by Joshua Guess
“Nik, stay!” I said, and he stayed. Nik crouched at the ready just at the top of the steps, clear of our fire. The first shots might startle him, but my dog knew what guns were. He had been out with me when I practiced often.
Jem picked a target off near the Jeep and fired, once and then again a few seconds later, swearing in between. I saw him pivot out of the corner of my eye, choosing a second zombie.
I did the same, but a little closer. A large man approached the base of the steps. He was a few inches over six feet and looked three hundred pounds if he was an ounce. I brought the Remington up and braced myself as I unloaded buckshot into his face.
Another zombie got closer, this one more wary. It watched me with bloodshot eyes—no, not bloodshot. Red. Absolutely red. Even from fifteen feet away I could tell there wasn’t any white left around the irises, only bright scarlet. It gave the gray-green color of her eyes a startling contrast.
I pumped in a new round and sighted, and the goddamn thing jerked to one side just as I squeezed the trigger. A fine mist of blood sprayed from her shoulder and I hurriedly chambered another round. The dead woman was hurtling toward me with her head held low when I managed to get a bead on her. The shot took her in the top of the head, downing her just at the base of the steps. Her face connected with the lowest step hard, the sickening crack of bone snapping ringing through the morning air.
“Uh, Ran,” Jem said uncertainly. I glanced over my shoulder.
There were only a few zombies left in the yard proper, but at least a dozen more were moving toward the house from the road. “Fuck me,” I breathed. “Okay, back in the house. Come on, Nik.”
We retreated inside. I locked the door for good measure, not sure if the understanding of doorknobs was information these things retained, but not willing to risk it.
“Well, that was bracing,” Jem said.
“Like a good run in the morning,” I agreed cheerily. “We have the bullets, but I don’t like our chances of taking down all of them without making a mistake, do you?”
“Nope. Pretty sure they’d mob us. Maybe soldiers could do it, but I don’t have that kind of training.”
I looked at him in surprise. “Really? I pegged you for former military. You have the bearing.”
Jem smiled. “My dad was in the Marines for thirty years. I guess a little rubbed off. So, what’s the plan?”
I chewed the inside of my lip. “You’re the cop. What would you do?”
Jem burst into laughter. “Sorry, this kind of thing wasn’t part of academy training. I’m gonna defer to you on this one. Don’t suppose you’ve got grenades or something in your dungeon?”
“It’s called the Lair,” I said. “And no, I don’t have any grenades. Oh! But I do have some explosives. I have an idea!”
“Wait, what?”
Jem didn’t sound enthused, but I was already moving toward the bedroom and humming loudly to myself in case he had objections. I kicked the bed out of the way, then flipped the carpet and floor hatch in once go before almost bouncing down the stairs.
I was already pouring the mixture into an old coffee can along with a handful of nails when Jem caught up with me. I put the lid on and duct-taped it thoroughly before setting it back down.
“What the fuck?” Jem huffed as he came to a stop next to me. “You just have explosives sitting around?”
“No,” I replied. “Of course not. I have the components of explosives just sitting around. It’s not a big deal, a lot of people make it for target shooting.” I jogged over to one of the heavy cabinets and retrieved a rifle. “Here, you’re going to need this.”
Jem made no motion to take the gun. “Why am I going to need a rifle?”
I took a few deep breaths, reminding myself that he was trying. “Look, you’ve had my back. I like you. But if you’re going to ask me to solve problems, I’d super appreciate it if you didn’t treat everything I do like a fucking math problem. I’m the weird chick with a bunker full of dangerous shit under her house. I get it. If you don’t want to help, you’re welcome to leave. Until you do, please understand that I will explain things to you and once I do, accept it and help.”
Jem blinked, recoiling from me a little. “Uh, right. Sorry. It’s just a little…”
I nodded patiently. “I get it. The whole situation is nuts, me and my place included. Some of us show our crazy in different ways. If you’re going to help, awesome. If not, tell me now because I need to get ready.”
“Get ready?” Jem asked, then shook his head. “I mean, yeah. Get ready. I’ll do what I can.”
“Good,” I said, trying not to sound condescending. “It should take me a few minutes to get my body armor on, and then we can slow those assholes down.”
I stopped at the fridge and pulled out a handful of the beef trimmings I kept handy for Nik, smearing them and their blood on the coffee can. My body armor was more snug than I remembered, the change less a statement on the quality of the riot gear and more a testament to my love of barbecue and steak.
Nik stayed locked in my bedroom, the next part too dangerous for him. Jem knew his part, and waited by the front door. Zombies crowded the porch, but they were going to get distracted shortly.
I took a deep, calming breath, and ran out through the back door.
There were no zombies in the back yard, making it ideal for my run. I built up speed and cut a wide arc around the house, yelling my head off the entire time. Mostly it was gibberish, just the first thing that came to mind. The content didn’t matter since the bad guys weren’t interested in—or apparently capable of—conversation.
It was almost entirely swear words. I may have called the zombies a slobbering pack of cunt-waffles.
I came around the house thirty feet wide and dashed closer to the front door. The zombies were definitely interested in me, but it was only after I zoomed by them and they caught the scent of blood and meat on my homemade bomb that they put real effort into moving.
Holy shit, did they move. Romero movies were wrong, or these weren’t real zombies, because those bastards shuffled faster than the population of a retirement community on free Viagra day. My armor clicked and clattered as I ran, careful to keep a decent space between me and my pursuers. It took a little back and forth to get to the spot I’d picked, and when I got close I risked a glance at the house.
Jem was ready. Once the door was clear it wouldn’t have taken much time at all for him to step outside, toss the rifle onto the roof, and step onto the deck rails to haul himself up. The distance between the top of the rail and the eave overhanging the deck was less than five feet, and he had good upper body strength, judging by the gun show he put on when coming out of the bedroom.
I looked back to make sure the herd was following, and of course they were. I dropped the coffee can and continued moving in a straight line.
Designing explosives is best not done as I had, quickly and with an amateur eye, but I figured this was far enough from the house and vehicles to keep the shrapnel damage minimal. I didn’t look back to see if the zombies took the bait. Jem had been insistent on this point; I was to book it with all haste to prevent myself from getting all blowed up.
“Down!” Jem shouted. I took a dive.
Fact: the best way to survive a nearby explosion is to fall away from it with your feet pointed at the blast. If you’re wearing the right kind of footwear, the sort with a steel tongue running the length of the shoe or boot, you might avoid injury altogether. I was wearing the right kind.
I hit the grass face first, hands slowing my fall but not blunting the impact entirely. My nose smashed into the ground, and a second later the earth rumbled as Jem put a bullet through the coffee-can-o-death. I put my hands over my neck and silently counted to five, listening for the sound of falling debris.
Then I hopped to my feet and drew my pistol.
I trotted back far enough to give myself clean shots and took in the carnage. A divot of dirt lay bare, not quite a circle, surround
ed by confused zombies with injuries of various degrees. Three of the closest to the blast had little more than bones left below the knee, while the furthest only seemed stunned.
I made sure I was out of Jem’s line of fire and started shooting. The reflex was mechanical, empty of anger or hate. I simply lined up the sights, fired a round, made sure the target was down, and repeated. The Glock had twelve in the magazine and one in the chamber, but I had five rounds left when it was all said and done. Jem turned out to be a decent shot.
I stood there looking at the bodies for a long time. Long enough for Jem to climb down from the roof and jog over to me with the .223 slung over his shoulder. He stood a few paces away, splitting his gaze between me and the bodies we had made together.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded, waving a hand at the human wreckage. “It’ll sound strange, but I was standing here thinking, what do you do with a big pile of bodies? What is the best means of disposal? Got kind of caught up in how fucking bizarre it is that it’s a question I have to ask myself. I never thought I would have to consider it.”
“Really? None of your research ever touched on it?”
I shook my head. “It’s not about knowing, I guess. Sure, I can think of ways. Just starting to see the difference between theory and practice.”
“I say we burn them,” Jem said. “Don’t think we’re going to be able to bury this many. Not without a backhoe or a lot of help.”
The words made sense to me, but my brain was still having a hard time coping with the idea I’d have to move the bodies. Maybe even search them for ID, because the thought of committing them to the flames nameless and forgotten touched on memories I’d much rather leave buried.
“We will,” I said. “We’ll give them a Viking funeral without the water. But not right now. We’re burning daylight.”
“You still want to make a run?”
“Yeah,” I said, and I really did. Not just because stocking up on supplies and food increasingly looked like a necessity, but because my desperate run drilled home the reality of what we faced. “I don’t want to leave people out there if we can help it. If there are other survivors out there, we need to find them and bring them to safety.”
Jem looked at me for a long few seconds, his eyes weighing what he saw. “You’re okay with us checking for my friends first? There are probably places where people holed up together, sturdy spots like fire stations or office buildings.”
“You might be right,” I said. “But if we’re going to pick an arbitrary starting point, it might as well be people you care about. We’ll do what we can for anyone we come across.”
I didn’t mention the sheer terror racing through my veins. Jem had no way of knowing, of course, but I hadn’t felt that brand of fear for years and years. Not for myself, though I was certainly afraid of being hurt or killed, but for other people. The last time I felt the sort of mind-shattering dread for someone else, I was fourteen. That day, like this one, I had chosen to do something about it.
Some people never change.
8
In the movies, searching for people usually comes in the form of an exciting montage or a beautifully dramatic journey through questionably constructed buildings. In real life it’s incredibly boring. Admittedly our experience was different given the inclusion of zombies, but still. Mostly boring.
We took the Jeep. I hauled out the small flatbed trailer I kept in the back yard and hooked it up. Jem eyed me when I handed him a backpack. Then he looked through it.
“Why do we need all this stuff?” he asked, pawing around in the carefully packed food, water, and spare clothes. The clothes I was especially proud of having on hand, since he couldn’t wear any of my stuff. Granted, it was just a few t-shirts I’d picked up in a package deal at a flea market, along with a pair of fleece pajama bottoms, but that I had anything at all was kind of amazing. I ask you, who could resist buying that stuff for just a dollar? No one, that’s who.
“These shirts are neon orange,” Jem noted. “The bottoms are...”
“Camouflage,” I finished super helpfully. “The guy selling them called it a ‘hunter’s combo’ deal. We’ll pick you up some other clothes out there.”
“I still don’t get why we need this,” he said, waving a hand at the bag.
I shrugged. “Hoping we don’t need it, but I’d much rather have something to eat, drink, and change into should we get stuck away from here and find ourselves hungry, thirsty, and covered in blood.”
Jem stared at me for a long few seconds. “Most women don’t pack with concerns about starving or being showered in blood.”
“Most men don’t hesitate to stereotype women into broad categories of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, but you don’t hear me complaining,” I said.
Jem did the wise thing and said nothing.
I’d spent the planning stages of the trip multitasking, which by my definition meant doing most of the work while explaining to Jem why and what I was doing. He was a smart guy and understood immediately once I nudged him in the right direction, but he was still having a hard time dealing with the change in context. Jem Kurtz operated in a world based on order in many variations, and all those kinds of order were now pretty fucked.
I let myself get into a flow of running babble as I checked guns and filled magazines. I reminded myself, when it got a little annoying, that most people don’t have the sort of childhood that prepares them for the end times. Oh, sure, a lot of people out there liked to go on about the apocalypse, but that was usually used as a political hammer or a fund-raising tool. I hadn’t seen any horsemen trotting around, though I graciously stipulate that it’s a big planet and they probably have more important places to be than rural Indiana.
The Jeep handled most of the junk on the back roads with ease. There wasn’t a lot of it this far into the county, but the occasional spray of random household objects at intersections spoke of families—or possibly looters—taking trucks full of hastily-packed belongings through corners at speed.
Wallace itself was a different story.
Our town is pretty small. Not Mayberry small, but definitely still not large enough to require, say, more than one McDonald’s. Or more than three Starbucks. Honestly, I think we could have got away with two Starbucks. Having access to espresso in its infinite configurations within a triangle stretching no more than four miles on a given side seemed almost like too much civilization.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Small town.
First-world community dwellings in the form of towns and cities all follow a similar growth pattern. You have the old, central element that is either—or sometimes both—composed of ancient buildings deemed historically necessary, or the largest, newest structures imaginable. Wallace had both. The absolute center of town was a strip of restored brick buildings with a road a hundred and fifty yards long between them. No cars were allowed on St. Agatha Street, commonly called Agatha Square or just Agatha, which turned it into a pleasant shopping center and thoroughfare.
Fact: Hector’s, a barbecue place housed in Agatha, was the five-time reigning state champion for ‘best barbecue’ at the state fair. It was a title well earned.
Growing in a ring outside this quaint setup were the hallmarks of the modern age. Office buildings, a parking structure, the library, and plenty of other concrete blocks posing as modern architecture. A curious feature of Wallace was the change in its population; on a given weekday, it increased by half. This was thanks to the assorted state government facilities housed around town. Small towns have cheap rents, and even rural parts of states need a central location from which to manage a given area.
From that hard nugget of commercial real estate sprang—sprung—grew the suburbs. Not the way you’re thinking. Not like Chicago or Atlanta, where entire towns are suburbs of the giant-ass city in question. No, I mean the quiet spreads of housing tracts whose reasonably large yards fit on geometrically perfect streets all loosely interconnected by county r
oads and a similar position on the overall socioeconomic spectrum.
A lot of people describe cities as organisms, usually like cells. I like to think of them in less complex terms.
The town of Wallace and the surrounding Louis County were like a boob.
Hear me out.
The center of the city, in terms of size, is the nipple. It’s the prominent, obvious part everyone pays the most attention to. Around that is the areola, the band of less interesting but still notably different material marking the buffer zone between the nipple and the rest of the boob in this metaphor.
Then there’s the county, the suburbs, all of that. That’s just the skin making up the majority of the boob.
Wait, what size are we talking about here? Uh. Pervert. This is just a visualization. Don’t be creepy.
The point is that the concentration of human beings in Wallace and the directly proportional volume of debris were both predictable variables. The closer to the center, the more dense it was going to be.
Except I didn’t think about the obvious. People’s homes were on the outside circle, the largest circle. When you’re terrified of losing your family, your dog, or maybe just your stuff, you get home. Damn the consequences.
It looked like someone took the level of crazy in Wallace and overrode the safeties to crank it up to eleven.
“Why didn’t we see this yesterday?” I said, leaning against the steering wheel as I gaped at a three-way intersection packed with stopped cars. Some were wrecked, many others trapped by those wrecks. Every one of them had been ransacked, clothes and supplies strewn about in every direction. Many dead bodies sat inside vehicles, blood splashed inside and out.
Jem studied the scene. “If I had to guess, I’d say most of them were either at home or got there fast when all the craziness started. Not hard to imagine a lot of people hunkering down and hoping things got better, then making a run for it when they didn’t.”