by Gibb, Lew
Before the thought that she was going to need a bleach bath after this was fully formed in Rachel’s head, the rail-thin boy in tattered jeans and no shirt was there. Rachel hesitated. Except for the red-rimmed eyes that looked like they might start bleeding any moment, he was a normal kid. He moved faster than she expected and grabbed her knife arm, first with one hand, then with both. He was a lot stronger than he looked, and before she knew it, her forearm was pulled into his wide-open mouth. When he bit down, the pain was like nothing she had ever felt. The chef’s knife dropped from her fingers, and she let out a scream that sounded a lot like the zombie screeches.
With her free arm, she pushed her attacker backward over the fallen body of the Uggs girl, but he held on and pulled Rachel down with him. Rachel landed hard on top of him, and their heads cracked together. A flash of white followed by a darkening of her vision made Rachel shake her head. Her vision cleared. The boy’s jaws ground in a pulsing rhythm. Rachel wasted valuable seconds groping in the crackling dry grass for the chef’s knife before she remembered the one taped inside her right boot.
Her fingers curled around the handle. She yanked the knife free and plunged it into the boy’s bare stomach three times, fast. The last time, she wrenched the blade back and forth before removing it. The smell of blood, wet and earthy, hit her senses at the same time her hand felt the warm torrent run down her arm. His teeth released, and the relief made her a little lightheaded. Rachel shoved the boy away and rolled onto her side. Her eyes darted around.
Something hit her from the back and drove her, face first, into the long grass. A massive weight settled on her back, then burning pain in her left shoulder made her vision blur. Rachel pushed against the ground with all her strength but couldn’t budge against the weight pinning her to the ground like she was a butterfly in a box. Her perception of herself shifted, zooming out until she saw herself from above being ripped to pieces by a horde of hungry zombies.
A shudder went through the body pinning her. The pain stopped, then the weight lifted. She pushed off the ground, scrambled to one knee, and brought her knife up to meet the next attack. Hands grabbed her under the arms and lifted, dragging her back. She struggled and kicked, watching her attacker, a fat zombie in skinny jeans and a black porkpie hat, clamber to his feet and start toward her.
A man stepped in and chopped the zombie’s head off with a two-foot-long machete. The machete guy wore camo BDU pants and a jean jacket buttoned to the neck. He turned toward Rachel and raised his free hand. “Take it easy.” He patted the air with his hand and the blade of the big knife. “We’re the good guys.”
Her arms were released, and Rachel spun to find a man with a shovel over one shoulder backing away from her, his free hand giving her the same placating-the-crazy-lady gesture the first guy had given her.
Then his eyes flicked over her shoulder. “Run!” he screamed and started running.
Rachel’s head snapped around.What must have been the original pack of zombies was maybe twenty yards away and closing the distance fast.
She spun and caught a glimpse of her knife lying beside a dead zombie’s head. She snatched it up and started running. The guy with the shovel was already a body length ahead, but she caught him in the first three strides.
“Follow the boy,” the guy with the machete yelled, pulling even with her and pointing ahead.
Rachel followed his finger. A boy of about twelve straddled the top of a six-foot fence bordering the path. He circled his arm in a hurry up gesture, then swung his leg to the other side and dropped out of sight. Rachel hit the middle rail at a run and grabbed the top of the fence with both hands to pull herself up and over. She dropped to the ground just as a shovel flew over the fence and clanged off the play structure in the house’s backyard. The guy with the machete dropped to the ground beside her. His look said he was surprised by how fast she’d scaled the fence. Then he took off after the boy, who was about thirty feet ahead. Rachel sprinted after them.
After hopping a series of fences and sprinting through several yards, the boy led them through a gate and into a parking lot at the edge of a business park. The twenty or thirty zombies in the area started screaming and heading their way. The boy crossed the lot to the rear of one of the buildings. He darted into the building past a blonde-haired woman who was dressed to kill in a clingy sequined dress. She was holding the door and circling her arm for them to hurry. Rachel sprinted across the lot with the sound of men’s boots clomping along behind her. As soon as they were through, the door was slammed shut and the room plunged into complete darkness.
Chapter Forty-Three
Jerry dropped into the passenger seat and looked over at Alberto with raised eyebrows.
The wiry man shrugged and started the engine. “The duct tape should hold us until we find a place to stop. But tomorrow, who can say.”
Holly had guarded the pair while they’d cleaned and repaired the radiator. The whole time the Vigil kids had pestered her to tell them how she’d learned to “swordfight so good.” She started to tell Marco when he asked her the first time from the window, but Isabella complained she couldn’t hear, so the story was postponed.
Jerry knew they would have to make a permanent fix on the radiator at some point, but at the moment, he just wanted to get back on the road. He was comfortable being copilot since he knew the area so well and driving would just add to the almost unbearable level of tension he was already feeling about getting home to Rachel.
Holly was squatting in the passthrough between the front and back. She gave him a searching look that reminded him of Rachel when she knew something was bothering him, but he just circled a finger for her to get on with her story. She shook her head but let it pass. When had she gotten so mature? There seemed to be nothing left of the girl who’d wanted to text her friend from the hospital.
She turned to face the two kids who were sitting on the bench seat on either side of their mother. “When I was eight, my dad took me to see The Princess Bride.”
Marco bounced in his seat and repeated Inigo Montoya’s classic line, “ ‘You killed my father. Prepare to die.’ ”
Holly smiled. “You know it?”
Both kids nodded their heads.
“Fezzik’s my favorite,” Marco said.
“No,” Isabella said, “Pirate Roberts.”
“I liked all the characters,” Holly said. “But the fencing scenes were my favorite. I replayed them until my brothers made me stop so they could watch the rest of the movie. I so wanted to be Inigo Montoya.”
Maria wrapped an arm around each kid. “So then I guess you took fencing lessons?”
Holly smiled and nodded. “When my brothers got tired of getting hit in the knuckles with broomsticks, they quit playing sword fight with me. Then I bugged my parents for, like, six months until they signed me up with a teacher. I practiced every day until I was fourteen. I even went to the Junior Olympics my last year.”
“What made you quit?” Maria said.
“Partially, I realized I wasn’t going to be Inigo. But mostly, I was fourteen and thought it was more important to hang out with my friends and talk about boys.”
Maria smiled a sad smile. “It was the same for me, but with horses. I rode every day on our farm in Mexico until my quinciñera. Then I thought I was too grown up for horses. I did not realize how much I would miss them.”
Jerry was interested in how Holly had developed her skills—he was pretty sure she had killed more zombies than he and Alberto had, maybe more than both of them and Maria combined. But his attention was being diverted by the number of vehicles, zombies, and ravaged bodies filling the road and slowing them down. The possibility of making it home to Rachel that day, or even the next, was looking more and more unlikely. He started thinking again about whether he would want to continue if he found Rachel hadn’t made it. His brain went into a feedback loop of what ifs until the ambulance lurched to a stop.
Jerry looked up and took in their surrou
ndings. What he saw made him groan in frustration. They were at the intersection of 29th Street and Speer Boulevard, one of the main vehicle arteries into or out of town. A stagnant river of cars, all pointing more or less in the same direction—including those in the lanes heading the other way—filled the road from curb to curb and even spilled into the surrounding yards. It looked like a lot of people had gotten impatient and tried to use the sidewalks as well but gotten stuck. The tightly packed line of vehicles ran away from them in either direction as far as Jerry could see.
“All of these people are trying to get out of Denver at once,” Alberto said.
“Yeah.” Holly had an elbow on the back of each of the front seats. She looked left, then right. “I wonder what happened to them.”
“I’m not sure,” Jerry said. “A lot of the doors are open. Maybe people got out of their cars to walk.”
“Do you think the zombies know how to open doors?” Alberto said.
“That’s very scary.” The hairs on Jerry’s arms prickled. Zombies who could operate a door latch, like the “smart zombies” in the Slow Burn series by Bobby Adair, would be a disaster. He didn’t see how they could fight a population of thinking zombies who could move almost as fast as normal humans. Any group bigger than what they had just fought would overwhelm them unless they all learned to fight like Holly. “I don’t think I’ve seen any smart zombies yet.”
“How did this all happen so fast?” Maria asked.
Jerry blinked and looked up and down the street. He wondered what had happened to Doctors Mendez and Patel. They had basically saved his life with their blog, and everything he knew about the virus was because of them. “From what I read, it only took a few hours to infect people instead of days or weeks, which is more common. That, and the fact that the infected go around biting people, means a whole lot of people are catching the virus at the same time. It’s a geometric progression, like compounding.”
“Do you think it’s like this all over the world?” Maria asked.
Jerry nodded. Maria and Alberto frowned. They probably had relatives in Mexico. “No one reacted anywhere near fast enough, including yours truly.” If it hadn’t been for the doctors, he never would have accepted Bob’s zombie pronouncement or made a survival kit for Rachel or been wearing his Kevlar jacket.
“So there’s no hope of reversing it?” Maria looked on the verge of tears, her eyes moist and red.
“I don’t even know where to begin on that one,” Jerry said, shaking his head. He seemed to be doing a lot of that lately. “Viruses build hard shells around themselves that are almost impervious to outside organisms. Hepatitis C is a virus. It took basically twenty-five years from when scientists first started working on it till there was an effective treatment. That treatment was a drug cocktail that people had to take regularly for weeks. Other viruses, like HIV and Ebola, still haven’t been cured even though the best scientists all over the world are working on them.”
“What about a vaccine for the people who aren’t infected yet?”
“I don’t know.” Jerry looked out the window. Black smoke drifted out several buildings downtown; one of them was only a couple blocks from his building. “That doctor in Brazil, Mendez, did say they were going to explore using the rabies vaccine to prevent transmission, but I don’t think they ever got around to it. I doubt they’re still doing research. Even if they were, we’ll never be able to communicate with them. Well, maybe with ham radio, if we can work out a generator.”
“It sounds so hopeless,” Maria said.
Jerry thought for a second. “We probably won’t be able to find a medical solution to this problem. The infrastructure’s all gone as far as I know. Unless someplace like the CDC in Atlanta managed to survive.”
“They made it in Resident Evil,” Holly said. Then she frowned and shook her head. “But then, that doctor was, like, totally crazy, and it didn’t end well.”
“Even if they did make it, I don’t see how it would do us any good, at least not for a long time.”
Alberto thumped his hand on the wheel and threw the ambulance into reverse. “That’s really something to worry about when we aren’t running from zombies all the time.” He pointed out his side window and started backing up.
Fifteen to twenty zombies were heading their way.
Chapter Forty-Four
“Okay, everyone. Keep calm and keep quiet,” whispered a male voice to Rachel’s right. It sounded like the machete guy.
No one else said anything. Rachel could hear them breathing. They remained standing in the dark for what seemed like an hour—long enough for her own breathing to return to normal—even though Rachel knew it was probably only a couple minutes.
A woman’s voice, heavy with a smoker’s rasp, broke the silence. “Think we lost them?”
One of the men said, “Doubt it, but let me take a look.”
Rachel didn’t like the idea, not sure if this breed of zombie had the ability to lie in wait for an unsuspecting human to underestimate them. But before she could object, a sliver of light barely brighter than a flashlight appeared near where she thought the door was. She couldn’t believe it was already dusk and she had traveled less than two miles since breakfast.
The gap widened and illuminated the room. Three women were standing together opposite her. One was the woman in the evening dress that had led them inside. Another was shorter and rounder and wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She stood next to a rough-looking older woman. Rachel pegged her as the smoker. The boy they had followed in here and two other kids were gathered behind the group. A third man, a weaselly looking guy in a pair of unflattering skinny jeans, was giving her the stink-eye.
The man at the door put his face against the crack on the hinge side, then opened the door wider and darted his head out. He swiveled his head back and forth a couple of times before pulling back and easing the door shut, plunging them back into darkness.
“They moved away a little, but they’re still out there,” he whispered, and Rachel heard a faint metallic click. Probably the deadbolt. “None of them’s paying any attention to this door. Just kind of milling around.”
A flashlight clicked on, and the beam wavered around for a few seconds. It flashed off the woman’s sequins before it came to rest on Rachel.
“What the hell was that all about?” a new male voice said.
Rachel couldn’t see much of him past the glare until machete guy grabbed the light and pointed it at the floor. “Knock it off, Gary,” he said in a tired voice, like it wasn’t the first time he’d had to say it.
Rachel couldn’t help saying something. “I guess I could have stayed where I was and let them eat you.”
“What?”
“You think I was just out for a walk and decided to fight some zombies to pass the time? Those fucking zombies were all set to catch you from behind and ruin your day when I saved your ass.”
“How do we know you didn’t lead them there in the first place?”
Rachel opened her mouth but couldn’t form words. The thought was so preposterous she was literally speechless.
The guy with the shovel said, “Give it a rest, Gary. What possible reason could she have for leading a bunch of zombies to us and then killing all of them?”
“All but one of them, anyway.” Rachel looked at the man and smiled. “Thanks for helping out. I’m Rachel.”
“Eric.” He smiled back and extended a hand. “And you’re welcome. We appreciate what you did back there.”
“No problem.” Rachel shook his hand.
Gary jumped back in. “You’re thanking her for bringing those things after us?”
The older woman took a step toward him, and he flinched. She wore a cowboy shirt that would have fit right in with Linda Walsh’s group, except it was yellow with age. “Gary, you just stop that right now.” As she spoke, Gary’s shoulders hunched a little more. “I know everything has to be some sort of conspiracy with you, but this woman risked her life to save you
r sorry butt, and the rest of us as well.”
Rachel got a whiff of stale cigarette smoke when she spoke.
“But, Grandma. It could be a trick,” Gary whined. “People can’t be trusted.”
The woman continued as if Gary hadn’t spoken. “It was just as likely you attracted them things to us with all your whining and complaining. Now, you apologize and thank her, and then try to keep your trap shut for five minutes for a change. You hear me?”
“Okay.” Gary looked at his feet. “Thank you, ma’am, for helping us.”
Rachel could see his face redden, even in the flashlight’s dim beam. His apology was so transparently insincere, it was all Rachel could do not to laugh. She turned to the older woman and held out her hand. “Thanks for your help.”
“Well, you are welcome. Rachel, did you say?”
Rachel nodded.
“I’m Emma.” Emma shook her hand. “And that fine specimen is my grandson Gary. These are my boys, Eric, as you just heard, and Larry.” She released Rachel’s hand and indicated the two men who had saved Rachel from the big hipster zombie. Eric still held the shovel, and Larry had sheathed the machete at his hip so he could grab the flashlight. “Gary is the offspring of my other boy, Michael, who is no longer with us.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Rachel said.
“It wasn’t much of a loss. He wasn’t good for nothin’ but drinking, chasing women, and causing problems. Gary being one of those problems. He got himself killed in a bar fight when Gary was five.”
Rachel didn’t know how to respond. She could see Gary’s face redden even more.
Larry seemed to sense Rachel’s discomfort at the overshare and stepped in. “This here’s my wife Cheryl.” He waved a hand at the sequined woman, who was nothing short of gorgeous up close. She looked like a beauty contest winner in that dress, and her makeup was still perfect even though the rest of the group looked like they had been chased for quite a while. “And my sister-in-law, Sandi.”