by Bryan James
Eli’s hand tightened on mine as a creature stumbled forward, crossing perpendicular to us, merely five feet ahead.
More ripples were spreading across the moving water, disclosing movement underneath the deep water. The liquid was cold against our legs—and Eli’s torso—and I suppressed a shiver as three more wandered ahead of us at diagonal vectors, reaching and stumbling in the darkness, eyes searching for us in a hungry frenzy.
Swallowing hard, I slowed to a stop. The movement in the water behind us had become frantic and confused, the surface boiling with activity as heads and hands emerged suddenly, grasping for air, hoping for flesh.
The three ahead of us slowed to a stop, drawn now to the noise of those coming to the surface behind us.
Shit on a zombie stick.
The fuckers in back were going to draw those asshats toward us. Behind me, Eli’s fingernails were digging into my palm, as the three creatures stumbled toward us now, eyes still searching, faces drawn in a rictus of hunger and malevolence.
Okay then. It’s on.
Surging forward, pulling the boy from his feet, my blade flashed in the darkness, taking the first zombie in the neck, separating its head from its body in a single stroke.
Its companions, now infuriated by the sound of humanity that they could not locate, hissed and grasped, one of them managing to find my sword-arm and tangle my sleeve in its broken fingers. I shrugged off the brittle grasp as its head came within the radius of my next stroke, cursing as I simply leveled it with my elbow, sending it to its knees in the water with the force of the blow. It looked up as I raised my right leg, bringing my boot down on its upturned face, mangled skin and milky eyes separating as the thick sole crushed its skull.
The last creature shambled forward, arms reaching. Sidestepping and forcing Eli behind me again, I leveled my machete and swung forward, suddenly stopping the swing as it reached its spine.
No, I have something else planned for you, I realized.
My hand found its shirt, pulling the confused creature in a tight circle, and spinning it toward the far corner of the room, directing its energy away from us. A single boot to the back helped it along as it splashed loudly into the deep water, arms flailing and legs churning as it hissed and moaned.
I pushed Eli ahead of me now, watching as the creature pulled itself to its feet and was almost immediately pulled under the water by one of its friends, confused by the noise and the lack of light, unable to smell each other in the water. Several more peeled away from moving in our direction, following our decoy.
Eli’s hand was shaking in mine as we crossed the next thirty feet, stumbling slowly over obscured obstacles as we passed within several yards of at least ten more creatures, all activated and energized by the noise and the activity.
Finally, as we neared the raised stairwell reaching promisingly out of the darkness of the water, I began to take heart. We were nearly there.
My hand found the cold metal of the railing, and I pulled Eli up and out of the water, placing him on the dry ground of the cement platform and pushing away from the cold swirling flood. As I focused on the door ahead of me, my foot caught behind me and I turned to search for the obstruction.
Too late, I realized it was a hand, and I lost my footing while my other leg was grasped by another creature. Two more surged to the surface behind the first pair, mouths opening and brackish water draining from their rotten faces as they lumbered forward.
Thrashing, I tried to dislodge my ankles, but their grip was too secure. My machete had flown from my grasp when I fell, and behind me I heard Eli yell once, even as my hand searched for the handrail, desperate to keep me from sliding further into the water. The zombies’ heads shot forward, trying to bite through my moving legs.
Not now, I nearly screamed. We were so fucking close. I cursed loudly and screamed as I surrendered to the water and took the fight to the enemy.
Water closed in around my eyes and face, the cold nearly forcing the air from my lungs. Their grip on my legs had loosened, my sudden change in direction having confused them and shaken the iron grasp. But it was a short-lived victory. There were four of them here with me in the awkward space, the thick cold water inhibiting my movements and working to neutralize my superior strength and speed. But there were doubtlessly more coming. If I was going to survive, I had to move fast.
My rifle was still attached to my chest at the single point harness, but it was bent under my body awkwardly, pulled to the side and around my torso by the direction of my slide into the water. Next to me, the closest zombie had grasped my right arm and was pulling it up and out of the water. To my left, another was thrashing in place, arms darting into the darkness, searching for purchase on my flesh or clothes—anything that would lever me back up, to its waiting mouth.
Left hand slipping down to my calf, I managed to wrap my cold fingers around the hilt of the long knife strapped inside my boot, and I found a way to put my weight back on my feet. Just in time, as the other two creatures had joined the party.
Surging up and out, I exploded from the water, pushing a stiff-arm into the creature on my right, sending its bloated torso against the concrete wall behind, then spinning my left arm in a tight arc, taking the creature on my left in the temple with the knife. Crumpling with a hand on my arm, fingers spasming in final death, it pulled me slightly off balance and I spun further into the water, cursing as I met the embrace of a third zombie, its head flashing forward immediately.
Grimacing, I turned and used its momentum to send it down and away, left hand coming down on its skull as it slipped under my raised arm, knife coming away from the head matted with blood.
The last two came forward as one, hands raised and mouths agape. Without pausing, each of my hands found each of their throats, and they squirmed in my solid grip as I angrily pushed forward. Hands scrabbled against my arms as I slammed the two thrashing heads against the concrete wall.
The bones of the two skulls made a thick, dull cracking sound and I felt the energy of the undead drain from each, like I had siphoned the gas from their tanks.
Tossing the bodies into the water, I hurried up the stairs, sparing a single kick for the next group of creatures that was pushing forward, forced into a funnel at the bottom of the stairs. Ahead of me, Eli had his bag open and was staring in my direction.
“Mike?” he asked, voice shaking but even. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” I managed, recovering my machete from the platform near Eli and sheathing the knife. The larger blade went back into its sheath as well, as I charged my carbine and faced the water behind us. My right hand moved from the gun to the door, finding the handle and pushing the lever down. Begrudgingly, the handle moved, creaking and groaning in the darkness.
“Are there more behind you?”
Grunting, I pulled my eyes back away from the stairs as I struggled with the door.
“Yeah kid, hold on…”
“Close your eyes,” he said curtly. Before I had time to ask why, I heard motion beside me, and then a bright light invaded the dark space.
Five zombies had managed to surge forward from the water below, fumbling their way up the stairs as I pulled on the door, finally seeing a sliver of light appear between the door and the frame. I closed my eyes as the unbearable brightness of a halogen bulb burst from Eli’s hand.
The creatures’ moans turned to startled and angry hisses, their eyes dilating and closing in response, the front-most creatures tumbling back in disorientation as their meager ability to see was overloaded by the sudden bright light.
Genius, this kid.
He bought us the time we needed.
Devoting both hands to the door, I felt it loosen as it opened wider, and I physically threw the child out of the opening before stepping through myself. Slightly disoriented, I squinted in the light. The door opened into a small clearing approximately fifty feet down a very steep hill from the entrance I had come through earlier in the day. A narrow bu
t well-kept trail led off straight in front of us, sheltered by looming trees and thick shrubbery.
I had initially planned on my large blade, intending on narrowing the exit somehow, and taking the emerging creatures one by one as they boiled out of the doorway.
But I had to adapt. There were too many coming up at once, now, I knew. It had to be the gun. Which meant noise. I spared a glance for the surrounding hills and prayed that the echoes in the valley would disperse the sound effectively.
“Watch that trail and watch that hill,” I said, pointing to the walkway and the steep hill to our right. To our left the hill continued down to the gorge below, and I doubted that we had to worry about zombie attacks coming up the steep incline.
“I’m going to make some noise.”
He nodded in the darkness, then turned away.
Hoping that my rifle would still fire after the aquatic adventures inside, I sited on the first creature and started blasting as the soggy undead poured from the exit.
***
Thirty-two.
I know because I counted the bodies as I pulled them away from the doorway, dragging their smelly, useless carcasses into the woods and away from the door so that the rest of the group could leave the building post-haste.
The doorway had funneled them exactly as I had expected, and I was able to take one at a time with careful shots from ten feet away. This part of the plan, at least, had gone like clockwork.
As they stacked up against one another in the small space, the work had gotten easier. I had only had to pull bodies out of the way once to allow more to surge forward. All of them were water-logged, half-blind and bloated like engorged whales—but they were all fearfully hungry.
The shots fired echoed off the walls of the small gorge, and I was content with the fact that they wouldn’t be traceable by any but the most acoustically sophisticated zombie.
I would have given my kingdom for a suppressor, but since no one was offering that deal—and I was a man conspicuously lacking in the kingdom department—so I figured I could make do with the noise of my rifle dispersing into the confines of the small canyon below the lurking form of the dam.
While I worked, Eli had modified his watch duty to a half-sentry, half-bookworm kind of deal, sitting on a rock and keeping half an eye on the path and another half on a small reading light in a huge book that he had pulled from his bag.
I wasn’t sure if the kid was Asperger’s or just scarred from his experiences, but I was cutting him some slack after his trick with the light inside the pump room of certain death, merely fifteen minutes before. I squinted in the light, trying to make out the title of the book as I hauled the last body—a generously proportioned mechanic named Stu, according to his convenient name tag—into the woods.
“Sorry Stu,” I muttered, wiping my brow with my wet sleeve, then grimacing as I remembered what had been swimming in the water with me. “Guess it wasn’t your day.”
A sharp noise in the woods drew my head around, and I moved to Eli quickly, dousing his light and squatting down, pulling my carbine around and checking the magazine. He looked up at me, then around, as if he had missed something.
I shook my head and made a gesture to the woods, then checked the path. It was time to leave.
“We’re going to go slowly up this path. If Rhi was right, it should connect up to the main road around this bend, then we move across the dam and grab the explosives. You okay?” I noticed him cocking his head, as if listening to something else.
His eyes were wide and staring as he looked back at me, and he didn’t move for nearly ten seconds. Then he suddenly slammed his book shut and stuck it in his bag. As he did so, I saw the title.
He stood up and started walking down the road.
“So what’s with the light reading?” I asked in a whisper, checking behind us and scanning the woods as we moved out.
“It’s not light,” he said seriously.
“I know, it’s an expression. A joke.” Just my luck, I lamented quietly. I keep getting saddled with people who lacked any detectable sense of humor. But I was curious.
The Encyclopedia of Mechanical, Physical and Chemical Sciences was not something most kids carried around for fun.
“Oh,” he said, not bothering to whisper. “Well in that case, why’d the chicken cross the road?”
I nearly tripped.
Well looky here…maybe there was something underneath that weird exterior.
“I don’t know, why?”
He chuckled awkwardly, his voice too loud as if he were forcing it.
“To give the kid with the eidetic memory a big book that allows him to solve post-apocalyptic problems for adult dummies with no clue about how stuff works.”
He didn’t pause. Didn’t stop walking. Just kept going forward, eyes locked on some point ahead. I paused, my brain jumpstarting to make the connection.
Eidetic.
Was that some sort of amnesia? No, that wasn’t it.
It was a language…like Persian or something, right?
No. That was Amharic.
Crap.
Was it a type of cat? A Peruvian lemur?
“You would recognize it if I said photographic?” he asked, throwing it back over his shoulder.
Why, yes, Mr. Smarty pants, I would.
“But it’s a little bit of a misnomer,” he continued, voice still flat. “I don’t remember things like a picture. I read them and just … remember.”
We had reached a sharp bend and I pulled ahead and put my arm out, scanning the thick brush and the trail as he spoke quietly.
“I’ve always had it. Was kind of a parlor trick … before. My mom and dad …” he paused, as most kids would, and should, if remembering their recently deceased parents. “They always said I was special. But it was never so apparent until after everything went sideways.”
As we climbed, I watched as the sun sank quickly beneath the mountains, a dull orb behind the clouds of ash and dust in the air. The light began to fade quickly, and I hoped absently that the moonlight would be ample enough to outline the open door to the pump room and signal the group that it was safe to pass.
The path had washed out ahead in several places, and a large tree had toppled in the upheavals of late. I helped pull him up and over the thinnest portion of the tree as I listened for more movement. The air was still and cold—colder than it should be.
I knew it was due to the volcanic activity, and I unconsciously looked up, scanning for the glowing red embers in the distance that marked the simmering behemoths.
“I can imagine,” I said, nodding at the backpack. “Is that all books?”
He just nodded solemnly.
“It’s heavy, but it’s better than carrying water or guns. At least I can sit down and read when I have time. Can’t do that with water. Or guns.”
The path opened up in twenty feet and I stopped, motioning to the child to kneel on the ground. I put my hand to my mouth and signaled for quiet. We needed to be careful here. We didn’t want to attract any from the road down this path, and we sure as hell didn’t want them following us across the bridge.
The woods were silent to our right, and the only noise to our left was the distant roaring of the waters sluicing through the ravine down below. I spared a glance for the now totally exposed dam behind us, and noted the multiple long, jagged, lightning bolt-shaped cracks in the thick cement. Like snakes climbing a wall, they covered the structure, making me wonder how the building was still intact.
Well, we could fix that real soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
If not now, then when...?
The night air was crisp and cool. Colder, in fact, than it should have been. Even in the late fall in the Northwest, she shouldn’t be able to see her breath mist before her eyes. Her vision was drawn inexorably toward the glowing and angry forms of the volcanoes in the far distance. Volcanoes that had, until recently, been masquerading as peaceful mountains and tranquil ski resorts. T
his was undoubtedly the next step in the planet’s slow journey to destruction. She knew enough from high school science and the Discovery Channel to appreciate the implications of massive volcanic upheaval.
Ash would fill the sky, blacking out the sun. The lack of sunshine would slowly kill plants that relied on this energy to survive, while the earth cooled more rapidly. Days would be hazy and dark. Nights would become cold. Temperatures would continue to drop.
Darkness would reign until the vast primordial giants had their say. Days. Weeks. Years. Eons. There was no way to tell. And the longer they spit ash into the air, the more dire the prediction for the planet’s future.
Everything was connected. This disaster would be felt in China. In India. In Australia. As the ash made its way into the ever-circulating currents of upper atmospheric winds, it would spread. Held aloft indefinitely by its constant source and oscillating drafts of petulant breeze, it would push its way across oceans, over continents, and through the long-gone borders of every nation. Soon, the earth itself would be cooler than it had been in millennia. Plants would die and the animals that relied upon them would perish as well. And when that happened, the zombies would rule the earth.
Her mood took her thoughts to dark places of pessimism and fatalist existentialism. All this struggle, all this angst. And now, it might be for naught.
As she made her way across the now-quiet circle in the middle of the camp, eyes adjusting quickly to the darkness as she honed in on her tent between the trees, mid-way between the admin building and the edge of forested darkness, she allowed herself to shiver. It wasn’t just the cold that had gotten under her skin.
She felt dirty. Used.
It was the memory of her time in a loveless marriage. The memory of suffering the touch of someone with whom she didn’t share a bond of love, in the service of a larger good.
Then, it was a vain effort to keep her family together. Now, it was in service of her ability to soldier on and continue her sole mission in life. To find her daughter.