by Gibb, Lew
“Yeah. Remember that Myth Busters episode?”
“I missed that one. But I’ve seen enough movies to know getting surrounded isn’t a good idea. I wonder if they can climb a fence.”
“I don’t know.” She scrunched up her face, then her eyes got wide. “Wait.” She pointed at him. “In World War Z they pretty much climbed anything. But those were fast zombies. We have, like, medium-fast ones.”
Jerry got the ambulance moving again, turning right into a more residential area. “Wow, you know your zombies.” He was looking for a house with a clear front yard.
“I have two older brothers, remember? I know about a lot of things. So what are you thinking? We climb into a backyard and the zombies can’t follow us?”
“They don’t seem to have normal coordination, so the fence should at least slow them down a little bit. We could even keep going to the next yard or go sideways and get ahead of them enough to get inside a house without them seeing.”
“If the back door isn’t locked.”
“Yeah.” Jerry shook his head. Nothing in their new world was easy or straightforward. “If it’s locked, we go next door and try that one.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Holly didn’t look quite as confident as she had before.
Jerry had Holly climb into the back and get the spears. She crawled between the seats and dug them out while he continued looking for a good spot to try his plan. The neighborhood was typical of southwest Denver—three-thousand-square-foot houses designed for square-footage rather than aesthetics, with big yards and more than a few three-car garages.
Holly returned to the front with the two spears. At least they’d gotten that right. Each one had a six-inch steel point affixed to the end of a four-foot-long shaft that was about one and a half inches in diameter and painted black. “These things are wicked. Where’d they come from?”
“My friend Bob knew—knows a guy who made them. He knows a lot of interesting characters.”
“No kidding? Your friend sounds like a good guy to have around. Especially now that there are actual zombies. I mean, I would much rather fight a zombie with one of these than your janky mop handles.” Holly turned one of the blades in front of her face. “This blade is pretty skinny, too. I wonder if it’s like the movies. You know, we need to destroy the brain.”
“I guess we should start by assuming they’re like movie zombies.”
“Yeah.” Holly looked at the spears, and her face puckered like she had tasted something sour.
“You okay?” Jerry said, slowing the ambulance so he wouldn’t hit anything while trying to make eye contact.
Holly kept looking at the spear’s tip. “I was just thinking, all these zombies used to be people. They might still be people, but we might have to kill them.”
“I know. I’m trying not to think about it.”
“It looks a lot easier in the movies.”
Jerry nodded. “If it’s them or us, there’s no question which I’ll choose.”
Her small smile looked forced. “I just wish it didn’t have to be that way.”
Fifty feet down the road Jerry saw what he was looking for. He pointed to a two-story colonial with an empty driveway and veered toward it. A bunch of zombies were trailing in their wake, and a few more were moving out from between the houses on both sides of the road. There were about fifteen or twenty all together.
“This house looks as good as any other. Let’s both get out on my side. Maybe they’ll focus on the ambulance while we start for the back of the house.”
“Okay.” Holly’s eyes were huge. He couldn’t blame her for being a little freaked out; it was a little surprising considering how well she was handling everything else so far, but he reminded himself she’d been doing teenager things just two days ago.
Jerry overcame his own terror, squeezed the ambulance up against the front porch, then slammed the shifter into park before switching the engine off and leaving the keys in the ignition. Holly passed him a spear, and he shouldered the door open and jumped out in one motion with Holly scrambling after him. The spear felt good in his hands, solid and dependable, much better than the bits of mop handle.
Holly passed him at the house’s corner and sprinted to the six-foot cedar fence. She tossed her spear ahead of her, planted her right foot halfway up the fence, and grabbed the top in one fluid motion. Then she pulled her legs up and flew over. She disappeared from his view with hardly a pause. Jerry thought of himself as a pretty good athlete, but the girl was making him look slow and uncoordinated. He clambered up, swung a leg over the top, then looked back. A group of six or seven zombies rounded the corner and headed his way. His heart rate kicked up a few notches as he pulled his other leg over the fence and dropped to the ground on the other side. Holly was already around the back corner of the house.
When he rounded the corner, Holly was pulling the sliding door open. She looked back and nodded. Jerry held his spear in front of him and kept moving. The sound of more zombies slamming into the fence followed them into the house. The sounds were muffled a second later when Holly slid the door shut behind her. Then she pulled the curtains closed, shutting out much of the light.
They were in a musty-smelling family room with what looked like a hallway to the front of the house directly across from the slider and a large trophy kitchen to their right. The kitchen and family room were separated by a breakfast bar with three stools. Rachel would have loved the six-burner Wolfe stove and the oversized double-door refrigerator. The interior was silent except for their breathing and the soft thud of zombies hitting the fence outside.
When he finished looking at the room, he looked back at Holly. She had parted the curtains an inch with her spear and had an eye against the gap. Her hands were pale white. She seemed to have the same death grip on her spear as he was using on his.
“The zombies ran right by,” she whispered. “And they can climb.”
Jerry eased up behind her and rose up on his toes looked over her head just in time to see a small, woman zombie in her twenties hit the fence at the rear of the property, followed by a teenaged guy without a shirt whose back was covered with reddish brown divots. He crashed into her and reached for the fence’s top without seeming to notice she was there. It wasn’t pretty, but he scaled the fence a lot faster than Jerry expected. The girl was right behind him until, with heel hooked over the top, she seemed to slip and tumbled backward. She hit the ground at an awkward angle but scrambled back to her feet right away and tried again. This time, she was hampered by an obviously fractured humerus. The top of her upper arm moved, but the fracture looked like an extra elbow that bent the wrong way.
More zombies arrived and scaled the fence while the woman flailed without success. Zombies started arriving faster than the ones ahead of them could scale the fence, and they kept smashing into each other in a weird horizontal dog pile until an eight-foot section of fence collapsed beneath their weight.
The zombies disappeared through the new opening. Holly seemed as mesmerized by how many had joined the chase as he was, and they watched until the flow slowed to a trickle and then stopped. When the last zombie disappeared through the new “gate,” Holly let the curtain fall and stepped away from the window to look at him.
Jerry stepped back and relaxed his death grip on the spear handle, then noticed his shoulders where hunched again. He forced himself to let them drop.
Holly copied his hand movements, then rolled her neck from side to side. “Tense much?” She shook her hands one by one.
The corners of Jerry’s mouth turned up and he whispered, “At least they’re not bloodhound zombies.”
Holly frowned and shook her head. Her eyes were huge. “Don’t even think about that.”
Jerry shivered. “Sorry.” He started for the front of the house. “Let’s clear the place before we go for the gas. I don’t want to get blindsided.”
When he got to the doorway leading to the front of the house, he looked back. Holly hadn�
�t moved.
“Shouldn’t we at least make sure there’s a car in there?” she said, pointing at the door on the far side of the kitchen.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Rachel made her way through a section of forest in a bent-over run, trying to put as much distance as she could between herself and the three people who had shown up at the creek. They didn’t sound like tweakers or zombies; still, Rachel wasn’t ready to jump up and draw attention to herself. This new world required caution, if not outright paranoia.
The woman and two men had been carrying a collection of water jugs, and one of them had what looked like a personal filtration device slung over his shoulder next to his assault rifle. She couldn’t be sure of the make—Jerry was better at identifying weapons. Apparently, the Y chromosome gave you the compulsion and ability to identify every gun and motorized vehicle you passed. The only guns she could identify were her own Sig Sauer P226, a couple of the weird guns Bob was always showing up with, and a very specialized subset of rifles used in biathlon competition.
As the group moved closer to the creek, she could see that they all carried the same type of rifle and wore military-looking webbing harnesses with various handguns and knives attached. But they weren’t military if their jeans and flannel shirts were any indication, not to mention the heavy beards that Rachel doubted were allowed in any branch of the service. They chatted and joked like they were on some kind of group excursion rather than living out the first days of the apocalypse. Rachel was thinking of approaching them with the idea of traveling together if they were heading the same way when something about one of them made her hesitate. Maybe it was the look in the bearded one’s eyes.
“You think there’s any of them demons around here?” he said as he finished filling one of the water jugs and stood to look around.
Rachel closed her eyes as his head traversed her way. Jerry had read somewhere—he spent way too much time online—that humans were subconsciously aware of being stared at and the best thing to do if you didn’t want to be caught watching someone was not to stare directly at the person and even to close your eyes when they looked your way. It could have been complete nonsense, but she didn’t see any harm in it. It seemed to work. When she opened her eyes after a count of thirty, the man was scanning the slope below Rachel’s hiding spot.
“No, Jed,” the woman said. “The sentries would sound the alarm, and you’d hear a whole lot of shooting. So, get back to work. I want to get this done and get a nap in before dinner.”
The man grumbled something about not trusting the sentries but bent back to his jug while the third member of the team kept his eyes on the surrounding area, holding his rifle across his chest and moving his head constantly. “Don’t worry, Jed,” he said without looking at the other man. “If they get past the sentries, I’ll protect you.”
“Right, Jimmy,” Jed said as he splashed a handful of water at the other man. “You know I’m a better shot. I’ll be the one protecting you.”
“You guys both suck,” the woman said. “If any of them attack us, I’ll be the one doing the saving.”
“Right,” Jed said. “How you figure that?”
“Easy,” the woman said. “All I have to do is run a little ways, then I can pick them off while they chase after the two of you.”
Rachel’s heart had sped up at the mention of the demons—which she figured must have meant the zombies—but the news of sentries made her even more nervous. What kind of group would be that organized a day into the apocalypse? Had she just been lucky and passed them by without them noticing? She decided to move on by herself and wait until they headed back down stream before she moved.
Her progress was slow since she had to watch where she put her feet and keep a lookout for the sentries, not to mention wandering zombies, but twenty minutes after moving on from the group—drenched in sweat and with her thighs burning with every step—she reached the next ridge and figured she had to be beyond the sentry line. Rachel ducked under a large rock and leaned against it while she took a long drink from her CamelBak. She had been so preoccupied with avoiding detection that she hadn’t realized how dry her mouth was. Even though the water was lukewarm, it tasted fantastic. She felt like her throat absorbed the majority of the water on the way down. What was left crashed against the empty shores of her stomach. She realized she hadn’t eaten anything since the fight with Barry and Steve. Food just hadn’t sounded the least bit attractive.
She was digging for a Clif Bar in her pack when a voice very close to her ear said, “Pull that hand out real slow, and it better be empty. I’d hate to have to shoot someone who wasn’t one of them devils.”
All the moisture her mouth had absorbed seemed to evaporate in a moment. The man’s breath alone should have alerted her to his presence. A putrid mixture of garlic, coffee, and cigarettes wafted across her face when he spoke. The use of the word devil seemed to indicate he was with the others by the stream. She wasn’t sure what it meant. In Jerry’s zombie stories, there was always some religious nutcase who wanted to dominate everyone around him and thought he was God’s voice on earth. She hoped the leader of this group wasn’t that kind of zealot.
“Okay,” she said, withdrawing her hand and raising it, along with the other one, to the level of her head. “I’m just glad you aren’t one of them.”
“You got that right, lady.” He moved around in front of her, keeping the barrel of his automatic rifle pointed at her. “Them things are nothing to mess around with.” His eyes scanned her up and down and came to rest on the pistol in her waistband. “Now, why don’t you hand over that weapon? Real slow. And toss your pack over here while you’re at it.”
Rachel lifted the pistol free with two fingers and tossed it to him. “Don’t kill me. Please. I was just trying to get home to my family.” It couldn’t hurt to play up the family angle. She kept her head down and tried to look meek.
He frowned. “I ain’t going to kill you.”
It didn’t reassure her, and the thought that his words implied someone else would have that honor popped into her head. He grabbed her pack and slung it over his shoulder one-handed, the barrel of his rifle never wavering from her chest. “We just need to make sure you’re okay before we let you run around with firearms. Now, let’s head on into camp.” He motioned with his weapon to the way the three water collectors had gone.
Rachel nodded and started off. He followed a few paces behind and kept the interval, preventing her from making a move on him. Not that she’d know what kind of move to make. She knew nothing about self defense. Other than the obvious kick-in-the-balls that was pretty much every woman’s go-to move in an attacker situation. Which made her wonder why she hadn’t thought of it in the fight with her two would-be rapists.
Chapter Thirty
Jerry eased his way up the first few stairs, again, gripping his spear way too hard and wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just siphon some gas and leave. The house’s three-car garage had been occupied by a single beat-up mid-nineties Nissan Pathfinder with rusting rocker panels, a snowboard rack on top, and a rear-end covered with a mosaic of snowboard and skate stickers so thick Jerry wondered how a driver could see anything out the back window. After Holly found the keys on a board by the door into the kitchen and they knew there was half a tank of gas to be had, they needed to clear the house. He kept going up the stairs, thankful for the way the thick, sky-blue carpet muffled their steps. He heard Holly breathing behind him as he reached the top. The carpet was so worn and stained, there was a whale’s tail of dirt pointing the way to the open bathroom door midway between the closed bedroom doors at either end of the dim hallway.
Holly whispered, “Maybe we should just go siphon the gas.”
She was so close he could feel the words on the back of his neck. Jerry’s head was starting to pound again. He looked over his shoulder, still not convinced a stealth zombie wasn’t sneaking up on them. The hallway was barely illuminated by light filtering up from d
ownstairs. The lack of electricity was already becoming a huge issue. They would need to get some headlamps or something similar for these excursions. Next time. Jerry gripped his spear harder and looked at the orange-and-yellow nerf rifle lying against the wall just beyond the open bathroom door. Had one of the kids tried to defend themselves with it when his zombie father had chased him into the bedroom at the end of the hall? Or had he thrown it at the sister who’d turned during dinner and bitten the rest of the family? But there weren’t any bloodstains. Maybe it was just what it looked like—a toy that had been dropped in favor of something more interesting.
Holly poked him in the back. “Are you okay?”
Jerry rolled his head around, dropped his shoulders, then nodded before moving down the hall. “We talked about this.” He needed to keep moving. “We have to check for survivors.”
When he reached the bathroom, he twisted into the doorway like a TV cop—one with a spear instead of a gun. He held the point at eye level, ready to impale any waiting zombies.
Nothing there.
Jerry turned and gave Holly a shake of the head while backing out. His heart was thudding against his chest wall. The spear handle that had felt so reassuring was now awkward in the narrow hallway. In the movies, people always knew how to use their weapons and succeeded in fighting off masses of zombies in all kinds of situations without apparent difficulty. Jerry and his friends had spent hours debating the topic of zombie-killing weapons, and he had decided the spear was the thing to have. Now it didn’t feel quite right. The only thing he knew for sure was that a gun wasn’t a good idea. The sound would bring every zombie within ten miles. A knife, or even a small sword, would make it too easy for a zombie to get close. He needed a better weapon for indoors, that was for sure. Maybe he should shorten the handle for inside use? A hatchet sounded pretty good. Like the Schrade survival model he’d seen at Cabella’s the last time he and Bob had been there. Its sixteen-inch length would be perfect for the cramped hallway, and the rubber grip would help with the sweat that had been coating his hands since they’d entered the house. He heard Donald Rumsfeld’s nasal voice in his head, talking about going to war with the tools you had.