by Fuchs, A. P.
Memories filled with April, the girl that he knew for only a weekend.
It had been a three-day blip on the radar, three days that changed his life.
He had never been in love before, and who would have thought the girl with the rich black hair and liquid-smooth gray eyes who’d plunked herself down across from him while he was scribbling in his notebook at Second Cup would change everything? At the time, she had only wanted to get away from her controlling boyfriend, Dan.
Joe—Joseph then—and April were never an item.
That weekend had been a one-off thing, but one that nailed him so deeply that he couldn’t help but write it all down and record every moment.
She had got to him that weekend, dug deep in a way no one else had. For a time afterward he thought he’d let her work out some of things she had going on, then, at some point, wait outside her apartment to see how she was doing. But that day never came. Each time he had thought of it, the fear of possible rejection consumed him. Instead, he found himself rereading the manuscript detailing their weekend together, a poetic memory that ripped his heart out each time.
When the dead began to rise and hell opened its gates, she was the first person he thought of. Not his family. Not his friends. Her.
Joseph had run through the rain from his place all the way to hers, the streets too cluttered with crashed cars and panicking people for him to get there by bus. The front glass door to her apartment building had been locked so, using his elbow, he smashed the glass, went in, and did the same to the second glass door beyond. He hadn’t known her apartment number, she never told him, so he shouted her name up and down the halls only to be met by screams, growls and the sick, sloppy sound of the dead feasting on flesh.
At the top floor, a little Spanish girl no more than six in a green and blue flower-patterned dress sat crying up against a wall in the hallway.
Joseph ran over to her. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said softly. “Where’s your mom and dad?”
The girl kept balling.
The door to the suite just beside her was open. When Joseph peered in, a pair of dismembered legs lay strewn on the floor in an L shape.
He picked up the girl. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”
The girl still cried as he carried her.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
After a few sobs, she said, “Lila.”
“Lila. Hi, I’m Joseph.” A pause, then, “I’m looking for someone. Do you know where a lady named April lives?”
Lila nodded and pointed to the suite at the front corner of the hallway.
Joseph smiled, but he wondered how he was going to manage carrying Lila and checking up on April at the same time.
A low and gurgled wheeze rose up behind him.
He turned around and a long arm with a gray hand reached out and gripped the girl around the skull, snatching her from him.
“Hey!” Joseph screamed.
The dead Hispanic before him, probably the girl’s father, stared back with a pair of eyes that were fogged over white. The man snapped the child’s neck then bit into her throat.
“NO!” Joseph screamed.
The man sunk to his knees and feasted on Lila’s tiny body.
April . . .
He looked at Lila, her broken body limp in the man’s arms, blood running over her dress.
I’m sorry.
Joseph ran to the end of the hallway and kicked open April’s door.
His heart stopped in his chest and time stood still. This couldn’t be happening. Not her. Not like this. Girls like her grew up to be princesses. Girls like her deserved a fairy tale.
They didn’t deserve to die.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in the landing was April. Her head was bowed; her normally wavy and shiny black hair was slicked with blood and goopy flesh. It hung like a beaded curtain over the corpse of an old woman in her lap.
The wet slurping sound of meat and skin being sucked on like noodles became Joseph’s only consciousness.
“April . . .” he whispered.
She looked up, a piece of trachea dangling from her mouth, blood dripping from her chin. Her white eyes softened, as if she recognized him, then she went back to her meal.
Heart pounding, sharp aches threatening to steal his soul away, Joseph just stood there, one dead man devouring his daughter in the hallway, the love of his life sitting before him eating another.
He didn’t know how long he stood there staring at her, but was soon drawn out of the bizarre mesmeric hold she had on him by a shadow in his right peripheral.
A dead man with white eyes walked slowly toward him.
It was Dan.
April must have gone back to him and worked things out.
Joseph would recognize him anywhere, recognize the fellow who had caused April so much grief.
At first the bullet hole at the top of Dan’s forehead didn’t register. Neither did the blown-out portion of the front of his mouth. How Dan wound up like that, Joseph didn’t know and the fleeting thought of it being self-imposed before the dead began to rise crossed his mind.
Eyes glazed over, lower lip quivering, Joseph cursed himself and clenched his fists.
His heart broke then, the shards from its bursting apart spiraling out in a blast of glassy pain, stabbing him everywhere within.
Dan had killed April. Had turned her into one of them.
Limbs trembling, Joseph squeezed his eyes shut and let the tears leak out. There was nothing left for him. The hope of a future with April was gone.
He envisioned himself walking over to Dan and letting April’s boyfriend take him.
“I love you,” he whispered to her.
He opened his eyes, half expecting April to be normal again and for her to have heard him. Instead she sat there, still eating.
Dan was only a few feet away, his beefy arms held out, about to grab him.
Joseph let himself die inside.
His expression hardened and he turned and faced Dan. A stream of profanities raced through his mind and nearly spewed out of his lips. But Dan wasn’t worth it. Not even worth cursing at.
The second Dan moved to grab him, Joseph swatted his arms away, ran to April’s kitchen and ripped out each of the drawers in the hopes of finding a knife. Something hard dropped and smacked the linoleum with a loud thunk!
A rolling pin.
Dan appeared in the kitchen doorway.
Joseph lunged at him and brought the rolling pin down on his head. Dan stumbled back a step and before he could regain his balance, Joseph struck him again. On the third blow, the skull split, and on the fourth, brain and blood began spattering out. Even after Dan’s body hit the floor, Joseph still wailed on him until his head was nothing more than a mishmash of bone, blood and brain.
Hard fingers grabbed him by the forearm and yanked him partway off Dan’s body. Instinctively, Joseph swung out with everything he had and it was only when his eyes made contact with the tip of the rolling pin did he watch its end strike April in the side of the head, sending her skull flying into the wall beside them. It hit with a wet smack, stuck there a moment, then slid off with a smear of blood. April’s body crumpled to the ground, a pool of dark blood gathering around her head.
“April! No! Please, no. Not her. Not you. No!”
He scrambled over to her body and grabbed her by the shoulders. When he picked her up and turned her over in his lap, her head lolled back, eyes open, blood gushing ever more from the side of her head and out the corners of her mouth.
Rage burst out of him in a stream of terror and he screamed at the top of his lungs until his voice went hoarse and he started to cough.
Then he screamed again, over and over, until his voice went raw and he could no longer breathe.
Joseph remained in April’s apartment well into the night, listening to the sirens outside and panicked screams from those in the building as they watched their loved ones butchered by the walking dead before th
ey themselves were consumed.
It took him two days to finally come home. Two days of walking the city streets, lost in a haze of pain and confusion and fear. Two days of not eating but witnessing from afar the undead feasting on anyone they could get their hands on.
Two whole days in the rain.
When he finally arrived home, he locked the door, took a baseball bat to bed and cried himself to sleep, dreaming of killing April, waking, dreaming of killing her again.
Joe awoke the next evening, leaving Joseph behind in that place of nightmares.
Dead, like everyone else.
2
Midnight Meeting
The only thing Billie had to go on to distinguish night from day was the clock. Long gone was the time when day and night were divided by sunny skies and a moonlit black quilt.
It was 11:40 p.m.
Billie pulled her cereal bowl from the sink, gave it a quick rinse, then poured the last bit of Cap’n Crunch into it. She opened the fridge and pulled out the milk carton and began to pour it into the bowl. Only a drop came out.
She grunted. “Great. Just great.” She eyed the bowl of cereal and debated eating it dry, but this was Cap’n Crunch she was talking about. Without milk, it was like trying to crunch through tiny razor-edged blocks of wood.
She tossed the empty carton into the garbage bin by the door and went to her computer and logged onto a chat program, hoping her buddy was online. ZW1 was. She right-clicked on his name and sent him a private message:
i’m coming over. out of moo juice. be there in 15.
A moment later, ZW1 replied: yep. knock 4 times. 2 stomps.
She typed: gimme 3 stomps back and a slap.
ZW1: k.
Billie padded her jean pockets and made sure she had her keys.
She left her apartment, locked up, and headed outside.
Before the plague hit—if a “plague” was what it was; the creatures just appeared the day of the gray rain—she used to go for late-night walks all the time. It was part of her pre-bed ritual, a time to clear her head and just have some alone time before coming back home and falling asleep. Nowadays, late-night walks were done only out of necessity and though, right now, she couldn’t call a milk run a matter of life or death, she could really use the company. It had been at least a month if not longer since she last saw anybody. All her communication was done online. And it’d been equally long since she heard another human’s voice, seeing as how the phone lines were no longer in service. She didn’t have a mike or headset for her computer.
The night air chilled her, the canopy of gray clouds that had covered the earth having completely thrown the planet’s climate into a state of perpetual fall. It should be winter right now, but instead the grass, though dead and withered from lack of sunlight and water, was still out. The trees were mere skeletons of their previous forms; bushes and shrubs cold and lifeless, just dry, crooked branches crisscrossing this way and that. The clouds above blocked everything. No rain. No snow. The air dry and always cool. Billie often wondered what might happen should the clouds either dissipate or give way. Had the rain or snow gathered on top of them and lay there dormant, waiting to fall and blanket the earth? And if it did fall, what kind of storm would it be? Surely nothing could be worse than what was happening right now. Then again, what moisture that could be up there could be enough to wipe the remnant of humanity off the planet.
There was no one alive to give answers. Not anymore. For a time each country’s military rose to fight off the dead, and for a time, each one fell at the hands of the creatures roaming the earth.
Billie stopped walking down the sidewalk as a thought hit her, one that she was surprised she hadn’t thought of till now. They need to eat human flesh to survive. They outnumber us at least a hundred to one. There’s not enough of us to go around. You’d think most of them would have starved to death by now. Then again, she couldn’t claim to know how the undead’s biology worked and how frequently they needed to feed despite the ravenous appetites they exhibited. They could very well be like bears going into hibernation or camels about to wander in the desert and store the sustenance they needed somewhere in their bodies, rationing it until their stores could be refilled.
The thought made her shudder.
She kept her eyes peeled in the dark. The dead suckers were silent. You had to be very quiet in order to hear them approach. The way they dragged their feet, the lack of weight on their footfalls, made them almost impossible to detect if you weren’t paying attention.
Nothing but the rush of the wind blowing past her ears made any sound. Like many other things, the days of hearing sirens whirr up in the distance were gone. Same with the screams that used to launch into the air by the minute.
She glanced behind her. The sidewalk was clear. All seemed to be well up front and on the sides, too.
Soon she was at ZW1’s apartment building. All the windows to the red-bricked building were boarded up, same with the glass of the front door and the window panes that ran up on either side of it.
Billie approached the front door. ZW1 should be just on the other side unless the idiot got sidetracked again. She hoped not. To wait out here in the dark . . .
She leaned over the railing next to the front door and pulled out the one-foot-square piece of pressboard hiding behind the branches of the skeletal bush alongside it. She dropped the board onto the stone step, knocked on the boarded-up door four times then pounded her heels twice on the pressboard. Thwack thwack!
From inside: Foombph foombph foombph, then against the inside of the wooden door, SLAK!
After the metallic jiggling of chains from inside, the door opened a crack. Then all the way.
Des Nottingham stood before her, a hatchet at the ready.
“I don’t know why you do that,” she said as she dumped the pressboard back in the bush and went in.
“What?”
“Open the stupid door just a skosh then all the way. You think those brain-dead idiots know what we write to each other as our secret code? We change it every time, Des.”
He lowered the hatchet and rested it against his scrawny leg as, with his other hand, he locked and chained the front door once she was in. “Yeah, but . . .”
“Yeah, but nothing,” she said and moved past him to the stairs leading to the basement.
“Hey, you think you can just come here for some milk then treat me like puke?”
Billie kept walking and didn’t reply. She stopped in front of the door to his suite, crossed her arms and tapped her foot impatiently.
Des’s thin and pasty face was hard as he neared her, but the closer he got, the more his expression lightened and that dorky smile of his crept up onto his face.
“You’re impossible, Billie. Anyone ever told you that?”
“Just my boyfriend before he died.”
“Nice,” Des said and let her in.
Billie went immediately to the refrigerator, opened it, and scanned the shelves. They were bare save for an old container of mustard, a couple soft-looking carrots, a bag of crackers and a thin, one-litre carton of milk.
She stomped her foot.
“What?” Des asked and came up beside her, his chest bumping into her arm.
“Do you mind?” she said and shoved him back.
A wisp of messy brown hair spilled over his eyes. He pushed it away. “No.”
She pulled out the milk.
“What do you need that for?” he asked.
“Was gonna have a bowl of cereal. Barely eaten anything today.”
“I can tell.”
She turned to face him just as he was finishing eyeing her up and down.
He raised his hands, palms out. “Hey, you look like you’ve lost at least ten pounds, probably fifteen, since I last seen you. You managing okay in that cyberworld planet thing you got going down over there?”
The truth was, she wasn’t managing, at least in terms of having enough supplies on hand. Baths had been reduced
to just soaking in water, the soap and shampoo just finished the other week. Food supply was down except for a few nonperishables and a few packs of noodles; nothing to drink but water which, based on the way it’d been tasting lately, probably wouldn’t last that much longer either. The power was going out now and then. Eventually the water would, too.
Billie had friends she could go to, those she met online who offered time and again to help one another out if someone was short on this or that. But it was leaving the apartment that was getting to be a chore. The thought of going outside . . . . The zombies only played a part in her choice to remain secluded. It was just that she didn’t feel like going out anymore. Try as she might to fight it, her heart had already begun to give up hope of coming out of this alive. Reason had begun to override the notion of someone coming to the world’s rescue. She, along with everyone else, was fighting a losing battle.
“I’ll be fine,” she said softly.
“Doesn’t sound like it. Face it, Billie, you’re beginning to look like one of them.”
“And you’re not?”
Des’s face paled, his already pallid complexion getting whiter. He was getting thin, too, and probably weighed no more than a hundred thirty pounds sopping wet. His arms, exposed by the white tank top he was wearing, were rail-thin. The black jeans he wore hung off his waist like a pair of balloon pants. “Touché.”
“I should have brought my bowl over,” she said. “Mind must have gone blank. Didn’t remember.”
“Want me to go get it for you?” he asked.
She considered his offer then shook her head. “Thanks anyway, but no. It’s too dangerous and you know it.”