by Nick Cole
Now I just need to keep them busy and focused on me, thought Holiday. He brought the scope up to his eyes. Both groups had merged at the bottom of the hill. They were struggling up it en masse. He lowered the rifle into them, the powerful scope making them seem freakishly close and jerky. He aimed into the broken-toothed grin of one of the climbers and fired.
Click.
He checked the rifle, found the SAFTEY and pushed it forward. He aimed again into the bobbing, working mouth of another zombie, pulled the trigger, and felt a powerful blast of recoil in his shoulder. He had no idea if he’d hit the zombie he’d intended. He peered over the scope, his shoulder bone already aching. He could see a downed zombie being trampled underneath the feet of its surging comrades.
But that’s not what I’m really doing here, he reminded himself. I’m not here to take them out. I’m here to get their attention.
He aimed again and fired, this time striking a zombie in the shoulder, who tumbled back onto another climbing the lower slope. A moment later, its shoulder missing as jagged white bone surrounded by black gore leaped out in the scope, it began to climb upward again.
Aim for the head, Holiday told himself. Distantly he heard a car engine down below. He raised his scope and scanned the roads. Nothing.
He took aim at a zombie that had suddenly stood up mid-slope. It waved its arms frantically as though it were threatening, reaching for, grabbing at Holiday, and at the same time trying to keep itself from falling backwards. It was a young woman, twenty something, ponytail bobbing listlessly in the sunlight, pale scabbed skin wretchedly revealed in the closeness of the scope, as her teeth and jaw worked in black-crusted anger, the gore between the spaces creating the effect of bad oral hygiene. Holiday aimed for her still perfectly shaped head, the desired shape of every twenty something college coed, rising off a slender sculpted neck, and fired. The bang of the rifle had carried the scope off her, and when he centered it on her again, he could see a gaping hole in her stomach as her snakelike intestines spilled out onto the dry brown grass of the hill. She continued to wheel her hands about until she fell forward. Then she too began to crawl with the rest of them up the hill toward Holiday.
Ritter’s car raced through the parking lot, jumped a curb, landed on a still-vibrant green belt between the buildings and skidded, almost smacking into the side of the corporate headquarters of Lolli-Quick Industries. Ritter gunned the engine, churning up grass until the wheels caught, and pulled the Cutlass forward.
Some of the zombies on the hill were reacting to the sound of the Cutlass’s surging engine. As they turned to its noise they fell face forward, downslope, in their first step back toward Ritter and the still-closed door.
“What…” wondered Holiday, was Ritter doing making all that noise. It’d ruin the whole plan. Then he saw. At the entrance to the parking lot a new crowd of zombies, un-countable, surged up the driveway and into the business park.
Ritter skidded to a halt in front of the door. He honked the horn twice. Loud, too loud. Urgently.
Nothing happened.
Ritter honked again. Leaning on it.
Suddenly the door banged open and three figures, a large black man, a skinny kid, and a woman in heels and navy blue power suit came running out.
The crowd of zombies surged across the parking lot. Lunging forward. Holiday checked the zombies climbing the hill. Some were stumbling back toward Ritter and company, but the rest were still fixed on him. They could see Holiday standing at the top of the hill, banging away at them with the massive rifle. They gnashed and growled at him as they drew closer, crawling on hands and knees, nearing the top, their collective roar the whispering hiss of the surf withdrawing back across the sand. The nearest of them was a mere twenty feet away and struggling furiously to get up the last of the slope.
Promachœ
The word leapt out in Holiday’s mind, its meaning hidden. But he knew it had something to do with being brave. Brave enough to… what, he asked himself. The zombies in front of him were a closing wall of horror.
Now he knew exactly what the strange word meant.
Brave enough to stand in the front rank of the battle.
Just as he was doing now, instead of running.
Holiday pushed the word from his mind and checked the Ritter situation below. Zombies surged across the parking lot, pushing others down as they crossed onto the sidewalk and then into the green swatch of daily overwatered grass between the buildings.
Windows inside the building the three had just run from shattered as zombies hurled themselves mindlessly through the glass, only to fall to the grass and sidewalk in sickening thuds as they lunged for the three survivors racing for Ritter’s Cutlass. One of the zombies even managed to stand after falling from the second floor. A skinny kid with long hair and blood-crusted jeans, a t-shirt ripped to tatters.
Car doors were flung open and closed in almost the same instant, as the three slid into the waiting Cutlass. Ritter gunned the engine and the wheels spun mud and grass into the oncoming zombies loping up from the parking lot.
The car refused to move, and instead continued to churn landscape into the faces of the clustering undead mob.
Ritter threw the Cutlass in reverse as the first of the parking lot zombies neared the rear bumper. The car lurched backward and knocked a few zombies into others throwing themselves forward onto the stuck car as it rocked backward. One seemed trapped beneath the rear bumper.
More and more zombies swarmed the main entrance, pouring through it like an unending flood. Holiday knew that if they didn’t move soon they’d be cut off.
“Get out of there!” Holiday screamed down at them. Then he saw the hill crawlers were closer than he’d ever anticipated them to be, back when he’d hatched the plan.
The zombie kid who’d fallen through the Green Front second-story window crossed in front of Ritter’s car and smashed his hands through the side passenger window, grabbing at whoever was in that seat, as even more zombies clutched and crawled up onto the rear of the rocking car. Holiday knew that if he didn’t do something, the car would be rat-piled in a few more seconds.
But what could he do from here?
He raised the sniper rifle and landed the cross hairs of the scope on the zombie kid with the long hair flailing away at the broken glass on the passenger side of the Cutlass.
Nearby, the hill crawlers grunted raspy murder.
Focus, he screamed inside himself.
Holiday fired, sending the bullet right through the front windshield. Ritter’s car gave one final heave forward, after rebounding from the mob at the rear bumper and then pulled forward, leaping suddenly away and into a few hill crawlers who’d turned back toward the car. Ritter sideswiped another one as he drove back toward the alley.
Holiday knew Ritter had seen that the mob at the front entrance had cut them off and that it would be impossible to leave that way. Halfway down the alley, Ritter stomped on the brakes, sending white smoke up from the rear tires.
The rear entrance was blocked by a solid steel arm that had been lowered across the narrow exit road on one of the last days of civilization. There would be no way out for them other than through the lowered gate, and Holiday doubted anyone would get out of the car to raise it as zombies swarmed into the alley behind them.
Holiday lowered the rifle and ran without thinking as zombies crawled, bloody hand over mangled hand, onto the top of the hill. He slung the sniper rifle across his back and dodged through the first rank of zombies. His hands felt empty as they pulled at the air, willing himself forward and down the hill into the surging mass of undead.
He didn’t know if the zombies were tumbling down the hill behind him, landing pell-mell, relentlessly continuing on. Had they become suddenly faster, more agile? Inside Holiday’s head, his fears showed him pumping gray legs and necrotic hands reaching out, just steps behind him.
Holiday didn’t care, he only knew he needed to get them out of the alley.
And that’s when he heard the voice in his head as he charged downhill toward the alley.
“Move yer butt, maggot. You’re dead, you’re worthless!”
Chapter Twenty Eight
Ritter swerved in reverse, trying hard to miss the shufflers who stumbled into the alley, trying to intercept him before he could make it back out to the parking lot.
He hadn’t seen the swarming mass at the main entrance. Instead he’d merely gone for the alley because it was right in front of him and looked like a good way out of the living cemetery he’d been in for a week. He’d quickly realized his mistake once he saw the steel arm guarding the narrow exit road and backed out of there. He smashed through a line of corpses then careened across the grassy landscape, a gaggle of gray-fleshed lurchers waving and clutching as he fishtailed the butterscotch and blood-spattered Cutlass. Another group flooded out of the Green Front Technology headquarters, streaming into the parking lot as Ritter veered left, going wide.
That’s when he saw that they were cut off. That they were trapped. Dante yelled at him as a corpse smashed into the windshield. Ritter mashed the accelerator and circled the entire parking lot, looking for another way out of the crawling, writhing, end of the world hellhole that was once an office park, kicking himself for ever coming back.
There wasn’t one. They were cut off.
In back, someone was screaming. Skully, he thought. Candace was telling the kid to calm down, as Skully repeatedly screamed, “Is it bad?”
The windshield now had a large bullet hole and concussive spider webs circling outward from the epicenter of the impact. Skully had been shot.
“What the hell happened to you?” Dante barked in Ritter’s face from the passenger seat, his voice hoarse and ragged, his hands covered in bloody gore as he slammed them onto the dashboard. He was holding the fractured stub of a Green Front, ergonomic, state of the art desk leg. It was badly dented and covered in blood.
“Got cut off…” Ritter mumbled and spun the wheel hard to avoid a cluster coming at them from the left, “… back in the alley, Loc. Over there,” he said, grunting as he mashed the accelerator, indicating the far side of the building they were just passing. The exact spot where he hadn’t run into the swarm of zombies.
One of them came racing out of a nearby office building. It was faster than any of the zombies he had seen so far. A woman, disheveled and screaming. Behind her a few others lumbered out the open door, following her.
Ritter clipped her with the side of the car, just as she screamed, “Wait!”
“That’s another survivor!” shouted Dante, his voice ragged and croaking.
In the side mirror, Ritter could already see the zombies who’d followed the woman out the door of whatever that corporate headquarters had once been, falling onto her prone body.
That’s why they’d been clustered in the alley, thought Ritter. She’d been in there, surviving, the whole time.
“Too late now,” muttered Ritter, as he yanked the car to the right again at the end of the parking lot, braked hard, then mashed the accelerator to the floor, pushing away other darker thoughts of responsibility.
Holiday made the landscaping at the bottom of the hill when the voice inside his head yelled at him again. He knew it was the voice of an older man. A tough man. A man made of iron.
“You’re gonna need a weapon, maggot!”
Even Holiday had to admit, after completely missing both zombies with the machine gun back at the downed chopper and his shooting on the hill, he was not the best person to be using firearms.
“A real weapon, maggot.”
Holiday thought of the Guy Fieri knife tucked in his belt. He knew it wouldn’t do.
Ahead of him, a gardener, a young Hispanic man, bloodstained and dirty, stood up from the tall grass along the slope. A pole had pierced his mid-section. The pole had a long serrated knife with a wicked tip at the end. Holiday had seen gardeners use this to prune tall trees. Someone, one of the other gardeners, must have used it on the guy when he turned.
Holiday stopped, his breath coming in halting gasps. He was quickly being surrounded. The mass at the entrance was swarming into the mob coming from the building. The hill climbers were tumbling down the hill, landing with rough thuds behind him, then getting up. In a moment, Holiday knew he’d be completely cut off too.
He watched as Ritter careened through the parking lot.
The gardener lumbered for Holiday, the pole sticking into the ground and bouncing the gardener away from him.
Zombies began to fill the alley from the far end. Now they were heading toward him. The rear exit lay halfway down the narrow space behind the buildings.
Holiday waved his arms frantically at the speeding car. On the next pass Ritter saw him and mashed the brakes, his face incredulous. Worried too.
“Follow me!” roared Holiday and turned back to the dead gardener. He pulled the pole from out of the gaping stomach wound of the dead man and raced toward the alley. He could hear Ritter behind him, gunning the car in reverse.
Holiday ran hard for the gate. Ahead of him a rank of zombies filled the alley, reaching out for him, stumbling to meet him somewhere near the middle.
Holiday blocked out the sound of Ritter’s racing engine. He had to concentrate now on getting the gate open. He’d only get one chance to save them.
“Where’s your shield, maggot? How ya gonna protect the man on yer left, you worthless idiot?”
Holiday loped forward, his right hand held the gardener’s pruning hook naturally, his left hand felt naked. He drew the Guy Fieri knife and held it out high and above.
The first zombie met him before the gate.
“AIM FOR THE HEAD!” roared the grizzled voice.
Without thinking, Holiday shot the pruning hook forward and smashed it into the pulpy skull of the flailing dead man. It went down with a gurgled strangle.
Another one of the dead things was on him. Holiday swiped high with his knife and slashed the thing’s throat. It backed away from the sheer force of the cut, stumbling backwards. Holiday shifted his feet, raised his spear back over his shoulder and drove it into the thing’s unprotected and already mauled face.
The butterscotch Cutlass raced down the alley with all the zombies in the world, or at least that’s what it looked like to Holiday as he turned and saw what was behind the oncoming car.
Another three zombies came at him. He gave ground while jabbing hard at the leader. He felt the iron bar at his back.
Ritter screeched to a halt steps away from the gate.
Holiday dropped the leader with the next strike, reared back and struck the one behind it right in the throat. The pruning hook went straight through the column of gray flabby flesh and struck bone. Holiday heard a Craack as the head flopped backward. The thing went down almost on top of the other.
The last one grabbed onto Holiday’s chest and bent Holiday backward over the gate.
The thing’s foul breath whisper-rasped in his face. Up close it was a hoary young woman. Ragged, wispy, eyes milk-white. Her skin was gray.
“If the enemy wants it so bad, then let him have his way!”
The voice again. The roaring, tough bark that sounded like nails tumbling in a rusty oil drum filled with Drano gone bad. But Holiday knew what the voice meant, so he let himself fall backward over the bar as th
e thing on his chest flipped up and above him and landed on its back on the other side of the gate. Holiday scrambled to his feet, righted the spear and jabbed it quickly into the back of the once-woman’s skull.
Ritter leaned hard on the horn.
Holiday turned, fumbled with the release latch and then heaved on the gate. It flew skyward of its own accord and banged hard on some other surface with a metallic clang. Ritter pulled forward as the rear door opened, zombies surging down the alley, nearing the back of the blood-spattered car. Holiday flung the spear at the nearest oncoming zombie and landed it in the thing’s concave chest. It fell backwards into the surging mass and disappeared.
Inside the car, a raven-haired woman in a business suit shot Holiday an angry look over her shoulder as she turned back to a bleeding kid in the back seat. She moved over, causing the kid to scream as she suddenly crushed into him.
“Told you I’d come get ya, thirsty man” said Ritter. “Oh, and you shot Skully, nice move, Wyatt Earp.”
Holiday climbed in awkwardly, leaning forward with the rifle strapped to his back. He turned toward Skully and said, “Sorry.”
Skully looked at him, eyes wide and rolling. His face was bloodless, his skin thick with sweat.
A large black man in the front passenger seat gave Holiday a look filled with instant disgust, then turned away. Already the acceleration of Ritter’s driving was pressing them backwards as they fled down the rear entrance road, leaving the undead crowd far behind. Skully groaned.
“Where to next, thirsty man?”
Holiday led them in an indirect route back up into Viejo Verde. They passed strip malls and shopping centers that were quiet and deserted. There were very few zombies up here now. Maybe most of them had begun making their way downhill, following the natural contour of the land. Holiday directed Ritter to cross under the toll road and turn near the Target, then Holiday told Ritter to slow down.