by Gibb, Lew
The crash of two zombies hitting the gate made Jerry focus on getting over the back fence without hurting himself or catching anything on the pickets. When the face of the first following zombie popped up, Jerry was over the fence and standing on the middle rail with his hands steadying himself on the top. He yelled, “Over here!”
The first zombie looked up and made the mangled cat scream before losing his balance. He toppled forward and landed in a heap. He was still scrambling to get back in the chase, hindered by what looked like a hand that stuck out at an odd angle from his wrist, when Jerry dropped to the far side of the fence. As soon as he hit the ground, he sprinted for the front of the yard.
Jerry made a big circle back to Holly’s front door without running into any more zombies. When he eased his way through the front door, Holly and the family were in the living room. The sobbing children pressed against the woman with their arms wrapped around her waist. She stroked their hair and cooed to them softly in Spanish and met Jerry’s eyes with a tearful nod. The man walked up to Jerry with his hand outstretched.
“I am forever in your debt for saving my family.” He gripped Jerry’s hand. “We could not have held them off much longer.” It was like shaking hands with a leather bag filled with rocks. “My name is Alberto Vigil.” His voice was quiet, and his intense dark eyes brimmed with tears when he fixed them on Jerry without blinking. “This is my wife, Maria, and my children, Isabella and Marco.” Maria still clutched the frying pan in her right hand, cupping the boy’s back in its protective shell.
Alberto was about five foot eight inches tall and had the creased and deep brown skin of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors.
“You’re welcome.” Jerry smiled and took his hand back, flexing his fingers.
“What were you doing out there with a frying pan?” Holly was smiling incredulously at Maria.
“I was making dinner when we had to flee.” Maria closed her eyes for a second then took a deep breath before she continued. “It was the closest thing.”
Alberto moved next to his wife and put his arm around her shoulders. “There was a lot of shooting and screaming in the neighborhood yesterday. We didn’t know what was happening, so we stayed in the house until things calmed down. Maria’s brother, Jose, was with us. Early this morning, we thought they had gone away, and Jose went outside to look for his car keys. He had dropped them on the lawn when we were attacked the day before. He was looking around when another of those people came up behind him. I ran out of the house and hit that man with a baseball bat until he let go of Jose. I had to hit him really hard, and he didn’t get up.
“We called the police,” his wife said, “but no one came.”
“Then, later, just before dinner, Jose began acting strangely. He was shaking his head and growling. He grabbed little Marco and tried to bite him, but Maria grabbed him too and wouldn’t let go. I pried his hands loose, and Maria ran with the children to the front room. I could barely keep Jose away. When he got on top of me, Maria knocked him out with the frying pan, and we ran out into the yard.”
“I just held onto it,” Maria said. She spoke with the same precise diction as Alberto, but her accent was more pronounced and had a more musical tone. “I didn’t realize I still had it until those people started chasing us. Thank you so much for helping.” She looked nervous, and her eyes darted around the room. “Don’t you think we should call the police?”
“I don’t think there are any police anymore,” Jerry said.
Maria pulled the children closer.
Alberto said, “I fear this the same thing as what was going on in Brazil.”
“Me too,” Jerry said. He sighed and summarized what he knew, along with how he and Holly came to be there. When he got to the part about her parents, Holly looked toward the ceiling.
“Did you really use the word zombie?” Maria said, raising her eyebrows and darting a glance at her husband.
“That’s pretty much what they are,” Jerry said. “Not official zombies because they aren’t dead, but the description works.”
“So what do we do now?” Alberto asked.
“I need to get to my house downtown.” Jerry explained his plan to go home, then looked at Holly. “I haven’t asked if you want to go. I was just getting to that when we saw the Vigils outside.”
“I’m in,” Holly said in a small voice, looking away from her parents’ bedroom.
Jerry turned to the Vigils. “What do you guys think?”
Maria and Alberto spoke to each other in rapid-fire Spanish. Jerry knew enough to ask his patients what was bothering them, and to understand most of what they said back, but he always asked them to speak slowly. The Vigils were going way too fast for him. He got the impression Maria was worried about trusting strangers while Alberto was trying to reassure her. Finally, they stopped and nodded to each other. Alberto turned to Jerry and Holly.
“We would like to join you. I am not very good with a gun, but I am strong, and Maria is a very good cook.”
“If she’s as good in the kitchen with that thing as she is in the street,” Jerry said, “we won’t be in any danger of starving to death.”
Maria gave him a smile.
Holly knelt between the kids. “These two are about the cutest things I’ve ever seen. I’m glad you’re coming with us.”
Everyone smiled. Alberto and Jerry shook hands again. Maria looked down at their kids.
“I think the first thing we need to do is check everyone for bites.” He and Holly locked eyes. She nodded. “Then we need to figure out some better weapons.”
Holly nodded. “Yeah. Something that doesn’t break every time you fight a zombie.”
Alberto and Maria looked confused.
“I was thinking maybe we could use a rake handle or something. They make those things out of oak or hickory. If we sharpened a couple.”
“That sounds good.” Holly looked thoughtful. “My dad has a bunch of tools, but I think most of them are electric.”
Then her eyes widened, and she grabbed Jerry’s forearm. “I just remembered. There was a guy down the street who was super into Renaissance Faires. I’m pretty sure he had some real swords.”
“That could work,” Jerry said. “I always sort of gravitated toward spears, but—”
“And,” Holly interrupted him, smiling, “they’re all metal, so the handles won’t break.”
“I could get used to a weapon like that,” Jerry said. “Maybe we should make a trip over there later.” He looked at Alberto and Maria, and they both nodded. “What time do you think the zombies go to bed?”
He received blank looks from the Vigil family.
Holly rolled her eyes at him.
Jerry shook his head. “Anyway. Before we go, Holly, do you think you might have some clothes here that the Vigils could wear, maybe some work gloves, leather jackets, boots?”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Jerry approached the corner of the house next door to Holly’s and stoped. The quarter moon gave just enough light to see a slumbering zombie curled up against the house with her hands beneath her head. Jerry gripped the wooden handle of his new hedge-trimmer-spear and thought about what to do. He had unbolted the large gardening scissors and pulled the two blades apart, then bent them flat using the vise in Holly’s dad’s basement workshop. The new weapon was only about half as long as Bob’s spear, maybe thirty inches overall, but the steel blade set into an eighteen-inch oak handle was much stronger.
Jerry forced himself to relax his fingers and noticed how the slight breeze made the zombie’s black hair flutter over the eye closest to him like she was winking at him. Alberto waited to his right, wearing Mike’s jacket and holding the axe he’d found in the garage like he was ready to beat someone with it. Holly had changed into her own leather jacket and a pair of pink gardening gloves. He felt her on his left and one step behind. In addition to nine-millimeter pistols in hip holsters, courtesy of Holly’s dad, each of them had a long gun slung
over their shoulders. A shotgun for Jerry, a deer rifle for Alberto, and an assault rifle for Holly. Jerry remembered Alicia calling the assault rifle “that AR thingy” and wondered if she and Bob were doing better than he was.
Jerry hesitated to stab the sleeping zombie but knew it could hinder their escape if they had to run back this way. Would he be so squeamish if the zombie was a man? What if it was a child? When the woman’s eye popped open, Jerry’s mind wasted a second shifting from moral quandary to active defense. Even then, his mind lost another half second wondering what had awakened her.
In that second and a half, she was on her feet and reaching for Jerry.
He actually felt his fight or flight system go into action—vessels constricting and shunting blood to vital organs in preparation for the confrontation, his whole body going cold and his fingers tingling. Unfortunately, he would have been better off reacting rather than thinking about the physiology of his response.
The woman crashed into him.
Jerry’s blade hit just under the outside edge of the collarbone on the left side, more because she impaled herself on the point than because he made a conscious decision and aimed there. There was a large vessel beneath the collarbone, the sub-clavicular artery. It was big enough, if his blade pierced it, for her to bleed out quickly. But he could tell the positioning and the angle were wrong.
Fingers latched onto his arm, the nails painful even through the Kevlar sleeve of his jacket. He tried to pull his arm free, but the zombie held on and yanked back. He was locked in a game of tug of war for his own arm. Jerry could feel his spear grind against the woman’s collarbone but didn’t think to make a new stab.
Holly’s blade appeared from his left, darted in, and stabbed the woman below the ear. Jerry realized, too late, that he should have done the same thing.
Holly yanked her blade free and bounced back a step with her sword poised for another strike.
Jerry managed to avoid the rope of blood, black in the weak light, that sprayed from the wound. His attacker took a step and collapsed at his feet.
Jerry looked at Holly. She bobbed on the balls of her feet but seemed coiled like a rattler, dangerous and deadly.
“Thanks,” Jerry whispered. “You’re starting to make a career of saving my butt.”
“No big deal,” she whispered back. Her eyes darted past him then as she checked her back. “I still owe you.”
“What?” Jerry was honestly confused.
“Hello?” He didn’t see the eyeroll but he heard it. “What? You think I could have whittled a spear out of a tongue depressor and fought my way out of that hospital by myself?”
Jerry wasn’t positive she couldn’t. “It was actually a mop handle.”
“Whatever.” She waved a hand in front of her face. “I never thought of going up in the ceiling either. Besides,” she punched him in the arm, “I have to keep you alive so I can meet this goddess Rachel that you keep talking about.”
Alberto hadn’t moved. He looked like he might be sick.
“You okay?” Jerry whispered.
“I cannot believe I still have clean underwear.”
Jerry shook his head. The man had neatly summarized his own thoughts. “Me too. Don’t count your chickens yet.”
“You two comedians ready?” Holly hissed.
Jerry was impressed with the serious gleam in her eyes.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step,” Alberto whispered.
“We’re standing out in the open with zombies all around,” she whispered. “Let’s wait till we’re safe to go all intellectual.”
Alberto shrugged. “When I get nervous, I quote the great philosophers.”
“What do you do for a living, anyway?” Jerry asked.
“I am a construction supervisor. But before we came here from Ecuador, I was a professor of philosophy.”
Jerry patted his shoulder. “You need to meet my friend Bob. You two will have a lot to talk about.”
Holly shook her head and started across the street. She seemed to have taken charge of the mission. Jerry was relieved in a way. He was having trouble adjusting to the need for split-second reactions. Also, a little ashamed. He should have been better at this. He knew how to shoot, and he’d discussed the subject of zombie killing almost every day. He read just about every zombie novel that came out, plus all kinds of adventure novels, from Lawrence of Arabia to the dark fantasies of Joe Abercrombie. Yet, when he needed react, he seemed to freeze. He resolved to do better next time. He couldn’t let his friends down.
The area around the target house seemed clear. Jerry caught a glimpse of Alberto as they crossed the lawn. He almost looked like a zombie himself, face immobile and eyes wide. Jerry felt a little better knowing someone else was as freaked out as he was. Reacting fast in a crisis was, on the surface, the main part of his job as a paramedic. But now that he thought about it, what he did wasn’t so much about split-second decision making as it was about making the right decision without delay. He usually had the time to double check the drug he had decided to give or to think once more about whether the patient really needed the treatment he was about to do. He never just saw a situation and acted with lethal effectiveness—like Holly was doing.
He had to admit, Holly was better suited to fighting zombies than he was. But she was so young. He wanted to protect her just like he protected his patients even though he might not be qualified for this particular job. Rachel would know what to say to get him back on track. Probably something about how everyone had their strengths and his were in another area and he needed to just go with it and let Holly do what she was good at.
Jerry and Alberto followed Holly up the stairs and stopped behind her. Jerry checked behind them while she tried the door.
“Locked,” she whispered. “Think we should go around back?”
“Wait a second.” Jerry hopped down to the flower bed at the base of the stairs and started picking up rocks. On the third one, he found it. “Here we go.” He held up a shiny black, softball-sized rock with a flat bottom. He thumbed the small sliding panel while bounding up the stairs, then dumped a key into Holly’s outstretched hand. Maybe the Rachel in his head was right, and he did have other strengths.
Holly gave him a smile, then unlocked the door and pushed it open. She shuffled across the threshold, leading with her sword point. Jerry pressed close, determined to react if she got into trouble. He felt Alberto close behind. The faint light coming in through the door barely lit up Holly’s back. Then Alberto pushed the door behind them closed, and Jerry’s view of Holly disappeared.
The place smelled like the dogs’ beds when they needed to be washed. Jerry thumbed the switch on his headlamp, and his light illuminated a chocolate brown couch on his left. At the same time, a matching cone of light sprung from Holly’s light. Even at its lowest setting, the weak glow—not enough to read by or do much else, but enough to illuminate the immediate area—seemed like a beacon, announcing their position to any lurking attackers. When Holly had found the lights in her family’s camping gear, they had debated the wisdom of using them. Jerry hypothesized that the zombies were drawn to noise and movement, so if they kept the drapes closed, they would be able to use a small amount of light without attracting the flesh eaters. Besides, he’d argued, they wouldn’t be able to search the house effectively without them. In the end, they’d decided to try them out but to keep them low and be ready to turn them off if it looked like they were attracting zombies.
The one-story ranch belonging to her history-buff neighbor had the same floor plan as the house where one of Holly’s friends lived. She had diagrammed it for them on a piece of printer paper at the kitchen table: living room in the front left and the kitchen behind, three bedrooms and two bathrooms down the hallway to their right. They moved left to clear the kitchen and living room first. The rooms were zombie-free, but the kitchen cabinets contained a few cans of vegetables, a carton of oatmeal, and a few bags of dried beans and cornmeal
. Everything went into the large duffel slung Alberto’s back.
The bathroom door at the start of the hallway was closed.
“Check it or leave it?” Holly whispered.
Alberto spoke first. “If there is a zombie trapped in there, and it is asleep, we should, as they say, let sleeping dogs lie.”
Holly nodded and looked at Jerry.
“I agree,” he said. “Let’s check the bedrooms.”
In spite of the coolness of the fall evening, it was close and stuffy in the house, and Jerry was covered in sweat after they cleared the first bedroom. By the time they’d cleared the second—without finding any swords or zombies—his shirt was sticking to his skin beneath his jacket.
“Are your sure this is the right place?” Jerry asked. There wasn’t a historic knick-knack or even a history book anywhere.
Holly nodded with confidence and moved to the last door. Jerry followed her through the doorway—and into a place that could have been Henry VIII’s walk-in closet. Elaborately embroidered and beaded clothing hung from racks flanking the overflowing closet, and one entire wall was covered in hats sprouting elaborate plumage of bright green, pale orange, blue, and yellow.
Alberto lifted a puffy beret encircled with pearls and faux rubies from a hook at the end of a rack and pulled it on. “What do you think, my friend?” He turned his head from side to side, making the long white ostrich feather sway like a fluffy tail.
“It’s absolutely you, Alberto,” Jerry said.
Holly stepped on the chair beside the desk then onto the desk’s surface. The thing was mounded with fabric that nearly buried a sewing machine at one end.
A pair of slender swords, each a little longer than a baseball bat and not much wider than one of Rachel’s paring knives, formed an X above the desk. They reminded Jerry of The Three Musketeers.
Holly pulled one from the wall and tested its weight. “Rapiers,” she said. With a twist of her wrist, the blade blurred into motion with a faint, high-pitched hissing noise. “Really nice ones.” The blade was a blur as it traced circles on either side of her torso.