by Jeremy Dyson
She follows my gaze back down to the road. For a long while we just stare at the smoke, and fires, and the dead bodies that walk the streets. We listen to distant gun shots and the sorrowful moans of the undead and try not to be overwhelmed by all of it. Danielle lays back in the grass, and the next time I look over she has fallen asleep. I take out my phone and notice a few hours have passed while I watched the fires in the street burn out. The spring night has brought a damp chill.
I nudge Danielle awake, and we head inside. I wake Quentin up and hand over the gun. Danielle arranges herself on the couch, pulling her feet up to leave some room for me on the other end. Her lips appear bluish, and she shivers while she tries to fall asleep. I look around for something to serve as a blanket, but there is nothing.
“Just lay down already,” she mumbles. She squirms forward toward the edge of the couch to make room for me to lay down beside her.
It feels too intimate at first, but I’m too damn tired and cold and troubled for the awkwardness to last. Within a matter of minutes, I can’t even keep my eyes from closing.
Six
"I got a signal,” Quentin shouts. "Wake up!"
It takes a moment to get my bearings after I open my eyes. I notice my arm draped over a brunette woman that I barely know. I squint my tired eyes to focus on my surroundings and realize I’m sleeping on a couch in the lobby of a cemetery. There was a time when waking up like this would not have surprised me, but that was ten years ago. Everything comes back to me, and I realize the events that transpired yesterday were not from some awful dream.
Danielle mumbles something unintelligible as she wakes, and I move my arm away before she notices it was there. She opens her eyes, then glances quickly around the room. She feels my body behind to her and cranes her neck to see me, then lets her head fall back on the couch.
I push myself upright and remove my phone from my pocket to check the time. The battery is dead.
“Damn,” Quentin curses. He whips the antenna from one angle to another. “I had it a minute ago.”
For a split-second, a voice cuts through the static. The sound snaps me right awake, and I awkwardly climb over Danielle and get to my feet. We gather around the radio, waiting while Quentin scans back to the frequency again. The radio crackles static, then finally, we get a clear signal.
"There are maybe sixty or seventy right outside the door,” the broadcaster reports.
“Here we go,” says Quentin eagerly.
“It seems like it’s just a matter of time before they bust their way inside. If anyone can hear me, this is Roger Wolf broadcasting from just outside Rockford,” the voice of the broadcaster falters. “My engineer and I are in the WKQZ building at 3718 Kennison Avenue, and we are surrounded by a large crowd of zombies. It sounds crazy, but I don’t know what else to fucking call them. We have no food or water. We have power for now, but we have no idea how long the fuel in the generator will last.”
"We haven't heard anything from the outside world for almost eighteen hours now. Neither of us here have any idea if our families are okay," the radio broadcaster continues. "If you can hear this honey, do not try to come to the station. If you are home, lock the doors and stay inside the house. Don't open the door for anyone. Tell Becca, daddy loves her.”
The voice of Roger Wolf cuts out suddenly and for a moment it seems like the signal has faded, but then his voice comes back again. He clears his throat.
“Lot of help this is," groans Dom. “He doesn't know any more than we do," She moves away first and flops down on a couch and pulls a cigarette from her pack.
"If you can hear this, please send help. Yesterday, around nine in the morning, our show was interrupted by the emergency broadcast station. The message was that an immediate national state of emergency was being declared and that people were to return to their homes and await further instructions. Ten minutes later, we lost power at the station. We have not heard a damn thing from any government officials or police authorities since then. There has been no signal from any networks on the television since yesterday morning. It’s like somebody just flipped the switch and shut everything down.”
“Our producer, Simon Davis, hung himself in his office during the night. We woke up to find his dead body hanging from the ceiling, but somehow he was still moving around. He was dead as can be, but he was trying to attack us. I had to bash his skull in with a goddamn hammer to stop him. The only way to kill them permanently is to destroy the brain.
For all we know, we could be the last people alive. We haven't seen anyone alive on the streets for hours now. Just more and more of these bastards surrounding the building and pounding on the door nonstop.”
"I'm going back to sleep," grumbles Joey.
The radio broadcaster goes on, but I can’t bear to listen anymore. It isn't the news, just a couple of desperate guys that are as helpless as the rest of us. There’s no sense in waiting around for someone on a radio or television to tell us what we need to know and what to do. If we do, we’ll be trapped just like them. The thought makes me wonder how many more undead might have gathered outside during the night.
“I better check the gate,” I sigh and push open the door, then notice Dom, Quentin, and Danielle following me out.
The first thing that strikes me is the utter lack of human noise outside. There are none of the typical sounds of traffic or blaring car stereos from the street. Even the sound of gunfire that we had become too familiar with over the course of the previous day is alarmingly absent now. In its place now are the sounds of the dead. In the bruise-tinged light of impending dawn, the walking dead line the street and reach for us through the bars of the cemetery fence.
"There's more of them now," Quentin notes. "Maybe twice as many as yesterday."
"I knew it," snaps Dom. “Staying here was a really stupid idea."
"The fences seem to be holding up," I assure her. “It still looks like we should be able to get out okay, too.”
"For now," Quentin interjects. "We have no idea how many more of those things might show up. It’s only getting worse.”
"But where do we go?" I ask. The question just hangs in the air unanswered.
A frightened voice behind us pleads, "I want to go home." We turn around to see Melanie stands at the door, staring down at the corpses along the fence in terror. Danielle hurries over and puts an arm around her shoulders and turns her around. She says something quietly to her that I can't quite hear as she maneuvers her back inside the building.
“No sense drawing more attention to ourselves out here,” Quentin suggests, then follows Danielle inside. I head for the door as well, but I stop to take one more look back at the entrance. The gate was only designed to block the drive when the cemetery was closed, not to serve as a fortification. I am also not sure how much longer it will be before getting out becomes a real problem for us. Either way, we are running out of time here.
When I get back inside, I say, "We should all get something to eat, then load the supplies up, so we are ready to go once we figure out just exactly what the plan is.”
Danielle, Dom, and Joey start going through the rest of the supplies we had procured from the gas station. Perhaps looted is a more accurate description of how we got supplies, but I don't feel guilty about taking anything to survive for as long as I can.
"I got dibs on the Skittles," says Joey. He grabs up a bag from the pile on the floor and tears off a corner with his teeth.
“It's only enough food for maybe five or six days," says Danielle. "Maybe a week."
"It's all junk, though," says Dom. "Jerky and trail mix. We can't live off that. I don't even eat junk food."
I am not surprised by the lack of real food we were able to gather. More urgently, we need the water, and we did okay there. We have maybe two hundred bottles of water and several dozen assorted sports drinks. Sure, our situation could be better, but we could be a lot worse off right now.
Quentin returns from the office and flips open
a phone book on his lap. He flips through the yellow pages. "Food's a priority, for sure," he says. "But there's lots of places to find that. Only a few places to find guns and you can bet there are a lot of people out there looking for a gun or ammunition."
"The phones are down," says Joey. "That thing won't do us any good." He looks at me and shakes his head while gesturing his thumb at what he perceives as Quentin’s mistake.
"Nearest place that sells guns is about ten miles from here." He flips the yellow pages shut and tosses it down on the floor. "Goddamn suburbs," he laments.
"We'll have to make due with what we've got then,” I say. “That’s too far.”
"We should go to that big castle down the road," says Joey. He snaps his fingers a few times trying to think of the name. "The restaurant."
"Are you serious?" Dom sneers.
"Yeah," he says. "I went there when I was a kid. It could be like a fortress."
"Not bad," admits Quentin. "There will be a lot of food in a place that size."
"We could get swords there too," says Joey. "And armor suits."
"They don't have real swords," says Dom. "It's just a show."
"A show with real swords," insists Joey.
As ridiculous as it sounds, the idea doesn't strike me as a bad option right now. I have driven by the castle-themed restaurant numerous times. From my memory of it, I don't recall seeing many exterior windows and doors. There are also very few buildings in the area as it is divided off from the more populated shopping district by the Kennedy, a major eight-lane expressway. Unfortunately, there is nothing to keep the corpses from walking right up to the building from the parking lot.
"We might be able to get a good view of the expressway," Danielle says.
“If it’s no good, we just stock up on food and keep heading away from the city," says Quentin. "Makes as much sense as anything I guess."
"We'll probably have to break in," I note. I doubt that is something we are even capable of doing. "I don't want to get there and be stuck outside."
"Leave that part to me," says Quentin. "I'll get us inside."
Again I wonder what exactly this guy did before all this. For the next five minutes, we eat mini powdered donuts and single serving loaves of banana bread and try to come up with some kind of plan to get us out of the cemetery gates. The best we can come up with is to draw the dead as far as possible from the gate to give us an opening to head out while they are distracted. Once we finish eating, we pile everything into the trunk of the police cruiser and the back of the Mercedes.
“Who gets to be the bait?” asks Quentin as I pick up the last packages of bottled water.
“I’ll take the squad car,” I offer when no one volunteers.
“I’ll go along with you,” says Danielle.
Quentin hands the gun back to me that I’d turned over to him last night and gives me one of the walkie talkies too. I wait for him to remind me not to do anything stupid, but he only gives me an appreciative nod. I haul the water over to the open trunk of the cruiser and set it down.
“I want to go with you guys,” Melanie pleads. She dashes around the cruiser and wraps her arms around Danielle.
“There’s more room in the other car.” Danielle looks at me as she hugs the girl. She frees herself by taking hold of Mel’s hands. “Listen,” she soothes. “There’s no seat belts in the back. It’s not safe. We’re just going down the road. It won’t be more than a few minutes.”
“No,” Melanie latches on to her again. “I want to be with you guys.” The young girl turns her face to show me a sulky look that my daughter has used on me a thousand times before to get what she wants. It always works. Amanda called me a pushover because I could never be the firm parent. I’d see that look and cave. I close the trunk and stare at Melanie’s pouting expression.
“Hop in, kid,” I relent.
Danielle stares at me doubtfully as Melanie releases her and hops in the backseat.
“It’ll be fine,” I assure Danielle. “Like you said, it’s just a few minutes.”
I settle in the seat behind the steering wheel, but I hesitate to turn the key in the ignition. Danielle sits beside me and takes a last look back up at the cemetery office.
"Are you sure we're doing the right thing?" asks Danielle.
"We have to move," I say. “I know that much.” I don't seem very confident because I still have a hard time with this decision. It’s not that I think we are better off in the cemetery, but we are moving in the opposite direction from where my family was when this all started. I am giving up hope of finding them alive to give myself a better chance of survival. I just saw them yesterday morning. As much as I had told myself they might be okay when I woke up and heard the radio broadcast, I realized that hope is fading. I'm also afraid of finding them. What if I manage to track down my wife or daughter, only they are walking corpses? I don't know if I could go on after that.
"Here we go," I say to Danielle, and start the car. I stick my arm out the window to wave to Quentin behind the wheel of the Mercedes. The circular single lane road takes us past the front gate and around to the perimeter of the graveyard. It takes me a while, but I figure out how to get the siren and lights going. That should be more than enough to draw the attention of every corpse in the area. At the far corner of the cemetery, I park the cruiser and leave the lights flashing and the siren blaring.
From where we parked, I don't have a clear view of the gate through the trees. I can see the SUV idling in front of the cemetery office. Now we wait. I open the car door and lift open the trunk. After a few moments of looking, I find some road flares at the bottom of the trunk.
I close the trunk and notice the dead are piling up along the fence near the cruiser. There must be close to a hundred undead already crowding along the barrier. The corpses in front get smashed into the iron bars from the press of bodies. Their moans grow louder now that we are so close to them; they drown out the wailing siren. They stretch their arms, their filthy hands covered in dirt and gore grasp at the air. The color of their dead eyes has started to turn milky, and their bodies give off a nauseating stench of rotten meat and excrement. I really don't enjoy being this close to such a large number of them.
Finally, the Mercedes accelerates toward the gate. Before I get back in the cruiser, I ignite a road flare and toss it near the fence. I don't know if that will hold their attention at all, but it is worth a shot if it buys us any extra time. I kill the sirens and gun the engine. The cruiser squeals around the curve near the main building and down the hill toward the front gate.
Several corpses are already limping around inside the cemetery. I jerk the wheel of the cruiser to veer around them as they launch their bodies at the sides of the car. The cruiser crunches over chunks of glass and metal strewn about the road from wrecks. Cars clog the four-lane road, but I get across it to drive on the campus lawn across the street. I follow the fresh ruts left in the turf by the tires of the Mercedes, then take a left at the light.
This road is relatively clear of cars, but the large crowd of undead that we lured to the fence are now up ahead to our left. They pour back into the street in pursuit of the first vehicle, and Quentin has to hug the far right lane to avoid them. I will have to plow through dozens of them to stay on the road. At the last second, I decide the best chance we have is to swerve the vehicle off the road to avoid them instead. The cruiser hops the curb and crashes down hard in a small drainage ditch. There is a heavy thud as Melanie smashes into the fiberglass partition between the back and front seats. For a terrifying second, the battered cruiser seems to be stuck in the soft earth, but I push the peddle as far down as it will go and the car continues up the slope into the middle of a golf course.
Not wanting to try my hand at crossing the ditch again, I accelerate down a fairway that runs alongside the road. The two-way radio crackles somewhere on the floor of the car and I hear the faint transmission of Quentin’s voice. Fuck it. I don’t have the time. He can lecture
me all he wants later. Up ahead, sunlight glints off the aluminum roof of a large maintenance building between the fairway and the road. I speed towards it, thinking there must be an access road to the street. The gravel drive comes into view, and I breathe a sigh of relief when I see it goes clear to the road.
The cruiser fishtails after I take a hard right back onto the road. The flags atop the spires of the restaurant come into view over a copse of trees to the left. I steer around a fire truck laying on its side and blocking three lanes of the road. Then I spot the restaurant entrance up ahead. As we turn into the parking lot, I glimpse a large purple banner hanging from the roof with HELP painted across it in crude black letters. I hadn't thought of the possibility we would find anyone here, but now I had to wonder who or what might be inside.
“Mel.” Danielle swivels around in her seat to peer into the rear compartment of the cruiser. “She’s on the floor back there. I can’t tell if she’s okay,” Danielle says.
The Mercedes idles in the middle of the parking lot along the south side of the building. I pull the cruiser alongside the SUV, and Danielle rolls down her window.
"Thought we might have lost you there," says Quentin. He glances at the backseat of the car and furrows his brow.
"Almost," I say. "Did you see the sign?"
"Yeah," he says. "That's why I hung back."
"We better knock first," I say. "How do we get in?"
"Service entrance," Quentin says. “Follow me.”
He leads us around the back of the building and pulls up in front of some dumpsters by the service entrance. Instead of parking alongside him, I angle the cruiser the other way to create an area around the door that is blocked off by the vehicles and a pair of dumpsters. With any luck, this will keep those things off the doors awhile and maybe allow us to get back in the vehicles if we need to leave.
I get out of the car and open the back door to find Melanie on the floor of the backseat. She is out cold and has a blooming welt on her forehead. Danielle opens the rear door on the passenger side and looks her over quickly.