by Fuchs, A. P.
“I treat you terrible.”
“Not really. Just seems to me you have some things you need to work out.”
“Don’t we all.”
“Real things, not just undead stuff. I think somewhere under your armor you and I are more alike than neither one of us care to admit.”
He walked past her to the roof’s ledge and looked over. The dead still roamed the streets, some moving slow but with purpose; others bumping into each other; others still seeming completely unaware of their surroundings or what they should be doing.
A giant zombie was several blocks away, glancing in between buildings. It looked over at Joe and started coming toward them. Joe backed away from the ledge.
“One’s coming,” he said.
“Climbing?”
“No, walking.”
The low, booming footfalls grew closer. The building shook and he and Tracy nearly lost their footing.
The creature bellowed in the distance.
It would be here soon.
15
No Way Out?
Billie screeched, the shock of seeing Del bound to his feet sending her tripping back over her own. She fell against the wall. Del grabbed her, hoisted her up, and brought his ugly dead mouth toward her face. Quickly, she used the keyboard stake and managed to slam it into his solar plexus, burying it deep. The impact was enough to send Del off balance and stumbling back against the bed. When his knees hit it, they folded and he fell over it, Billy landing on top.
Del’s hands still held her shoulders. She snapped her body side-to-side, jerking herself free. With a fast wiggle, she got herself off him and ran toward the door.
Weaponless, she headed down the hallway, hoping that at the end of it she’d find a stairwell to the main floor.
More undead groans filled the air.
I didn’t get him. I didn’t save him. August, I’m sorry. I have to go. It’s . . . “. . . not just Del, anymore. Lots of them. Has to be. I hear them,” she said.
She ran as fast as she could. Footsteps filled the hallway behind her, at first just one set, but quickly joined by an undeterminable amount. As much as she didn’t want to, she glanced over her shoulder. A swarm of zombies shambled down the hallway behind her, as if the dark rooms had all been opened at once and the dead poured out. Del led the charge, his stride seeming more in control than the others’. The keyboard stake still protruded from his middle, black blood leaking out around it.
Billie snapped her head forward and her palms instinctively shot out in front of her, stopping her from smacking into the wall at the end of the hallway. A door. There had to be a door. She looked to her right. Yes! She pushed into it. It didn’t budge.
Pull! she thought and pressed the thumb-latch and yanked the door open. How fast the undead would be on the stairs, she only had a guess. Didn’t matter. She had to move fast. Billie took the steps two at a time, first one flight then the next. At the bottom, she grabbed the door bar and pushed.
“Oh no . . .” she said, her feet skidding to a halt when a row of zombies greeted her, each of them young, no more than thirteen or so when they died and came back.
The hallway they were in was narrow. Behind the door she’d just emerged from, the echoes of dead feet coming down the stairs from above reminded her she had a scant few seconds to make a choice of action otherwise she was as good as dead.
There was a wall on her right with a single window about two-feet-square some fifteen feet up. There was no way she could reach it, and even if she could, it was made of dense glass and busting through would be impossible.
There was only one choice.
Billie ran toward the zombies.
The moment she came upon an undead teenage boy with brown hair, bleeding eyes and purple lips, she shot her elbow into his face, forcing his head to jerk to the side and look away from her. With a shove, she pushed him into the zombie beside him.
Another came up on her left, this one female. She had white hair with pink streaks running through it. Her nose had been ripped out and the lower half of her jaw was missing. The black H-shaped jumpsuit loosely fitting her frame was dirty and streaked in some kind of oily substance.
Billie jumped into the air and kicked her foot out. It caught the white-haired teen in the throat. Billie landed on one foot; it slipped out from under her, her bottom hitting the floor. With a quick press of her palms against the ground, she pushed herself to her feet and continued running.
Footsteps filled the hallway behind her. The undead from upstairs had arrived.
“You’re dead!” Del shouted after her, his words accented with a growl.
The jolt from his voice sent Billie’s legs into overdrive and she ran as fast as she could.
She spotted something dark on the cement floor in her lower peripheral, but before she could slow down, her foot found it and was swept out from under her again. She landed on her back, the impact sending a spike of pain into her shoulder blades. A splash of blood from the pile of guts she accidentally kicked up hit her in the face. She clamped her mouth shut, careful to not ingest it in case it was contaminated. The back of her head, thankfully, didn’t hit the ground. Sore, her upper torso tense despite her efforts to move fluidly, she put her arms beside her and sat up. Dizziness swooshed through her head.
“Move,” she told herself and got to her feet. Her shoe slipped beneath her and she landed on her knees.
Footsteps, loud and clear, were right behind her.
“Get up!” she shouted and scrambled to her feet.
Something caught her shirt from behind and yanked her to the side as an old, wrinkly hand clamped over her mouth.
* * * *
Joe and Tracy hid beneath a long heating duct. The duct was narrow so they had to lay head-to-foot; Tracy closest to where the duct fed into the building, Joe behind her.
The rooftop rumbled beneath them, the vibrations growing more intense the closer the giant neared.
Though the X-09 packed a wallop when fired, it would be useless against a creature so big. At most it’d be like a mosquito bite and nothing more.
He heard Tracy wriggling behind him. “What’re you doing?”
“Getting ready.”
“Any ideas on how to take it down?”
“Got a bazooka?”
“Seriously.”
“Yeah, seriously. Right now our best bet is to stay put. It might pass if it doesn’t see us.”
“I thought their sight wasn’t based on movement.”
“It’s not. We’re food, remember? We hide. It doesn’t see us. We might live. Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless it throws a tantrum and levels the building anyway.” She cleared her throat. “You sure you never seen one of these things in your world?”
“I’m sure. I guess we got off light.”
“Think your world still exists?”
She made a good point, though Joe thought this was hardly the time for quantum theory.
“Don’t know,” he said. Was this indeed a separate world or dimension? Or was it an altered future? He shook his head.
“What?” She seemed to have forgotten she asked a question.
“Nothing.” He’d think about it later.
The building shook and a crack burst at the building’s ledge and snaked a jagged path across the roof just shy of the heating duct.
Hope the beams under here hold even if the roof itself cracks, Joe thought.
A boom rocked the building. The crack deepened and gave birth to a spider web of others. The rooftop suddenly looked like cracked mud.
An enormous undead head peered over the top of the building, its hair in patches, the gray skin peppered with pus-oozing sores. Milky white eyes scanned the roof’s surface while giant hands with bruised and cracked fingernails clamped onto the roofline like a kid poking his head over a fence. The roof’s ledge crumbled beneath its fingers and when the creature pulled its hand away, it took the edge of the roof wit
h it.
Joe gripped the cement beneath him as best he could, bracing himself to go for a ride.
The zombie didn’t breathe, nor did it moan or growl. Instead it searched quizzically, it’s eyes conveying the sense that it knew it saw something up here but couldn’t find it.
Just move on, Joe caught himself thinking. He used to pride himself on his strength against the undead. Not today. His legs were weak and he wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to get onto them should he and Tracy decide to run and take their chances with the ladder on the other side of the building and the undead waiting at the bottom.
The giant zombie slammed a palm down on the rooftop. The roof broke away; a huge crack slashed through the concrete and ran between Tracy and Joe, sending their bodies up and slamming into the metal duct above them with a loud thrum!
The zombie looked in their direction and narrowed its eyes.
“It’s seen us,” Tracy said.
* * * *
“Billie, it’s me,” August said, his voice low and raspy. He closed the door to the room behind him.
“August, thank God,” she said and wrapped her arms around him.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“I thought they killed you.”
“They’ll be here any second,” he said and shoved her further into the room.
“What are we going to do?”
His eyes emptied.
“You don’t know.”
“No, I know, I . . .” He winced and closed his eyes and swooned to the side. Billie put a hand against his good shoulder to brace him. Opening his eyes, he said, “Here, go over here,” and shoved her in the direction of the far corner.
It was hard to see, but the deeper they went into the room, the more Billie was able to make out. In the corner was an old white-board, leaning up against the wall.
“Get behind it,” August said.
“What about you?”
“I can talk my way out of them finding you. That’s the important part. I’m old, Billie. I’m hurt. I’d much rather you go on than I.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Once more he was going to save her. The guilt forced her to slouch and the words to catch in her throat.
Footsteps in the hallway outside, close, nearly upon them.
“Hide, Billie,” August said.
She couldn’t move. To do so would be to sign off on his death, to officially stamp his file “case closed.”
“If you’re going to die,” she said, “then so will I.”
“And we’ll accomplish nothing!” he snapped back.
Billie went ridged from the ice in his voice.
“Don’t.”
Reluctantly, she backed away from him and went over to the white-board. After another glance his way, she crouched down and crawled in behind it. She’d probably never see him again after tonight. Alive, anyway.
The footsteps outside drew nearer. Behind the white-board, Billie buried her face in her hands in an effort to quiet her breathing.
The door creaked open. The stench of the dead filled the room; Billie could smell it even with her mouth and nose covered.
Dragging footsteps slid along the floor. A moment later, a zombie grunted. A few more seconds passed and the sliding footsteps resumed.
The door creaked closed.
Silence hung on the air.
Billie didn’t dare to come out.
* * * *
“Get up. Now!” Tracy said and she and Joe scrambled out from under the heating duct.
The two bolted for the far side of the roof.
The giant zombie growled and brought both its hands onto the roof and pressed against it, using the rooftop for leverage as it tried to pull itself up. Its sheer weight caused the roof to collapse toward it. Joe and Tracy immediately took a nosedive forward. They stopped their faces from planting into the cement with their hands.
“Agh!” Tracy said.
Joe grunted as he felt the skin of his palms sting from the friction.
They were on an angle, gravity pulling them toward the giant undead man on the other side of the roof. Joe peered past his feet.
If we’re lucky, we’ll slip and crash into the heating ducts first, he thought. “But what then?” They’d might be able to hang on for a few moments before the whole heating unit broke free and tumbled toward the zombie. Either the creature would stop it, or the heating unit, along with them, would fly off the roof and plummet to the street below, killing them.
Joe brought one hand in close, reached inside his coat and pulled the X-09 free. He took aim underneath the heating duct and fired shot after shot into the giant zombie’s face.
“What’re you doing?” Tracy screamed.
“I’m not going down like this.”
The rooftop shook and gave way beneath him, forcing him to rock to the side and grab hold of a more stable piece. Tracy was further from him now, to his right.
She had something in her hand. She looked at it then back at him. “Get it to look at you.”
He could barely hear her above the rumbling of the collapsing rooftop. “What?”
“Get it to look at you! Make it mad.”
To himself, “Make it mad. Right.”
He clenched the X-09 hard between his fingers and fired at the creature. One bullet hit it in the eye, bursting a blood vessel as big as a branch, sending a gush of black blood over part of the eyeball. He fired again. A tiny black dot materialized in the middle of the creature’s forehead. Another shot, this one right in the tear duct.
The creature growled and raised its fists then brought them back down on the building. The chunk of concrete Joe clung to gave way and he skidded with it down the roof like a sled out of control. He hit something hard and the slab launched; his body separated from it and he flew against the heating duct.
“Joe!” Tracy yelled from somewhere behind him.
Laying with his back against the duct, he couldn’t see where he was headed.
The zombie growled.
Tracy threw something from her hand.
A moment later a loud boom went off behind him and a shower of blood and goopy meat rained upon him. Joe squeezed his mouth and eyes shut as he was coated in slimy flesh. The sharp sting of bone fragments struck his skin; he put his arms over his face to shield it from the onslaught.
The metal of the heating duct creaked all around him as it gave way, the clamps and metal ties holding it to the roof broken.
Gravity took over.
16
Out
Billie shook the instant a hand touched the back of her head. She peered up to see August looking down on her.
“They’re gone,” he said.
She got to her feet. “They didn’t see you?”
“I hid before they got in. They didn’t see me.”
“Where?”
“Like they say, the best hiding spot is in plain sight,” he said, nodding to somewhere closer to the door. He had probably hid behind it.
He took her by the hand and the two snuggled up tight in behind the door.
“I’m assuming they’ve gone that way,” she said, thumbing to the left.
August nodded. “We go right. Find the exit and get out of here.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Slowly, August opened the door and slightly poked his head into the hallway. He pulled back into the room. “They’re turning a corner,” he whispered. “They look like a bunch of dead Nazis, the way Del’s got them all walking together.”
“You know about him? About his, um, zombiness?”
He nodded. “Showed it to me pretty much right after they bandaged me up. Didn’t eat me. Wanted me as leverage against you. Didn’t know there’d be so many others in this place, though.”
“Let’s just hope we’re the only humans here, too.”
He eyed her and she saw the wheels turning behind his gaze. “With all that’s happened, that didn’t cross my mind.”
“Mine n
either ’til now.”
“Let’s pray to God we’re the only ones, for their sakes.”
She nodded.
“Okay, they’re gone,” he said and pulled her out into the hallway with him. They went right and kept close to the wall. Billie didn’t have to be a mind reader to know his ears were listening for the undead as well.
“If we see one?” she whispered.
“We hope it didn’t see us.”
“If it did?”
“We kill it.”
“With what?”
“Our bare hands, if we have to. We can’t stay here any longer. Enough’s happened.”
“I can’t wait to get out.”
“Me, too. Enough talking.”
They made it to the end of the hallway. They turned right; Billie hoped Del and the other zombies weren’t already nearing their location coming up the other side. Around ten feet ahead were a pair of rusted-red metal doors, each with a push-bar handle.