I Zombie I [Omnibus Edition]

by Jack Wallen

  Before I could even get the door to the building open, a distant moan was carried to my ear by a soft, cool wind. The moan seemed to originate from where my old friend “Flaky” was. I knew I should go check it out, but I was never really big on being the hero. In fact, I’d always been quite the coward. Maybe that was why journalism had always suited me so well. Even when war was waging, the only weapon I would ever wield was a keyboard or pen while tucked safely behind enemy lines.

  And yes, I had seen war. I covered Desert Storm and Bush’s “Great Surge.” I saw more than my fair share of blood and death. I’d have gone back to either of those wars in a heartbeat if it meant I’d see a living, breathing human again. I’d relive every horrible moment. But I knew that wouldn’t happen. I was in a special kind of Hell, and there was no way I would just wake up from this.

  “Hell.”

  Chapter 3: The bite

  Cowardice be damned. I had to go look. When I arrived, I immediately noticed Flaky had disappeared. The man bled out from hundreds of bites when I saw him last, but somehow he had managed to pull himself up and amble off.

  My first thought regarding Flaky’s disappearance was that someone must have carried his gnawed-up carcass off the street. After a second look, I realized that wasn’t possible because there were only two sets of footprints, one coming toward the body―mine―and two sets leading away―mine and, well, some probably belonging to Flaky. No one else could have taken my friend away.

  I decided I should follow the other set of footprints. After all, it would be better for me to give myself something to do before my brain had time to process everything. I couldn’t allow my brain to do that. I was afraid if I did, I might finally just spiral into some lonely abyss, never to return.

  Or worse.

  Against all intelligence and discretion, I followed Flaky’s footprints. I had to. Knowing that someone else was alive was about the only thing keeping me from folding in on myself.

  Flaky’s tracks seemed to have had no purpose. They just meandered about the street as if he had partied a bit too much before the end came. And judging from the placement of his feet, he was hurt worse than he had been when I’d first seen him. I have to wonder though, what exactly was “hurt worse than death”? At least, I thought he was dead. Damn.

  I tried to follow his tracks, step for step, and I nearly fell over more times than I care to admit. Flaky was seriously fucked up. The tracks paused at the body of a dead female whose stomach had been ripped open with its contents spilled all over the street. I never realized just how much the human body contained. Bits, pieces, and liquids were splattered and spattered from one side of the street to the other. I nearly slipped on a piece of what looked like brain matter.

  But why would Flaky pause here? Was she a friend? Was he just trying to help the lady out? Or was he stopping to make sure she wasn’t still alive? From the looks of the bloody footprints leaving the site of the horror, Flaky must have stopped to help the woman. Hell, he must have dug his hands and feet deep within the muck and mire of her gore and then walked away when he realized she was too far gone.

  No time for bad feelings, prayers, or sympathy for the unsealed woman. “Sorry, lady, but I have a friend to catch up with.”

  The blood-spatter trail left by Flaky made it fairly easy to follow his tracks, for a while, at least. The blood ceased flowing after a block. By that point, I had to keep my eyes glued to the ground. The ash was falling faster, so the tracks were disappearing quickly. If I didn’t catch up with Flaky, I’d lose him for good this time. I had to pick up my pace. Fuck. Didn’t I mention I wasn’t a runner?

  Flaky’s tracks took a sharp right. What the hell? I found him. He was… well, he was standing in the middle of the street slowly swaying back and forth, as if he was dancing to some unheard music. If this whole situation wasn’t already a nightmare, I would turn around and run for my life. Unfortunately, turning tail didn’t guarantee my safety. If this were a horror film, what I was witnessing would be the calm before the serial-killer storm.

  I waved my arms at the swaying man. He had to have seen me, but he gave no reaction. I couldn’t seem to pull him out of his prom-night flashback. I had to get up close and personal with this stranger.

  “Hello.” The man continued swaying and moaning.

  As soon as I was within reach of the man, his sickly gray fingers wrapped around my arm and pulled me closer than I cared to be. The son of a bitch then wrapped those same clammy fingers around my throat, pulled my face to his rotten-toothed mouth and clamped his blackened teeth on the flesh of my cheek. He didn’t say a word, he just moaned like a cow lowing for its mate. His breath was putrid, like he’d been, I don’t know, eating the dead.

  At first I thought he was going to kiss me, rejoicing in the sight of another living being. I assumed he’d be elated to see another human. I was wrong, very wrong.

  I didn’t hang around to chat. The motherfucker probably would have decided to make dessert of my neck. Besides, I thought it best to pick up something to disinfect the gaping hole from which blood was profusely pouring. As I ran, the chunk of cheek dangling from my face threatened to tear off at any moment. The wound was burning like fire. I’ve been badly cut before, but I’ve never felt an injury burn like that. It felt as if someone had taken a torch to my face.

  I made my way to the nearest car to find a mirror and see what the bastard had done to my cheek. The mirror was covered with ash, and my hands were too shaky to get it clean. I tried to bend down enough to sneak a glance anyway, but a bullet of pain shot down my neck, forcing me to give up the pursuit of vanity.

  I needed to get the bite cleaned out before some nasty infection took over. I needed a shot of vodka with a side of anti-bacterial soap.

  Chapter 4: Restroom first aid

  It took me long enough, but I finally found a drugstore. Fortunately for me, it must have been open for business when the blast occurred, so I was able to waltz right in, grab what I needed, and head straight to the men’s room where I could repair my sullied cheek flesh. I did everything I could to remain quiet. The last thing I needed was to attract more of whatever it was that had attacked me. I pulled the shop door closed behind me and carefully made my way to the employee washroom.

  Unfortunately, the light in the building was less than ideal, and I managed to knock over a display of drinks. So much for being quiet. I picked up my pace and made it to the back of the building where the employee washroom stood sentinel. It wasn’t until I saw my face that I realized how badly I needed a doctor, and probably a psychiatrist. The chunk of cheek hanging from my face was black and numb. Now I’m no surgeon, but I didn’t believe it had been long enough since the bite for the flesh to go necrotic. But there it was, in living black and white rot.

  At least I could take some solace in the fact that it wasn’t that same sour-milk white color covering the moaner that bit me.

  Some consolation.

  I made the mistake of touching the charred chunk; at which point, it dropped to the floor. Gravity hardly had to pull; it just gave up like it was done with being a part of me. Not even so much as a goodbye. The sound the blackened flesh made wasn’t the wet, sloppy sound you would associate with a meaty chunk of a man’s cheek hitting the floor. Oh, no. This sound was a dull thunk, as if a piece of terracotta clay had hit the tile. I half expected the chunk to shatter into dust. It didn’t. Instead it just lay there, with not even respect enough to look up and mock me. That little piece of me was gone, lost in battle with what looked like the walking dead.

  A cold, evil chill slowly waltzed up my spine. I didn’t want to revisit the thought that had traversed my brain and made its way to conscious thought. I refused to give it credence. The dead do not walk. There is no such thing as zombies. Fiction is not made real, not like this.

  The world was not coming to an end.

  The world was really not coming to an end.

  The world―

  Before I could finish the n
ewly-coined mantra, a sudden, sharp pounding began on the other side of the restroom door. The pounding was too violent to be human―at least no human I had ever known. My heart was pounding in my ears, loud enough that whoever, or whatever, was on the other side of the door would most likely hear. And then, between the ear-splitting pounding, I heard a familiar moan. Someone had decided to come back for another round of abuse. Either that or he was next in line to use the facilities. I didn’t care which. I only cared that I was trapped inside a dirty washroom with a maniac beating on the door hoping to break open my brain-pan and have a meal.

  The moaner was pounding hard enough to shatter the bones in his hands and moaning loud enough to shame a porn star nearing a money shot. And here I was stuck fuck-all in the middle of the shit storm. I wanted out of this scene, and I wanted out now.

  I checked the room for something to use as a weapon. I found nothing. I could break the mirror and wield a piece of the broken glass like a knife, but hand-to-hand combat with one of those monsters was not one of the entries in my bucket list.

  I turned around and quietly locked the door while trying not to let the beast know I was occupying the room. From the sounds of the beat-down he was giving the door, I was fairly certainly he had no intention of relenting or apologizing for the earlier incident.

  I slid down the door until my ass hit tile. The floor was disgusting. I was most likely sitting in some stranger’s piss or puke. The pounding was reverberating in my head and numbing all other senses. All there was in that moment was sound, nothing but sound, pounding, echoing sound. Just a moment ago, I was begging to be released from the silence, and now I would give my other cheek for just a moment of that quiet bliss.

  I could have screamed at the top of my lungs. Of course, that would only have brought about more relentless pounding.

  Persistence, I have always felt, was one of mankind’s greatest attributes. Persistence has driven man to great heights, helped him to discover and invent new and better technology. Persistence was the spark that drove mothers to raise children into good and kind adults. Persistence took man to the moon and to the center of the earth. But at this very moment, persistence was about to undo the sanity of one man―me.

  I was about to stand up, swing the bathroom door open, and choke the life out of whoever was on the other side, when the hammering stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The sound echoed on for a while, although I was pretty sure that echoing was in my head. But finally, sweet, sweet silence blanketed the room. A brief peace overcame my chest. I breathed it in, savored it.

  The short-lived peace was lifted when I heard Flaky stomping away. Was he looking for something to help him smash down the door?

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  My heart finally slowed to a just-above-average-tempo, and I was able to piece together the question that had been swimming in my head when Flaky attacked me.

  “What in the hell did he want?”

  I waited a moment longer until I was fairly sure there was nothing on the other side of the door that wanted to rip me apart. Once I felt safe, I stood and immediately went to work. Before I put my fingers anywhere near my cheek, I had to disinfect my hands. Who knew what kind of hellish germs were infesting the floor? A few scrubs with some anti-bacterial soap and I felt it was safe to begin playing doctor on my face.

  Patching up my desecrated cheek proved to be more difficult than I had thought. In order to keep the bandage in place, I actually had to stuff the crater with a bit of gauze after dumping in half of a tube of antibiotic salve. Once the bite was covered, my face returned to its average-looking self.

  With the surgery complete, I rummaged through the store until I located a means of carrying supplies. A backpack would fit the bill perfectly, even if said backpack was designed for a young teenager. I wasn’t sure what it said, but the prepubescent grins of five young boys offered enough for a fairly good guess.

  Even though I had no idea what had happened, I needed to at least be as prepared as a drugstore would allow.

  Trail mix and other junk food items - check.

  Bottled water - check.

  Flashlight - check.

  Extra batteries - check.

  Matches - check.

  Radio - check.

  First aid supplies - check.

  Paper and pens - check.

  That was about all I could stuff into my boy-band backpack. It wouldn’t get me through Armageddon, but―Wow! I hadn’t thought that one through. Armageddon. The word itself was too Hollywood, too biblical, to be real. I had always assumed Armageddon would simply be the end. Blackout. Boom! You’re dead! The idea that the end would actually be sufferable made no logical sense. This was more like a bad joke or, worse, a Roger Corman movie that had no ending.

  I desperately wanted to wipe the word from my vocabulary. I wanted to strike it, and any similar word, from my memory. Would that the mind worked that way. But there it was―Armageddon―stuck in my brain. And now that it was there, the possibility of Fiction Made Real began to make more and more sense.

  My hands were shaking. I wasn’t sure if it was from the meatball surgery or from the idea that humanity might very well have pulled back the trigger of the fuck-you gun while aiming the barrel at its own temple.

  Ultimately, none of that mattered now. The only immediate concern was finding somewhere safe to hide. I had to get out of this drugstore and find some fellow living humans.

  Outside, the ash was still falling. Maybe I had died and gone to Hell. I’ve seen plenty of renditions of Hell that smacked of this. Only problem was that I don’t believe in Hell, or Heaven for that matter. So the possibility of my having died and been reborn in a devilish, Satan-ruled afterlife was pretty slim.

  Back to the task at hand.

  Flaky was nowhere in sight. The newly-fallen ash had already covered up any footprints he might have left. I had no idea which way would be safe from the monsters. I decided it really didn’t matter which way I went.

  My next move? I had no idea. But I was prepared with my backpack on my back and no fucking idea which way to go. I decided to move forward. I couldn’t just stay in one place. Not only would my chances of survival significantly decrease, so would my chances of documenting this damnable story. After all, I had yet to win that ever-elusive Pulitzer, and documenting the Apocalypse might well be the closest I’ll ever come. I had to begin anew my trek to ground zero of the device that most likely had caused the planet to bend over and grab its ankles.

  The ash crunched under foot. There had to be three inches of the stuff already on the ground. Curiosity finally got the best of me, and I stopped by a parked Volkswagen, scooped up a handful, and brought it to my nose. Still no smell. I fought back the urge to taste the stuff. Instead, I tossed the handful into the air only to watch it disappear into its millions of falling brethren gently floating down from the sky.

  Chapter 5: Brain poi and a plea for help

  A loud screeching echoed from the building in front of me. The screeching shortened my spine and chilled my skin. I had two choices: I could turn the other way as if I never heard the sound, or I could investigate.

  Although the sound didn’t seem human, someone could have been hurt. I couldn’t just turn my back…or could I? Has everything devolved into self-preservation and nothing more?

  Shit, the noise was getting closer. Fast! This was too damn creepy.

  The screaming filled the sky with fear once again. The sound was like a chorus of demons. I quickly found a third option and scrambled under an abandoned truck. What I heard was not human. I had no desire to find out up close and personal what was capable of making that sound.

  I held my breath. The only sound I was making was the scratching of my pen on paper. The ash was still piling up around me. I watched, waited, and hoped like hell whatever it was would run on by. The hideous sound continued echoing around me. It sounded ape-ish or maybe like a Jurassic-era bird that had been ri
pped from the fabric of a past we humans would probably be best served to never see or know. Whatever it was, it was terrifying.

  Another roaring screech was followed by a crashing sound and the sound of my own heavy breathing.

  After another soul-sucking scream echoed through my skull, a pair of bare feet came to a bone-breaking stop beside the truck. It was make or break, live or die, right here and right now. The feet were human. I say human because the shape was human; there were ten toes, heels, ankles, and shins, but the color of the skin was not human, at least not living human. I had seen that color before. The only woman who had ever cared enough about me to take my last name had been murdered. Her body was dredged out of a local river after she had been raped and strangled. The color of her skin had been the color of fouled milk, and her veins had peered through it like blue spaghetti. It was a part of my past I had forced down so far, forgotten. It was almost another life. The memory did its best to force itself to the front of my brain. I knew it wasn’t something I could deal with right now. I hadn’t even thought about it for years, and yet there it was, threatening to ruin my chance for survival. I tried to force the images out of my mind, but there they lingered.

  That same color was what I was seeing, making me want to vomit, or weep, or both. And in that moment, every memory I had forced deep into the recesses of my brain came flooding back into my consciousness.

  She had been perfect. She was beautiful. She had so quickly become my entire world, and I hers. The moment I had laid eyes on her, the whole of the world’s problems had just eased away. I had her in my life for only a few glorious years before she was ripped away.