by Arthur Stone
Actually, he could pry the SIM card out of his current phone and jam it in his old one, then try to contact someone in the city. Now he had to apologize to both Catalina and his boss. There was no way he would make it to work on time.
As these thoughts filled his already swollen skull, Leland climbed up to the bank and walked back to his Jeep.
The toxic mist had vanished without a trace. He could see for miles around, where the terrain allowed. He peered across the lake at the rows of unfinished cottages beyond. No signs of life. Weird. He knew at least some of those houses had been inhabited since last year, and where were the security guards and construction workers? But if this second-phone plan of his failed, he’d have to go that way.
He saw his Jeep as soon as he rounded the bend, near the black SUV. Nothing in the scene had changed in the slightest, and Leland didn't like that. The traffic conditions were unsettling, too: precisely zero vehicles had passed Leland on the road, besides the murderous minibus. Nighttime was one thing, but a whole morning of neglect? No, the road’s popularity precluded that possibility. Something was amiss.
He walked past his Jeep and knocked on the window of the SUV.
“Hey, anybody alive in there?”
Silence. The people who were here must have hitched a ride out of the place. Somehow. Perhaps the county plastic surgeon’s finest tools were reconstructing Kara’s proboscis at this exact moment. For a few seconds, he regretted missing the chance to see how it turned out.
But the SUV’s door was open, and Leland couldn’t resist peeking in. The airbags were deployed. That made sense. But the driver’s seat was soaked with blood. Huh. That jackass hadn’t appeared to be hurt. Where could all of this blood have come from? The passenger seat was clean by comparison, save a few traces of Kara’s nasal calamity.
Leland stepped on something metal. Glancing down, he saw a brass cylinder. He knelt down, picked it up, and sniffed it. It was a fresh cartridge, recently fired.
What could that mean? Had highway robbers attacked the crashed SUV? Perhaps. It was very unlikely, but possible. Or maybe that irate idiot driver was trying to settle something and failed to devise any solution that did not involve firing a gun. Narrow-minded dolts like that liked to carry weapons around. And use them for any nonsensical reason they could conjure.
So, there was a firefight, the car was splattered with all that blood, and the man and his girlfriend had ambled off somewhere. A bizarre turn of events.
It was, in fact, a lot of blood. Not a scratch. No scratch ever gushed like that. Leland struggled against the growing urge to faint at the sight of the crimson river. But it wasn’t the blood that bothered him. It never had before—he had strong nerves. No, he must have hit his head harder than he had believed. Or he was still poisoned from that stupid fog. Something was clearly wrong with him. I can’t think straight. I just feel like zoning out.
A shot rang out somewhere in the distance, echoing through the area, then dying out. Could that have been hunters? No, hunting season hadn’t started yet, surely. And nobody ever tried a hunting expedition this close to the city. Even far away from the city, in places difficult to reach by car, you could spend all day in the wilderness without discovering any of the game you were after. The area had been disastrously over-hunted. The authorities were trying to remedy the situation, but they would only succeed many years from now, if at all.
Plus, the shot was clearly from a large rifle. Guns that size were not uncommon, but nobody around here had them. To use them legally, you had to go farther out into the wild, where all kinds of game still roamed the landscape. Shooting guns this close to town would just get the police called on you.
The road was still dead, though. Not a car in sight. Something was clearly wrong.
Leland had no concept of what he had gotten himself into, but he knew what he should do next. That fat man had been right: he had to get to the village, learn what was occurring, and act accordingly. His clothes showed streaks of mud, but no rips or tears, and his ID was in his pocket. He could explain the trouble he’d had and the town would do whatever it could to help. North Dakotans might be isolated, but they were friendly enough.
He heard a noise behind him. He whirled—and saw that the SUV driver had stuck around. He was standing a few steps away, in fact.
Wait, no, not standing. He was walking. Walking towards Leland.
* * *
Leland had seen The Walking Dead and Z and played Left for Dead. He knew about zombies. They were a convenient plot device for fantasy works, and for some a deus ex machina of infinite utility. Creating zombie extras was easy. You didn’t have to blow a huge special effects budget on immense monsters built from scratch. Zombies were easily recognizable, their motives demanded no explanation, and anyone could play the part with just a little makeup. Studios could create a whole crowd of undead with no special requirements other than hiring enough extras. And that crowd didn’t need any special skills on their resumes, other than “hobble” and “moan.”
Thanks to the ease of employing zombies, even an amateur filmmaker could successfully create and distribute something in the popular genre. A camera of some kind, or access to someone else’s camera, was enough to produce the latest Zombies vs. Strippers on a budget no larger than a grad student’s stipend. You needed neither talent nor even a plot, but only enthusiasm, a copious supply of ketchup, and a shaky hold on the camera.
This meant, of course, that many such “directors” had emerged from the woodwork, laboring tirelessly to deflate the already-mediocre quality of the genre into something truly reprehensible. Leland sometimes found himself in situations where he had to watch these movies, or worse, where he had to pretend they were actually decent.
Zombie movies were the first thought that visited Leland’s mind when he saw the man. Amateur actors with lousy makeup and cheap ketchup. The lead antagonist of the latest “masterpiece” was the driver of the wrecked SUV.
Greg had undergone considerable changes since Leland’s trip to the bridge and back. He had lost his pants somewhere, introducing the world to his colorful knee-length boxers. The rest of his clothes were blood-blotched and torn, and a solid cake of red covered the bottom half of his face. Two faded, fish-like eyes flicked and flitted above the dark mess.
A hole was torn in his right cheek, and through it, his teeth were visible. That might have been the wound that had lost so much blood. Either that, or this was some kind of budget-breaking expensive makeup. But the man also smelled like an outhouse, which to Leland’s knowledge wasn’t necessary for quality filmmaking.
There was no makeup smell mixed in with the outhouse smell.
The walking deadman’s breathing was a noisy affair, a masterclass in strained rattling. He approached Leland with a sluggish, swaying gait. No, he wasn’t holding his hands out and begging for some yummy brains. But he was a zombie, or something from that general class of deathforms. The man was certainly dead. Not just mostly dead.[1] One glance in his eyes was enough to tell Leland that.
Greg uttered a chilling, nauseating, inhuman growl. His dim eyes sparkled with longing. The walking dead man had inspected Leland, and he liked him.
Liked him in the gastrointestinal sense of the word, that is.
Leland heard an abrupt rustling off to his side. Glancing over, he saw a woman of indeterminate age crawling towards him, her intentions visibly malicious. She had been the companion of the fat man zombie. Her poor neck was so torn, Leland could make out the bones and exposed arteries inside. But despite her grave injuries, the young lady moved forward unimpeded. She fell back to her knees each time she tried to stand, but that failed to slow her down.
“Stop right there! I said stop! Stay away!” Leland commanded.
As expected, she ignored his request. He took a step back and gave his arm a vicious pinch. It hurt, but he didn’t wake up. Dreams were never this lifelike anyway, at least no dreams he had ever experienced.
Another step. And another.
The couple was drawing closer, slowly but steadily. Leland could escape at a brisk walking pace, and they’d be far behind him a few minutes later. But where would he go? His predictable world had turned into a plane of madness. He had to try and make sense of it.
What should he do? What should anyone surrounded by walking corpses do?
At least Leland knew what he shouldn’t do. He shouldn’t stay on the road, not with these shenanigans in process. He climbed over the guardrail, looked around, checked how far away the remarkably lively corpses were, and hurried up the slope, planning to climb the hill, skirt around the lake, and reach the village. Hopefully some explanation was waiting for him there.
One minute later, he turned back. He saw the driver clumsily stumble over the guardrail, tumble into the tall grass, stand awkwardly, and resume his drunken stagger after Leland. The woman was far behind. Unable to surmount the guardrail, she was crawling along its length instead.
At least these specimens were as dumb as the zombies in the movies. That was comforting. A little.
Chapter 3
The guard booth was in even worse shape than Greg and Kara. Its hideous stare featured teeth of jagged windowglass, an unhinged jaw-like door swung painfully wide open, and an outer skin speckled with handprints of blood. Leland gripped the sturdy stick he had collected on the way a little tighter and cautiously peeked through the remnants of the window. Inside, he discovered an overturned table and chairs, numerous dark splotches, and scattered sheets of paper of various colors. No one living and nothing useful could be seen inside. At least no one dead was inside, either.
Leland turned away from the booth. The former residents of the lakeside cottages were cozying up to give him as warm a welcome as they could, being dead. They rocked slowly, encompassing him three quarters of the way around. They were no better off than that couple he had escaped. He even saw a bearded man crawling along the same way the woman had been, unable to keep his head balanced. Some sported wounds, others bloodstained clothing. A number of them looked to be undamaged—but Leland was not about to grant them a closer examination.
They were all slow, but their threat would be compounded if they cornered you in a room, or even out in the open. Leland had no trouble recalling all the movies where a single bite from a painted extra would enlist you in the army of the dead, in perpetuity. Job stability aside, the career path was not an inspiring one. Perhaps this reality was different, and no bite could “turn” him. But his curiosity was not so insatiable as to risk eternal servitude on an experiment.
A quick evaluation of the situation made up his mind. He bounded inside and rushed through the small room, flinging chairs and papers aside and opening a number of cardboard boxes. No weapons. No communication instruments. Dammit. The hopes he had placed in this village’s security force were as far off the mark as Greg’s driving.
Leland wasn’t about to fight a war with the dead. Maybe he was mistaken, and they were stricken with an illness. Maybe recovery was possible—if not for all of them, at least for some. But if they swamped him, he wanted to cut their Achilles’ tendons or put bullets in their shins. He’d rather deal with police and the fickle justice system than wander around like them, staggering after any normal person that happened to walk by.
He jumped out and looked around. The village had been effectively uninhabited. Out of the hundred and fifty or so zombies, only a third were dressed as if they lived here. The remainder wore work clothes or uniforms. They had been working at the local construction sites as of twenty-four hours ago. These must have been more of them. Way more. So where were the rest?
There was nothing good to be found in this village, except for more trouble. The guard booth had no phone, and Leland had no idea where to look for one. He dismissed the notion of peeking around the inhabited cottages. There could have been anything inside, waiting to ambush him. The owner of the house in question, for instance. All well and good if he, too, was cold and slow-moving. But what if he was scared to death of this bloody circus, crouching in a corner with his finger on the trigger of a double-barreled shotgun?
Leland was not a coward, but he knew breaking and entering was an unwise strategy.
A car. He needed a car, right away. He’d drive to Bismarck, where there should still be some semblance of order, at least more than the mess of crawlers overfilling this village.
A brand new Volvo stood by a gate to one of the houses. No one in their right mind would leave a car like that with the keys in it, but Leland ran up to check, nevertheless. Nope. He could look for the keys, but that would mean going inside the house, taking risks, wasting time. The dead people continued to be drawn toward him. The bustle of a living person clearly attracted them, and Leland dreaded finding himself surrounded. He had to keep going. To the construction sites. Leland had never driven a truck before, but he’d get behind the wheel of anything in these circumstances, even a cement truck or a sewer utility vehicle. As long as it was still in working condition.
The next vehicle was a Suburban. A good choice, but with no key in sight, and Leland still had no desire to go looking for one. He had to keep moving. Wait, what’s that? In the distance, along the edge of a particularly impressive construction site, he saw a Jeep Cherokee. Perfect! The vehicle was at once capable and familiar to him. But why was it rammed into a crumpled fence? A crash, perhaps? And who had been messing with the driver side door? It was torn clean off, but that simply could not have happened in the accident.
And what was that just beyond it? Further away, towards the end of the dark tire marks leading from the Jeep?
It was probably the driver, or what was left of him. Mostly bones, with some flesh left on his shins and skull, a few scraps of soft tissue here and there. A child of about ten crouched over his remains, fruitlessly striving to rip a piece from his well-gnawed arm.
The spectacle finally provoked Leland to vomit. His stomach was empty, so nothing but bile came up, but he could barely keep himself standing as he retched repeatedly. The young zombie failed to react to his convulsions, obsessed with its vile scavenging.
That was for the best. No need to attract attention.
Leland’s luck finally turned as he approached. The key to the Jeep was still there, right in the ignition! Someone had attacked the car while it was on the move, probably at a relatively slow speed. Then the unknown strongman peeled off the door, wrenched the driver out, and hauled him down the road, leaving nothing but the few minute subjects of the child’s rapt indulgence.
The marks adorning the car door bore a suspicious resemblance to huge claw marks. Someone had smashed the window, grabbed the metal edge of the door, and bent it off—even tearing it in places.
Even the world’s toughest fingernails couldn’t have performed a feat like that. What was worse, this evil beast might be hidden somewhere nearby. Perhaps it was watching Leland right now, pondering which of his body parts it would consume first.
The child could not have eaten that much of the driver on its own. Something else had munched on him first. And maybe that something was still hungry.
The driverless Jeep had stalled after running into the fence. Leland hammered his foot down on the clutch, revved the engine, backed away from the fence, and floored the gas. The Jeep’s tires squealed. He sped off, whipping around turns with total disregard for potholes. He had to escape this village now. Something here had just torn a Jeep door clean off and eaten the driver for breakfast. In this moment, speed was all that mattered. He would not let the ogre overtake him.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something move among the boxes near the unfinished cottages. He looked directly at it. Nothing. Leland was just imagining things. He would escape the village, but there was no escaping his nerves in a situation like this.
He drove past a single zombie hobbling awkwardly down the road. The creature lunged with a burst of surprising speed, quickly clearing five feet as it grasped with its sole remaining, bloody hand. Its crooked fingers har
mlessly raked their nails down the side of the Jeep.
A little closer, and it might have gotten a grip. With the door gone, Leland had nothing left on that side to protect him.
The Jeep powered through the last of the rough terrain and out onto the road just beyond the bridge where he had spent the night prior. He was in the open now, and his fears began to subside. He could make the sprint to Bismarck, and if nothing got in his way, he would arrive at the edge of the city within ten minutes.
* * *
There was no way to listen to the radio. Not that Leland cared about the absence of music. It was the news he wanted.
He passed multiple dead, abandoned cars, both on and off the road. Some had crashed into fences or even flipped over them. Most had their doors opened. Only once did he see an unmolested, lifeless body near one of the cars. No one else was nearby.
Gnawed skeletons, however, covered the landscape.
The walking corpses were everywhere, too. The sound of the Jeep attracted them, making them waddle over like ducks about to give birth, rushing towards him as quickly as they could. Leland went around them, all the while trying not to expose his left side lest one of them leap inside. This strategy proved to be a wise one, as several more zombies executed sudden leaps as they drew close. One even managed to poke his head inside. The move twisted the ghoul’s neck to the breaking point before it fell out, but Leland declined to stop and check on him.
He was willing to kill these things now. Several times he’d seen the beasts crouched over bodies, feasting on them. Only one of the bodies was a dog’s; the rest had all been human.
A wrinkly old woman with her false teeth missing was trying to gnaw something with her bare gums. It wasn’t easy to process details as he flew by with all possible speed, but this old lady had turned at just the right time and bared her teeth, as if posing for a picture—he’d have to be blind to miss it. The sight impressed itself into his mind, and he considered it for the remainder of his trip.