by Guy James
“Right,” Sven said, and he fell in step behind Lorie, who was already crossing the short distance from the still bing-bonging door of the drugstore to the door of the hibachi restaurant. From within the drugstore, Sven could see shuffling movement in the dark, and just before he and Lorie got inside the hibachi restaurant, the arc of undead began to move toward them, as if they had been waiting for Sven and Lorie’s next move.
Once Sven was inside, Lorie said, “We have to block off the door with something,” and she was right. Lorie began to pull on a table.
“Here,” Sven said, “put one of these on first,” and he put his surgical mask packages down on the table and gave one to Lorie.
She wrinkled her nose at the wrapped object. “I guess that’ll do better than me running around pinching my nose. It helps against the smell?”
Sven nodded, and pushed the table up against the door while Lorie fiddled with the surgical mask’s wrapper. When Sven turned back the mask was on, hiding most of her expressive face.
“Now we match,” she said, and that’s when Sven noticed what she was carrying.
“Have you had that with you the whole time?”
“What this?” Lorie pulled the thing out of her pocket. “I picked this up before I went in looking for you. Thought it might be useful.” The girl’s eyes seemed to be completing a grin beneath her mask. “Or at least fun. Just because the world is ending or whatever doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have any more fun, right?”
“Right.” Sven smiled under his mask. They were in a tight spot, but he was glad it was her in there with him. She had a sense of humor. Maybe later, when they got somewhere safe—if there were any safe places left—they could light up that firework that Lorie had grabbed and watch it explode, announcing their triumph over the zombies...or mark humankind’s passage into extinction.
“So,” Sven said, “now that we’re in here, what’s the plan?”
“Well there’s gotta be a back door or something. All restaurants have back doors.”
“Sounds good to me.” Sven pointed to the table they had put in front of the door. “The door opens out, so if those things suddenly remember how to pull on doors and climb over hip-high tables, we might be trouble.”
“I think we might be in trouble anyway.”
Sven turned around, and saw that some of the staff of the restaurant had joined the ranks of the undead. Two hibachi chef zombies were stumbling toward him and Lorie.
“Is that all?” Sven asked. “We can take them.”
Lorie nodded and said, “At least the lights are on in here,” and they began to approach the hibachi chefs.
A knife gleamed on one of the cooking tables. Sven picked the knife up, and with a whipping motion he flung it at the closest hibachi chef, mimicking the motion he had seen countless times in the movies.
The knife spun through the air as Sven had intended. The knife hit the hibachi chef in the chest, and that was where reality diverged from Hollywood fantasy. The butt-end of the knife hit the chef, and the knife bounced off and fell to ground, clattering.
“Not quite how they do it in the movies,” Sven said, and shrugged.
Then, before Sven could stop her, Lorie dashed toward the chef, picked up the knife that had fallen to the ground, lunged forward, and stabbed upward through the zombie chef’s throat, plunging the knife all the way in, up to its black plastic handle. The zombie fell backward, losing its chef hat and clutching at the air one final time.
Sven dropped the surgical mask packages and pill bottles, and under his mask, his mouth fell open. Jesus! Who was this girl? Sven didn’t know what to do next, he almost felt afraid of Lorie.
“But,” Lorie said, “like in the movies, you gotta get them in the brain. Good thing that was a long knife.”
“Uhh, beh,” Sven stammered. Good thing that was a long knife? He was speechless.
Lorie put her hands on her hips. “Well? Come on, let’s go.”
Sven picked up the things he had dropped and an idea occurred to him. “Hey, about what you just said—the having fun part.”
“Yeah?”
“How would you like to blow this place up?”
65
Jane stood next to the car stewing. She couldn’t believe that Lorie had run off like that. The girl was going to get hurt, or worse. Jane had run after her, trying to stop her, but Lorie was so fast, and then she was on the other side of the gate, running around those things, and Jane had Evan and the car to look after and—
Jane took a deep breath. What’s done is done, she told herself. She poured some of Sven’s water on some paper towels from the trunk and dabbed at Evan’s forehead. She had taken the boy outside after parking the car close to the fence, hoping the fresh air might revive him some, but it hadn’t. Now she was starting to think she should put him back in the car. She just didn’t know what to do with him, didn’t know how to make him better.
The paper towels seemed to fill with steam as soon as they made contact with his skin. Jane was worried about the boy, and she had already been worried about Sven, and now that Lorie had run off, well, she was worried about everyone. And all she could do was sit there and mind the car and the sick boy propped up against the rear door. She had to. Someone had to.
Though she was mad that Lorie had run off, Jane had to admire the girl’s bravery. Jane didn’t think she would have done that when she was Lorie’s age. Jane wasn’t sure she would do it now, but then again, things always seemed different when you were younger, and maybe this whole thing wasn’t that scary to Lorie, at least not the way it was to Jane. But that didn’t really make sense either. Jane decided that the girl had guts, and settled on that.
“Why aren’t they back yet?” Jane asked.
Evan didn’t respond, and Jane shuddered at the reminder of the non-responsive Vicky she had encountered that morning. She was still there—Vicky—still standing in the kitchen perhaps, looking out onto
Lewis Mountain Road, in the house that they had shared. Jane didn’t think she could ever go back there now, could ever live there again after what had happened there, after what she had done. She had gotten drunk and fork-stabbed her roommate. Yes, it was true that her roommate had become a zombie, but gulping down wine and fork-stabbing her, had that really been called for? Who the hell did that—zombie plague or no?
She shot a nervous glance at the gas gauge. She had been eyeing the gauge constantly, watching the boy one second and looking through the rolled-down window at the dashboard the next. The car was very close to empty, the boy was surely dying, and Ivan was hissing at her like it was going out of style. Jane was sure that she had never been this stressed out before, and she wished with all of her being that she could rewind the day and go to her stupid, boring accounting job where the term “zombie” was a joke to refer to co-workers.
Jane had given some thought to turning the car off to save gas, but she had decided against it each time, telling herself that Sven would only be another minute longer. Then after Lorie had left, Jane kept telling herself they would be back any second, and it was certainly not a good idea to turn the car off at this point. She was afraid of running out of gas, and of the car not starting back up. But Sven and Lorie were taking so long. It had been over twenty minutes. What the hell were they doing over there? They were just supposed to get something to knock down the boy’s fever, and there was a drugstore right next to the restaurant.
The fact that they were taking so long meant that they were in trouble. They had to be, there was no other explanation Jane could think of.
The way Jane saw it, she had three choices, three ways to deal with the situation, and they were all bad. First, she could call out to Sven and Lorie through the gate. Maybe they would hear her, and maybe not. Whether or not Sven and Lorie heard, the zombies would, and Jane was sure they would be attracted to the noise. There was something that attracted the creatures to people. It could’ve been in the way non-zombie people smelled, or in the way they move
d, or in the sounds they made. It could’ve been all three or some combination. Even if noise didn’t attract the things, Jane wasn’t going to risk it. If she yelled for Sven and Lorie, the zombies would come, and they would block the gate, and then Sven and Lorie wouldn’t be able to get to the car.
Jane had tried using her phone to call Sven, but that was no use, it just kept giving her that same stupid message about the circuits being busy, and she wasn’t sure he’d taken his phone anyway. It was good that she had kept his number in her phone though. She had thought about erasing it, to make a clean break and all that, but he did live on her block and she did want to stay friends. It wasn’t as if she was going to move away just because they broke up, and it wasn’t as if she was going to get drunk and call him just because she kept his number in her phone—although she had—but that wasn’t the point. It was good that she still had his number because at some point in this calamity the circuits might unbusy themselves and the phone could become a lifeline. Jane sighed. That point was settled, there was no way for her to contact the rest of the gang—that was how she was beginning to think of their little group, and she hoped there was still a gang to think of when this was all over.
Second, Jane could go searching for them. She could put Evan in the backseat, take the keys, lock the car, and go through the gate. But Ivan wouldn’t have that. It seemed the cat wanted to tear the boy apart, although he wouldn’t come close enough to do it. She was uncomfortable about leaving the two alone together even if that had been a real option, and it wasn’t. She couldn’t leave the boy. She had a bad feeling about him for all the obvious reasons, but she couldn’t just leave him to die alone, and—she caught herself being too dismissive—he wasn’t dead yet, he might still pull through. And she had no weapons. If she did get through the sporadic clumps of zombies on the other side of the fence, how would she help Sven and Lorie if they were in trouble? She would likely just make matters worse. No, leaving the boy and cat alone in their getaway vehicle was not an option.
Then there was the third option.
The only option.
Jane opened the rear door and placed the boy on the back seat, ignoring Ivan’s spitting protests and wondering why options always seemed to run in threes. She closed the door and stepped back into the field.
She looked up at the sky to the north, in the direction they were traveling—assuming they ever got back on track. There were dark storm clouds in that direction, and they were heading south, toward her.
She took a deep breath, opened the driver’s side door and climbed in. She closed the door and rolled up the window.
“Shut up Ivan will you?”
Ivan quieted his hissing.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to yell, I just—it’s a bad day okay? Please be nice.”
Ivan lowered his head and meowed, making Jane feel even worse about yelling at him. She wished this nightmare would end. How could it even be happening in the first place?
Probably some damn government experiment in biological warfare gone wrong. Or a terrorist attack.
Damn people, she thought, damn them all to hell.
Jane put her foot on the brake and shifted the car into drive. Then she gently released the brake, and drove away.
66
This is it, Milt thought, the honorable death of the greatest warrior that ever graced the universe with his most generous presence.
The end.
Death at the rotten hands of the zombies. At least it was an interesting way to die. Then terror overtook him, and gone were his deliberations over the comparative merits of the various means by which a person may meet death.
Their hands were clamped so tightly, so firmly, around his ankles, and no matter how hard he kicked or pulled or tried to crawl backward, the undead talons that held him wouldn’t yield.
Milt was overcome by a sudden mourning when it occurred to him he might never consume another Snickers bar, or quench his thirst with the delightful sparkle of Coca-Cola. That was the worst thing of all, because whether he died or was transformed into a zombie, the worldly delights of food and drink would become forever off-limits. He was sure that zombies didn’t eat...that they couldn’t eat, except of humans. He figured that if they did still have the capacity to eat human food, they would be doing so now, instead of trying to eat Milt. If only they could still know the pleasure of sticky peanuts and nougat and caramel and if—
There was a thud, and then a crunch, and Milt’s eyes darted up to see a zombie’s head explode into a spray of eyes and nose and teeth and brain...desiccated solids but no blood. Then there was another thud and another crunch—crunchier this time—and another head turned into a vile spray of its shattered component parts. Milt recalled the destroyed Commodore 64 lying in its spray of electronic innards, and didn’t feel the bite of loss he had before. Then another head exploded, and another.
The pull on Milt’s legs lessened, and he saw that the zombies who were holding him in their undead grasp were all headless—headless but still holding on, relentless. No...wait, they were falling backward, away from him. They were dead, and they couldn’t let go because their hands weren’t working anymore. But what had made their heads explode? Was it divine providence intervening on Milt’s behalf so that he may live out his glorious destiny? It must—
“Are you okay?” came a voice next to Milt’s head. “Damn they’re still holding on, let me see if I can get the hands off.”
Milt turned in surprise to see that a man was there, and in his hands he held a baseball bat. The bat looked like it had seen better days. It was splattered with a generous coating of zombie gobbets of all shapes and sizes. Milt was quite confident that there was an eyeball on it, flattened down so that it looked like an imperfect square with a shriveled and twisted optic nerve hanging from the back. At the end of the optic nerve was a warped brain globule. Milt didn’t know if that was the right terminology for it, but it seemed correct enough. The globule stared at him, and made him extremely uncomfortable, but it also gave him an idea.
He waited until the globule was out of sight, along with the bat it rode in on, and then executed his plan. The man with the bat had lifted it over his head like a woodchopper ready to strike at the decapitated zombie’s arms...and, that was when Milt commenced his globule-inspired maneuver.
He pushed himself up on his left elbow as far as he could go and shifted the great bulk of his big-boned back to the right, trying to rock over onto his right side. It took two attempts, and he was there. Then, putting all of his strength into it, Milt pushed off his right side, twisting his body back to the left.
The maneuver went exactly as Milt had intended. His legs fluttered around as he rolled over, and the torque exacted on the zombies’ arms was too much for their brittle undead bodies to handle. There were snaps and cracks and a sound similar to that which paper makes when it is ripped, and Milt was free. He kept rolling until he came to rest against the side of a car.
The headless zombies that had held him now had torn bits of sinew sticking out where their arms and forearms had once been. The front of the zombie line was destroyed, and Milt was, at least temporarily, out of harm’s way.
The baseball bat man went at the rest of them, dispatching the remaining five zombies with precisely aimed blows to the head. They all fell, decapitated or mostly so, to the pavement.
And then there were none.
Milt propped himself up on one elbow. He looked down and was filled with disgust when he saw that around his ankles and lower shins, detached zombie hands still held firm to him. There were five hands in all—two on his left leg and three on his right—and two of the hands were barely hands at all, they were torn up to the point of only having two fingers apiece, and bits of bone and tendon where the backs of the hands and wrists should have been.
The other three hands were relatively whole, but they were coming apart in a fleshy, wiry mess. It was a revolting sight.
Cringing, Milt looked away and at the man
with the baseball bat. The man had on flip-flops, blue shorts, a yellow polo, and a University of Virginia baseball cap pulled low on his head. He was panting, and his eyes were darting among the zombie bodies, as if looking to see if any of them still posed a threat.
“Are you in league with the damned, or are you as yet uncontaminated?” Milt shouted. “If you are in league with the ill-fated zombies, you shall meet the edge of my proud blade.”
That reminded Milt. Where was said blade? Milt looked around for it but didn’t see it. Then he spotted its hilt, covered in his own dried blood, the chocolate coating no longer visible. The sword stuck out from under a mangle of zombie parts.
“What? I just helped you get away from those things, of course I’m not with them. I’m human, not bitten or anything. See?” The man brushed his short sleeves upward to reveal his upper arms, then picked his t-shirt up, revealing a midsection devoid of any visible fat. “See? No bites, still human.”
What a show-off, Milt thought. “Well, that is fine, but be more careful next time, there are zombies about, as you may have guessed.”
“You’re welcome?”
“Yes, you are welcome to join me in my quest. You may be my squire. You may call me Miltimore the Mighty.”
Milt stuck out his hand to the man, who was obviously some sort of simpleton, but that was alright. It wasn’t a day to be exceedingly selective in one’s alliances.
The man looked at Milt’s hand and shook his head. “We’ll shake later, looks like you got a lot of blood there, and I’m not taking any chances today. Oh, and you’re bleeding pretty good from your head.”
“I am certainly not infected. What is your name, young squire?”
“My name is Brian.” Brian seemed to be speaking slowly, like he had some kind of learning impediment. “And you’re being really weird. I think you have heat stroke. Let’s get out of the sun and take care of that wound.”
“Very well. That will do. Allow me to retrieve my sword first.”