by D A Madigan
For just a minute or so, then, before he continued his tour of his new domain, the General looked around, self-satisfaction radiating from his every line and contour.
He was, in effect, King of All He Surveyed... all these good folks, his armed officers, former police and National Guard, most of 'em, all deferred to him. Because he'd had the Great Idea, inspired directly from the Lord no doubt, of usin' them there snow plows that were just sittin' in the Municipal Garage... snow plows that were just what was needed and necessary, when travelin' the streets of the End Times. Yes sir.
He'd come a long, long way from being a lowly assistant groundskeeper in the Louisville Metro Parks Department. Yes sir, he had. And by the Grace of God he'd rise yet further before the 7 years of tribulations were over and he went to his Heavenly reward, yes sir. Someone had to oppose the Anti-Christ, and the General was that someone.
Everything was workin' out just the way the Lord had planned it.
At the far end of the store, in the small upstairs section that had once held clerical offices for Kroger's management staff, a small conference room, two bathrooms, and the staff break room, Captain Cass moaned quietly... then reached down and gently patted Dorothy on the head.
The girl looked up at her, eyes and lips gleaming. "Was that good?" she whispered.
"It's always good with you, baby doll," the Captain responded, pitching her voice low to keep from being overheard. To be overheard meant death for both of them... a long, hard, unpleasant death, at that. What the General would do to anyone he caught 'seducing' his little girl did not bear thinking about... and that it was a woman doing the 'seducing'... Captain Cass felt a shudder go through her, quite unlike the more pleasurable one she had just experienced.
No matter that the little tramp had come on to Cassie in the first place, or mentioned during their second tryst how much she just 'loooooooooooved eatin' pussy'... a skill she'd apparently picked up at the all girl's Catholic school the General had been sending her to, before Z Day. No, none of that would matter. Cassie had no illusions... if the General or anyone else caught her with Dorothy, Dorothy would sob and whimper and plead and tell the General exactly what he would want to hear... that Cassie had forced her into the relationship, and frightened her into keeping quiet about it. It might not be enough to save Dorothy... who knew, with that crazy ex groundskeeper who styled himself a General now?
But Cassie was morally certain that Dorothy would throw her under the bus anyway. The little slut had absolutely no scruples at all... which only made sense, given who had raised her. And given that, according to Dorothy, at least, the General... her own father... had been fucking her since she was in middle school.
Not that the General was shy about his incestuous child abuse now. Everybody knew he was screwing his own daughter; he seemed positively proud of it. "The old ways are swept away by the hand of the Lord," he liked to say. "Now, righteousness is as righteousness does, and my love for my people is that of an Old Testament prophet towards his sons and his daughters!" The General seemed to think that in the Old Testament, most of those old beardie guys had been shaggin' their own kids, and nobody in the Ad Hoc Christian End Times Survival Battalion was going to argue with him. Not while he was the only who knew how to keep those snow plows running, anyway. Not while he kept coming up with plans that worked.
Cassie straightened out her uniform, made sure everything was where it should be, then leaned down and kissed Dorothy one last time. She could taste herself on the girl's lips. "Breath mints," she breathed to her, before patting the girl's ass and moving by her to the stairs.
Behind Captain Cass, Dorothy's usually angelic features crumpled into something somewhere between a snarl and a scowl. Stupid piggy bitch. Thought she knew everything. If her daddy ever found out his precious Captain Cass was a lez... and a child molesting lez goin' after his adorable little girl, too... she'd be lucky to get fed to the geeks. Most likely Daddy would stage his own version of the Crucifixion, crossed with the Last Supper... only Cassie would be writhin' around up on the cross sayin' 'take eat, this is my body' to a bunch o' zombies.
Dorothy wasn't worried about what her daddy might do to her. She'd had that foolish old man wrapped around her little finger since she was a baby. The sex, if anything, just made him easier to control.
The 14 year old girl shrugged then, and walked over to the corner where the Captain had had the enlisted men drop all the luggage belonging to her daddy and her. She fumbled around in her own backpack for a while, pulled out a Baggie, opened it, dropped the four bullets she'd stolen from Captain Cass' equipment belt into it, and resealed it.
Guns were no good against the geeks. Anybody knew that... anybody who was still alive and not some kinda retard, anyway. But the geeks weren't really such a much when you knew their weakness... a rolled up newspaper and a Cricket lighter would send a whole herd of them runnin' away as fast as their dead ol' legs would carry 'em.
And guns were still REAL good against people.
Most people, of course, did what Dorothy wanted anyhow... all she had to do was bat her eyelashes at 'em, or, occasionally, maybe provide a little lip service. Everybody liked lip service. Dorothy didn't mind providing it. Even if they were nasty or smelly or somethin' -- and since the Rapture, pretty much everyone was nasty all the time cuz no one could take a shower or a bath any more -- she could always just kinda listen to music in her mind while she did... whatever.
But the time was comin' when there was gonna be some changes made 'round here. Her Daddy wasn't gonna last forever.
Not if she had anything to say about it, anyway...
v.
Up on the roof, Franklin Morabito squinted through the cheap plastic children's binoculars they all used when they were up here gathering intelligence. He liked how that sounded, 'gathering intelligence'. When Franklin had been younger, he'd wanted to be James Bond when he grew up.
"Some kind of fire, up there by Kroger's," he murmured.
Crouched down near Franklin, Dan just grunted. It was getting pretty cold up here, and all he was wearing was a pair of sweatpants three sizes too small for him, a t-shirt, and a sweat shirt, too. Socks and sneakers completed the ensemble, and a billed cap with a red cardinal on it. None of it did much to hold off the seasonal chill of a late November night.
But there was no way he was going back down into the store until Sheila returned.
He could see what looked like a brief spurt of flame up near where Kroger's had to be... a brief spurt of flame, and two bright cones of what looked like headlights. And he could hear the sound of a loud diesel engine, too... maybe more than one. All coming from the direction of Kroger's.
And then, from just across their parking lot -- well, ten feet or so above their parking lot, at the top of the concrete dividing wall where the shrubs were -- a flashlight began to blink.
Dan let his breath come out in a relieved sigh. "That's Sheila," he whispered. He poked his head out over the edge of the roof and looked down. It was dark and hard to make out anything down at ground level now, and of course a flashlight beam from the roof would be near-suicidal... but he was pretty sure he could see shapes shuffling around down there, and hear moans and grunts. Not as many as there had been... but already, the zombies had returned to the area they had run from, screaming and in flames, only half an hour ago.
The hive organism that was the zombie horde had no memory, apparently. It just expanded into whatever room was available to it, in the absence of harmful phenomena.
Dan crawled backwards, grabbed another small bag of charcoal briquettes, punctured its front with a kitchen knife, and stuffed a ball of wrapping paper with a long paper tail into the bag. Then he took out one of the many lighters he carried -- none of them were ever without the means to make fire any more -- flicked it to get a flame, and touched the flame to the end of the paper tail.
As the flames started to glisten and flicker and run quickly up to the crumpled mass of wrapping paper that was s
tuffed into the front of the bag, Dan hefted the bag by its top (where it was sewed closed with a long heavy piece of white cotton string) and threw it outward. The bag itself was starting to grow a blue halo of flame as it dropped out of sight below the edge of the roof. Dan heard a metallic 'wump' that would be the bag landing on top of a car roof below and the now familiar scuttering sound of flaming charcoal briquettes exploding out of the bag to roll across the ground -- or, in this case, to roll across the top of the automobile's roof where the bag must have landed, and then ponk and chunk down to the hood of the car, and then finally chunk down to the tarmac, where they would roll for a few feet before coming to a stop.
Below, zombies screamed and started running.
Dan ran over to the corner of the roof where the rope Sheila had used was coiled up; he'd pulled it back up, after she was on the ground. They had no way of knowing if zombies could climb ropes. Certainly there was no physical reason they shouldn't be able to; they could certain walk, run, grab, scream, leap, claw, and bite at people... why not climb?
Dan himself had an instinctive feeling that it would be beyond them.... not that they would be physically incapable, but that the dead simply wouldn't have the vaguest idea what to do with a dangling rope if they encountered one. But nobody could know for sure, so he'd pulled the rope back up after his wife had used it.
But now he knew the zombies would all be fleeing the flaming bag of briquettes, and Sheila would be coming down from the top of the wall and moving across the parking lot to the corner where the rope should be. They had debated for a long time just having whoever went out come back to the rear loading doors... but in the end, none of them wanted to risk letting even one zombie into the store by opening any doors at ground level at all.
Sheila had told them all she could climb that rope pretty easily, so... Dan began lowering the rope again.
After a second, he felt it jerk in his hands. Sheila had found it and was climbing up. Good. In another couple of seconds at most, she'd be safe again... as safe as any of them could be. And maybe she could answer some of the questions about those lights they'd seen...
What happened next never left Dan's mind for longer than a few moments, not for the rest of his life. He was never able to close his eyes again without seeing the next minute or so occur, over and over and over again, in full and vivid technicolor. And no matter how much he might have wanted to do something else, to change how that next sixty seconds went, he never could.
He was reaching his right hand out to help Sheila over the edge of the roof when he saw a head appear.
It was very dark. And Dan remembered that Sheila had been wearing a bicycle helmet over a rubber Hallowe'en mask, so when the dark bulk of the head silhouetted against the bare flickering light cast by the burning briquettes below didn't look like Sheila, Dan's mind automatically reassured him that, of course, it wouldn't, due to the helmet and the mask.
His mind was still assuring him of that when the rope climbing zombie came lunging over the edge and buried its teeth in Dan's hand.
Somehow, he didn't scream. Had he screamed, it might have been over for all of them in the Walgreen's... if a zombie could climb a rope impelled by its fear of fire, why couldn't a dozen or a hundred zombies climb a rope in search of uninfected hosts? Had Dan screamed, every zombie within earshot would have come running.
Or maybe the fire below would have kept them back. Maybe.
Anyway, somehow, he didn't scream.
But he'd stuffed the lighter he'd just used into his right sweatpants pocket, and now, as the zombie grabbed his wrist and set its teeth to really start chomping, he fumbled left handed for the lighter, got it out, flicked it...
...flicked it...
...flicked it....
...and got a flame.
And shoved that flame into the face of the zombie currently trying to chew his hand off.
And then several things happened all at once.
The zombie burst into flames, screamed, and threw itself backwards, away from the lighter.
Directly into Sheila, who had just pulled herself up onto the roof. She'd sprinted across the lot, having seen the dark bulk of what must be a zombie hauling itself up the rope to the roof.
With a mingled scream from both of them, Sheila and the zombie both fell off the roof into the parking lot below.
Dan heard a horribly small and unimportant sounding thud.
Just that... a little thud. Nothing loud. Nothing significant.
But the screaming stopped.
Dan walked over to the roof of the Walgreen's and looked down.
The zombie's body was still burning.
Underneath, all reds and oranges and yellows and strangely flickering shadows, Dan could see his wife sprawled on the tarmac.
Her clothes were smoldering.
Her legs and arms were thrown out, starfished, beneath the sullenly burning zombie lying on top of her.
As Dan watched, the zombie broke into cindered, ashy fragments and fell into burning bits around his wife's body, much the way a flame eaten log will collapse into coals and cinders in a fireplace where it has burned for a time.
Sheila never moved.
Dan's mind, in an idiot's voice, a madman's voice, gibbering like a fool, said to him, quite clearly, Well, you're never getting that pair of jeans back, good buddy.
Dan felt a... something, some kind of sound, a howl, a scream, a yell, an endless shriek of hysterical laughter, something... building up in his chest. In his throat. Pushing at his clenched teeth now, struggling to get out into the night air.
He shoved his left forearm into his mouth and bit down, hard.
His right hand was starting to throb, dully.
He'd been bitten. He'd been bitten by a zombie.
His wife Sheila was dead.
Vicki's mom was dead.
She'd saved herself. She'd saved Vivian and those two kids. She'd saved Dan and Vicki. She'd gone out to see what was going on, trying to save Skip. She'd...
...the zombie had climbed the rope, and....
He saw it again, lunging up onto the roof, felt its teeth sinking into his hand. Felt the lighter in his left hand. The flames, blossoming in the zombie's filthy hair and flesh and eye sockets, wreathing his hand. The zombie hurling itself backward, screaming.
Knocking Sheila off the roof, both of them screaming now.
And that tiny, terrible thud.
Sheila was dead.
He'd been bitten.
He couldn't go back down into the store.
He'd seen all the zombie movies. He knew what it meant to be bitten. He'd turn... how fast? He didn't know. But he'd die, and then he'd turn, and when that happened, he couldn't be up here on this roof.
His hand was really starting to hurt now.
Numb, in shock, Dan knelt and started to pull the rope back up again.
The flames were out down below now.
The zombies would start coming back.
Apparently, they could climb ropes.
He pulled the rope up, and sat down.
His hand really hurt.
His wife was dead.
In just a minute, he was going to jump off the roof.
In just a minute.
After he got his breath back.
Behind him, Dan never heard Franklin Morabito scuttling over to the trapdoor. Never noticed Franklin nearly falling down the open trapdoor, so anxious and nervous that his hands were trembling and his body nearly unresponsive. Never heard Franklin yank the trapdoor closed behind him, and then throw the bolt that locked it closed.
Never heard Franklin run out into the store yelling "There was a zombie on the roof! A zombie on the roof! Dan and Sheila are both dead!"
On the roof, oblivious to all of that, Dan just sat, in shock, rocking back and forth, cradling his bitten, burned hand.
Occasionally, he sobbed.
vi.
The man -- he supposed he was a man now, he'd thought he was before the c
raziness of Z Day happened, he sure as shit had to be one by now -- leaned back against the cool concrete wall behind him and closed his eyes.
For a minute. Just a minute, here at the back of the store, where none of those crazy ass ofays could see him.
He had a gun. He was one of the General's 'armed officers'. Only he and the General knew that the AR 15 he'd been issued, which the Ad Hoc Crazy Ass Christian Motherfucking Militia, or whatever the General called 'em, had gotten out of a pawnshop on Broadway, had no bullets in it. So he wasn't really an armed officer, was he? No. He knew exactly what he was... he was the General's house nigger.
But he'd had to play the little fucking game. No choice there. That crazy motherfucking ofay with his almost as crazy posse of ex cops and National Guardsmen, driving around in their snowplows like they was the kings of the motherfucking world... they all thought the General shit sunshine and pissed malt liquor. They didn't even care that the little bastard was screwing his own kid. And what the fuck was that? Who did that? And who put up with that? Jesus.
It made him sick to his stomach. Literally. He'd be puking up blood if he had to keep this shit up much longer. Pouring fucking lighter fluid over that goddam Pakistani bastard's head and sending him up to pull the geeks out of this Kroger's and then dropping that match... that had nearly got him killed. He nearly couldn't do it. Even knowing what it meant if he didn't, he could barely force himself do it. When he thought it up he'd been sure the General, or somebody, maybe that ugly ass bitch Cass, would say noooooo, that's crazy, we need some other plan, but they'd also think that he was a crazy ruthless sonofabitch and give him some fuckin' space. But no, those insane psychos had loved the idea!
And then, made him do it.
He wanted to cry. But a man didn't cry. A man took care of fucking business.
But he'd been doin' good, hadn't he? Before this crazy ofay and his crew showed up, he'd been doin' all right. Yeah, he woke up at C-dog's house on that shit ass sofa in the living room with one fuck of a hangover. Not just from the beer and the vodka, neither; C-dog had somehow come into a pretty good pile of pills that they'd all been sampling pretty prodigiously too. And that shit will give you a motherfucking skull raping the next day when you open your eyes up, yeah baby.