by Guy James
As they drove back the way they had come only the previous day, Lorie noticed that it had grown much quieter.
The engines of the cars that they passed didn’t run, and there was no drone of zombies scratching at the insides of their cars. The zombies in their cars were still trapped, but they no longer moved, their bodies lay still, slumped against windows and steering wheels, or slumped toward the passenger seat but kept in place by their buckled seatbelts.
There was no noise save for that made by Sven’s car, Sven’s ragged gasps, and the soothing chirrup of birds.
“They’re coming apart,” Jane said, as they drove farther away from the Wegmans. Lorie looked and saw that Jane had slowed down and was peering into some of the cars, in which the zombies seemed to be deteriorating.
Maybe it was ending!
Maybe the military people, untrustworthy and loathsome as they were, had been telling the truth about this being the end of the outbreak.
On the verge of a joyful outburst, Lorie felt her jubilation die as her eyes passed over Sven. He looked just as Evan had before…
Lorie noticed they were pulling into a strip mall. “What are you doing?”
“We need some water, maybe some food, and I personally need some caffeine if we’re to keep driving like this forever. Gas wouldn’t hurt either.”
Lorie gave Jane her order and stayed with Sven while Jane rummaged in the convenience store. Pacing around the car, Lorie almost felt safe. It really did seem that the zombies were gone.
Jane came back and loaded the car with candy bars, and bottles of water and iced tea.
After a short leg-stretching break, they set off again, putting more distance between them and the Wegmans.
Lorie was munching on a Mounds Dark Chocolate candy bar when she saw them—a small throng of zombies coming up a side road toward 29. The throng reacted violently to the car’s presence, and though Lorie suspected that Jane saw them too, Lorie didn’t say a word.
Trying to work up the saliva with which to swallow her bite of coconut and chocolate goodness, Lorie tried to make peace with the truth. The outbreak wasn’t over. It would never be over.
120
Sven let himself fade in and out of consciousness as Jane drove and Lorie navigated. He couldn’t believe it was down to the three of them now. It had just been seven, counting Milt.
He realized that he was neglecting to count Ivan.
Good, faithful Ivan, scratching at the bottom of the seat. Ivan would always be there, Ivan would always…
There was a shaking, a pain in his chest, blood in the trees—
He opened his eyes.
The car wasn’t moving. Was he in the car? Yes, still in the car, he could feel the strap of the seatbelt holding him uncomfortably in place.
Lorie was shaking him awake. “You need to eat.” Her eyes were kind, concerned.
Sven shook his head, feeling his throat seize and lock up.
“Sven,” she pleaded.
Abruptly, Sven jolted awake. “Why are we stopped? Where’s Jane?”
Lorie began to answer something about ABC Stores, but Sven didn’t catch the rest of it. He opened his door just in time, and fell out of the car to heave.
The heaving sapped the last of his strength, his will.
“Where are the…” he managed.
“Far behind us, far—”
When Sven next came to, they were stopped again. He heard voices—whispering voices. He opened his eyes.
Ivan was looking down disconsolately at him, intermittently poking at Sven’s head with a concerned paw.
Where were the voices coming from?
Whose voices?
Sven looked around, bleary-eyed, wondering if Ivan had been fed.
His field of vision lurched, and began to spin.
He rolled over and gave in to the vomiting. His body became one large spasm of expulsion. But nothing came out. What he needed most to get rid of could not be thrown off.
The darkness was there, drilling its way into his bones, and Sven knew that it would never leave.
When his vision cleared, Sven’s mouth was filled with a thick liquid. He was sure that it was blood.
I’m a zombie now too, he thought, that’s what’s happened. Just swallow it and shamble on. Come on zombie Sven, come o—
Sven’s vision cleared. Lorie and Jane were crouched over him, pouring water into his mouth.
He managed to swallow some of the vile liquid between bouts of coughing. Then his vision clouded again, and he was swimming in nausea.
After what seemed like hours, Sven regained some of his former self and propped himself up on his elbows. “Where are we?”
Lorie’s voice answered. “On the UVa grounds. Memorial Gym.”
“What? We’re back where we started? Across the street from my…”
“Across the street from what?”
Sven sighed, keeping the nausea at bay for the moment. “My house.”
His eyes finally focused properly, and he saw that he was lying on a gym mat, in what he recognized as the ground floor of Memorial Gymnasium, a building whose layout he knew well from years of working out there. Sven found the gym mat’s sweaty smell oddly comforting, and reminiscent of the pure athletic endeavor that he wasn’t sure he would ever experience again.
He sat up slowly. “What’s happening to me? Am I…”
“I think you’re fine, probably inhaled too much of the zombie fog. I think of it as their tentacles. They reach out and grab you, paralyzing you, and then…well, you know.”
“Wait, how’d you get me in here?”
Lorie pointed at something.
Sven looked where she was pointing and saw a small, carpeted dolly. He laughed in spite of everything. “You carted me in on that?”
“Yeah, that’s right, and you weren’t much help either, flopping around all over the place like a dead jellyfish.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Any time.”
“Where’s Jane?”
Lorie pointed straight up. “On the roof, getting ready for…well, why don’t you go up and see for yourself? She’ll be so happy to see that you’re better! We had already thought you were gone when you weren’t coming back, and then when you showed up, well, you were so sick that we…”
Trying to understand Lorie’s words, Sven felt a gap in his memory, in the story of that day. There was something he couldn’t place, an inexplicable dead zone where a connection should have been. He tried to fill the gap, to remember, but his mind wouldn’t let him.
121
Dusk was approaching, and it would be time to start soon. Things were going as smoothly as could be expected. The outbreak did seem to be waning, but Jane wasn’t going to be the one to tell that to the zombies that had gathered down below, snapping and clawing up at her, probably trying to project their stench upward so she would fall down to them, a heaven-sent dinner gift for the undead.
Jane was crunching away at a bag of hickory-smoked potato chips, reflecting on what she would soon do, when the doorknob shook.
She dropped the chips and whirled toward the door, reaching for her semi-automatic.
Then the door that led onto the roof opened, and Sven hobbled out, Lorie supporting him at his side. Ivan kept crossing in front of Sven, as if trying to trip him up.
Jane was overjoyed to see Sven limping over to her, seemingly alright, the color back in his face.
She felt cold at how wrong she had been about him dying in his successful attempt to create a diversion, and then again in her assessment that he was becoming a zombie himself.
The man she had now mourned twice looked about the roof, then at her. “I see we’re drinking tonight.”
Jane smiled. “Only if you’re buying.”
“You have chip on your chin.”
“How unladylike of me—forgetting my compact what with starring in a zombie movie and all that.”
Sven smiled. “I’ll overlook it.”
> “I’m glad to see you’re in high spirits.”
“Good one!” Lorie said. “High spirits! Get it?”
Jane was lost. “What?”
Lorie’s grin broadened. “High. Spirits. Get it?”
Jane shook her head.
Lorie sighed, still smiling. “We’re high up, and we have spirits.” Lorie pointed to the neat rows of liquor bottles.
“Oh,” Jane said. “Okay.” The girl did have a weird sense of humor.
Sven’s eyes narrowed. “So what’s with the rags and bottles of 151…and are those gasoline cans?”
Lorie threw up her hands. “Am I the only one that knows how to make a proper Molotov cocktail?”
Sven gave the girl an odd look. “Probably.”
Then he turned to Jane. “Wait what? You’re going to burn them? Shooting not your thing anymore?”
“The gun shop was burned to the ground when we passed it on the way here. I’m low on ammo, and…we picked all this stuff up on the way down here, stopped at a couple ABC Stores and a gas station. The rags are from downstairs—they’re just torn up towels.”
Lorie chimed in excitedly. “The fire will dry them up faster. We think that’s what’s happening to them, they’re drying up and crumpling to nothing.”
“I think she’s right,” Jane said. “And I can take no credit for the Molotov stuff either. Lorie’s the mastermind behind all of it. She’s sharp.”
Sven looked unconvinced. “And you know how to make a Molotov cocktail because…why?”
“That’s what she said!” Lorie said, rolling her eyes. “Didn’t either of you pay attention in school? They cover this stuff in history class.”
“Not in my history class,” Sven said.
“Or mine,” Jane agreed.
“Whatever, now you know.”
“Okay,” Sven said, “so we burn them and then what?”
Jane and Lorie filled Sven in on what the military people had said about the outbreak dying down and being brought under control.
“So this is the end of it?” Sven asked when they had finished.
Jane shrugged, and recovered her bag of potato chips from the ground. “If it is, it is. If not, we’re locked up good in here. We’ll burn them for as long as we can, and then we’ll run again. There’s gas in the Sven-mobile.”
That seemed to satisfy Sven.
Jane popped a chip in her mouth, savoring the salty, smoky flavor.
Then, after some instruction from Lorie, they each took turns hurling Molotov cocktails from the roof, down to the gathering undead beneath them.
The cocktails were mixed about half and half 151 and gasoline. Lorie said there was usually another component, but Lorie didn’t remember what it was.
The mixtures they used worked better than Jane had expected, and after attaching rags to the bottles, lighting the rags, and tossing about half of the prepared cocktails from the roof, they all stopped to watch.
The zombies came, walking into the flames, their stumbling alacrity in destroying themselves a bitter relief to behold.
Many never made it, their bodies coming apart long before they reached the pyre, falling into pieces about the tennis courts.
The flames licked the air over the burning congregation, and Jane imagined that the crackling fire was burning the deadly, numbing odor out of the air.
Cutting up through the sky from the west, the brilliant streaks of red that accompanied the sunset gave the disgusting barbecue a surreal flavor.
They stayed on the roof, watching until the last of the walking dead had crumpled.
It was over, Jane knew it—could feel it even.
The air was changed, not changed all the way back to the way it had been, but changed all the same. Jane could smell the flowers and the grass again, now that the overpowering stench of the zombies had been removed.
It made her feel hopeful, and when she closed her eyes and the thoughts emptied from her mind, it felt like the world was back to normal.
122
Sven was running down a dark road. It resembled Route 29 except that the strip malls that he passed were filled with burnt-out, unrecognizable skeletons of buildings.
There was a sense of desolation, and of fear.
Sven ran hard, pumping his arms up and down and kicking his knees up high. It was a faster run than he was capable of in real life, and his speed and agility surprised him.
He was wearing his man-tard, so his movements were unrestricted.
In his left hand he had a grip trainer that he was pumping within inches of its squeaky death, and in his right hand was a feather quill pen.
A feather quill pen? What the hell was that for?
He looked down at his left forearm and watched his muscles bulge. His body fat was very low. That was good. He was close to competition form now.
Then Sven saw something in the darkness ahead of him and it was all he could do to stop himself in time.
Their eyes were...they were burning. The things’ eyes were lit up with a black fire...and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, in a throng that took up the whole of the road before him.
They had appeared out of nowhere, and now he was backing up to stay out of their clutches. They were shambling, but their shamble had a bounce to it, almost like they were gamboling at him, excited to tear his untarnished muscular flesh apart, biting and tearing…and the eyes were boring into him, into his very soul—
Sven’s eyes opened and he jerked awake, beginning to crawl backward, startled in his disorientation.
Then he remembered. They were in the basement of Mem Gym. Everything was going to be alright…well not alright, but they had lived through it.
It was mostly, if not completely, over. There was no reason to be having dreams like that. The zombies were dying, crumpling under the weight of their disease. It had just been a disease—no evil in those black eyes after all. It had been a terrible viral outbreak, and now it was going to be over and life would return to some semblance of ordinariness.
Sven surveyed the space they were in until he was satisfied that they were alone.
“Good cat,” Sven whispered to Ivan, who was padding around the rearranged gym mats, apparently keeping watch. Sven knew that if something—one of the diseased—drew near, Ivan would alert them all at once.
“You’re the best cat ever.”
Ivan padded over to Sven. Sven petted Ivan a few times, and the cat purred gently. Then Sven settled back onto his smelly gym mat, closed his eyes, and told himself not to dream.
Don’t dream, don’t dream, don’t dream, don’t...
He repeated the mantra over and over again as he was falling asleep, but it didn’t work.
123
Lorie woke, not sure where she was at first. Then she saw Sven and Jane still sleeping, and it all hit her like a ton of bricks.
She peeled herself off the raunchy gym mat she had gotten stuck with and got up. Ivan brushed up against her legs as she rubbed some of the sleep from her eyes. She gave Ivan a light pat on the head.
Then she picked up her serrated hunting knife, and began to walk down the hall.
The stillness of the vast basement was unsettling.
Lorie left the side area in which she had been sleeping with the others and turned into the basement’s main hallway. She began to walk in slow, measured steps, almost tiptoeing, and had the strange feeling that she was walking down the nave of a cathedral, a feeling that added to her paranoia.
As she proceeded down the hallway, Lorie held her knife high and swung it from side to side with each step. She kept glancing behind her, making sure nothing was sneaking up on her.
There wasn’t anyone behind her except for Ivan, who was watching her with wide cat eyes and following from a distance.
Lorie came to the foot of the stairs. It was still quiet, and no one had come looking for her, so Sven and Jane were probably still sleeping. Lorie walked up the first set of stairs to Mem Gym’s first floor. She look
ed behind her and saw Ivan padding up the stairs in tow. He was keeping quiet too, as if they were both in on the silent game.
She walked across the lobby and up to Mem Gym’s large doors. She slowed down as she got closer, then crouched down. She wanted to have a look outside, but didn’t want anyone or anything outside to spot her.
She half crawled and half duck-walked over to the doors, then sat down under one of the door’s windows with her back to it. Ivan came over to her and nuzzled against her knee, prompting her to set her knife down on the floor.
Lorie took a deep breath. She wanted to see. It was like those movies her mom told her she couldn’t watch—that just made her want to see them more. But it was different than a movie too, because it wasn’t a movie, and there was something truly horrible outside, and she wanted to see just how horrible it was.
Even with everything she had seen in the past few days, she wanted more. She wanted to see the mangled, rotten corpses. She wanted to see the destroyed bodies. She wanted to see it all.
She surveyed the lobby for a moment to make sure that she was alone. Survival came first, no matter how enticing the gore outside was.
There was no one with her there except Ivan. He was looking at her, and Lorie was sure he was as curious as she was.
Lorie smiled. “You know what it’s about, don’t you?”
Lorie picked Ivan up in her arms and raised him to the window. She picked him up high enough so that he could look outside too, and she was satisfied when he stared out, apparently as engrossed in the scene as she was.
“That’s what I thought. See all those bodies?”
Ivan meowed.
“Do you think we’re bad people?”
Ivan turned and looked up at Lorie with his curious eyes, then he turned back to the writhing carnage—and it was writhing, unbelievably alive in death.
A sprinkle of early morning rain was falling on the charred corpses of the undead, and on the many equally charred but detached pieces of corpses.
Lorie thought the detached pieces were the most interesting to look at—the nastiest bits, moving, beckoning, struggling to be…