Simple. Easy.
Right?
A stretch of clear road opens in front of us. I take this opportunity to go a little faster. I don’t know what street we’re on, but we’re framed by tall buildings on both sides. Traffic lights have fallen into a few of them, making long gashes in their glass surfaces. On my left is a dead body—not a zombie, but a dead dead body. I see it out of the corner of my eyes despite not wanting to look. It’s like seeing a dog smashed in half on the road. You hate to see it, but you can’t take your eyes away from it, either.
This body isn’t fresh. The bones and what’s left of the flesh have long since rotted away. The bloodstains on the concrete have only faded slightly.
Lilly moans low in her throat, grips her rifle again.
So far, it’s the worse part of our trip to the Windy City, which is surprising in and of itself.
We come to a dead end on our right. It’s a parking deck that curls around and around, a place that probably cost fifteen or twenty bucks to leave your car there for a few hours once upon a time. The only way to go is left or back the way we’ve came. I take a look at the gas gauge. We’re floating somewhere between a quarter of a tank and empty. We have one extra can of gas in the backseat. Had to fill up about fifteen miles ago. This old Lincoln isn’t the best on gas mileage, but it was all we could get—and much better than the U-Haul would’ve been had it not been destroyed in the massive shootout on Bandit’s farm. We could fill up again, I know, but I don’t really want to get out of the car yet. There could be snipers posted on the high buildings or monsters lurking in the shadows.
Really, it’s the emptiness of this place that once held millions of people that gets to me…and the smell. The air is always tinged with rotting flesh. Knowing my luck, I’ll stop the car and not be able to get it started again, or I’ll get out and as soon as my boot hits the pavement, the dead will swarm. So I’ll take my chances with the quarter tank of gas, won’t fill up until I absolutely have to.
I slow down and begin to turn left.
Suddenly, Lilly lets out a low shriek, building into a full-on scream. I’m too shocked to do much of anything.
But I do manage to slam on the brakes.
26
A long, four lane street stretches out in front of us.
“Go back!” Lilly yells. “Go!”
I’m too frozen to do much of anything besides keep my foot pressed on the brake. On this road, streetlights line each side. The bulbs are long gone, I think, but that doesn’t matter. Fear is gripping me as hard as I’m gripping the steering wheel. Though I know I shouldn’t let it.
Bodies dangle from these streetlights. Groups of them, four or five to each light. They dangle low, reminding me of clusters of bananas you used to see at the grocery stores next to those shiny bowl-like scales. Chains are wrapped around the heads of those bodies that still have them, others dangle by their arms or their waists, slumped over.
Dead.
Their bloody faces and clothes stand out against the gray and black backdrop of the city buildings.
Now this wouldn’t be too bad, I guess, considering the things I’ve seen in my travels, but what gets me is the hundreds—no, thousands—of zombies below these dangling bodies. Almost every zombie has their hands up to the sky. They bat and swing at the low-hanging bait, apocalyptic fruit trees. The closest cluster of dead are about fifty feet from the Lincoln and when they hear the idling engine (which is entirely too loud in this quiet city) hundreds of golden eyes look in our direction.
A sudden jolt of pain in my arm. I’m dimly aware of it being Lilly’s hand. She’s graduated from holding her rifle to digging her fingers into my flesh. Somewhere in all of this confusion I think of getting a bruise. I hate being bruised.
“Go!” Lilly yells into my ear.
The zombies are slowly breaking away from the streetlights. Their arms come down almost one by one, like they’re doing the wave at a football game. Then the Domino Effect comes into play. The closer zombies have set off a chain reaction. As this group notices us, turns around, and starts shambling toward the Lincoln, so does the group behind them, and behind them, and so on.
A sudden burning on my face. The sound of skin connecting with skin. My eyes close and for this split second that they’re closed, I think everything will be gone when I open them, everything will be normal. Darlene will be back with Junior alive and smiling in her arms, the past two years will have never happened, the one-eyed man would’ve never attacked Haven and we’d all live happily ever after.
It’s a go-to fantasy of mine, I know. I can’t help it.
This isn’t the case, but as I do open my eyes, I realize I’m no longer frozen. Lilly has slapped the fear and shock right out of me.
I shift into reverse and my foot jumps from the brake to the gas. The screeching of the tires drown out the guttural groans of the horde—for the most part. As I start cutting the wheel to turn around and go back the way we came, the spare gives out on us with a muted pop.
The car rocks back and forth and for a moment I think we’re about to flip. Wouldn’t that just be my fucking luck?
It doesn’t happen, but I do lose control of the car. It spins out and the next thing I know the back of the car smashes into a nearby traffic light, taking out a blue USPS box in the process. Old paper flies into the air and comes down like snow.
Lilly and I fly forward. Her airbag comes out and softens her blow, but mine doesn’t and the steering wheel is there to greet me. Right in the face.
The world spins, goes black for a moment, and I’m willing myself to get it together, to resist the urge to pass out or die.
Glass breaks.
Snapshots of real life come to me. Speaking of snapshots, I think I’m somehow grabbing the locket that has come out from beneath my shirt. Then my eyes flutter and it’s like one of those old-time movie reels. Subliminal messages of the dead spliced into the film. Here’s a woman with half of her face eaten away, moving with a useless leg dragging behind her. Here’s a man with his neck broken, head dangling back and forth every time his feet touch the ground. Behind them are more. An old deteriorated fella with reading glasses hanging around his neck. A black man with a dingy gold necklace welded into his flesh, not dangling. Indiscernible faces of the dead. Zombies in ratty suits. Some in street clothes that have turned to rags. Greasy clumps of hair. Exposed innards. Guts hanging out of their stomachs like slimy snakes.
Then, the blackness again.
C’mon, Jack. You have to get up. You have to fight. You have to move! It’s Darlene’s voice, coming from somewhere deep in my subconscious.
I’m slipping.
JACK!
Slipping.
Dad. Wake up, Dad!
A new voice, the voice of my son.
“Junior,” I say with a croak. Blood floods my mouth and there’s a sharp pain in my forehead where the steering wheel broke my momentum—as well as my orbital bone.
Something touches my shoulder. It’s cold and wet. I turn my head in the direction of the touch, somehow.
There, glowing and radiant, is Junior. He has a wide smile on his face. He looks so much like Darlene. He’s got her eyes, her nose…
I smile back.
Groggily, I say, “Junior.”
He opens his mouth, those grinning teeth parting. No words come out. Just a gurgle. In fact, this noise has no emotion in it whatsoever.
Then it hits me as hard as the car has hit the traffic pole behind us. That’s not my son, that’s a zombie.
My heart leaps in my chest. Eyes open wider than they ever have. I’m back in the now, back in the terrible now. Zombies surround the car. The windshield is cracked wider than before, a jagged lightning bolt running across its width next to the stars from Suzanna shooting at the fleeing Bandit back at the farm. Lilly’s moaning. The sound is muffled. There’s bright red on the powdery white of the airbag. The driver’s side window has shattered, glittering shards are stuck in my cloak and em
bedded in my arms. The pain comes full-force now. I have to try to keep it at bay as I move my hand toward Lilly’s rifle. Where mine went I have no idea, but I do know that there’s a zombie sticking his moldy arms into the car, reaching for my throat.
Not even the adrenaline can keep the fire in my head from subsiding.
I grab the rifle. It feels like it weighs a million pounds, the heaviest thing I’ve ever lifted. Somehow, I do lift it. Maybe it’s now a natural motion, something my body will never forget, like breathing or blinking. The gun comes up. I’m trying to aim it at its face, sloughed-off skin, broken teeth. Can’t reach it. Not strong enough.
I pull the trigger and I lose control. The gun blasts off a succession of shots and each one lifts it higher. Blood splatters the inside of the Lincoln as this eager zombie is ripped apart. Then the next shot reaches its head. It pops with an explosion of red and black. The tang of rot and coppery blood fills the cab and my mouth.
Beside me, Lilly stirs, coming back to consciousness. The rifle’s burst of shots is an alarm clock, the most effective one I’ve ever heard.
“We gotta go,” I say. “Can you walk?”
“Oh,” she moans, “I think so.”
We don’t have much of a choice. I throw the door open and spill onto the pavement. Shards of glass dig through my pant legs, bite into my knees. The door acts as a shield from the other zombies for a time, enough for me to limp around the other side. Their collective weight would be no match for me and as I’m almost near Lilly’s door, my own door slams shut. The shield is down.
Lilly moves on her own volition…mostly. I have to help her out and it’s painful. I’m biting my tongue to distract from the pain.
A zombie reaches for me, grapples the back of my cloak. The cold chain around my neck with the picture of Darlene and Junior stretches. I spin around with almost as much speed as is normal and blast this zombie woman’s face to shreds. In the process, the bullets that don’t hit the mark take out three other stragglers.
I tell myself not to look up, not to see how many more are closing in on us, and let me tell you, that never works. It’s like saying don’t look down when you’re standing on the edge of a skyscraper.
“What about the weapons?” Lilly asks.
“Leave them,” I say. I push her in the direction of an alley. When I say leave the weapons, I meant the ones in the trunk. My sword is in the backseat, and I can’t leave that. So I lean into the car, against my better judgment, I might add, and grab the sheathed blade. Guns run out of ammunition eventually. The sword won’t.
27
By the time I reach the alleyway Lilly has disappeared to, the amplified moans reaching my ears, Lilly is already at the other end. She has stopped. She’s standing there with her back bent, looking like she’s in pain.
I catch up to her. I have to do my own zombie walk to make it, but I do.
She still hasn’t moved. This is starting to worry me, and right now, with the wall of dead closing in on us, I don’t need another worry added to my growing list of things to worry about.
“Lilly?” I say, surprised at how strong my voice sounds. I feel anything but strong right now. Luckily, I’ve been able to ride a wave of adrenaline, but it’s already depleting.
She doesn’t answer.
“I’m unarmed,” she says instead, and I’m wondering who she’s talking to. Can’t be me.
Then I see who it is.
My zombie shuffle comes to a stop about fifteen feet from the mouth of the alley. Vision isn’t what it used to be and nailing my head on the steering wheel didn’t help much, but a blind person could see the men and women who crowd around Lilly. They all have guns, big rifles like the kind we stole from Paul and Duane.
“You!” a man shouts. “You stop right there!”
Now, I’m no longer the Jack Jupiter I used to be, no longer that writer turned snarky action hero, but this close to the end, able to see the light at the other side of the tunnel, I think I have to be.
So I don’t stop, don’t listen to this asshole. Or at least, I don’t act like this is exactly what I want. Can’t let them know I want to get captured and taken to Abby. I turn around. The zombies stream in the opening where the Lincoln sits, crashed and forgotten. The image that comes to mind is of sand going through an hourglass. The slow drip of an IV. They are too smashed together, too eager to get at this reachable fresh meat, that they’re getting wedged between the buildings. I wonder what will give way first, the zombie’s rotten bodies or the brick. You may think that’s an easy question to answer, but seeing what I see, I know it’s not. They’re so many that the brick seems to swell until it can’t hold it much longer. Then these savage beasts trample each other, tearing off rotten flesh, exposing cranberry-red innards, sending brick dust into the alley.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” the same man says.
This time, I do stop. I put my hands up and turn around slowly.
“Always gets them,” this man says. He says it loud enough to be heard over the squelching and tearing and death rattling.
“Drop your weapons and come forward,” a woman says. She has prematurely gray hair and a face like a weathered headstone.
I do as she says. Lilly is looking at me out of the corner of her eyes, hands still raised, nose and lips still bleeding.
I walk up next to her and the man tells me to get on my knees and hold out my hands. I do this, too, only because that moaning and rattling is weighing heavy on my shoulders. I can feel this wave of death heading for the coast, ready to drown us all.
“All right, good. I like when people listen to me. It’s not often that that happens,” the man is saying. He takes handcuffs out and puts them harshly around my wrists.
“Don’t you think we can do this a little farther away from the dead?” I say. I’m not trying to be sarcastic. The man doesn’t like it. He snarls at me. This is a man who no longer fears the zombies, not even a horde like the one behind us.
“Idiots messed up the feeding frenzy,” the woman says.
“Don’t worry about it, Gina. Quincy has meat duty,” the man who handcuffed me says.
“Meat duty? Hell naw, I don’t got meat duty. It’s your turn, Mark,” this one known as Quincy says. He’s a young black man with a face as hard as stone.
“I’ll flip you for it.”
“No, ain’t no flippin when it’s your turn!” Quincy yells back.
Behind us, the zombies are closer.
Closer.
Always closer.
A rising panic hits me. It’s like two guys arguing on a set of train tracks while a freight barrels down on them. I have to speak up.
“Hey, can we move this along?” I say. “I don’t particularly want to be something’s dinner today.”
“Ain’t gonna matter much, man,” Quincy says. “Soon as we get back to ol’ Ab, y’all’s dead meat anyway.”
Ab. Abby. The sound of her name is enough to vanquish any of the panic and fear that has settled in me.
“Real nice,” Lilly says. “So much for manners.”
This raises a laugh from both the woman and the man with the other set of cuffs. He’s still chuckling as he slips them over Lilly’s wrists. I notice he doesn’t put them on her as tight as he did to me. Maybe he does have some manners.
“Seriously though, fellas,” Gina says, “they’re getting awfully close.”
Now that we’re both cuffed and unable to harm these District guards, Mark seems to relax a bit. He lowers his rifle, lets it hang on his shoulder, then raises his arms and shouts, “Bring those motherfuckers on! I’ll kill them all.”
Great, I think to myself, yet another psychopath to deal with.
“C’mon, Mark,” Gina says, her voice matronly.
The yell dies out and now Mark grabs his gun again. “I’m sorry,” he says to me.
And I look at him, confused. “For what? For doing your job—”
He raises his rifle up like a club. “For this.”
Waking up is painful. There’s a dull thudding in my head that I don’t think we’ll ever go away. I haven’t opened my eyes yet, not fully, but I know I’m back to consciousness. I guess the best way to describe what has happened is like being under anesthesia.
I’ve been under once before. They put the mask on me and have me count down and I start feeling cold all over, then boom, next thing I know I’m waking up in a different room with a fresh cut on my leg and a pin in my foot. Except, in this case right now, I wake up with nothing but a new knot on my head and a few less brain cells.
It takes me a moment to remember what exactly happened. All I really remember was a bunch of zombies, but that’s no different than much of anything in this world. There’s always zombies.
Opening my eyes doesn’t do much else in the way of making me comprehend what’s going on. I’m in some kind of conference room with a big glass wall on the end opposite of me. From the wall, I see some of Chicago’s skyline. All of the other skyscrapers, the medium-sized buildings, the dead cars which look like Matchboxes from up here. Each building, it seems, is missing pieces or has been charred by fire; each building looks at me with lifeless window-eyes. It’s a lonely and cold feeling that invades me. The whole city is diseased.
No, the whole world is diseased.
Only when I turn my head, which results in quite a few cracks and much pain, do I remember what has happened. The reason for this is Lilly. She’s sitting next to me in a cracked leather chair, something an executive of a Fortune-500 company might do business from. Funny when you think about that chair, really. How it once mattered, how it was once a sign of wealth and power and respect. Now it’s used to tie up nobodies in the zombie apocalypse.
This thought doesn’t help much in the way of that cold and lonely feeling, but seeing Lilly does. A familiar face is nice even if I hardly know her.
“Lilly,” I say, but it comes out like a whisper. I shake my head again. The pain hits me like a tidal wave.
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