by D. L. Snell
When the first gunshot rang out, I nearly fell forward again. There was another shot, and another as the things turned away from my cell and shambled down the hall.
I heard a voice.
“Get the one on the left, Wally.”
Another shot rang out, followed by the sound of blood and bone splashing across the tile floor. I scurried to the front of my cell and tried to look down the hall, but couldn’t see past the sea of dead that shuffled toward the gunfire.
“Hey!” I cried. “Hey, I’m down here!”
“Whoa, we got a live one down there, Tucker.”
“Just hang on, there, fella. We’re comin!”
There were several more shots, followed by the wet sound of bodies dropping to the floor.
“Sheeeeeit! Did you see that fucker blow?”
“Get back you jagoffs.” It was another voice, deeper, clearly the one in charge. “We ain’t got time for this chicken shit.”
The cellblock filled with the deafening roar of an automatic rifle. Bullets whizzed past, ricocheting off the concrete and tile and brick. I dove into the corner of my cell, instinctively wrapping my arms around my head until, mercifully, the gunfire ceased. In the silence, the last shells tinkled to the floor, and a high-pitched ringing deafened my ears. As I stood, I saw three men step into view: a middle-age man in a flannel coat and a Yankees hat, a teenager with a pierced lip and jet black hair, and a big man wearing fatigues. The patch on his shirt said Tucker, and he cradled an M-16.
“Take care o’ that one,” Tucker said, nodding toward Pastor’s cell. The teenager smiled and leveraged a double-barreled shotgun right under the thing’s nose. I blocked my ears as I watched the contents of the Pastor-thing’s skull splash against the baby blue wall of the cell. The thing dropped to the floor, and the teenager grinned back at Tucker.
“Righteous,” he said.
Tucker shook his head and looked back at me.
“This thing need a key?” he asked, gesturing toward the door of my cell.
“No . . . uh . . . down the hall. There’s a guard room. I think it’s the . . . uh . . . the orange lever. It unlocks all of them,” I said.
Tucker nodded and looked at the middle-aged man, who stood there for a moment, but finally sighed and walked down the hall, muttering under his breath. After a few seconds, the doors buzzed and Tucker swung my cell door open. As I stepped out, he aimed the M-16 at my chest.
“We ain’t gonna get any trouble from you, right?”
I held up my hands. “No. No trouble at all.”
Tucker gave me a long look and then lowered his gun. He looked back at the other two. “Alright, let’s make sure the rest of this place is clear and meet up with the others.”
“What about this one?” the teenager asked, pointing at Svelski.
The middle-aged man shrugged. “He looks plenty dead to me.”
Tucker took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Better safe than sorry,” he said.
The teenager grinned and swung open the door to Svelski’s cell.
Tucker grabbed my shoulder, and we started down the hallway. A single shot rang out behind us.
The other two caught up to us as we stepped through the emergency exit and started down the stairs. I heard scattered gunfire in the distance as we walked through the prison lobby.
“So what the hell’s going on out there?” I asked Tucker.
He smiled wryly and stepped in front of me. “Oh, it’s hell, alright,” he said as he swung the tinted glass doors open.
And then, as I saw the bodies and the chaos and the black plumes of smoke rising into the gray sky as the city burned around us, I understood why they came for me, for a killer on death row. Things had changed now.
And then I remembered something Pastor had said: “This is the reckoning, people.”
There was no time for right and wrong.
There was no room for good and evil.
There was simply war, a war between the living and the dead.
And the dead were winning.
The living needed every man they could get.
Existence
John Hubbard
What you are about to read is real. It really happened, or in my case, it is really happening. Most stories have the benefit of a controlled plot, along with a beginning and an end. My story does not. I have no idea how it all began and there is no end . . . yet. In that aspect, you may view what you are about to read as an episode or chapter or an incident report. But it is real. Of that I am certain. Here is my hell.
My wife and three-year-old son left for the Piggly Wiggly at 3 PM. Three hours later, when my family still had not returned, I got out of bed and walked into the kitchen. I tried calling Linda’s cell phone, but a cold, digital voice told me that all the circuits were busy. It wasn’t like Linda to take so long. Tyler would need to eat soon, and if they had decided to go to Linda’s parents she definitely would have called because she was in our only car, a 1998 Ford Explorer. I worked from home, as a service manager for Bell South and we didn’t really need another car. But at times like this, it could be a minor annoyance to be stuck without transportation.
I hung up the phone and decided to make some coffee. As I ran the water in the sink to fill up the reservoir, I looked out across the yard to the barn. The side door, which hadn’t been left open in the three years since my son’s birth, was now thrown wide, and the lock was hanging as if someone had pried it off. A barn is no place for a small child; if not seen to, it can turn into a treacherous madhouse of tetanus, splinters and long falls from the hayloft. Linda and I decided from day one that the barn would remain locked when not in use. And not four hours ago, I had locked the barn myself.
We live on one hundred and seventy acres in southern Georgia. To someone from New York, this would seem like a small country, but in reality the deep south views a one-hundred-and-seventy-acre farm as a blip. If we had to actually farm the land to survive, we’d go broke in a week. The farm was bought in the late 1800’s by my great grandfather. Ever since then, it has been used as a recreational tract for my family. I grew up hunting in the woods and fishing in the seven-acre pond. I inherited the farm in 1991 when my father died, and Linda and I had moved down from Atlanta in 1992 to become transplants. It was only two hours away from the big city by car, but it felt like two centuries away in terms of quality of life. We were happy here. We were safe. We’d never been robbed or bothered, and our nearest neighbors were a half mile down the road. When I saw the barn door open, I knew something was wrong.
I went out to the barn. False bravery or stupidity filled my head. Nobody fucked with my property. The door had actually not been jimmied. Rather it looked like something had clawed or chewed its way in. There were sticky, brown and purple splotches on the white paint that looked like plum sauce. Inside, there was nothing but silence. I opened the door wider and reached to the right to switch on the light. Someone grabbed my hand.
“Don’t turn it on, John. You’ll just attract more of them.”
I turned it on anyway, yanking my hand away from the grasp. It was my neighbor Lucious Royal. He went by the moniker “Lucky,” which he was anything but. Twice divorced, he lived two farms over on a six-hundred-acre spread he’d inherited from his father. He was broke-ass poor and some judge had given him custody of his two boys, eight-year-old Delmar and fourteen-year-old Chuck. The six hundred acres he lived on had once been twenty-three hundred, but he had sold it off in parcels every few years, like clockwork, so that he’d have enough money to get by. He looked like he had been run over by a tractor.
“Lucky, what the hell happened to you?” I asked. “And why are you in my barn?”
“John,” he said, “I killed a zombie. Just like in the movies. The un-fucking-dead.”
I would have figured him to be drunk or on drugs as soon as he said zombie, but you should have seen him. His shirt was ripped down the front, and part of his scalp was torn. His left ear was completely gone. Th
e blood covering his head had mostly congealed into the consistency of blackberry jam. He was leaning up against the wall, wheezing, and I could tell he was scared to death. Oh yeah, he was carrying a shotgun as well.
“John,” he repeated, uttering my name like it pained him to talk, “I chased one in here. All the way down from my place. I thought it was some peeping tom. Saw him looking in my living room window. Ran outside with the shotgun, but the fucker just stood there. Circling out of the light. I shot up in the air to spook him, and he ran out the drive and headed this way. He tore up your door like a hot knife thru butter. Oh god, man. This is fucked. I killed it John. You understand? I killed a zombie. But it ain’t just a zombie. It’s a fucking Dietrich Dalrymple zombie.”
Dietrich Dalrymple was a peculiar man who still lived with his parents. In his late 30’s, he was heavy but not obese, and he worked for Talbot County as a middle school bus driver. If the undead were really taking over rural southern Georgia, they couldn’t have picked a worse candidate to propagate their species.
“Lucky, did you shoot Dietrich the bus driver? What exactly are you saying?”
“He’s dead John. I shot him. He’s in the corner of the barn. He’s not Dietrich anymore. Don’t get too close to him.”
I went forward, through the small office area, into the main barn. The halogens were still warming up, but there was enough light to see that there was, or what appeared to be, a body in the corner of my barn. I grabbed the rusty pitchfork that was hanging on a hook. I held it in front of me as I approached the prone figure.
It was Dietrich all right, or what had once been Dietrich. He/it was unmoving. The whole body splayed out on the floor like it had fallen out of an airplane and had just struck earth. The skin, where I could see it, was covered in pustules like the worst type of textbook acne. The hands, forearms, neck and face were infested with chicken-pox-type lesions that oozed what looked to be pus mixed with Vaseline. The body looked wet, like some kind of plague or Ebola victim. I was staring at this monstrosity for a few seconds when his/its eyes opened and turned to look at me.
The pupils were dilated and fixed. They eclipsed the entire iris. It was like looking into the soulless depths of a black hole. No beginning or end. Just the hollow nothingness like the depths of space. What had once been a bus driver pushed himself up on infected arms and grinned:
“Hey, John boy. How’s it hanging?”
When he spoke, I could see pieces of what could only have been Lucky Royal’s ear and scalp. They hung in shreds, stuck between Dietrich’s teeth like moist pieces of a mango. He looked like a sloppy eater at some gruesome deep-south barbecue festival.
“Stay the fuck put, Dietrich. Don’t move. I don’t know what the hell is going on with you and Lucky, but you just stay down for a minute.”
As I spoke, he stood up not six feet away. I could see burn marks in his torso. Lucky must have got him good with the shotgun from close range. Also, his legs were ruined. He stood on splintered bone. His right foot and sneaker were behind him against the wall, disconnected from his leg. His left leg had holes in the shinbone and a good chunk missing from the knee. All behind him, the barn wall was splintered and gouged. Lucky had really let him have it. How I could have slept through this melee was beyond me. But what was even more fucked up was how this goddamned thing was standing up. It should have been dead.
Dietrich walked towards me, grinning with pieces of my neighbor stuck between the teeth of his lower jaw. It was a ventriloquist dummy’s grin, insincere and vacant. I wanted to stick him with the pitchfork but was worried that the fork might stick in the body and then I’d be defenseless. Instead, I lowered my shoulder and slammed into him. Because of his wasted legs, he toppled over easily and fell where he had lain before.
“You can knock me over, John, but you’ll never stop all of us. I’ll be up again sooner or later.”
I was betting on sooner. I backed out of the main barn into the office. I wanted to go back and get Lucky’s shotgun in case that thing came at me again. When I stepped into the room, I was met with a scene from some kind of George Romero movie. Lucky’s youngest son Delmar was in the office too. He was covered with the same type of rotten complexion that Dietrich had been infected with. Delmar was down on his hands and knees, tearing the meaty part of his daddy’s hip off with his mouth. He was feasting on Lucky’s thigh meat like it was a piece of KFC. He snarled at me, his young face covered with gore.
“Mine,” he said.
I freaked at that point. This was no unexplainable altercation between neighbor and local bus driver. This was an actual type of Zombie occurrence. It didn’t matter whether or not the infected were actually the walking dead or victims of some type of horrific disease. They were here, and they ate the living.
I stabbed at Delmar as fast as I could. I caught him vertically through the neck and collarbone area and pinned him against the barn. The eight year old screamed. He seemed more angry than hurt as he tore at the prongs, trying desperately to unstick the fork from the wood behind him. I looked down at Lucky. In my unprofessional opinion, he wasn’t going to make it. In fact, his skin was already turning more gruesome near his missing ear and scalp. It was red and swollen with lesions, which grew upward and caused the skin to slough away and split. He was beginning to change.
I ran from the barn back towards the cabin. Before I climbed up the steps, I caught a glimpse of a slight glow down the driveway, towards the road. I couldn’t actually see a light because of the trees, but there was a glow where there should have only been darkness. I decided to sprint down the driveway and see what it was. I’m not sure why I didn’t return directly to the cabin, but I didn’t and I’ll never forgive myself.
I ran past the pond on my right. Its floating dock bobbed out in the middle. Underneath the half moon, the water looked like spilled blood, cold and vacant. After the pond, the drive snaked through a patch of woods for about six hundred yards. It wasn’t any quieter than any other normal night. I could hear frogs and owls and other night sounds.
At the head of the driveway, I saw what I had feared: our family car, half in the road, half in the drive, engine off, headlights on. I went to the driver’s-side door and just stared. Linda was dead. Her body was in the road, only one arm remained in the driver’s seat, detached from her torso, still gripping the bottle of mace on her key chain. I recognized her clothes and her engagement ring. I knew it was my wife, even though her head was missing. Her body had been picked at. Some thing, or a group of things, had feasted on my wife’s body. There were bloody prints all over the hood and the driver’s side of the car. Some looked to still be wet, and some looked to be dry and solidifying. I stumbled towards the trunk of the car and tried to throw up. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so my tank was a little empty. All the fear and uncertainty came out of me in the form of mucus, saliva and dry heaves.
Once I had gained my bearings a little, I looked in the back of the car. Tyler was not in his baby seat. The nylon straps that had once held him safe had been severed. They looked like rats had chewed threw them. My baby was gone.
My baby was gone.
I had to make some decisions. Should I take the car and go for help, or go back to the house, lock up and call for the police? Would the police even come? Should I look for Tyler? Oh god, I couldn’t decide. While contemplating, I heard a noise a few feet away, behind me, in the woods. It sounded like somebody or something had shifted from one foot to the other. I was being watched.
“Da Da?” the voice came.
I can’t tell you how hopeful I was. It was my boy. Alive and well.
“Tyler, is that you? It’s Da Da.”
“Da Da.” A statement. No longer a question.
I could make out his little form about six feet in front of me, his shadow a small blotch, slightly darker than the surrounding area. I took a step to him, arms outstretched, and that’s when it came.
“Da Da!” it screamed as it launched itself at my leg.
I kicked it loose, grabbed it, and flung it onto the hood of the car. It looked at me, the same blank eyes I had seen on Dietrich. Tyler’s body wasn’t in bad shape. I could see no wounds clearly. His skin, however, was horrific. Like the others, he almost resembled a burn victim dipped in oil. He was rotting. He was no longer my son. I turned and ran for the cabin.
In the background, I heard the singsong voice of a little boy: “Da Da, let’s play.”
As I came back to the front of the cabin and climbed the stairs to the back door, I sensed shapes to my right. I turned, door half open, and saw Lucky and his son Delmar, rubbing his shoulder where I had stuck him, standing in the glow of the bug light at the far end of the porch.
“Howdy neighbor,” Lucky said. Delmar stood next to him silently, glaring at me hungrily. “Care to join us for a stroll?”
The skin over their entire bodies was ruined. Their features seemed to be melting off them. They were becoming walking and talking bodies of putrefaction and gore.
“Stay the fuck away, Lucky.” I was halfway in the door, defenseless, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the surreal pair. At this moment, another form materialized from the barn. It was, of course, the zombie version of Dietrich Dalrymple.
“We won’t be coming any closer, John Boy. Don’t need to. You got the fever already.” He nodded his head downwards, towards my raw-looking leg. “We’ll just wait out here, enjoying the night. You’ll be joining us soon enough.”
I left them there, standing in my yard, Dietrich propped up against my barn on his ruined, splintered femurs, Lucky and Delmar standing side by side, staring blankly towards nothing at all. I backed into the house and locked the door. I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and locked the door.