by J. Rudolph
We piled into the truck and drove the short distance to town. When we climbed out of the cab, we heard the muffled moans of the dead that were trapped inside one of the buildings. Their fists banged on windows as they heard and smelled the fresh meat that was us close in on their space.
We started with the café. The windows were crusted with a heavy layer of grime, a mixture of dust, rain, and last year's snow, making it difficult to see inside. We opened the door cautiously. Patrons still sat in their chairs, waiting for the waitress to come so they could eat. Oh God, that was corny even for me. Even still, that was the impression that I had, that they were going to sit and wait forever, like their drive to do anything had abandoned them. They were in energy conservation mode, right until we opened the door. Heads rose up sharply from the tables they were resting on. They turned in unison to see why the direct sunlight suddenly was on them for the first time in over a year. When they realized that there was food walking in, they pulled themselves into a standing position and shambled towards us. We had our weapons out and at the ready. As they came to the door we stepped back, letting them come out to the street where we could swing at them with less hindrance.
Like I hoped, they came to the door and created a bottleneck, making it so only a few could come out at a time. We plunged our knives in head after head, killing off these emaciated, mummy-like restaurant patrons quickly until the flow of corpses stopped. Once there were no more hungry dead things coming at us, we went inside to make sure there were no more stragglers.
There were.
As we stepped inside, we walked around the counter to clear the area. Suddenly, there was a hand that grasped my leg. I looked down at my feet frightened, to find that a fry cook that was missing his legs had me in a vice-like grip. Rotten, broken teeth were gnashing as it tried to pull itself towards me, pulling me off balance. As I regained my footing, those teeth were wrapped around my steel-toed boot. I sunk my knife into its head. Ink-black fluid came out of the new opening in the skull and pooled on the floor where he lay motionless. I pulled my foot out of its mouth and kicked the dead thing in the face. I kept kicking and kicking until the face was nothing but a sunken hole that never resembled anything human. When I was done, my head was spinning in fear and adrenalin, and I grasped the counter with both hands and let out a sigh. Once I felt more steady, I looked up at my husband who was battling his own decayed monster with no leg control. That zombie seemed to have a gunshot wound in the chest, and the bullet must have severed the spinal cord. Tyreese and Lucas were in the kitchen where someone had shoved a door on a couple of zombies in the pantry. No one had seen how frighteningly close my encounter had been and my first reaction was to laugh softly, as waves of complete relief washed over me. I was embarrassed that I had been so careless to not have watched my feet better. I knew that zombie clearing was a three dimensional duty, but I had only been looking at my eye level. It was a mistake that could have been fatal, and I recognized that I had simply been lucky this time. I was going to have to be a whole lot more careful since this was my second near miss. I didn't want to risk the three strikes and you're out scenario.
I strode over to Trent and the others joined us. We kicked in the other doors and cleared the rest of the café, and when we had checked every nook and cranny, we started to load the bodies in the truck. When the last corpse was loaded, we moved on to the next building, the bar.
The bar in town was a neat building. It was called The Bank Bar, and was a rustic looking place made of gray stone brick. I wasn't up on a lot of history when it comes to little towns in Montana, so I have no idea if it was ever really a bank, or if they just took people's money like a bank. I kept an eye out for a sign that would tell me one way or another, but I never did find one. I wanted to obsess on the building, but the fact remained, duty called. It didn't matter what it was in the past, it mattered what needed to be done now, and that was to go in, clear-out zombies, and take a mental inventory of what was inside when we were done. I didn't drink, that was something I gave up a long time before, but I knew that there was value to alcohol, as trade, as antiseptic, as something for my friends who may not share my take on alcohol to enjoy.
The door was pretty, much prettier than the bar doors back home. There was ornate glass paneling on them like in a high end home. The only windows to the bar were set high off the ground and darkened out so it gave no clues to what we were going to find inside. We opened the door and for a very scary moment, the dark room left us blind to the zombies inside.
Throaty growls came out of the curtain of blackness like a pack of feral dogs about to take down their prey. My hand tightened involuntarily around the handle of my homemade sword, the muscles in my shoulders twisted in a knot. My jaw clenched even though I was trying to keep myself calm. I didn't want to let this ball of swarming butterflies in my stomach take over. It frustrated me that I still had this anxiety washing over me in waves. I was a seasoned fighter, not some newbie. I'd buried my knife deep into skulls before, I was very aware of what it sounded like when the skull was broken by the impact of a bullet or the way the rotted blood seeped into the dirt in a halo around their heads. I knew the smells that made up the scent of the dead. I knew the sight of the leathery, torn skin and the sharp, jagged teeth that rotted quickly. I knew the dead. I knew them more than I cared to know, but even still, even in the face of knowing what zombies were, I felt fear when they were coming towards me. I felt everything that I figured I would have outgrown when I faced that first zombie in front of the sporting goods store. I thought I would have been so prepared to face the zombie apocalypse with my plans, but here I was, scared while I waited for the growling creatures to stumble out of the bar that was their home, their prison, since this all started.
The first zombie to emerge from the darkness and into the door walked with an unsteady gait, like a baby making their first unassisted steps. It was a tall young man, his face made up of a series of sharp angles, some I imagined were there even before he became an emaciated thing. He wore a tattered flannel shirt and frayed, dirt crusted jeans that were held up by a belt with an impossibly big belt buckle that had long ago lost its shine. Filthy cowboy boots skidded along the floor in a hiss against the linoleum until it made its way through the door and ground against the concrete sidewalk. Despite the darkness that the zombie had been immersed in for so long, it didn't react to the bright sunlight in its eyes like I would have. I didn't know what it saw when it looked at each of us, or if I was just imagining that it saw anything at all. It turned to face each of us, as though it were assessing who would be the best meal. When it seemed to realize there were four untainted food sources in front of it, the zombie cowboy lifted its leathery arms and moaned as it began to move faster. He stepped towards Tyreese, the closest person to him by inches, and increased his stumbling steps from the speed of a sloth to the lumbering run of Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Ty positioned his hunting knife in his hand and with a sharp step forward, bridging the gap between them while sinking the blade to the hilt into the forehead of the dead man. Ty twisted the knife from its vertical puncture to the right and when it sat perfectly horizontal, he pulled the knife out. Rivers of gore leaked from the hole as he fell forward, landing on his knees before he hit the ground with a smack. As he was going down, two more zombies crossed through the doorway. Trent and Lucas lured the newcomers out of the bar and ended their existence with a flash of metal.
Over and over, these dead things came through the door. It seemed interesting that so many people made the bar their bug out place. I wonder how many came to drink out the end of the world and how many saw this building as a potential place to ride out the wave of zombies. With the high, dark windows, there was definitely potential in being able to secure the place. I could imagine people thinking that if the cluster was just passing through, then this bar was as good a place as any other. I wondered if someone had gone inside after they were bit, either unaware they were infected or so afraid of being ripped to
shreds that they came in anyway, only to infect everyone else. Finally, the last zombie emerged from the open door and we pushed inside. We were more careful this time. We were reminded that every corner had to be examined while in the café, and that was not a mistake we were about to make twice.
Our vigilance paid off this time. We found a couple zombies trapped in the bathroom stalls as well as, based on his extreme amount of injuries, what had to be the last meal standing. Now that the zombie apocalypse hit, almost everyone could do some basic forensics. Again, we piled the dead into the truck, and started another pile in the road for a return trip. I knew that there would be a lot of dead, but it was different seeing the truck bed filled and a second pile in the road.
When we cleared out the mercantile, I felt like we were playing a macabre game of hide-and-go-seek. The mostly bare shelves were just tall enough that I couldn't see anything on the next aisle over. I heard moans echoing off the walls that I had a hard time placing. Tennis shoes chirped on the tile floor as the dead shambled across the store. We traveled in a tight formation so nothing would have the capability of showing up out of nowhere, but even still, we were caught off guard. We hit an aisle that was more narrow than the others, and Lucas was closer to an end cap than we would have liked. In a flash of knocked over paper towels, a pair of gnarled hands pushed through and latched on to Lucas. I was the closest to him so I reached the owner of those twisted fingers first.
The virus that turned people into monsters was not one to discriminate. It didn't matter if the person was a child, a healthy cowboy, or in this case, a little old lady. I would have bet money that in her alive days, this lady would have used a walker and been incapable of getting out of her own way. Her spine was hunched and twisted, making her much shorter than she would have otherwise been. Arthritis was clearly set into her joints and she wore a simple snap closure dress. She looked like she was probably in a great deal of pain in her before life. Being dead at least gave her more freedom in her movement, and she didn't need a walker or cane to navigate her endless shopping trip anymore.
It wasn't often that I paused before killing a zombie these days. The mini zombies were still hard, and they probably always would be, but in an adult, I no longer had any qualms, unless it turned out to be this little old lady. I tried to be as quick with this as possible. I didn't want to see her anymore. I didn't want to think about who she used to be. With that reminder in my head, to not think, I pushed my knife into the base of her skull.
We went from one building to the next, repeating the process over and over again of finding the pockets of the dead, killing them, and moving on. Our pile of zombies in the street grew ever larger. What started off as an emotional roller coaster turned into a task in numbness, until the second to last business was empty.
When we began this clearing out of the buildings, I asked for the medical center to be the last one. I wanted to have something to look forward to, and cleaning out where I was going to be able to go to work again made me happy. There was even a house next door that we had cleared out that I wanted to claim, mostly so I would be right next to where I was going to work, and I also wanted to start imagining myself in my house. This was a step in feeling normal again, and I craved that hope with everything in me.
I stood outside this small building with its long wheelchair ramp and overgrown tree branches that hung like a heavy blanket over the roof and admired the easy look to the building. It had a homey feel and had it not been for the signs outside in the parking lot that proclaimed this to be a place of healing, I'd have assumed that this was just a heavily modified home. That was a feature of Wilsall that I liked the most, every place looked like it was where people lived. I could only imagine the civic pride that the people who lived here must have felt. I felt it now.
I took a walk around the building to see if there were any obvious signs of someone having looted this place before we came here, and was shocked that all the glass was intact and the doors didn't seem to be pried open. I walked up to the back door to test the lock and it was secure.
I was smiling as I half jogged down to where the others stood. When I caught up to them, for a moment I was without words. I just stood there grinning. Trent, who had been tense since the mercantile, lifted his hands in a 'Well, what's going on?' gesture. I smiled bigger.
"It's in one piece on the outside. All of the windows are still there and the back door is even locked. It looks beautiful."
"Well, that's a start," Lucas said, "At least there isn't going to be mountains of repair work to make the structure safe."
"I suppose it's time to see if the insides are just as intact." Trent looked exhausted, and I was glad that this was the last place to take care of. He took the lead and we walked up the winding wheelchair ramp. When we approached the front door, we noticed a small sign in the window. It said,
"We can't accept any more patients. We are out of everything. We don't know what else to do. Good luck."
As though to punctuate what the note was saying, a zombie dressed in a lab coat stained with blood appeared against the glass. The pocket on the coat was embroidered with his name, Dr. James Carrol. Dr. Carrol had a horrible bite wound just above his right wrist, visible now that the sleeve slid down as he started to bang on the glass window. He pressed his face on the glass, trying to breech the mystic force field. His jagged, broken, blackened teeth snapped at the air, as though one of those bites would magically land on our skin. A female zombie, dressed in scrubs, was drawn by the commotion that Dr. Carrol was making. As she came closer to the glass, she realized that there was food just out of reach. I didn't see a bite mark on her, but the amount of blood that stained her floral print scrub top, from high on her side to the cuff of her white scrub pants, proved she was hurt. She walked unevenly to the window, as though one leg was shorter than the other, and when I looked at her feet, I understood why; she lost one of those nursing clog shoes from her left foot.
Zombies wearing hospital gowns sat on the floor in the dimly lit hallway. The waiting area to the side of the check-in window held a mixture of regularly dressed people, patients, and another couple of nurses, milling around with no purpose, just a collection of lost souls.
There were a lot of zombies inside.
The idea that there were going to be a lot of them inside was not a shock. People got bit, then sick, and reached out for a chance of life. They went to their trusted doctors, hoping for something that could make them feel better. Hospitals were the first place to be overrun back home. Part of me had this delusion that since California and New York were the first to fall, that the areas that the virus trickled into, like this one, would have been better prepared. I figured there would be no bite patients allowed in the medical center because they knew what a bite meant. The news went on and on about avoiding hospitals before we lost our feed, and the group we ran into from New Orleans said that the cameras continued to roll even after we lost ours. My happy high left when I saw how many people were bit in there. I couldn't wrap my brain around it. They wouldn't have accepted TB patients that were coughing up blood, would they? This doctor had no reason to die.
It really made me angry that the medical staff here were infected. I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't expecting to have any feelings over these idiots who gathered where they were told not to, but I did. These were healers, and now they were dead.
I wondered how things would have been different if I had been floated to the ER the night that the virus came to my hospital, when all those trauma codes came rolling in. I wondered about the people that were working that day when the CDC made the reanimates speech. How many of them stayed at work, wanting so badly to help, and how many people were lost because of it? How many doctors clung to the oath they took to help others, even after it was clear that there was nothing else they could do.
Every once in a while, a little bit of survivor's guilt that I got out wormed its way into my head. I left work that day when my shift ended and I was spared. The
re were so many nurses and doctors and janitors there. There were so many people that were much more skilled than I that died that day, and I was spared. Those ER doctors would have been a valued member of any group, and would have been able to handle so much more than my nurse self. If a doctor had been in our group, DaWayne's surgery would have gone so much better; Joey would have had a chance. Doctor Carrol here? He would have been able to save so many lives, but instead, he was rotting, and all that information in his head was gone.
I realized after a while of staring into the window, that the rest of the group was waiting on me. I shook myself off and made a smile happen.
"We ready to kick some rotted butt?" I chirped, trying to make myself sound more upbeat than I felt. I pulled my blade out of the sheath, bounced from side to side to loosen myself up, and added, "Let's do this."
The door to the medical center was one of those automatic sliding doors and the power had long been out. Ty found a pin that held everything together and Trent lifted the door off its tracks a bit, just enough to slide the door open. This definitely caught the attention of the zombies, and they all pushed towards the small opening.
Lucas took the first zombie that appeared at the crack, a nurse who must have been much larger before all of this, given how her scrub top hung on her. He pushed his sword through her eye and she fell to the ground in a thump. The spot where she was standing was quickly replaced with another, this time a patient, and I took it out. The bodies quickly piled up as we repeated this process until there was no more room, and Trent opened the door a little more to attract more zombies. We continued this method until the door couldn't be opened any farther. Tyreese and Lucas grabbed the shirt of one of the zombies on the bottom of the pile and pulled it outside with us, taking several with it. Trent and I were ready when the opening was refilled with more dead.