It wasn't just Emily that he'd grown to love. His new neighborhood was like something out of a Disney Channel show, with themed block get-togethers, street hockey and baseball games, skateboard launch ramps, summer barbeques, and frequent pool parties. There was always something going on. During Halloween, they shut down the whole area to create the spookiest haunted house show in Southern California. They shut it down once more during Christmas, and set up their own version of the fabled Candy Cane Lane—with guided block tours, fake snow made from shredded plastic, hot cocoa, and loud Christmas caroling—during the entire month of December. Each family tried to outdo the next with the brilliance of their lights and decorations. Christmas day, they all played together out on the hot asphalt with their new toys like one big happy family, and not a single snowflake in sight. A week later, groups from the neighborhood would camp out side-by-side overnight in tents to ensure everyone had the best seats for the Rose Parade on New Year's Day. The thought that things would never be the same again, that those days were all over, made his stomach churn.
I never knew how good I really had it, he realized. I just took it for granted that it was always going to be here. It all vanished in an instant!
He saw the Owens family, who lived at the end of the block, but no sign of their teenage kids, Scott and Laurie. He saw Mr. and Mrs. Garcia, from right across the street, fighting with their next-door neighbors, the Campbells, over the gnarled carcass of Dexter, their beloved Siberian husky.
The reality of that hit him hard in the chest. It felt like his heart was breaking as he looked out at their angry, bloated faces. They screamed in agony, driven by their hunger, and surrounded the vehicle, pounding fists and faces against the windows, biting at the glass.
There's Jimmy, Tyler thought mournfully, the kid from up the block, along with his dad, James. He has on that shirt my mom always made fun of him for wearing; the oversized Hawaiian one with tropical drinks printed all over it. Mom used to say it looked like something a pregnant woman would wear. Dad said he was retired and it didn't matter what he wore. Mom said he must have retired the last of his self-respect, too. She said she didn't know how his wife put up with it. She said she would divorce Dad if he ever humiliated her like that. He smiled and said he would remember that in case he ever needed an out. She smirked at him.
Tyler thought about his brother, Sean.
I shouldn't have let him try to help me, he thought, slivers of guilt gnawing at his weary heart. If he hadn't left the house, he'd still be alive.
Sean was only a year older, but he acted like he was in charge long before the zombie apocalypse happened. They'd shared a bedroom ever since their mom had found out she was having a girl.
I hated it so much at the time, Tyler thought, with Sean always snooping around in my stuff, and asking me tons of personal questions about my relationship with Em, but looking back now it wasn't so bad.
Truth be told, he'd learned a lot from him, not just about cars and sports, but also about girls. Sean had given him nearly all the sex advice he'd ever gotten, which made sense. His brother had been the first to show him a Playboy—one he’d “borrowed” from their father. Sean was supposed to go to UCLA in a few weeks. Everyone was so proud that he got in. Tyler had been looking forward to having the bedroom all to himself. He'd begun to plan out where he was going to put all his stuff once Sean was officially gone.
Guess that's not happening anymore, Tyler thought. Mom was so proud, too.
Tyler tried not to think about his parents for fear that the memory would overwhelm him, but images of them turning on him and his brother—the dead look in their empty eyes as they lunged for them driven by their raw hunger—came rushing back to him anyway. He wanted to remember their smiling faces, but all he could see was the rotting skin and dark blood caked in the corners of their blood-smeared mouths.
I'll never forget the way they came at us like animals gone insane.
They'd woken up to the sound of his annoying little sister’s screams coming from the living room. They'd both shot out of bed. By the time they reached the living room, their parents were already kneeling over their sister, Amy's, tiny body, shoveling her slick red insides into their open mouths. They were drenched in her bright red blood. Tyler didn't remember screaming, he just remembered the sound of it. He knew that it had been him, and not Sean, but somehow in the moment it didn't seem real. The creature that used to be his mom looked up, and bared her bloody teeth at him with a hiss. His dad turned around to stare at them, slowly getting to his feet.
“Come on! Let's go!”
Sean had pulled him by the shoulder back toward their room. He had locked Tyler in while he used his prized LA Kings hockey stick to put them down—the stick Dad had bought for him during the big championship game.
Sean told me not to come out until he'd arranged the bodies, Tyler remembered, the sick feeling in his stomach swirling at the terrible memory. He took the remains out into the backyard, but didn't bury them. The entire hallway was stained dark red like someone had coated the walls and carpet with wine.
When it was all over, Tyler watched the lifeless bodies from the kitchen, waiting for them to get up, to tell him it was all part of some sick joke, that none of this was real, but they didn't move. Crows came down from the trees and began to eat Amy's remains. A few scampered over the pale bodies of Tyler's parents, but didn't land or eat any of the infected corpses’ flesh.
It's like they know the meat is bad, Tyler thought. How do they know? What can they sense that tells them not to eat the meat?
He wanted to run out and chase them off his sister’s body, but he knew it didn't matter anymore. Nothing did, really. That's when he started thinking about Emily. They were supposed to go to prom in a few weeks, but he knew that was off now. Sean said she was probably dead already. He argued that it was better to stay in the house, to board up the windows, and try to ride things out.
“Once this is all over we can go looking for her,” Sean offered. “Until then, it doesn't make any sense. It's like a suicide mission, bro. Just look out there. We'd never make it two blocks in that mess.”
Tyler hadn't listened. He'd insisted that Emily was alive. He knew it down in his bones, and he wasn't willing to let it go. He'd convinced Sean that with the two of them working together they'd be safe—but they weren't. They'd made a plan to distract the fiends by opening the side gate. Sean would lure them in towards the backyard, and once they took the bait, Tyler would run and get the minivan started. Sean would dash through the side garage door, cut back across the living room, run out the front door, and hop in the passenger seat.
“It will be easy,” he assured Tyler. “These things are dumb. They'll never even know what went wrong.”
But he hadn't anticipated Amy coming back. She caught him in the living room—having let herself in from the backyard through the wide open door—and attached herself by the teeth to his right calf. Sean was still dragging her along as he came out the front door, shouting for Tyler to go on without him. He fell down face-first into the lush green grass in their front yard. A swarm of neighbors converged on him, biting chunks of meat off of him from head to toe, like a kabob. Tyler could still hear his agonizing cries.
Why didn't he make sure she was really gone?
Tyler fought back angry tears. He knew the answer. No matter what happened, nothing in the world could make either of them cave in their little sister’s skull.
“Don't think about it now,” he told himself as another neighbor pounded the minivan. “What matters now is that you survive, otherwise Sean died for nothing.”
He put it in drive, and slowly inched forward, pushing most of them out of the way with the bumper. By the time he reached the end of the street, it was pretty clear his day wasn't going to get any better. He was blocks away from Em's house, and already there was smoke coming from under the hood, along with a terrible high-pitched whining sound that seemed to be drawing the attention of every last monster i
n suburbia.
“It's like a fucking dinner bell for the undead,” he groused, hitting the steering wheel with both hands as the minivan shuddered forward in jerks and spurts in response to him gunning the gas pedal.
He saw Mrs. Knudsen's rose garden up at the end of the street. The old lady spent hours every day tending to them during the summer months. Days when there was a warm breeze, Tyler could smell the fragrant blooms by simply opening his bedroom window. Now all he could smell was the foul stench of decay coming off the sun-heated reanimated corpses, ambling like a herd of sick cattle in the middle of the road, blocking his way out.
In a split-second decision, he turned the wheel and slammed his foot on the pedal, holding it to the floor with all the strength he could muster. He gripped the wheel until his knuckles went white, praying that the “swag wagon,” as his dad liked to call it, would respond. The vehicle began to shimmy violently, making a loud, grinding sound like metal on metal, and then shot out all of a sudden, springing forward like a cornered animal on the attack. The last thing Tyler saw, before plowing through the award winning rose garden, was the bite-riddled corpse of the old woman hitting the front of the van and slipping under the wheels.
Tyler screamed at the top of his lungs, more out of shock than fear, and let go of the wheel. The minivan careened onto a side street and slammed into the back of a midnight blue Ford F150 truck, spidering the windshield and causing the airbag to explode in Tyler's surprised face. His ears were ringing, and his face stung from the impact. The seat belt had dug into his chest, causing him to gasp for air as he undid it. He threw open the door and fell to the hot asphalt, sucking in as much air as he could, choking and coughing as he tried to catch his breath. A steady ringing from the open door brought his attention back to his surroundings, and he quickly got to his feet to see how bad things were.
“Fucking thing is like a homing beacon,” Tyler growled, spitting out blood from his split lip. One look at the minivan was enough to inform him that he could now officially add 'stranded outside in the middle of a zombie apocalypse' to his growing list of problems. The entire front end was smashed in, and it looked like a fire had started underneath the carriage. The familiar howl of the ever-hungry dead could be heard all around as they made their way over to the crash, hoping to get a taste of Tyler's living flesh. He turned towards Emily's house, but the street was now covered in rotting ghouls.
It's like a funeral home entered the Rose Parade, he thought. How the fuck am I going to get out of this?
That's when he realized he'd been going about things all wrong. He was still thinking of the world in terms of how things were before all this madness started. He turned in the direction of Emily's house, realizing it was only a few houses over from where he was standing.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, he reminded himself. Just pretend you're Ferris Bueller.
He ran up to the first house and struggled with the doorknob, but wasn't able to get it open.
“Shit, man,” he yelled. “Who locks their door in this neighborhood?”
He turned to see the ghouls closing in on him from the street. He yanked harder, rattling the door, but it didn't budge. He'd just let go when a loud thump and a roar from the other side made his heart pound in his chest, sending spikes of painful adrenaline through his body until he could taste the acid in his mouth. He ran towards the side of the house, passing a large window along the way that showed a man in a business suit with his three young zombie children, all howling and slamming their decaying bodies at the front door. The wooden side gate was partially ajar so he slipped inside, shutting and locking it behind him.
He turned and froze dead in his tracks, staring down at a large, muscular, bluenose pit bull, standing just feet away from him. The massive animal was crouched low to the ground, with its tail between its legs, whimpering. Tyler cautiously approached the dog, and put out his hand. The pit bull looked up with sad eyes and licked his hand, then put its head back down.
“Sorry I can't take you with me,” Tyler apologized. “You'll be okay girl. Just stay out of sight.”
Tyler gingerly stepped over the animal and made his way across the well-groomed backyard, passing through a recreation of a Japanese Zen garden. He used the gurgling waterfall statue to help him get up onto the top of the fence. From just a few feet up, he could make out a clear path to his girlfriend’s street. He slipped over the other side of the fence and into the neighbor’s yard, where the dead body of a grown man floated face down in the pool. His head had been smashed open and hollowed out. The water was a murky shade of black and dark red, the color of coagulated blood.
“Guess we're not the only ones to fight back,” Tyler said as he nervously made his way around the edge of the pool, past the Jacuzzi, and towards the next yard. Slowly, he made his way through several manicured yards, ducking past windows when he could, just in case his presence might lure out more biters.
When he got to the end of the block, he ran into his first real problem. The fence that bordered the street had been knocked down. He didn't notice it until he was already slipping into the yard from the other side. Nearly a dozen adult sized demons rounded the corner on Tyler, forcing him to rush to the sliding glass door, and lock himself in the living room of a stranger’s house. Within seconds, dozens more undead men, women, and children, had flooded into the backyard, and began pounding on the glass. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, before he even heard the growl behind him.
Oh shit, Tyler thought in panic, why didn't I bother to make sure the house was empty?
Slowly he turned to face the music. Standing between him and the front door were the corpses of a heavy-set man and his twin daughters. The guy was wearing an expensive designer brand jogging suit, while both the girls wore matching Sunday school dresses with creepy bows in their hair. Dark blood drooled out from the blistered lips of the man as he growled at Tyler. The skin on his forearms was torn apart, like he'd been attacked by a pack of wild dogs while taking a jog. Tyler guessed he'd brought it home with him before infecting his girls. A bite sized wound on the side of one of the girl’s heads seemed to lend credibility to the theory as well.
Tyler was frozen in complete fear and shock.
Why don't they charge me? What are they waiting for?
A quick glance at the family portrait on the wall confirmed that the big guy was Emily's neighbor, Mr. Hendrix, who lived over and across the street from her place.
Great, Tyler thought. All I have to do is make it out of here alive, then across the street to Em's. Piece of cake.
The sinking feeling in his stomach grew as Mr. Hendrix stumbled towards him. Tyler frantically scanned the room, looking for anything to use as a weapon. He thought of trying to lift the flat screen TV off the wall and throw it at them, but there didn't seem to be enough time to unplug all the wires—plus he wasn't sure he could actually lift it. The same with the bulky potted plants near the sofa.
Hurry up, man! You're running out of time. They're almost here!
A loud roar, and the sound of fists pounding hard on the glass sliding door behind him, shook him out of his inertia. Tyler’s adrenaline kicked into high gear, and he reacted without thinking. He dashed to the large floor lamp, picked it up, and jabbed it into Mr. Hendrix's face. The plug yanked free from the socket, giving him more freedom to swing the thing around. The soft glass of the bulb made a loud pop as it exploded into the man's sallow skin, cutting a fresh gash that bled a grisly mixture of seething pus and crimson tears.
The impact didn't slow Mr. Hendrix. It was as if he didn’t feel it at all. The jagged shards of glass still connected to the base of the bulb had become anchored into his skull. His incessant lunging had locked them in like Crazy Glue, trapping him at the end of the metal rod. Tyler had some breathing room, but not much and not for long. Mr. Hendrix roared with frustration as he clawed at the air, trying to close the gap between Tyler and his snapping jaws. Tyler sh
oved him back like an animal trainer working with an unruly lion, and knocked over the glass coffee table in the process. One side remained edge up while the rest of the glass shattered.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the little girls rushing towards his unprotected legs. Tyler quickly turned, and yanked the lamp down to block them, pulling the grisly corpse of his girlfriend's former neighbor down with it. The metal bar came down on the head of the first girl, knocking her back, but her twin slipped beneath it at the last second and charged teeth-first towards Tyler's crotch.
She's going to bite my junk, Tyler thought in terror.
Fear and instinct caused him to kick out at her, just as she lunged for him. His foot caught her square in the gut, sending her flailing backwards towards her dad and sister. The blow did little to faze her. She sprung back to her feet, chattering like a rabid squirrel, and raced towards him again. Tyler kicked frantically at her, doing his best to keep her from sinking her tiny, sharp teeth into his legs. She just kept coming.
Do something, man, or you're going to die!
Tyler screamed, and kicked at her as hard as he could. His new sneakers connected with her jaw, redirecting her towards the glass table. He braced himself for her next attack, but she didn't get back up again. He maneuvered closer to her, ready for her to bounce back to life like a terrifying jack in the box, his clammy hands slipped slightly on the lamp pole keeping her dad and sister at bay. Turning his head for a quick glance, he saw that by some stroke of luck she'd managed to land face-first on the upturned corner of the coffee table. The sharp glass sunk deep into her skull. She lay as still as the grave, while a trickle of rancid smelling oily fluid leaked down her lips and off her chin, staining the carpet under her.
Head shots, Tyler thought. Why didn't I think of that before?
The crowd on the patio was growing. They'd begun to press their bodies against the glass, desperate to get in and join the hunt. Tyler knew what he needed to do. Summoning all the strength he could muster, he drove the lamp and Mr. Hendrix towards the closest wall. He let out an animal cry as he rammed the pole—still attached to the man—into the side of the living room, forcing the glass-edged pole deeper into his torn face. The man roared in anger, clawing at the metal pole until the harsh sound of fingernails on metal filled the room. His remaining daughter came running towards Tyler, but he was ready for her. He brought down the heavy base of the metal lamp on top of her head as hard as he could, knocking her to the ground. The force of the blow tore her small skull wide open. She writhed on the carpet, not fully dispatched, but unable to rise again and rejoin the attack.
Undead L.A. 2 Page 5