Jack Zombie (Book 2): Dead Hope

by Flint Maxwell

  Abby is next. She kicks and bucks, eventually getting out herself. The soldier guiding her grows impatient, his face snarling, and he throws her. She falls, not as hard as Norm but pretty hard.

  “Fuck you,” she seethes.

  The soldier just smiles.

  Behind all of this, Spike cackles like a witch.

  Last is Darlene, and the rough way Butch takes her arm causes me to lunge forward. The soldiers behind me grabs my cuffed wrists. “Uh-uh, Hercules,” he says.

  “Jack!” Darlene says, but she sounds so distant.

  I’m pulled up to my feet.

  The crowd is growing restless, the heads and bodies are constantly shifting from foot to foot. They want blood now. The preliminary matters are too boring. They think they are cooped up chickens, when really they are safe behind these walls, they are blessed.

  Butch takes the sack off of Darlene’s face.

  She tries to run over to me. No luck. Butch holds her back.

  “Murderers!”

  “Kill them all!”

  I see Spike leaning in his chair like the class clown. He is smiling, his hands up, fingers waggling to the crowd, urging them on.

  Keep it coming, c’mon, let ‘em hear it, his face says.

  “Jack, I love you,” Darlene says.

  “I love you, too,” I say. We stare at each other for a long moment, the crowd buzzing all around us.

  “How cute,” Norm says, snickering.

  Butch sucker punches him, a spray of blood escapes his clenched teeth, and he falls to his knees on the dirt.

  I lunge again.

  “When are we going to kill these sons of bitches?” Abby asks.

  Smack.

  She is backhanded by a portly man wearing the soldier attire. A stream of blood falls from the corner of her mouth, and she looks at him. “I’m going to remember that,” she says. And she will. I know what she’s capable of, but seeing someone hit her brings my rage back.

  The portly man just laughs.

  Spike picks the microphone back up. “You know, I’ve punished him once already.” He looks to the soldier holding me. “Uncuff him and put his hands in the air! Make him bow down to me!”

  The soldier uncuffs me, the pressure vanishing sweetly. But he grabs my hands hard and thrusts them up hard enough to make my shoulders pop. I try not to let him do it, but I’m overmatched. Bowing to Spike makes me want to vomit, but I do.

  To the soldier, Spike says, “Bring Jupiter below my feet, and don’t let him look away.”

  The soldier nudges me.

  “Now bring my babies out!” Spike says.

  Butch seems to grow a shade paler. I see the beads of sweat standing out on his forehead in the sickly light blazing above us. He motions to a couple of his posse near the tunnel.

  The crowd goes silent.

  There is a terrible buzz that fills the air. In the darkness a red light flips on, the color of the devil, the color of blood.

  Dirt starts to shift below our feet. In the middle of the arena, it looks as if a great worm is trying to break through to the surface. The ground shakes. Feedback whines from the microphone, but not loud enough to drown out Spike’s mad cackles.

  My heartbeat is thrumming in my ears. Darlene looks to me. Norm is too dazed. Abby is trying to stay balanced.

  A cage raises from an opening in the dirt floor. Gears and pulleys whine and grind. The top of the dome comes first, its polished metal gleaming. Then comes the rest. The bars are thick, the surface area is large, and the amount of zombies inside is shocking.

  It stops and settles, clouds of dirt puffing up around its steel beam underside.

  For a second, everything is normal.

  The crowd doesn’t make a sound aside from a few people asking each other what the hell is going on.

  Like a warning siren knifing through the air, I hear it, that noise that only used to be in my head but is now inescapable. I am not imagining this. As much as I wish I was, I’m not not seeing zombies milling about in a cage that seems to materialize out of nowhere. I’m not not hearing the groans and moans of the dead.

  42

  The crowd goes fucking bonkers. Really, it’s like their favorite baseball player just hit a walk-off grand slam to win the World Series. Have these people never seen a zombie before? No way. The dead are everywhere. Sure, these walls and gates and crazy bastards with AR15s might keep the hordes out but the people had come from somewhere, some overrun city, right? I’m not crazy to think that, am I?

  I curl my fingers into fists. The very reaction of this crowd, who I felt bad for at one point being at the beck and call of this crazy, Brooklyn cowboy, pisses me off. They are no different from the beasts on the outside and the beasts in this pit.

  “Yee-haw!” Spike shouts. “That what you want? You’re damn right it is!”

  The crowd roars again.

  “Bring Jack closer to me. We are both gonna wanna see this in all its excruciating glory.”

  I am jolted off my feet and dragged toward the cage. I glance behind me before the soldier snaps my head back, and I catch the flinty eyes of Spike. There’s evil in those eyes, malice. It’s as if I’m staring into the face of the devil. He grins wide, sits back in his chair and grips the arms while a small group of camouflaged-wearing jackasses begin struggling to move the platform, their faces turning beet-red, sweat gleaming from their foreheads.

  Meanwhile, the crowd goes crazy again.

  Me, well, I do what any man in my position would do, any man who is getting dragged to a container full of starving zombies, I go slack, let all my weight fall to my knees. I picture a rock breaking the surface of a pond, sinking, sinking, sinking. I picture a dog on a leash at the vet’s office pulling in the opposite direction of that glass door with the doctor’s name stenciled on it.

  Sadly, the soldiers aren’t having any of that, and as they kick me and yank me, the crowd only grows louder.

  “Bring the others,” Spike says from behind me.

  Coming from my left is Darlene, Norm, and Abby. They are fighting, but not with much luck. We are vastly outnumbered now, and it’s not like before. On the outside, we’re always outnumbered. There were seven billion people on this planet when the disease hit, and I remember hearing reports of an almost ninety percent communicability, which means there’s a possibility of over six billion dead people walking this earth. You’re always outnumbered, man, I just never thought I’d be outnumbered inside these walls.

  Darlene offers me one last look of despair as she passes by, and she’s so close I can almost smell the sweetness of her skin.

  Jack, she says. I don’t hear it over the roaring of the crowd, but I do read her lips. Jack, I love you.

  “Bring ‘em closer,” Spike yells. Even with the microphone picking up his voice, I can hardly hear him. But I feel the rough hands pushing into my back. My heels dig into the dirt, making small divots. It’s no use. I feel the opposing forces giving.

  The zombies look up with their rotting faces, their hands clenched on the bars. I see one with a missing index finger, just like Norm. There is another without eyes, and it looks so weird without the glowing orbs in its face — somehow more dead.

  “See that?” Spike says. “This is what you get for messing with Eden. This is what you all get!” This is no Brooklyn or Old Western accent. This is the accent of a man who’s frayed rope of sanity has snapped a long time ago.

  “Throw them in, and make Jupiter watch his friends and his lover torn to pieces,” Spike says.

  The crowd cheers. They all stand up, the bleachers beneath their feet creaking, their eyes widening.

  The soldier’s grip on my arms is sweaty. It’s a hot night in Florida.

  Darlene screams out as she is the first dragged to the zombie cage.

  “No!” I scream.

  “Yes! Yes!” Spike says. I see him jumping up and down out of the corner of my eye like an overexcited puppy. “Kill them! Kill them all!”

 
We stop at the base of the platform, about ten feet from Norm and Abby, farther from Darlene who is at the cage’s retractable door. The crowd is now on tiptoe, shielding their eyes from the blazing floodlights.

  Butch leans over and says in my ear, “I take it back. Tony was lucky. He got off easy. No torture, hardly any pain. These ones….eh, not so lucky. The girl’s are always the worst. They scream and scream their damn heads off…”

  He drones on, but I don’t hear him. All I can do is look at Darlene, the woman that I love about to be thrown into a cage full of zombies while a screaming crowd cheers for her death.

  No.

  That’s it. Fuck this.

  It is not hard to make a move against Butch because he is not expecting it. He is scary, he has weapons and a killer instinct I cannot begin to comprehend, but he does not have what I have going for me.

  He doesn’t have stupidity.

  Yeah, that’s right, I just called myself stupid. And as I rip my arms out of his sweaty grips and he and his soldier’s mouths turn into shocked Os of surprise, I can’t help but realize how utterly dumb I am.

  But it all happens so fast.

  A soldier clears a path in the dense forest of dead limbs and snarling faces inside of the cage with what looks like a six-foot animal catch pole. Another has Darlene by the hair and throws her in. What’s even stupider, as I shove my way past Butch Hazard and the younger soldier who I met in the locker room, is that I go in after her.

  And the crowd goes wild.

  43

  The first thing I hear after I hear Darlene and me hitting the metal floor and the sounds of the curious snarls — as if these zombies’s prayers were answered and fresh meat materialized from the heavens — is Spike saying, “You idiots! You imbeciles!”

  One of his pistols cracks the night air, seemingly splitting the atmosphere in two. The crowd’s screams momentarily quiet. The zombies turn their heads toward the sound of the shot, giving me a moment to scramble up from the floor. My head is thrumming and Darlene is a crumpled ball behind me, but we are relatively unscathed.

  “Darlene, get up, c’mon!” I say. I’m scrabbling at her like a dog trying to find a bone he buried in the dirt. “Please! Get up!”

  She starts to move. Slowly, but she’s moving nonetheless.

  From my vantage point I can see the citizens looking on with eager eyes. Salivating. Wanting the kill.

  Darlene gets up, dazed, her head lolling from side to side. Then, she snaps to attention. I think it’s the smell that hits her first, the rotting smell of dead people. It can get your attention real quick.

  “Get him out! Get him out! Get him out right now! I don’t want him eaten, I want him to watch. I want him to watch,” Spike yells, then breaks into his southern drawl. “Time here’s a-wasting!”

  He is right, it’s a-wasting and it’s already wasted because the zombies no longer care about the gunshot of the cheering crowd or the screaming Spike. No, all they care about is us.

  There’s a fat one with a belly that hangs over his waistband. The bottom part of his jaw is missing. What is left is just a great, red wound speckled with shards of teeth. The top teeth are still sharp, still deadly. Next to him, lunging forward on an ankle that is mostly broken, is a woman who is less rotted than the rest. She must have recently turned. She is a brunette. From a distance, you might even mistake her as normal. But when she opens her mouth and you see the inky-black saliva dripping down her fangs, you realize she is anything besides normal. Next to her, is a man in a greasy trucker’s cap and equally greasy — maybe greasier — coveralls. On his chest, stitched in cursive is a name. SAL, it reads. On Sal’s left is a man long dead, so rotted, I couldn’t even give you an estimated age of this guy. His skin is the color of a fish’s underbelly. Most of his head is cracked open, revealing pinkish-gray brains, dried, crusted blood. I immediately think of Pat Huber, my high school bully and how his head looked after I drove the wrong side of a hammer into his open head wound. I shudder. There’s a man in a ripped and dirty prison jumpsuit. A woman in a dress that might have once been white. A police officer (I think of Doaks and Beth coming at me in the Woodhaven Rec Center), an old woman whose skin sags off her face in droopy folds (I think of my dead mother).

  And there is more, but I don’t get a long enough look at them to really see what they were before disease, bite, death, or whatever took them. All I know is their eyes are glowing, they’re hungry, and we are trapped.

  44

  The crowd is in control now. That much is true. Spike stands up on his throne, his arms out to his sides as if letting their screams and cheers and jeers run over him like rainwater. “You like this?” he shouts into the microphone, causing a ripple of feedback to slice my eardrums. My back is pressed into Darlene and her back is pressed into the bars. I hear her grunting, the breath whooshing out of her as I am backed up farther and father.

  “You want more?” Spike screams.

  “Stop it! Stop it, you sadistic fuck!” Abby says, barely audible over the crowd. I want to scream with her. Then I want to put a bullet in Spike’s head.

  The cowboy is beaming.

  A strong wind blows in the arena — a welcome one — taking his hat nearly off his head. It moves the stench of death away from Darlene and me.

  “We have to fight,” I say. “We can’t go out without a fight.” I say this to myself more than anything.

  The dead are inches away from me. No heat radiates off of them. Not anymore. Not like it was when the disease ravaged their bodies. I remember the baking corpses in Atlanta when the shit really hit the fan. You could crack an egg and fry up some hash browns on those dying people, no joke. These zombies, well, they’re about as cold as ice.

  “Y-Yeah,” Darlene says.

  I break free from her, going head first into a sea of dead. My goal is not to survive, but to clear a path large enough for her to escape.

  The bottom of my boot meets the prisoner’s knee, and the skin and bone is brittle. It cracks like a twig. I’m not that strong, even after life on the road for six months, but if you saw the way his knee explodes out of the side of his leg, you’d think I was the fucking Incredible Hulk.

  The zombie lets out a choppy shriek. Of pain? Of confusion? Of defeat?

  Meanwhile, the crowd is chanting: “We want blood! We want blood!” And they’re jumping up and down, thudding against the bleachers.

  The door to the cage squeals open, but none of the zombies notice. They are too focused on Darlene and me. A soldier, the one with the scraggly, patchy beard is entering. He looks as gray and squeamish as one of the dead. He has the pole in hand, one with the wire loop at the far end.

  “Get Jupiter out of there! Get him out!” Spike yells. “But don’t hurt my babies!”

  I’m going to do more than that. I’m going to kill them all.

  “We want blood! We want blood!”

  The snarls of the zombies fill my ears.

  “Get him! Get him now!”

  Another scream, this one outside of the cage. Through the bars, I see Norm spring up off of his knees. It’s a jerky movement, one that would’ve been much smoother had he not been beaten and tortured, but still an effective one. He throws his head back and connects with Butch Hazard’s face and Butch staggers backward, blood gushing from his nose. Norm rolls forward, swipes his leg beneath one of the three remaining soldiers, taking him down. Abby sees this all and must be inspired because her elbow suddenly connects with the gut of the female soldier who is guarding her. The soldier doubles over and her gun goes off, sending sprays of dirt up from the ground.

  “We want blood! We want blood!”

  Well, they’re getting it, and they’re going to get more.

  But cheers? Can you believe that? Happy, smiling people in the crowd. I should’ve realized what kind of people were living here once I saw who Spike really was. Not even Tony would recognize the crowd now. He wasn’t anything like this.

  Sal, the dirty mechanic is e
yeing me, sizing me up, for some reason oblivious to all the maelstrom going on outside of the cage. I am side-stepping, sizing him up, too.

  “Get him!” Spike shouts.

  I’m not sure if he is talking about me inside of here or Norm out there. But the soldier answers back. “I’m trying, damn it!” His voice a high-pitched shriek. So loud, I hear it perfectly clear over the buzz of Spike’s microphone, the shouts of the crowd, and the revving-engine sounds of the zombies.

  The fat zombie notices that today might be his lucky day. Not only did food plunge into the cage once, but twice. It spins around and grunts a small, quizzical grunt. The soldier freezes on the spot, his back against the cage, hands gripped tight on his AR15 that was slung on his shoulder. He has since dropped the pole with the wire loop. Then, he makes a move for the door, but he only gets it about halfway open before the fat zombie falls on him with a wet plop.

  He screams, and the screams are loud, ear-piercing. The rest of the zombies take notice, all of them except Sal who only flicks his head in that direction and looks back to Darlene and me.

  “It’s okay,” I say, “we can get past him. Follow my lead.”

  She squeezes my waist.

  Behind Sal, the zombies are piling up on the soldier. His skin rips, blood spurts like a hot, red fountain. There’s the wet squelching noise of claw-like hands digging into his guts. The AR15 goes off in intermittent bursts, its bullets hitting the metal bars with a high-pitched whine, sparking in every direction. Still, over all this chaos is the chant: “We want blood! We want blood!”

  Sal makes his move, and so do I. I fake right, his whole body lurches that direction, and I dart left, my hand wrapped around Darlene’s. Then, I slingshot her toward the door. “Go!” I shout. “Get out of here! I’m right behind you.”

  Norm stands over Butch Hazard. He swings down, his fist connecting with his face. Butch shouts out in pain. I never thought I’d hear this man of steel cry out, but I do. I know my brother is a badass from firsthand experience. He may be missing a finger and damn near on the cusp of death but he’s Norman Jupiter.