaulting the living, seeking them out, pulling them from their hiding places and feeding on them. We were trapped in the basement and there was nothing we could do. We shut the TV off and turned out all the lights. I didn’t know if lights would draw them in but I wasn’t taking any chances. There were two windows in the basement. Both were far too small for anyone to fit through. My insurance company wouldn’t even let me call the bedroom down there a bedroom because it lacked a window large enough for egress and escape in the case of a fire. For the last couple years I’d been planning on putting bigger windows down there and now I was glad that I hadn’t.
We cowered in the darkness while the dead laid waste to the neighborhood.
It was absolute anarchy out there and we could hear people shooting, people screaming, the continual thud of marching feet, windows breaking, thudding noises and smashing sounds. I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to see. I had to know the nature of the enemy. I crept up to one of the windows and pulled the curtain aside. In the glow of the streetlights I saw, all right. Hundreds and hundreds of them, packs and gangs and swarms of the dead. They were forcing their way into houses. They were pushing through doors by sheer volume and strength of their numbers, they were going right through windows. I heard old man Castleberry’s beagles barking and yipping in a mad rage…and then the squealing sounds as they were devoured.
And then they found our house.
I heard windows shatter and the doors up there come off their hinges as the night things battered into them again and again. Then they were upstairs. They were pounding on walls, tipping over cabinets, overturning furniture. I heard our plasma TV get ripped off the wall and shatter on the floor. The sound of dishes being smashed underfoot, cupboards looted through. The refrigerator—I thought it was the refrigerator—went over with a resounding boom and with such force it seemed like it was going to come right through the floor.
It went on and on.
Ricki was gripping my hand so tightly by then I thought she was going to crush it. She was scared. We were all scared. But I really thought it was more than that with her. This was her house. She had put together everything up there lovingly for our care and comfort and now these ghouls were destroying it all, tearing down everything she had built up. Each crash from above made her jerk as if she’d been hit herself. She was scared, yes, but I think she was angry, too. In fact, I knew she was. She was pissed off and she had all she could do not to charge up there with guns blazing to put down the things that were desecrating her home, violating it and fouling it.
Even above all the clamor you could hear them up there.
I can’t say they were voices as such but more like animal sounds: hissing and growling, shrieking and moaning. It was hard to say whether they were sounds of hunger or sounds of agony and maybe they were both. Regardless, it seemed to go on and on and on. They weren’t finding any fucking prey, I thought, so why weren’t they moving on?
Those voices…yammering/shrilling/hissing, it had risen up into a constant, nerve-jangling droning that went right through my skull. Not people, dear God, not people but insects. Human insects swarming. Like millions of locusts stripping orchards and fields. That’s what they were. Not remotely intelligent: just things that were driven by the stupid need to feed and feed and feed. The most basic of survival instincts had been perverted in them into a mindless, slobbering ravening. Just the sound of them up there, that wall of almost insectile piping and screeching and gurgling. It thrummed in my bones and made my molars ache. It was deafening and ceaseless, a yelping, howling barrage of minds driven insane by insatiable hunger.
Then, just about the time it seemed to quiet down up there, I heard a worse sound.
The very sound I did not want to hear.
I heard bare feet slapping down the stairs.
I heard one of them standing beyond the door, just breathing with a phlegmy, liquid sound.
Then hands began to slap at the door.
The knob was rattled.
More feet on the stairs, then more and more and I could hear them gathered in the stairwell. They were pounding on the door, not knocking as you or I would, but hammering at it, beating on it, clawing and slapping it, hitting it with fists and maybe smashing their heads against it. All the while that awful animal gurgling and groaning, slurping, and slobbering sounds echoing up the stairwell.
I was starting to doubt whether the door would hold.
If they breached it…I could kill a lot of them but there was no way we could hold out against the sheer numbers of them driven by that voracious, mindless hunger to get at us. There was no other way out of the basement. It would be a goddamn buffet down there, a slaughterhouse and there was no way I could let something like that happen.
“Quick,” I whispered. “Help me with the floor freezer.”
Using flashlights we went into the junk room, as we called it, where we stored everything from Xmas decorations to old clothes and toys and appliances. It was also where the hot water heater and furnace were located. Stuck away in a corner gathering dust was a huge aluminum floor freezer that had belonged to Ricki’s Uncle Charlie who had run a very lucrative hamburger stand in Palisades Park in Jersey before it was closed down and the real estate parasites put up condos and ruined everyone’s childhood memories. The freezer was huge and it could hold four-hundred pounds of meat. It weighed a ton. With all four of us working at it we got it into the rec room, puffing and straining and sweating. We could only move it three feet at a time because it weighed so much. But eventually we got it in front of the door and wedged it up against it.
Between the door and that freezer, it was going to take some unbelievably determined zombies to get us.
They kept up the racket at the door. I positioned myself nearby with both guns and a flashlight. I was ready to do some killing. I was ready to do whatever it took to protect my family.
Then I heard a shattering sound.
Ricki screamed.
Paul cried out and Diane shushed him.
What seemed like a dozen hands were reaching through the windows, I saw in the flashlight beam. Pallid, rotting hands with bloated fingers and strips of flesh hanging from them like ribbons. They were clawing and grabbing, trying to seize on anything they could get. The curtains were torn away. The molding was stripped free. I saw one puffy white hand with a shard of glass impaled right through it.
Everyone was panicking and I didn’t blame them.
“STEVE!” Ricki called out, her nerve gone. “DO SOMETHING!”
The only thing I could do was to go over there with m
y shotgun and blast a few rounds into the mutiny of hands. I did it at one window and then the other. I pulverized several hands into fragments of white pulp and foul-smelling gray juice that ran down the walls. But I was doing it mostly for effect. The windows were too small for any of them to get through and they were so greedy in their hunger that they were all trying to get through at once.
“They can’t get in,” I told everyone. “We just have to wait it out.”
We huddled together on the couch and did just that.
The zombies kept battering the door and reaching through the windows, but they did not get in. It was a very long night. By about three a.m. they had pretty much given up and moved on to better pickings. There were a few stragglers. I could hear them from time to time upstairs or out in the streets, but the siege was over.
I heard a few gunshots close by now and again and I figured it was Jimmy across the street.
About five a.m. my cell rang. It was Jimmy, all right. “You people still in one piece over there?” he asked.
I told him we were.
“Man, it was like a blitzkrieg, wasn’t it?” Jimmy said. “They tore apart my house same as yours. I don’t know if my barricade can take another assault like that.”
“I’m thinking of moving on to somewhere better,” I said. “You with me?”
“Damn straight,” Jimmy said. “I’ll start throwing some things together. Be like a camp out. I haven’t done any Boy Scouting in fifty years, Steve, but I’m game.”
“First light, we’ll come up with a plan.”
Diane and Paul had drifted off by then and Ricki was sleeping fitfully, closing her eyes for ten minutes then coming wide awake in a panic.
I waited for daylight.
I began to know what it must have been like for my primitive ancestors, the terror night must have brought.
I waited and thought of where we could go next.
DEVASTATION
Around eight a.m. when it was full light out and I spied no deadheads wondering in the streets, I had the others help me move the floor freezer. To my surprise—and horror—the freezer had slid about three inches away from the door and that was because the door itself was coming off its hinges. I was amazed. Shocked. But there was no doubt in my mind: we had to abandon the house. We couldn’t handle another assault like that. It was time to move, time to get gone. There was no joy here.
But to where?
Jimmy called and said he was packed-up, ready to leave. Being a widower, he didn’t have much. I almost got the feeling he was getting a kick out of this. But since his wife passed three years before, there wasn’t much for him but home improvement. Maybe the excitement gave him a reason to live. Just like it scared the shit out of me.
Ricki and Diane—working together surprisingly—and Paul got most of our stuff organized. Clothes. Food. Sleeping bags. Blankets. Flashlights. Batteries. Essential stuff, really. Our problem was that Ricki’s car was a little VW Jetta and there was no way we’d all fit into it, especially not with our gear. My pick-up was the same. You can’t fit five people in the cab of a pick-up. I didn’t like the idea of trying to make a run with two different cars.
I called Jimmy and he had been out on a recon through the neighborhood.
“Saw three dead ones, Steve, but I avoided them. I went house to house and I hate to say it, but I think we’re the last living people in the neighborhood.”
It was grim, but no worse than I suspected.
Jimmy was taking a big chance going around knocking on doors. I suspected that many of our neighbors were now zombies and the ones that weren’t might shoot first and ask questions later.
I told Jimmy about our problem with vehicles. “Yeah, we’ll never fit in my truck either.”
“I don’t like the idea of too many vehicles,” I told him. “Too easy to get separated.”
“Castleberry’s got that big Suburban,” Jimmy said. “We could all ride in high style in that baby.”
It was a good idea.
I had Ricki lock the door after me and I went to meet Jimmy out in the street. What I saw upstairs pretty much took my breath away. The house was trashed. I knew it would be, of course, but to see it was something else again. Furniture was flipped over, some of it broken to kindling. Pictures were yanked off the walls, the plasma TV shattered into pieces, the computer desk broken. The hard drive had been thrown through a window. All of Ricki’s plants were scattered about with the remains of their pots, black soil tracked from one end of the house to the other. Both back and front doors were bashed-in, screen doors completely torn off. It was just a mess of dirt and broken dishes and shards of glass all powdered down with flour and sugar and just about everything else that had been in the dry goods cupboards.
It broke my heart seeing it.
It would devastate Ricki.
But I had no time for that sort of thing. I met Jimmy in the street and we had just started discussing our options when a dead one—not from the neighborhood—came out of Mrs. Hazen’s side yard. I had smelled something fusty and rotten, but that odor was on the breeze. It was now the rule rather than the exception so it didn’t give me too much pause for concern.
Then that stink went from bad to sickening.
It became almost hot and feverish.
That’s when the dead one showed. A woman in a business skirt. Her blouse was torn wide open. There were crusty stains of gore and slime all down her chest and over her breasts. Looking at her, I knew she hadn’t come from any graveyard or morgue. They didn’t generally bury women in business wear. Her face was clown-white, kind of swollen and cracking open in places. I noticed that she had no lips. No lips at all. There was just the bloody hole of her mouth with pink-stained teeth jutting from it. She had wide bleached eyes with tiny black pinprick pupils.
She came at us with no hesitation, dragging one leg behind her as if it were damaged.
Jimmy had his .22 up. “You can always walk away, miss,” he said.
To that, her face screwed-up into a sort of psychopathic leer, her mouth opening and teeth gnashing. She made some sound. I don’t think it was speech exactly, more like a rough animal growling. Gouts of black blood oozed down her chin.
Jimmy pulled the trigger.
The .22 slug caught her right between the eyes and popped an exit wound out the back of her head that sprayed Mrs. Hazen’s bushes with gore. The impact spun the zombie woman in a complete circle. She started walking again in the opposite direction…for about three steps, that is, before she fell into the Azaleas, twitching.
Jimmy and I wasted no more time.
We went over to the Castleberrys.
We cut around the side through the alley and immediately regretted our decision. That’s where Castleberry kept the cages for his beagles. I remember how many times they’d annoyed me with their barking and yipping, but they wouldn’t annoy anyone anymore. The doors to the cages were torn open and there were the remains of dogs strewn up and down the alley. There were dried pools of blood smeared and splashed everywhere. I saw a set of bloody prints moving on down the alley. They looked like the footprints of a child and I had this awful image in my head of some zombie kid gnawing on a beagle carcass as he or she or it shambled off.
“Don’t think about,” Jimmy told me, as if reading my mind.
The back door was smashed-in. We went through it with guns drawn like a couple TV cops. There was wreckage everywhere. We found neither Castleberry nor his wife, Myrna. What we did find was blood sprayed over the walls. A smeared trail of it led to the front door which was wide open. It looked like somebody had been bleeding profusely, dragging themselves along the wall, then dove through the screen door and continued crawling down the steps and into the grass. The most telling thing we found was a discarded mailbag. The rest we could put together.
We found the keys on a pegboard and jumped in Castleberry’s big maroon Suburban. We were beginning to make some progress, I hoped.
THE GRAVEYARD
The Suburban had a full tank of gas which was a plus. We drove it over to Jimmy’s and loaded his things. Nothing much. A sleeping bag and a couple duffel bags.
Then we went over to my house and backed in the driveway.
While Jimmy stood guard, we loaded up our stuff and climbed in. Jimmy took the wheel and I rode shotgun. Paul was in the back between Ricki and Diane. Both of them were oddly quiet and I had the feeling they’d got into another one while I was gone.
“Where we going?” Jimmy said. “Any idea?”
“Let’s take a ride through town, see what we see.”
“Good enough.”
As we drove, Jimmy kept casting glances back at Paul, who was uncharacteristically silent. Jimmy was always real good to Paul. He was practically like a grandfather to him. Jimmy had no kids of his own, so he’d never had the pleasure of being a grandpa. When I was busy working or off in the war, Jimmy had been there going to Little League games with Ricki, teaching my boy how to throw and how to hit a ball. He’d taken them camping while I was in Iraq. Always brought over birthday presents and Christmas presents for the boy. Between Bill DeForest and Jimmy, we’d had it damn good. I started thinking about the neighborhood. I was going to miss it. I started to get pissed off at the damn zombies.
“This is going to be an adventure, eh, Skip?” Jimmy said. He always called Paul Skip for reasons unknown.
“Sure will, Jimmy. It’ll be like going to war or something. You were in the war, weren’t you?”
Jimmy nodded. “Yes, many years ago.”
“What did you do?”
“I was in the Navy, Skip. I was a gunner on a PBR.”
“What’s a PBR?”
“That’s Navy talk—Patrol Boat, River. We gave the Cong hell in the Delta. Sometime, you remind me, I’ll tell you about those PBRs. They were something.”