The fireman zombie lifted its axe and swung with force, clumsily but in the right direction. The axe landed in the other zombie’s chest, breaking through it and coming out from the side, making the elderly zombie lurch to one side and then fall down as the contents of its upper torso hit the forest floor.
“Fuck me,” Haws said.
Ash looked at him.
“They can use weapons?” Haws said.
They watched as the elderly zombie writhed on the floor to get back up, its arms now twisted and in the wrong place now that the torso was split almost in two. The firefighter then did something even stranger. It watched. It looked down with the axe in its hand at the wriggling zombie. It swung the axe down again.
“What the fuck is it doing?” Haws said.
The firefighter pulled the axe out, with pieces of rotten lungs attached. The elderly zombie still struggled and tried to get up. The firefighter peered from under its bright yellow helmet with dry eyeballs and half of its face burned away to expose the bone beneath. The firefighter swung the axe down again.
“It’s not trying to eat it,” Ash said. “It’s trying to kill it.”
The firefighter’s axe severed the elderly zombie’s right shoulder completely from its torso. When the senior zombie continued struggling and grunting and trying to get up, the firefighter looked at it and tilted its head like a curious dog.
The firefighter swung the axe down into the elderly zombie’s head and it died.
“Oh, my fucking shit,” Ash said.
“What the…” Haws said.
Ash’s face was white. “It killed it.”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Haws said. “It’s fucked up, but-”
“Do you know what this means?” Ash said. “Haws, that thing down there, it just learned from its mistakes.”
Haws frowned, confused.
“These zombies,” Ash said, “they can learn. They’re dumb, but they get smarter.”
“What does that mean?” Haws said.
“It means they’re only gonna get harder to kill.”
Haws leaned forward to take a better look at the undead firefighter. The board beneath his hand broke off and Haws tumbled forward.
“Fuck!” Haws shouted.
Ash grabbed him by his belt and stopped him falling. Haws reached back and pulled himself back fully onto the half-built tree house.
“That was fuckin’ close,” he said, laughing.
Ash smiled, and then looked down to the ground.
The firefighter was looking right at them.
“We may be in some trouble,” Ash said.
“We’ll be fine. What can he do from down there?” Haws said.
The firefighter moved slowly towards the base of the tree. He looked up. They were more than 50 feet up. Haws spat over the edge and it bounced off the zombie’s helmet.
“Nice hat, asshole,” Haws said with a grin. “Let’s see you climb this shit.”
The firefighter looked at the bloodied axe it was holding for a few moments. Its face was blank. Ash watched it carefully, shielding her eyes from the rain with her hands. The firefighter lifted the axe up at his side.
The zombie firefighter went to work at chopping down the tree.
“Holy fuckin’ shit,” Haws said.
The axe wasn’t having much effect, chipping only a small amount of wood away at a time, but it was slowly working. More than that, however, was the sound of it. Knock. Knock. Knock. Ash and Haws watched helplessly as the sound echoed through the forest and dark figures started limping out of the darkness towards their tree.
“That sound is gonna get us both killed,” Ash said, “never mind the axe. He’s ringing the goddamn dinner bell.”
Haws nodded and said, “We may be in some trouble.”
Ash grabbed the radio from Haws’s hand and spoke into it. “Barcomb, if you’re out there,” she said, “now would be a really great fuckin’ time to ride in and rescue us.”
Chapter 3: Patrol Dog
The rain wasn’t letting up. Munday was soaked through to her very bones. She removed her jacket and placed it under Barcomb’s head. He was breathing, but he was unconscious. Blood pooled around the wound on his chest, just above the heart. Munday had laid him on the ground under a large bush, somewhat hidden from view. There wasn’t enough room for her, however, so she was a sitting duck. The car was on its roof. The road was deserted apart from a few corpses lying face down on the asphalt with various parts bitten or torn off. Rain water was streaming down the slight hillside, carrying soil from the forest onto the road. Munday was at a loss for what to do next. She hugged the AR-15 close and prayed nothing would get close enough that she’d have to use it. They couldn’t afford the attention.
Underneath the constant swish of the rain, she started to hear moaning.
They’re coming, she thought. They’re coming whether I like it or not.
Munday stood up and looked around. She took Barcomb’s knife from his belt and cut length of cloth from her pants. She squeezed it dry and took out a lighter from her pocket.
If they’re coming anyway, she thought, let’s try and get someone else here, too. I got a big fuckin’ sign over my head right now anyway after that crash.
Munday dabbed the cloth in gasoline that was pooled under the car, then opened the fuel cap and jammed the cloth inside. She took out a lighter and, shielding it with her hands; she set fire to the cloth. She couldn’t move right away. The rain would put out the cloth. She needed to stay to make sure that didn’t happen, but too long and she’d be blown all to Hell. She decided to count to twenty, whatever happened.
She closed her eyes.
This is a long shot, she thought. This is so fuckin’ stupid. I’m getting myself killed. This is insane.
And then, in the darkness behind her eyes and for what seemed like an eternity, she thought only of the numbers between twenty and one as she felt the warmth of the flames beneath her hands. She tried to imagine she was warming her hands on her grandmother’s fire, a cup of coffee and a warm snack waiting for her when she was done.
The heat on her hands was becoming unbearable.
Munday opened her eyes. Three zombies were bearing down on her from the side of the road. The flames were higher in the tank. She turned and ran. When she got close to the other side of the road, there was a deafening boom and a wall of heat punched her in the back and sent her flying to the ground. A zombie landed around her. Although the parts would have formed one complete zombie, they were mixed limbs and flesh from the three. Munday pushed herself up and tore a fragment of steel from her forearm. The heat on her back from the fire was almost unbearable. She touched the scratch on her cheek. There was a moment’s doubt, but she told herself once again that she was lucky, that she wasn’t infected.
She went back over to Barcomb.
“You want to get me killed,” came a gruff voice from under the bush, “you could stop fucking about and just shoot me again.”
Barcomb sat up slowly, holding his chest in agony. Munday helped him stand. Barcomb looked at the burning car.
“Please tell me you took out the crate of beer that was in the back before you decided to set the car on fire,” Barcomb said.
“There was beer in there?” Munday said.
Barcomb nodded. He started to fall and Munday caught him. “You have to take it easy,” she said.
“I’ll take it easy when I’m dead,” Barcomb quipped.
“No, you won’t. You’ll be running around screaming and eating people like the rest of those crazy zombie bastards.”
Barcomb touched the wound on his chest and the other on his head which was a huge gash just above his eye that left a small flap of skin hanging off and his right eye covered in sticky blood. His chest wouldn’t stop bleeding. He applied pressure.
“I thought you were dead,” Munday said. “I thought I’d killed you.”
“You’ll have to try harder next time.”
“I shot you twice and you flipped your car. I might just have to give up on the whole idea.”
“About that…” Barcomb said.
Munday looked around as the trees along the side of the road started rustling and the night came alive with grunting and guttural shrieking. Barcomb nodded down the road.
“Excuses will have to wait, I guess,” he said.
“Can you walk?”
“More or less.” Barcomb saw the AR-15 on her shoulder. “Give me my gun.”
He took the AR-15 and handed her a clip for her glock.
“What was the plan with the fire anyway?”
“Distress call,” Munday said.
“Well, you seem to have just called in more distress.”
“You know where Haws and Ash are?”
Barcomb shook his head. “Got separated after the attack on the Humvee.”
They walked quickly down the road. Barcomb was unsteady, but not slow. Every step caused him almost unbearable pain. He tore off a piece of his shirt and stuck in his mouth to bite down.
“After that, I booked it to the nearest house to regroup,” he said, muffled through the cloth. “Seemed like everyone else went the other way, so I stole a car.”
“Was the house safe?”
Barcomb shook his head. “Overrun. No windows left. There was a swimming pool. It was red.”
“Do you think Dutroux was lying about the whole thing, everything about the big house with the big walls and the supplies? Or do you think he just lied about where it was?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think this Torrento guy really exists?”
“I never heard of him,” Barcomb said. “So either he’s bullshit or he’s the sneakiest motherfucker alive.”
Barcomb looked forward and stopped. Munday was looking at him and carried on for a moment. Then she turned and saw what he saw. Dozens of zombies were coming towards them, their hands outstretched, their mouths snarling.
“We don’t have the ammo for this,” Munday said.
“I don’t have the legs to run,” Barcomb said.
Munday looked at Barcomb.
“If you’re waiting for me to tell you to save yourself and leave me behind,” Barcomb said, “you’re in for a long fuckin’ wait.”
Barcomb checked his mag and frowned. He nearly fell down and righted himself. Munday had a full clip, but it still wouldn’t be enough. Barcomb looked over his shoulder towards the burning wreck and more zombies were coming from that direction, running first through the fire and then towards him and Munday after they spotted them down the road. Seven or eight burning zombies were ambling towards them from one direction and five times as many were running and walking from the other.
Barcomb remembered his radio. He picked it up to speak into it.
The radio was smashed.
“Shit,” he said.
The zombies were closing fast.
“Into the woods,” Barcomb said. “Now!”
They hit the darkness beyond the trees. Barcomb tumbled into the wet mud. He pulled himself out, regained his breath and shut his eyes for a moment.
“Maybe they don’t see so good,” Barcomb said, looking at Munday again. “Their eyes should be all fucked up, anyway.”
“Maybe-” Munday began, before an almighty bang sounded and the zombies screeched in chorus and the roar of a six-wheeler truck drowned them out.
Bodies exploded into goopy red clouds with the crunch of bones and the slap of meat as the truck plowed through the crowd, throwing flesh and strings of blood and intestines into the air. The truck slammed onto its brakes with a scraping sound and skidded to a stop on the insides of a dozen zombies, right beside the burning car. For a moment it just sat there with no movement inside. Barcomb and Munday exchanged a nervous glance.
The truck was without a trailer. It was metallic blue with a photorealistic supermodel in a red bikini spray-painted on the side. A terminator skeleton was spray-painted on the back. The truck door opened and a man stepped out from behind the wheel. He was dressed in a shirt and tie. He didn’t look much like a truck driver to Barcomb. The driver looked around. He leaned into the cab and grabbed the radio.
“No sign of anyone,” he said into it. “Must all be dead. I’ll look around for anything useful and kill anything that moves.”
“You see any good meat,” a deep Jamaican voice said, “you be a good boy and bring that on back home, you dig?”
“I’ll get the hound on it,” the driver said, laughing.
Barcomb frowned and raised his assault rifle, ready for anything. It was heavier than the last time he lifted it. He could feel his strength leaving him.
The driver walked around to the other side of the truck and opened the door. Munday could see under the truck where another person climbed down. The strange thing was, she saw hands touch the floor first, not feet. The feet came down after. She heard a loud bark and her face scrunched up, confused, instinctively disgusted.
The driver walked back around and Munday and Barcomb got a look at his “hound”. The hound was a naked woman in her early 20s with dark hair which had been scruffily cut short, with a knife from the looks of it. Her knees and elbows were red raw and she was painfully thin, looking almost starved with her bones clearly visible poking through her skin. She panted like a dog as she walked on all fours. She barked.
Barcomb whispered, “What in the name of fuckin’ shit is that?”
Munday was silent. Munday was furious. She fought every urge to run out and start shooting at the driver as he smiled at his hound and patted her on the head. He kneeled beside her and grabbed her face to make her look at him. He said something to her and she started running off towards the trees in the other direction on all fours, panting and barking.
Barcomb pointed back into the dark forest and Munday understood: time to get the fuck out of there before shit gets weird.
Weird-er.
Barcomb and Munday hiked through the woods, taking it slow, trying to stay quiet and struggling to navigate through only by moonlight. Munday led the way, though she didn’t know where they could go. Barcomb’s wounds slowed him down, made him careless. He stood on branches and they cracked beneath his boots.
It was around ten minutes later when they heard bizarre fake growling in front of them. The driver’s human dog walked into the moonlight on all fours. She snarled. Munday and Barcomb trained their guns on the insane, naked woman in front of them.
“We must’ve walked in a circle,” Barcomb said, wiping the rain from his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt as he trained his gun on the “dog”. “Fuck’s sake,” he said.
“What the fuck is it?” Munday said.
“This is some dark shit,” Barcomb said. “I don’t even wanna know.”
Then they heard the click of the hammer on a pistol being drawn back. It came from behind them. Then there came a voice: “Don’t do anything stupid, now,” the driver said. “I’d love nothing more than to kill the pair of you, loot your shit and fuck your corpses, so if you want to make me the happiest man alive you just hang onto those guns and see how it goes for you.”
Barcomb and Munday placed their weapons on the ground and got on their knees.
Barcomb was bleeding.
He was bleeding badly.
The “dog” barked at them. It snarled and showed teeth which had been filed into crude points, into sharp fangs.
Chapter 4: Death’s Door
“You call that dancing’?” he said. “Put your fuckin’ back into it. Fuck we keep you around here for? Might as well throw you to the fuckin’ goons outside and let them chew you up.”
Shannon had heard that they called him “Beat” after some movie star or other because he was Japanese. Or half-Japanese, at least. He didn’t look Asian. Maybe that was the joke. He sat there in his boxers watching her shake her ass in a bikini that was two sizes too small. He had short blonde hair, light blue eyes, and his chest was waxed and hairless and his shoulder
s were the size of a gorilla’s. Shannon had no doubt that he could snap her neck with one squeeze. That’s why she danced. Beat had been sizing her up for a while. If she could get on his good side, she might be allowed to stay. She might even be given real food, real meals. Since the start of all the death and insanity, she’d barely eaten enough to keep her on her feet.
It’ll be over soon, she thought. I just need to keep going a couple more weeks and everything will get back to normal. I can go back to working as a teaching assistant. I can see my boyfriend again, wherever he might be now. I’ll find her parents and everything can be back to how it was. It can’t be as bad as it looks, she thought. Things don’t go that bad that fast. The TV was wrong. It hadn’t been broadcasting for a few days, but it must be wrong. This isn’t so bad. They’re exaggerating. The world isn’t that cruel. Things will be OK. They always are.
Officer Barcomb vs. The Undead Page 12