by Gibb, Lew
Then something slammed into him from behind. The weight drove him to his hands and knees. Pain stabbed his shoulder, and he twisted like a snake with its head pinned to the ground.
Blood arced over his head, splattering the blacktop and soaking the back of his neck. The zombie dropped off.
Jerry turned his head to find Maria standing over the dying zombie. She gave him a quick smile before moving onto the next attacker. Her technique wasn’t as fluid and skillful as Holly’s, but she was still leaving a trail of blood and death in her wake.
Jerry felt under his jacket, relieved to find that the skin on shoulder was intact, and scrambled to his feet.
Then the zombies were on him. He hacked and slashed at everything in his path until he met up with Holly and Alberto. Their clothes were soaked in blood. Jerry turned to find Maria standing next to him. A trail of blood, body parts, and bodies led down the street to the ambulance. Jerry’s own sleeves were darkened to the elbows, and the rest of his jacket and pants were splattered with blood and globs of gray matter. The rest of the group’s faces showed exactly what he felt: exhaustion and relief.
Holly threw her arms around him, and Jerry pulled Alberto in for a one-armed bro-hug while Maria put an arm each around Holly and her husband. They remained like that, panting and happy to be alive, for what felt like ten minutes, but in reality it was probably more like one.
Finally, Alberto spoke. “We still need to see what is wrong with the ambulance before more of these things show up.”
“Thanks a lot, Mr. Buzz Kill,” Holly said, smiling.
“Yes,” Maria added. “We could have sung ‘Kumbaya.’”
Alberto took a step back, eyes wide. The three of them laughed at his stunned look and Maria giving him a dose of his own medicine.
“Unfortunately, he’s right,” Jerry said, the smile leaving his face. The feeling of relief at being alive remained, but there would be time to relax later. Holly and Maria sobered and looked at him expectantly. “Let’s get this done and get moving.”
Chunks of flesh and congealing blood covered the radiator like frosting on a cake. What had appeared to be a heavy and impressive grill had been reduced by the constant barrage of zombie bodies to a few jagged shards of hollow plastic attached to the perimeter of the radiator.
Holly pointed at the radiator’s top edge. “That doesn’t look right.”
A cylindrical hunk of flesh protruded from a hose next to where it entered the radiator. Jerry pulled a pair of blue nitrile exam gloves from his pocket and pulled them on over his motorcycle gloves. His own gloves were soaked through, but it was a habit to glove up before touching bodily fluids. The object was small and slippery with blood. Using two hands, he managed to pull it free. It was a human finger. The skin had peeled back, allowing the bone to penetrate the hose past the first knuckle.
Jerry held up the finger. He couldn’t imagine the force it had taken for it to be ripped from a body. “Between this and the goo spread all over the front, there was no way the radiator could keep the engine cool.” The rest of the group stared at the macabre cause of their problems. “We need to seal this hole. Who’s got the duct-tape?”
No one said anything.
Jerry looked around. Sometimes he forgot normal people weren’t used to his kind of humor. “I guess I need to work on my delivery.”
“Might not be the delivery.” Holly punched him in the arm. “You just might not be as funny as you think you are.” She and Maria smiled at each other.
Jerry tossed the finger over his shoulder and rubbed his arm while sticking his tongue out at Holly. “Anyway, Rachel swears by the stuff. Bob and I put some in here last week. Plus, there’s a stiff brush we use for cleaning when there’s blood all over inside.”
Marco stayed inside with Isabella during the clean-up but opened the window and stared at Holly like she was a movie star.
“How did you learn to do that?” Marco asked when she stopped by the window to ruffle his hair.
Chapter Forty-Two
Fortified with a hot and nutritious, if not one-hundred-percent-delicious, meal—which she managed to keep down—Rachel contemplated the waterproof map lying in her lap.
The memories of news footage and the chaos she had witnessed herself, abandoned vehicles and accidents, not to mention zombies, on the roads the night before replayed themselves in her mind. How could she not have seen what was happening? Even with Jerry’s warnings and preparations, she had allowed herself to deny what should have been obvious. If only she hadn’t been so determined to be “rational” about everything. Jerry had given her all the information she needed, but what he’d been insisting just didn’t happen in the world she’d thought they lived in, a world of rationality where people did what they were supposed to and things always went the way they were supposed to.
But their world wasn’t rational. Because people weren’t rational. There were any number of stock market crashes to prove that. And the superstitions around tulip bulbs—how was it that supposedly rational people got caught up in such hype that they ignored the fact that tulips weren’t imbued with any magic power? They were just flowers, and the reason they were valuable was because people couldn’t stand to miss out on all the money they saw other people making. It was the same thing over and over again: tulips, gold, internet stocks, the housing market. Herd mentality took over, and perfectly rational people forgot about risk and followed their friends and even acquaintances into financial ruin. Why would Rachel be any different?
Now that she thought about it, the herd-mentality idea could explain why the zombies grouped together. They were just falling back on their most basic instincts. Still, she should have reacted sooner. If she had, Lisa and Phyllis might have still been alive. Or maybe she would have been dead along with them. She would never know. She only knew she needed to make it home to Jerry.
Rachel looked out at the base of the mountain and studied the open grassland that stretched like a moat between her position on the side of the mountain and the two-lane highway. She was thankful the people of Boulder had seen the need to establish a greenbelt around the city to protect it from absorption by the rest of the metro area. The highway was littered with cars, no doubt some of them still containing imprisoned zombies. A few tiny forms shuffled along, apparently unwilling to leave the highway. Maybe there was more of that herd mentality at work with them, too.
The speed of the apocalypse amazed her. Two days ago, she’d had a house, a husband, and a thriving catering business. Now she was fighting for her life and hiding from other humans like some B-list actor in a sci-fi-channel movie. But at least she had coffee. The MRE heating packet hadn’t done much more than warm the water in her cup, but the mere fact that she was drinking it made it the best partially dissolved, lukewarm coffee she had ever had. And the caffeine was starting to take effect.
With a more focused mind, she drank another mouthful and concentrated on the map. A narrow band of green and blue snaking at an angle through downtown caught her eye. The Cherry Creek path ran alongside the river from the extreme southeast corner of the city right into downtown.
She and Jerry had ridden the twelve miles out to the Cherry Creek reservoir one weekend. They hadn’t started early enough, and by the time they’d reached the end, the temperature was well into the nineties. After a long refreshing swim in the lake and an excellent Mediterranean lunch at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant they’d stumbled upon, they had ended up “cheating”—as Jerry called it, though Rachel called it common sense—and riding back in air-conditioned comfort on the light rail with their bikes. Several other off-street paths radiated from the city center. One even followed the highway all the way from Boulder to Denver.
Rachel discarded that idea right away. The path had been constructed as part of a project to widen US36 and followed the road too closely. She traced her finger down the map until it stopped on the Clear Creek Path, a hidden corridor of nature through the urban landscape starting in a park at
the northern edge of Golden and following State Highway 58. That could be a little dicey; maybe she could traverse the wetlands that bordered the path in that area. After the highway turned north, the path wound through the suburb of Wheat Ridge and into downtown where it joined the Cherry Creek path not five blocks from her house.
Why hadn’t she thought of it before? The thin line of green was almost completely separated from the city. Even downtown they had seen coyotes, skunks, foxes, blue herons, and occasionally a couple beavers. Thinking about it, she realized another branch of the path headed northwest and passed very close to the station where Bob and Jerry’s friends were hopefully waiting.
She could do this. With renewed energy and a sense of hope, Rachel gulped the rest of her coffee and gathered her gear for the hike into Golden.
The sound of sporadic, distant gunfire accompanied her as she headed south, like the popping of a massive batch of popcorn that never ended, providing muted accompaniment to Rachel’s thoughts as she traversed the base of the foothills. Using the convenient rail right-of-way that ran along the front range on its long climb to the Moffett tunnel made the going much easier. Eventually, the suburbs of north Golden reached out and ate up the buffer between the hills and the town. As she walked, the gunfire came closer and became more sporadic but also sounded more desperate.
Almost as soon as she entered the backyard of the westernmost house, she heard a rattling sound like ball bearings dropping into a number ten can. Rachel dove for cover and snapped her head around, looking for the source of the shooting, clutching her chef’s knife in one hand and her pistol in the other. Something about the rhythm of the shooting made her think it was two groups of humans fighting each other rather than someone fighting off a zombie attack. Rachel crept up to the fence at the front of the yard and peered through a gap between two pickets. She couldn’t see any people, but she saw plenty of zombies heading toward the sounds. She wondered if she should go try to help, but with the encounter with Barry and Steve fresh in her mind, she wasn’t anxious to move toward the fighting.
After a while, the rhythm of the shooting shifted to a more continuous and desperate sound. Rachel thought she heard screaming, or maybe it was the zombie hunting call. A minute or two later, the sounds died out altogether. Whether because the shooters had killed all the zombies or because they had been overpowered, she couldn’t tell. Using a gun wasn’t a surefire way to increase your chances of survival—one more thing Jerry had been right about. Damn him.
Staying close to cover and trying to look everywhere at once, Rachel spent most of the morning just making her way far too slowly for her liking through the neighborhood. The bike path right-of-way was only twenty to thirty yards wide at this point with tall grass and lots of cottonwoods and willow bushes that could be concealing countless zombies lying in wait for her.
But she was finally making some real progress toward home. She smiled for the first time that day. She could almost see Jerry’s face and feel the dogs’ exuberant licking on her cheeks when she walked into their apartment. She occupied her mind with what she would say to Jerry first rather than conjuring imaginary zombies.
Then she rounded a bend and caught sight of a group of people bunched together and running toward her about two hundred yards down the trail. Rachel dropped into a crouch, then headed in a bent-over run for a scraggly patch of willows. She dove behind the bushes, rolling and wriggling in while trying to keep the group in sight. Six adults and four or five children. She couldn’t see any firearms. The man in the lead had a shovel and another carried a machete. One of the women was holding what looked like a sharpened shovel handle. They were mostly focused on the trail behind them. Rachel took a quick look over her shoulder before focusing on the group again. They seemed to be pretty normal—although what abnormal would look like in this situation, she wasn’t sure. Then a pack of zombies rounded the corner about twenty yards behind them. The high-pitched screeching made Rachel want to dig a hole and curl up in it until the zombies were gone.
Rachel opened her eyes and made herself evaluate the group heading her way. They seemed to be staying ahead of the zombies just fine on their own. The guy with the shovel had muscular arms and moved like an athlete. She could see the corded muscles of his forearms from her hiding place. Even the woman moved like she was good at sports. The overall impression was of a group of people who could most likely take care of themselves without Rachel’s help. The pack of zombies looked like it was only ten or so, and one of them was limping badly on a mangled foot.
A piercing screech from behind made Rachel’s head snap around. A group of about twenty zombies lumbered down the path toward her, staying on the concrete as if they were afraid to touch the grassy verges. Rachel felt like a massive hand was wrapping its fingers around her chest and squeezing.
With the decision about whether to help or not taken out of her hands, Rachel backed out of the bush and crouched while she sheathed her knife and pulled her pistol.
“Noise won’t be a problem,” she whispered, flicking the safety off without taking her eyes off the approaching pack. “The zombies are already here.”
Since retiring from biathlon competition, Rachel had spent quite a bit of time learning how to shoot a pistol with Jerry and Bob on the range. Her abilities with a rifle translated well, and before long, she was winning her share of bets with guys like Mike who just couldn’t accept that women could beat them at such manly things as shooting and running.
Rachel hoped Mike was okay. Even though he was kind of a chauvinist about some things, he was a pretty good guy, and he was one of Jerry’s best friends.
Rachel patted her rear pocket to verify the two spare magazines were still there, then shrugged her backpack off and stuffed it under the bush before she started toward the new horde at a jog.
The leader caught sight of Rachel right away and veered off the path with a piercing screech. The rest of the pack followed, and the sound of their screeches made the hair on her arms tingle and her skin feel like the blood had been wrung out of it. She stopped, planted her feet, and tried to aim at the leader. Her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t hold the sight on the zombie’s head.
“Shooting at someone who’s trying to kill you is a lot different than shooting at paper,” her Grandfather, always said.
Her first shot missed, but the monsters were bunched so close together her bullet still hit a college-aged guy with a scraggly beard in the right eye. He fell like he’d stepped in a hole. The next couple stumbled and fell over him, creating a small pile that all-but-one of the remaining zombies managed to avoid.
The leader was only ten feet away when Rachel fired a second time, hitting him just below the nose. She was aiming for their heads since that was, as far as she knew, the way you killed zombies. The thought that she had killed plenty of them the night before by stabbing them in the jugular occurred to her, but she didn’t have time to work out the implications of that right now. Besides, they were getting so close, a headshot wasn’t that hard, and they went down fast. The leader dropped, and she fired twice more in quick succession, missing a young female in shorts and Uggs but hitting an old man in a raincoat in the right shoulder. The guy staggered but kept coming.
Rachel bolted and sprinted for a large boulder, dodging around it and bracing her pistol on top of it. The old man in the raincoat went down with a bullet through the forehead. Rachel was starting to overcome her initial fear. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly while she squeezed off a couple more shots. Her aim was improving, and the next zombie went down with a shot in the center of his forehead. A second guy appeared in the haze of red hanging in the air. All she had to do was pull the trigger again, and the round car salesman in a short-sleeved shirt and tie was gone. Rachel pushed off the rock and sprinted west, swapping magazines on the run.
The group of zombies trailed in her wake like a gaggle of ducklings. They seemed to have completely forgotten the humans farther east. The empty magazi
ne went into her back pocket. Every ten yards or so, she stopped and fired two or three more times. Her aim still wouldn’t win any trophies, but she was whittling them down. What had started as more than twenty hungry zombies was down to four when the slide locked back on her last magazine. It seemed like only a minute had passed, but she had fired thirty-six bullets and moved almost a hundred yards up the path. The chick with the Uggs, whom Rachel had missed twice, was still on her feet, along with a long-haired guy and a pair of teen boys. Rachel holstered the pistol and drew her chef’s knife, then reversed directions.
The memory of her previous wrestling match with Sporty-zombie came back in vivid detail. Rachel circled clockwise, pulling the group into a ragged line led by a puffy guy wearing Birkenstocks on his bare feet. She reminded herself not to let them grab her. When the leader closed to within a couple feet of her, she lunged and stabbed his neck. The blade went in just to the left of his Adam’s apple and seemed to glance off of something hard before her fingers lodged firmly against his flesh. He turned and snapped his jaws at her hand. Rachel twisted the blade and yanked the knife free. She was surprised to see the amount of blood that spewed and soaked her hand. The night before had been so dark she hadn’t seen the results of her work. The guy fell with his blood. Uggs girl stepped forward and stumbled on the dead guy’s leg but kept her balance. When she reached for Rachel, Rachel could see her teeth and gums clearly through a big bite wound on the left side of her face. What was left of the girl’s upper lip peeled back as she opened her mouth and stretched her arms out.
Rachel dodged to her left, more of a reflex than a conscious decision. The movement opened up Ugg girl’s left side to attack, so she jabbed the blade into the neck just below the angle of the girl’s jaw. Rachel kept moving to her left as she pulled the knife free. A torrent of blood sprayed from the three-inch gash, drenching Rachel’s lower leg and the girl’s Uggs as she collapsed in a heap.