by D A Madigan
The zombie -- this skinny, gray haired guy in dirty clothes who smelled homeless and looked like hell, anyway -- was chewing. And swallowing.
And now, as Thomas stopped screaming and slumped limply to the ground, the blood now pumping but not jetting from his neck wounds, the hellish looking homeless fellow was looking up, bright eyed and avid, at Randall.
Randall was looking around desperately for anything he could use as a weapon. One good shot to the head should take this thing out. Then he'd have to deal with the other guy, of course... who knew how long he'd take to turn... but he'd seen the movies, and if he could find something heavy --
The zombie that had recently been Teddy Boynton was scrabbling across the oil stained pavement of the parking garage at Randall when Randall grabbed up the broken chunk of cinder block and swung it hard at Teddy's head.
Randall got lucky -- it's much harder to hit a moving person in the head than you'd think, from watching TV -- and connected solidly, sending the stinking old fuck spinning backwards onto its ass. Randall had heard a wet sort of crunching sound as the chunk of cinder block had slammed into the creep's skull, felt something give, and could see a sort of dented in area on the head of his attacker where the skin was gashed and something that looked like bone was showing through. That should do it. Now he'd have to deal similarly with this poor other fella, and then catch up with that good looking young woman who had just run out. They should really team up; surviving this would be easier with two people than just one. And he'd seen the tramp stamp across her hip bones when she was leaning forward against the car, gasping for breath. Under the right circumstances, who knew what might happ --
Two undead hands, ferociously strong and very cold, closed around Randall's throat from behind. He never felt the half rotten teeth that had once belonged to Teddy Boynton tear into his scalp, because the inhumanly powerful grip had snapped his neck like a cheap pencil.
Naomi had run out onto Second Street and turned to the left. Uphill was Main, and Main Street would have restaurants and other places where she maybe could get some shelter off the street. Maybe the Science Center or the Bat Museum. Yeah, a nice hefty Louisville Slugger would be a good thing to have, if these freakish things were going to keep --
Below her, where the Second Street Bridge began (or ended, if you were coming in from Indiana), a huge crowd of -- whatever they were -- was moving off the bridge. She could tell they weren't normal people, they just didn't look right -- torn clothes, splattered with blood, arms and faces covered with wounds, and, generally, they had dark reddish stains around their mouths. Plus they didn't move like people -- they kind of loped along, heads moving back and forth, eyes bugging out, usually screaming or screeching like nothing human.
She turned to run like hell up Second Street to Main, and caught movement from the corner of her eye.
Some old homeless guy with something wrong with his head and blood smeared around his mouth, running towards her, arms waving wildly, screaming his crazy old homeless ass off.
A few steps behind him, she could see those guys who had been running with her off the bridge -- the heavy gutted one in the paint splattered jeans and old blue t-shirt and the grey haired one in the expensive Dockers and polo shirt. They were running at her too -- also screaming.
She made it six steps towards Main before they dragged her down.
In the Kroger's off Outer Loop road, Geoffrey Lewis heard an engine going by the front of the store, no more than thirty feet away at the most. Whoever it was was driving fast. Geoffrey didn't blame them; wherever they were going, he wished to God he was riding shotgun. Because wherever it was, it couldn't possibly suck as much as here.
Geoffrey had showed up for work at 6 am and started stocking his aisle. The goddam warehouse had a huge oversupply on Dinty Moore Beef Stew and had given Kroger's a pretty sweet fucking discount on it just to get the shit out the door, so Geoffrey had eight boxes of the happy crappy he had to somehow fit onto his aisle, because Mr. Becker, the shit for brains General Manager, wanted that happy crappy to move right on the Christ out of his store. Fitting eight boxes of the nasty ass diarrhea looking turd soup into a section of shelves that usually accommodated no more than three had been a pretty decent challenge, but eventually, by fudging the scanner numbers, taking down an endcap that had been put up by a stocker who had the day off and replacing it with one featuring Dinty Moore beef stew, and then hiding two boxes of the shit behind the mops out back, he managed it. He was just punching out to his first break at the time clock up front by the courtesy counter when all hell had broken loose.
'All hell', in this case, meaning that half a dozen people in bloody clothes, screaming their heads off, had come into the store and started grabbing and biting at everyone they could get to. Sheeeee it! Geoffrey didn't need any of that bullshit. He was turning to head in the opposite direction -- there were more doors down there -- but as he turned, he saw another bunch of whatever these crazy fucks were had come in by those doors, too. Same action, they were grabbing and biting chunks out of anyone they could get their hands and teeth on.
Geoffrey had no clue what was going on -- mass hysteria, bath salts in the water supply , the government beaming mass murder rays from its secret HARP array as some kind of fucked up experiment (Geoffrey knew all about that bullshit, he was Art Bell's biggest fan) but Geoffrey wanted exactly not one motherfucking milligram of it. With an exquisitely finely tuned sense of self preservation, Geoffrey had vaulted over the courtesy counter (knocking Connie, the fat assistant manager with the stupid looking perm, ass over teacups as he did it, but in a situation like this, it was every man for himself and God take the motherfucking hindmost) and bolting into the office where they kept the safe and a secure computer terminal and the really expensive special ordered food for the handful of crazy rich fucks who came here instead of going to the Trader Joe's out on Shelbyville Road.
He got a brief glimpse of somebody already in there -- Jeanette, the other assistant manager, who was short and blonde and actually kind of pretty, although she was fifteen years older than Geoffrey and married and annoyingly Born Again -- but he didn't hesitate; he slammed the door closed and hit the locking button on it.
And then leaned against it. There, motherfuckers... whatever the fuck was going off, that was a reinforced metal door and they were in a room with concrete block walls. Ol' Geoffrey was just going to sit here and wait this shit out.
Jeanette hadn't given him a hard time about it, she'd been watching the little color TV they had in there, that managers weren't supposed to watch soap operas or U of L games on, but all of them did. Apparently this shit was happening all over Louisville, all over Kentucky, all over the world -- some kind of crazy ass riots, or something. Whole lotta people going crazy and attacking everyone else, all at once. Weird.
"It's the Rapture," Jeanette had said. "The dead are risen in Christ! The dead are risen in Christ!"
Geoffrey had seen a few zombie flicks; those freaky screaming people who had been biting at everyone could have been zombies, he supposed... although they hadn't been gray faced or rotting or all tore up, like the zombies in the movies were. As to the Rapture, Geoffrey wouldn't have recognized Jesus, or any other religious figure major or minor, if they'd come up to him wearing a name tag and handed him a fucking tract.
A couple of minutes before, someone -- probably that fat ass Connie -- had started pounding on the other side of the metal door, screaming at Jeanette to let her in. Jeanette hadn't even gotten up; she was on her knees behind the desk, wringing her hands together, praying to Jesus to take her up with Him in His Glorious Arms to Heaven, or some shit. After a minute or so, Connie had stopped screaming to be let in and started screaming to leave her alone, oh god don't do that, no no no, while there had been a lot of thrashing and scrabbling sounds outside.
And then it had gotten quiet, except for Jeanette, continuing to frantically mutter prayers over in the corner. And, more distantly, sounds of screaming. But
now, they'd pretty much died out, too.
But you could see the little TV screens connected to the security cameras from in here, too, and Geoffrey could see the store was still full of people... some crouched down on the floor, munching on some kind of mess down there he couldn't clearly make out on the black and white monitors, others just kind of aimlessly shuffling up and down the aisles. It was freaky as shit. He wasn't goin' out there yet, no sir.
He looked over at Jeanette again, still on her knees praying her little ass off. Geoffrey thought her being on her knees worked out real well. He ran his hands down his blue stocker's apron... then pulled it off over his head and dropped it on the ground. Reached down again, and unzipped his fly.
"Hey, Jeanette," he said. "As long as you're down there..."
Jeanette Farnsworth, 37 years old, mother of two, more or less happily married and a devoted member of Louisville's very own megachurch, Southeast Christian, was paying no attention whatsoever to Geoffrey. She had to get right with Jesus. She had been reasonably sure she was already right with Jesus, but Scriptures taught that He shall come as a thief in the night and no man knoweth the hour or the day, and apparently, she had been caught with her pants down, at least, spiritually. She did not know which of her sins might have momentarily nudged her out of a state of grace... perhaps those lustful thoughts she had found herself having while she and her husband had watched that Matthew McConaughey movie last night on the cable. Or maybe the football bet she had placed with Connie two days ago; it had seemed harmless enough, but Pastor Brian had been very clear that there really were no minor sins, anything could interrupt the flow of blessings and grace from Jesus, so...
Jeanette was completely unprepared to feel someone's hand on her head, turning it to the left. She opened her eyes and -- holy shit! A penis! RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF HER FACE!!!
Jeanette had not always been a Born Again Christian. In fact, she had come to her Born Again status relatively late in life. When she had still been married to her first husband, and dating the man who would become her second husband behind her first husband's back, she would never in her life have dreamed that one day she would come to find grace in the loving arms of the Lord Jesus Christ Our Savior. But when Mark -- by then her second husband -- had been called to grace and called pretty damn hard, and then he'd wanted Jeanette to start going to Southeast Baptist with him, and it had been pretty clear that either she went, or she started working on husband #3... and with kid #1 already swelling her belly, that hadn't seemed like a good option. So she'd gone, and on her sixth Sunday, much to her surprise, she'd found herself getting up from the pew and heading on down to the railing in response to Pastor Brian's weekly invitation.
Prior to that heady moment, though, Jeanette had been a pretty take no shit kinda chick. She'd had more than a few penises this close to her face in her earlier days as a sinner, but those days were long gone. However, that did not mean that Jeanette, who in her early 20s had spent 8 months on a local roller derby team, had forgotten how to deal with jackasses who shoved their puds into the faces of decent married Christian women.
Jeanette grabbed and twisted. Geoffrey's face went an odd shade of puce and he would have screamed, except that when he tried, all he could do was make a weird little high pitched whistling sound. He went to his knees as Jeanette rose to her feet; for good measure, she kneed the little bastard right in his stupid, half green half yellow face as she got up and he went down. Something gave underneath her kneecap, and Geoffrey, making noises vaguely like a toy tea kettle boiling merrily away on a toy stove, went over backwards.
Jeanette unlocked the door and went slamming out of the office, pissed as hell. She was going to get Geoffrey fired -- hell, she was going to get the little prick (pun certainly intended, and, for that matter, accurate) arrested. She was going to --
Connie, still fat in death, permed hair wildly mussed, chubby face marred by several deep bite marks that were no longer bleeding, grabbed Jeanette by the shoulders and sank her teeth into Jeanette's left deltoid, right where it sloped between her neck and her left shoulder. Jeanette screamed and tried to push her off, but it was way, way too late for that. Or for prayer. Or for much of anything else, for that matter.
Geoffrey was just starting to feel like maybe he could make a volitional movement beyond writhing in pain on the floor, when Connie and Jeanette came into the office with him.
He still didn't have enough breath to scream. And he was never going to.
All over Louisville -- all over the world -- the dead were getting up again and attacking the living. If roughly 156,000 people die every day, all over the world, this may be a vanishingly small percentage of the actual global population. But if at one particular moment in time, all those recently deceased bodies start moving again, and immediately begin attacking any living person near to them, those numbers will increase by orders of magnitude -- and continue increasing.
It is impossible to estimate how many relatively intact dead bodies there may be in any significant urban area at any one time. Figuring Louisville contains something like 1/7000th of the global population, a very rough approximation based on that same roughly approximated global death rate of 156,000 per day, would be that 20 people die in the Louisville Metro area every day. But that number could, on any given day, be much higher, or, obviously, as low as zero, although in a region where more than a million people live, this is so statistically unlikely as to be very nearly impossible.
Modern laws require certain bureaucratic niceties be observed as regards the dead; in some cases, bodies may be stored for up to two weeks before final disposition. Over such a period, it is not unreasonable to assess that there may be several hundred relatively intact corpses in any given metropolitan area, scattered around various hospitals, mortuaries, and funeral homes. And this does not even count the number of corpses freshly buried over the past few months.
Suffice to say, when the dead suddenly begin attacking the living, even a relatively small number of 'patient zeroes' will very quickly get out of hand.
Louisville -- sometimes affectionately known to its inhabitants as Derby City -- was rapidly becoming a city of the dead.
viii.
It was dangerous. There was no doubt about that. Crazy dangerous. And with Vicki to worry about...
Still. What it came down to for Dan was, did he trust his wife's judgment?
And the answer was -- yes.
So he and Vicki were in their kitchen, on the first floor of the house, looking out through the kitchen window. Or Dan was. Vicki was sitting on a kitchen chair, being quiet. Not still... she was fidgeting... but quiet.
Dan had gone down in the basement and found the old mop they hadn't used in years propped up over in the corner with the other cleaning equipment they didn't use any more. The mophead was a snake's nest of woven cloth fibers rather like big hanks of yarn and was completely dry and stiff. He had it in his left hand and in his right, he had the fire-starter he used to light the grill with when they barbecued in nice weather.
Vicki had assured him she could haul the box of canned food that was all they were salvaging from the house.
Dan had been surprised by how much of a help Vicki had been during this whole nightmare. She was only 9; she could easily have simply started crying and shrieking and brought all the hordes of hell in on them... in which case, well, they'd probably be wandering around the house screaming with the rest of the ghouls out there, and Sheila would be driving home into hell herself.
But Vicki had been surprisingly calm and cool. She'd shrugged off her usual 9 year old rebelliousness and really buckled down. She'd helped move everything upstairs quickly and efficiently, kept quiet despite being pretty obviously scared out of her mind -- couldn't blame her for that, Dan was in a constant state of low terror himself -- and now, she was downstairs in the kitchen, waiting for her mother to show up in the back alley. And when Sheila did show up, Vicki knew the plan... and Dan had a pretty good sense that she'd fol
low it, too. Unlike that 15 year old from next door who had proven completely useless --
Well, that was unkind. And possibly tempting fate, since Dan was pretty sure she and her dad were outside wandering around right now...
They were vulnerable here. There were windows all around the first floor of the house, and the back door was half glass. If they made a noise that attracted the horde's attention, they had no shelter at all...
His phone buzzed, once -- incoming text message. He looked at it -- 'In alley'.
He looked out back, through the kitchen window.
A Galaxy repair van was pulling up and parking in the alley that ran past the end of their lot.
Dan used the fire-lighter on the ancient mophead. It blossomed into flame, and with his other hand, he yanked open the back door. "Come on, pook!" he whispered urgently to Vicki. "There's your mom!"
Vicki grabbed the box of cans and moved up behind Dan. He stepped out onto the back porch, waving his torch around, jabbing it like a spear.
From just to the left of the porch, around the corner of his house -- but much, much closer than the front street - he heard growls and shrieks. He and Vicki started down the steps -- and his former next door neighbor came loping around the corner of the house at him, his one-time teenaged daughter running right behind him. Both were slack jawed, imbecilic, drooling -- and had looks of terrifyingly avid hunger on their hideously vacuous features.
His former neighbor saw the torch and not only stopped running forward, he screamed in apparent terror and tried to throw himself backwards. The girl slammed into the back of her once-and-never-again dad, and sent him lurching forward again. He brushed up against the corona of fire crackling around the swiftly burning mophead --