by Dalton Wolf
Just as they topped the hill to the north speeding down an empty lane, they heard the first of several explosions in their wake. Flames jumped up and smoke immediately began filling the valley behind them before they crested the hill and all was blocked from view. Several more explosions rocked the area just as Quinn turned onto State Avenue. The ashen-faced trio clutched their respective weapons with a newfound fear. It had all seemed like a fun little adventure. Nothing about the situation had felt real until now. Unable to come to grips with how quickly things were happening, Quinn reached a meaty paw up and flipped on the radio. Classic rock poured out as if nothing were wrong.
“Hmm. No Emergency Alert System yet. See if you can find anything.” He motioned for Athena to take over the radio and she leaned forward between the men, changing stations and listening for a few seconds, then moving on. Each one either played uninterrupted music or was off the air.
“Do you think anyone is even live on air today?” Athena asked. “They probably all pre-recorded everything so they could be downtown for the parade. Or their programs are broadcasting from locations around the parade route. They wouldn’t have had time to get to their stations and set off the EAS alarms yet.”
“No, the Emergency Alert System is automatic,” Quinn said. “Once someone initiates it, it takes over all registered transmissions and puts out the appropriate signals.”
“Wait!” Athena breathed excitedly. “Here’s something…”
A deep, made-for-radio voice was reporting in hushed tones.
“Again, I can’t tell you for sure what’s going on. We lost contact with Skeve and the Slut down on Main Street over an hour ago. The last thing they said—and I can’t emphasize enough that these are their words to me—was that zombies have taken over the parade and that everyone needs to get to safety. I’m looking at video from a local news chopper right now that we recorded before that network went off the air. The scene I’m seeing down there is absolute bedlam. There is a downed plane, but nothing around the area suggests it caused any damage to surrounding buildings. However, there are ground level fires all over downtown. Floats and vehicles are ablaze all along the parade route. It seems people are attacking other people indiscriminately. It looks like the film footage from the L.A. riots for those of you who remember. The ground-level images on camera before the cameramen were attacked were horrendous and graphic. I swear I saw a man trying to eat a woman. I do not believe this is a hoax. There is rioting and mayhem in downtown Kansas City…and my friends who were there first-hand said there are zombies. That, along with what I saw with my own eyes on the video leads me to believe that the end may very well be upon us. Everyone needs to stay away from downtown and maybe get some appropriate protection from…oh my god…from zombies. I’m uncertain how long we will remain on the air. We received word from federal authorities demanding that we stop broadcasting, but I have sworn to continue as long as possible.”
Athena clasped Scooter’s larger hand, but some of the comfort was filtered by the steel coils of the mail gloves both wore. He had never known her to be afraid of anything before, but this was really happening. It wasn’t a prank. They weren’t being Punk’d. They would not arrive downtown to find Tripper pointing and laughing at their gullibility. They might not find Tripper at all. The radio transmission cut off abruptly emphasizing the fact that they might not even make it downtown. Athena changed the stations, but found no other live stations. The big ambulance cruised in silence all the way to State Street until Quinn turned onto 4th, followed it around to Washington. Everything seemed unnaturally normal. If it hadn’t been for the call from Tripper and the dead silence on the air waves they could have believed this day was no different than any other fall day.
“Everything seems fine over here,” Scooter commented quietly.
“Yeah,” the big smith agreed. “It’s kind of creepy, given the circumstances.”
Traffic flowed in what seemed a light rush hour pattern rolling away from downtown with only a few erratic drivers, until they took the ramp onto I-70 and crossed the river, where the highway became uncomfortably barren. Quinn slowed down as they approached the summit of the hill. The low grumble of the Ambulance eased as they approached the downtown end of the viaduct, the concrete retaining walls beginning to rise around them. Heavy smoke billowed from several sources in the downtown superstructures ahead to their right. Calvin and Athena clutched their weapons as if they were teddy bears.
Topping the hill brought them a better view, but no closer to an understanding of the situation. The smoke, they saw, flowed from the lower and mid-levels of several buildings on either side of the highway, but the bridges seemed mostly intact. Just ahead three cars lay in varying stages of disintegration, two unrecognizable, flattened masses flipped onto their roofs and one grey Mercedes that had smashed into a bridge support and flipped onto its side. Calvin opened the thick port window on his side and listened intently, but could distinguish nothing but the echo of the Humvee’s engine rumbling off of the concrete retaining walls.
The ebony vehicle rolled through without stopping. There were no dazed survivors wandering around. No calls for help. Concrete and rod-iron dangled from the bridges they passed and it was clear that at least two of the cars had burst through the rails of the bridges at a very high rate of speed. The absence of emergency personnel in the area considering the circumstances was extremely unsettling.
“Should we stop and see if they’re alright?” Athena asked quietly.
“We don’t stop for anything but living people,” Scooter answered quickly.
“How do we know they’re not infected?” Quinn asked. “I guess the only people we can trust are in this vehicle now,” the man answered his own question.
“And our friends,” Scooter argued.
“But they were down here. How do you know they’re not infected?”
“Doesn’t matter. They have the guy.”
“What guy is that?”
“The guy who can stop this…maybe.”
“You’ve been watching too many movies, kid. No one stops something like this.”
“Supposedly this guy has the data of the virus that started it.”
“Whatever. I promised to help you, and now we’re in this together, but I personally think we need to get out of the city and find someplace to dig in.”
“My uncle has a place in central Missouri. It’s a walled compound ringing in a small valley between a steep, u-shaped crater on a mesa, took half of his money to build.”
“Nice. That should do just fine, if we can get there in one piece. Not sure how open the highways are going to be; looks like everyone is already heading out of town.”
“We have a friend across the river who has a shop we can hide out in until we’ve collected everyone and—”
“Noo!” Athena screamed in horror and clutched his arm with the hand not holding the panabas the smith had given her. Next to another overturned vehicle stood a person missing one arm with his innards dangling from huge chunks of missing midsection. A tattered and bloodied Chiefs jersey hung in ribbons over the gaping holes in his flesh and the eyes that followed the vehicle were milky-white and seemed to glow with an insane fire. “Oh my god. It’s real,” she whispered.
The zombie held a black man’s leg in his only hand, sinewy jaws repeatedly ripping off chunks. Just an hour before Calvin had eaten a turkey leg at the Ren Fest in exactly the same manner. Occasionally the foot with the Air Jordan would wiggle when the zombie bit into a muscle, which had caused Athena to scream. Believing the leg to be still alive had made things somehow even worse in her dazed mind. Fear gripping three guts, they continued past the dead guy and exited up the off-ramp.
“Almost there. We’re only a block away,” Scooter breathed, troubled by the fact that he didn’t feel more relief from the statement.
Don’t count your Zombies until they’re Dead
We made it, one of Calvin’s many internal voices sighed. But they weren’t
there yet, and around the next corner waited a reminder of why you don’t count your chickens before they hatch…or your zombies until they’re dead. The first zombie they had passed seemed mostly harmless. Distractedly gorging itself on a meaty treat, it had ignored the vehicle. But merely a block from their destination, a stench struck the vehicle like a wave and they looked to see the road ahead partially blocked by a mass of infected people. Perhaps twenty prone, unmoving corpses littered the street, while another thirty quite mobile corpse-like people milled around off in the grass on the right. The grey-skinned zombies danced and jostled with dexterity and speed nearly the equal of normal people and could have easily been mistaken for such if not for the fact that each was missing some body part—an arm here, chunks of flesh there, an ear or lower jaw.
The scene cleared as they approached and the trio noted the moaning mass of diseased humanity was gathered around a green, late model Chevy truck that held four desperate people in the back, all of whom were swinging odd weapons in a barely effective attempt to keep the dead at bay. The truck had crashed backwards into a decorative wall on the back corner of the new district court building, across the street from their destination. A tall rod iron fence protected the back of the pickup and three of the members, two young women and a man were in the bed facing the street swinging crowbars and a stop sign to keep the zombies from climbing into the bed, the other man stood on the roof, keeping the dead from climbing up over the hood, if that was possible. But the group was only keeping the mass of attackers at bay, they hadn’t killed many. Only the one protecting the hood seemed to have the time and space to plan how to split a skull with his stop sign, but he kept slipping on the roof and nearly falling into the waiting arms of the seemingly starving crowd.
“Stop. Stop!” Athena shrieked in horror.
The big smith brought the former ambulance to a screeching halt halfway up the street. Several of the diseased attackers turned to look.
“Are you crazy?” Scooter yelled at her, pointing at the gang of undead who had turned and were now lumbering their direction.
“Look.” she pointed to the wrecked vehicle. “Isn’t that Gus and Joel up there?”
“Can’t be. There are women with them.” Scooter stated flatly.
“It looks like them.”
“It does. But it can’t be. They’re the opposite of babe magnets, Rosebud. Even in the apocalypse, most women wouldn’t be caught dead with those two.”
“Hey, they’re your friends.”
“I know. And I love them. They’re two of my best friends, but they would have creeped those girls out more than any pack of zombies could.”
“That’s not funny.”
Calvin sighed, closely scrutinizing the group of defenders. The two men did, indeed, resemble their friends. Even if it was not them, it was unlikely Athena was going to let them continue without helping the people. It was the right thing to do.
“We’re going to need to do something…” said Quinn, the dead inching closer.
“We have to help whoever that is,” Athena insisted.
“Don’t you think it’s every man for himself now?” Calvin asked.
“No. And neither do you or we’d be on our way to California right now.”
“California sounds fine with me,” Quinn interjected.
Athena gave him a withering glare to match the one she had been aiming at Calvin for the entire conversation.
“Just sayin…”
“We’re going to help them!” she insisted. “If we’re going to survive whatever this is, we need to know now if we can make it the right way. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
“Fair enough,” the big man said, ripping open his door and pulling out his big maces and slamming down the face-plate on his blue helm.
“Damnit!” Scooter spat angrily. “Ok, we have to help them.”
“Welcome to the team, Scooter,” Athena chided him with affection, her voice sounding tinny and echoing within the now closed faceplate of her helm.
Calvin slammed down the visor on his own helm and stepped out, pulling both war axes out in one fluid motion. Athena had more trouble when a loose piece of leather caught on the seat belt and pulled her back in, wrapping the two together even more.
“Damn it!” she cursed.
Scooter leaned back into the big vehicle to give the straps one hack of an axe, but Quinn harrumphed and he realized he was about to cut the man’s property. “Sorry,” he shot back and he and Athena unwound the leather and nylon with shaking fingers.
The dead who had become interested in them were not fast movers, thankfully, which explained why they were at the back of the pack attacking the truck. But they weren’t patient either. Sensing food, or whatever it was that was made them attack the uninfected, and even though these things moved with the enthusiasm and coordination of the lunch crowd in the rehabilitation wing of nearly any recovery hospital, they were coming closer. Calvin felt time eroding under the relentless tenacity of their hunger, but that was probably thanks to all of the movies they’d all seen.
“Get her clear. I’ve got your back!” The big man bellowed and charged forward.
He heard Quinn grunt as he took on the first zombie out of four who were slightly faster than the others. But he refused to look away from his task.
Leather under the nylon, twist, twist again, pull—it’s free!
“Ok, go!” Athena snapped and both extracted themselves from the vehicle and dashed forward to stand on either side of the already entrenched Blacksmith.
That was a great start, part of Athena’s mind muttered sarcastically, but it was only trying to keep her bladder from releasing by distracting her. Unfortunately, her eyes found the mangled masses of brain and skull the big smith had already left in his wake and she wretched.
Oh my god. I can’t do this. But it was kill or be killed. She had made them jump out. Now she had to live with that.
“Ok,” Scooter panted, splitting the skull of a man in a Timberwolves shirt and sending brain matter spraying everywhere. “Ugh, that’s disgusting,” he muttered.
“Remember. As far as we know, they’re zombies. Head shots take them down. Keep your mouth closed until we find something to protect us from the spray. We fight down the right side, keeping them on our left until we get to the truck, then get that group behind us, edge down the truck to the street and force our way back here.”
Athena swung a sideways arc into the side of the head belonging to a wild-eyed young grey-black girl missing a big hunk of flesh from her thigh just under a plaid skirt. The panabas cut completely through the skull, the top half of which popped off and into the air like the top of a dandelion under a weed-eater, sticky brain matter flying one direction, the skull another. The body sank down with a heavy thump and the empty skull cap landed a few feet away and bounced with the sound of two coconuts banging together. She wretched again, but held the bile down. Some sick, twisted part of her mind brought up the flight speed of an unladen swallow and she giggled for just a moment.
Quinn had taken out another two with single swings to the side of the head, bursting the skulls and turning both zombies into Human rugs. With ten feet between themselves and the group of twenty or thirty zombies attacking the truck, he flipped up his visor to remove a hunk of flesh that had landed on the cheek. His features were visibly pale, green eyes filled with a crazed gleam bordering on horror. Athena felt better knowing even the big man was scared, but still stood to the task.
“Ready?” Calvin asked, sounding much calmer in his own ears than he felt.
“Ready!” his partners shouted resolutely, even if it was false bravado.
“Go!”
The armored trio dashed forward until they met the next line of shuffling zombies and three were down in one simultaneous, fluid motion, Athena’s panabas proved to be at least as effective as William had promised as she split the skull of her second target just as Scooter’s off-hand axe found its second skull. Quinn crushed the
skull of one short, immensely fat man wearing a red #25 jersey, spilling goo all over the sidewalk before them. He slipped, but caught himself and stepped over the growing puddle to kick a drooling moaner back into the group, gaining them all a little breathing room to realign as it knocked several others to the pavement.
“Help us!” someone from the group in the truck screamed at them.”
“What the hell do you think we’re doing, genius?” Scooter called back.
“Scooter?” the man on the roof called in surprise.
“I’ll be damned; you were right, Rosebud. It is Gus and Joel,” Scooter muttered as he hacked through the necks of two zombies who were so close they were practically humping each other as they approached their feast. The bodies dropped motionless as the heads rolled off, still snapping, smoky eyes continuing to follow them as they moved past. As with most of the movies, it did seem to take destruction of something within the brain to finish them completely; merely severing the spine deadened the body, but not the skull.
“I wish William had decided to join us,” Quinn shouted over the grunting of the trio, the zombies’ moaning and sickening chunking of hacked flesh and popping of battered skulls. “He would have enjoyed this, I think.”
The rotting stench of corpses overwhelmed them all, forcing Athena to become a mouth-breather. “How could anyone enjoy this?” she wretched.
On every other step she vomited in the back of her throat and swallowed her own bile, gulping and retching in time with her swings, but never wavering, knowing if she gave in, she would likely die, or worse, Calvin might. And it was her fault they were out here in the first place. She could have let them drive on, but would Calvin really have done that? She was sure he wouldn’t.
“Not what I mean,” the big man panted. “I doubt he’d like the killing…”
They were in a small shrub garden area now, only a few feet from the truck. A dozen dead remained dead again behind them. That left less than twenty moving dead between them and their friends, only half of the Shufflers had noticed their presence. But it was gory, disgusting work. And it didn’t help to know that they were killing things that used to be people.