LZR-1143: Infection

by Bryan James

  “Fuck! It’s caught up! I god damned told you so!” We had gained a hundred feet, but they were still advancing, an implacable army of ugly, hungry motherfuckers.

  Sam jumped out of the driver’s seat, falling to the ground and out of sight to inspect the problem. Anaru opened his door, stepping onto the running board and setting the barrel of his rifle on the lower edge of his open window to steady his aim. He started firing carefully aimed shots at the approaching group. I jumped out, crouching and peering under the truck. A four by four support post had lodged itself in a gap in the engine shield next to the front axle; Sam was working on dislodging it manually, rocking it back and forth. I tried to help, but we didn’t have the strength.

  “Anaru, switch up with me,” Sam yelled, rolling out and running to the passenger side of the truck. He stopped firing and came to the driver’s side around the back of the truck, as she took up his position, standing on the outside of the door and shooting carefully into the crowd. I got up, hearing Kate’s voice as I did so.

  “Mike, watch out!” Even as I turned, I knew it was too late. Four zombies, their vacant staring eyes and drawn faces staring hungrily at Sam, had turned the corner ten feet away, shuffling toward her as she fired into the approaching horde. She couldn’t hear their approach, focused as she was on the numbers advancing toward us and deafened by the sound of her consistently fired shots. I yelled at her and she turned to me; but she turned the wrong way, giving them the last few feet of distance they needed.

  My hand shot out, pointing to them as the first creature, an ordinary woman of average height and build, left hand still clutching the remnants of her last wet meal, grabbed Sam’s arm, bringing it toward her mouth. Caught off guard, Sam jerked her arm back, but the creature had leaned forward too far and it bit down hard on Sam’s wrist, drawing a scream as blood rose from the wound and trickled out of the corners of the ghoul’s mouth. Clutching the hand in its teeth, the creature shook the member from side to side like a dog with a chew toy, trying to detach it from her arm.

  Amid her cries of pain, Sam’s weapon discharged, splattering the head of the creature against the side of the truck. I reached her side, raising my weapon and firing at the remaining three as she moved back, cradling her wounded arm. She leaned against the truck, sliding to the ground slowly, face stricken and pale. The approaching crowd from the lot was forty feet away, shuffling steadily forward, moans louder as they approached.

  I grabbed Anaru’s ax from his seat and put my foot on Sam’s shoulder, pushing her to the ground. This had to happen fast. Off balance from the unexpected contact, she fell down flat, back on the ground, arms splayed out to each side. I gave myself no time to consider or rethink; I simply acted on impulse, bringing the ax down with as much force as I could muster.

  I briefly considered aiming for the neck, but allowed my initial swing to strike true. Her left arm lay flat on the ground with blood leaking from the bite wound and the ax cleaved through the flesh and bone of her forearm cleanly. She jerked and screamed, trying to raise her gun toward me. Suddenly the rear door of the cab opened, knocking the rifle from her hand as Kate looked down knowingly. Sam’s eyes flipped back in her head as she fainted, head striking the pavement with a dull thud.

  Nodding at Kate thankfully, I grabbed Sam by the vest, hauling her up to the passenger seat. Anaru appeared again from the driver’s side as a loud thump resounded from beneath the truck.

  “What happened?” he asked, looking at Sam and then to me. Her blood poured from her wound onto the seat, as I snatched her rifle from where it had landed. Taking the strap from the gun, I tied it hastily above the cut, stemming the flow of blood as much as possible. The horde was fifteen feet away and now fearfully excited by the sight of Sam’s blood.

  “Later,” I said, pushing her in and slamming the door. I sprinted to the other side and dove into the truck. The kick from the powerful engine knocked me against the back of the seat as we shot forward, the first few zombies reaching the broken fence as we shot out onto the cross street.

  I looked back and watched the mob descend on the severed hand, several faces converging on the dismembered appendage, mouths moving silently. They fought among themselves as the fingers were pulled from the palm, bloody trails following from hand to mouth.

  “You should have shot her,” Kate whispered softly, eyes riveted to the windows, intentionally avoiding my eyes. “She’s going to turn. Like you told Earl, it’s not a matter of if.” She turned back to me, eyes uncharacteristically hard.

  “It’s a matter of when.”

  Silent in the face of her unexpected pragmatism, I stared outside, watching the town pass us by and listening to Sam’s heavy breathing. Why could I so readily abandon Earl to his fate, but hesitate with Sam? Why hadn’t I swung for the neck? There’s nothing about the human condition at this point in time that cries out for mercy. No hand should be stayed by hope and compassion. These were not emotions at home in a world overrun by the living dead. Not when you’re dealing with a killer as ruthless as this.

  But why Earl, and not Sam?

  You know why, you sentimental, cowardly bastard. You can’t kill another woman, not if there’s a chance. You killed Maria, and you’ll be damned if you repeat that sin, won’t you. Well son, congratulations.

  We passed out of the alley into the main street we had just crossed. Creatures covered the pavement, alerted to the presence of food by the masses clustered at the dealership.

  You’re damned whether you sin or not. Like your cute little friend said, it’s not a matter of if…

  A zombie still wearing the habit of a nun wandered in front of the truck, shattering the illusion of safety as Anaru sent it spinning into the underbrush lining the highway, blood from the impact spraying onto the windshield.

  Anaru pulled the lever on the steering column, sending blue fluid over the glass. It mixed with the blood, and the diluted purple liquid ran lazily down the slick surface before the wiper blades erased it in one quick, efficient pass.

  No, sir. It’s just a matter of when.

  Chapter 21

  Dependence on fossil fuels never seems like an urgent or imminent problem when you have plenty of money and there’s a gas station on every corner; you just figure that you’ll keep paying for it until there isn’t any left, and by then, someone will have invented an alternative. It’s a logical enough conclusion, until something completely random, like a zombie apocalypse, is thrown into the works.

  “We have a problem, kids.” Anaru said from the driver’s seat. We were passing the main drag of the town, and a post office and hardware store disappeared to either side. A hastily erected barricade composed of sawhorses and parked police cruisers blocked part of the road ahead. But he wasn’t looking at the barricade. He was staring at the damned dashboard. I knew what he was going to say, but despite my own tendencies toward the skeptically negative side of life, I couldn’t really believe that it had happened again. Not really. Attempts at humor had always been my first defense mechanism.

  “Lemme guess,” I said, affecting the appropriate sarcastic tone. “We’re running low on gas?”

  He nodded curtly, eyes on the road.

  Despite my intuition, I was incredulous. “What the hell? Doesn’t anyone keep gas in their cars anymore? Why don’t any vehicles in the apocalypse have any goddamn gasoline? It’s like a really bad fucking movie! Jesus!”

  I couldn’t believe this. Second time in as many vehicles!

  “OK, I’m just telling you now, if any of you mother-fuckers even think about going outside to check out the noise in the dark, or go to the dark room upstairs to find the virgin after hearing the strange sound, I’m shooting you myself!”

  Kate was looking at me funny, so I cut short my offended rant, realizing even as the echo of my voice against the windows faded into silence that I had sounded like a blithering, crazed moron. But it was unbelievable!

  “How much?” I asked, moderating my tone.

 
; “I’d say another couple miles; we’re below red.”

  Out of gas. Again. See? Case in point. I was neither out of money, nor out of fossil fuels-on a global level, at least-I was just prevented from accessing the fuel by thousands of the living dead. Completely random? Abso-fucking-tively. But I digress.

  We moved through zombies, in groups and individually, wandering in front of the truck, driven to feed but uncomprehending of the danger the large moving vehicle posed. Their skulls and limbs shattered against the front grill, their torsos were ground against the pavement, but there were always more. As the truck began to shudder after barely a mile through town, Anaru turned back to me, sparing a glance for Sam, whose face was pale.

  “We need alternate transport soon, I think,” he said. “I see a sign for a fire station coming up. You wanna try for one of their trucks?” He seemed almost anxious to get into a vehicle he knew. I shuddered internally at the thought of fighting through more of these with a wounded woman in tow, but knew we needed wheels to continue.

  “Why not? But can we please, pretty please, check to see if it has gas first?”

  He answered with a brief smile, steering to the right as the station approached. One large door stood open, the other closed. No truck could be seen in the open bay, but as our truck started its own death rattle, we ran out of choices.

  We stopped and I jumped out, watching the doors and the few creatures outside that had seen our progress into the firehouse. They knew where we were, and others soon would as well.

  “Check it out!” I yelled over my shoulder, noting already that there was no truck in the bay next to us. The station was empty.

  “They might have something out back, I’ll be back in a minute!” He disappeared through a door in the rear of the building.

  Kate’s voice from the cab broke the silence a minute later. “We need to get out of here, Sam’s losing a lot of blood; she’s not going to make it if we can’t get this bleeding stopped ASAP!”

  The zombies from outside were getting closer, and more followed from the street, emerging from alleys and buildings, from the ether, it seemed. How many people lived in this town, anyhow?

  Anaru burst in through the rear door. “I got our new ride,” he said, “but we gotta find some keys.”

  “Shit. Okay, help me with the door. We need more time in here.” I bolted to the side of the hangar and slammed my palm against the automated mechanism. Nothing. As I expected.

  Anaru bolted to the manual crank, slowly pulling the door down. The window of daylight on the smooth concrete floor slowly shrank to a rectangle, then a line. As the bottom of the metal sheet reached the ground, ten hands suddenly flew through the last sliver of light, reaching for us from outside. I cursed and jumped back, watching the hands and forearms search frantically for purchase against the cold concrete as the door came down at last. Anaru’s massive arms strained against the crank as the door closed the last four inches, trapping the hands beneath the padded door and the floor of the station.

  They twitched incessantly, fingers curling and uncurling in automated response to being confined. It was creepy shit; a row of twelve zombie hands lining the floor, looking like those prank Halloween candy bowls that curled down on your hand when you reached for a Snickers.

  I leaned back against the exterior wall, breathing hard. Kate jumped down, moving to the front seat to tend to Sam.

  “Keys?” I said after I caught my breath, glancing at Anaru. He nodded once and we moved into the office between the two truck bays.

  It was a small space, and it held a radio and a white board covered with various assignments and names. I shrugged and turned to Anaru.

  “Uh, I got no idea where to look. Any ideas?”

  He shook his head and opened a small, empty box resting on the dispatch table. “Should be in here, but they’re not. We’ll need to check the living quarters.” He moved past me, toward a narrow flight of stairs. “Up here.”

  I followed his eyes, incredulous. “You mean up the stairs, into what is likely to be a dark, windowless attic? Where the firefighters used to live and could still be stuck, behind that very door,” my voice raised an octave as I gestured toward the solid wood door at the top of the stairs.

  I was indignant. “What did I just finish telling you? Did I stutter?”

  He just smiled as he moved up the stairs.

  What the hell was so damned funny? Did he think I was kidding? Why wouldn’t anyone take me seriously? Must be the insanity thing.

  I sighed. It was hard being me.

  Anaru reached the top of the stairs and grabbed the handle carefully. He turned it slowly, gun raised in his right hand. Moments later he turned to me, shaking his head.

  “Locked,” he said.

  “So try it the other way, big fella. Don’t be afraid. You can do it.” I was being a wise ass, but I didn’t appreciate being ignored.

  Shouldering his rifle, he grabbed the banisters on either side and slammed his huge foot into the door, directly below the handle. The door, a fairly weak affair made of cheap plywood, shattered on impact. Shards of wood blasted back into the dark room. I reached for the door frame to pull myself up, noticing as I did so that my hand no longer bore the deep scrapes from its earlier run-in with the concrete outside the stadium. Several thin scratches still ran across the back of my hand. But the deep gouges were gone. I just stared, confused, knowing that I hadn’t imagined the injury-the profuse amounts of blood on my sleeve were testament to that.

  Suddenly, a shrill, weak voice from within.

  “Don’t hurt us, we’re human!”

  It was a young voice. Female. Anaru turned back to me, nodding once toward the rectangle of darkness above our heads before responding.

  “We’re not going to hurt you, we’re friendly. We’re coming in.” He waited ten seconds before stepping inside. I followed him up the stairs and to the threshold of the top floor.

  She was maybe all of fourteen, and she was sitting next to a bed on a small nightstand. The room was dark, but sunlight made its way in narrow streams through dark drapes, stapled to the drywall at the sills to the windows. A musty, dirty smell pervaded the small space. Her dark, clearly unwashed hair framed a narrow face. The tank top she wore was filthy, smeared and blotched; her pants, torn and mangled, hung from a too-thin waist. But for all her look of destitution, it wasn’t her that our attention was drawn to-it was the bed next to her.

  A large form, clearly that of a grown man, lay covered to the chin in a narrow bunk. Her eyes followed our own as we approached slowly. I noticed the restraints first. It was then that I placed the smell.

  “He can’t hurt you,” she said defensively, moving unconsciously closer to the body-and between us and the bed.

  As she got closer, the body thrashed suddenly, covers coiling and falling to the floor as the limbs jerked heavily against the bonds that held it. A dull, aching moan escaped from its throat and the bed rattled in protest.

  “Who’s… he?” I asked gently, searching in vain for a better pronoun as I walked forward slowly, trying not to move too quickly.

  “My dad. He’s… sick. But he can get better. He hasn’t hurt anyone!” As she finished, her voice rose slightly as I brought my pistol up in response to his renewed movement. He was a middle-aged man, slightly portly but with what I knew had been a kind face. He wore a polo shirt with the name of a real estate office on the breast pocket. A gold wristwatch gleamed in the trickle of sunlight that melted through the small gaps in the drapery.

  I lowered my pistol, hoping to ease her anxiety. “OK, OK. I’m sure he hasn’t,” I said, glancing at Anaru who had also lowered his gun.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, trying to sound friendly and nonplussed. He jerked against the bonds once more. I noticed that he was secured to the bed with four leather belts, all tied so tightly around the contact points that dried blood flaked and crumbled around the straps, evidence that they had been tied before his blood started to congeal. Be
fore he had turned. While he was alive.

  “Tristan,” she said, sounding slightly calmer. She looked back toward Anaru, who was scanning the room slowly, hopefully in a cursory search for where the keys might be.

  “How long have you been up here, Tristan?” I asked.

  “Si-since it started,” she replied, wiping her eyes and sniffling. Her eyes darted back to her father-what used to be her father-and back to me.

  “You’ve been here more than a week? Have you eaten?”

  She shrugged. “I found some cereal bars when we got here, and there was some soda and Gatorade… I thought more people would… I thought we’d be rescued.” She sniffled again, collecting her breath. “I tried to feed dad, but…”

  “How did you get here?” I didn’t want to upset her, so I thought to keep her talking while Anaru looked for the keys. She turned to the bed and reached for the sheet that it had thrown off when we arrived, her hand passing within a foot of its head. The creature that used to be her father sat up as far as it could in response, teeth clamping down on air in an effort to reach her arms. She jerked back, but kept out of range as she pulled the sheets up as close as possible to her father’s head. He snarled in response.

  “Dad was-is-a realtor, and was showing a house to a client near here. He works a lot, so as a treat, he fixed it so that he would pick me up from school on his way home and we’d meet my mom for dinner. That was the day that everything happened. People at school started to get sick, so they called parents to pick kids up. But most of the parents were sick too, so all the students had to stay at school. I didn’t feel sick, and I didn’t want to catch anything, so I thought I’d wait for my dad outside.” She wiped her eyes again, pausing as she remembered. From across the room, I heard Anaru curse softly as he dropped something in the near darkness.

  “He called my cell phone and told me to wait near the road. He sounded scared and anxious, so I started to get a little scared. I had thought it was the flu, but right after I hung up with him, I heard loud noises from downtown. Like fireworks. Then, Mr. Simpson came outside and he looked really strange. His eyes were really wide open, and he sounded funny and walked funny. I got scared and ran to the street. My dad got there right before Mr. Simpson made his way down the stairs, and we drove away, but as we were leaving I saw Mr. Simpson trying to wrestle with another student who had run outside.” She was crying in earnest now, but her voice was steady, if a trifle hurried, like she hadn’t talked in days. She probably hadn’t.