by Zuko, Joseph
“Grab a jacket and let’s move.”
“Wait,” she looks at her bandaged hand. “My ring,” I look at Devon and then back into the living room at Brad’s dead body.
“Really?”
“Please help me?” she whimpers. I drop my head. This is going to be gross, but I can’t leave her and steal her dead husbands Bronco. I pull out one of the knives I have strapped to my hip. I walk over to Brad’s dead body and kneel down next to his head. Devon steps into the living room with me. Colleen follows him. I look at Brad’s destroyed face. I got him right between the eyes but the blade is so big that it cut into his left eye. I have a thing about eyes. Touching them grosses me out. My Dad wore contacts and I would almost throw up as a kid every time he would put them in. My stomach turns a little so I look away from his eyes and focus on the jaw. I take the back of the knife and slide it between his lips. The metal clanks against the enamel of his teeth. I move the blade back and forth until I get it to slide between his teeth. I pull down to open his jaw. Blood dumps out onto the floor. I jump back a little when the blood pours my way. It reminds me of when I was sixteen and my parents took my brother and me to Disneyland. On our first night there we rode “It’s A Small World.” It was a horrible ride. Long and boring. If you ever get a chance to ride it, don’t. You are trapped on a little boat, floating in gross old water with the same stupid song playing over and over. I am sitting in this little boat with my family and I am wearing my brand new letterman’s jacket. I worked really hard to earn this jacket and I was so proud of it. I think it might have only been a month old at this point. The boat rocked and I thought some of the nasty water was going to splash up onto my beautiful jacket. So I jumped. I jumped like a shark was coming to get me. After that my parents loved to tell everyone that I was scared and jumped on the “It’s A Small World” ride. I jumped the same way just now. Like the blood was a shark coming to get me.
“I can’t do this. You’re gonna have to do it. I’ll hold it open,” I fight back against the puke. She stumbles over to her dead husbands body. With her good hand she digs her fingers down into the blood. I pull on the jaw to open it as far as it will go. She digs down deep almost to her wrist. Tears stream down her cheeks. She gets a hold of something and pulls her hand out of his mouth. It is so coated in blood I can’t tell if she has got it. She stands up, walks back into the kitchen and turns on the water at the sink. The water reveals a severed finger with a diamond ring on it. She works the ring off the finger.
“Should I put it on ice? Maybe they can put it back on.”
“The hospitals are overrun,” I tell her. She nods her head and picks her jacket off the back of a dining chair. She tosses the severed finger into the sink like it was a spoiled hotdog.
“The stairs are down here,” she leads the way into a hall. Devon and I follow her down into the tight stairway. At the bottom of the stairs is another door. She opens it and turns on the lights. When I enter the room I am blown away. It is a rebuilt Ford Bronco. I am not a car guy, but it is a good-looking machine. The silver paint looks 3D. The tires are big and knobby. They look like they can climb straight up a wall. This room is a shrine to all things Ford Bronco, old posters, toy cars and books. One of the posters on the wall is of this exact Bronco. It has the year 1974 written across the top of the poster. This guy loved this car and I am about to take it and probably destroy it. We will be lucky if it even makes it to the river.
“What’s the plan?” Colleen asks.
“I’m gonna take the side roads and get to Vancouver,” I open the door and slide into the driver’s seat. She pops open the passenger door. “Get in kid,” she says to Devon. He pops the lever on the front seat to get it to fold forward and climbs up into the backseat. I slide the key into the ignition, push in the clutch and turn the key. The V8 roars to life. I click the garage door opener. The door slowly rises. I give the gas a few pumps and the body of the SUV shakes. This thing has got a lot of torque. There is a small pack of infected in the street. A couple of teens and an old woman, all three of them look like they were shot out of a meat grinder.
“What happened to them?” Colleen looks over to me.
“They’re infected,” I slip it into first and let off the clutch and the Bronco takes off out of the garage. The infected race to meet us.
Chapter 7
I have only driven this car for two seconds and I have already put a dent into it. At this speed the infected bounce off the Bronco’s front end. An old lady’s arm is ripped off and it lays flat against the windshield. I hit the switch that runs the wipers as I take a right out of the garage. They help push the arm off the window and onto the asphalt. The wipers also do a great job of smearing the blood and gore all over the windshield. I click on the spray and the dark black blood turns pink as the wipers wash the window clean. Colleen covers her eyes. The police have been overrun at the intersection. The cruisers are covered in blood. Infected bodies wearing riot gear mill about in the streets. They make a beeline for us.
“It’s worse than…I never would have thought…” Colleen shakes her head.
I take a left to avoid the growing horde. There is an old Catholic church up ahead. Groups of people fight against the infected on the steps. They are armed with bats, hockey sticks and a few machetes. People see the world going to hell and they go to church. It makes sense. The group on the stairs beat the hell out of the infected. They deliver head blow after head blow. The massive staircase that leads up into the church is coated in their black blood.
I check my watch and it is a little after one o’clock. If I can keep this Bronco on the road I will be home in about twenty minutes. On the street a family tries to load their car and a group of infected has spotted them.
“Should we help them?” asks Colleen. I don’t answer her. There is no good answer. Yes, I want to help them, but I can’t. I can’t stop every time a family is in trouble. I would never get home.
“Holy shit!” I blurt out. A man, completely covered in blood, jogs down the sidewalk with a running chainsaw. He looks like Leatherface in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre movie.
“Damn!” exclaims Devon.
“Where’s he going?” asks Colleen.
“That’s such a bad idea. He’s gonna lose a limb,” I shake my head.
Every other driveway on the street has a family loading up their vehicle. Where the hell do they think they are going? Does everyone have a safe house that they can bug out to? Like it is safer out here on the street. Here I am trying to get home and they are leaving theirs. If it is like this everywhere then the streets are going to be swamped. The roads are about to become an all you can eat buffet for the infected. The dinner bell is ringing. We are coming up on a large cemetery. I downshift to get ready for a turn, but at the end of the block there is an overturned semi. It lies across the street and blocks my right turn. A big Ford truck is jammed in between the semi and the trailer. The pickup is on fire. The driver of the semi fights to get out of the cab. He gets to his feet and looks around. It is an eight-foot drop to the ground. I look for a place to squeeze by the accident. The truck driver leaps out into the air the second the semi explodes. He is engulfed in flames. He rolls on the ground unable to put himself out. Fire has spread everywhere around the semi truck. All of the brush and trees are going up in flames. I can’t turn right anymore. Going left sends me in the wrong direction. A fence surrounds the graveyard that is dead ahead of us. I drop the Bronco into second gear and punch it.
“What are you doing?” Colleen props up in her seat, appalled.
“Shortcut,” I answer. We pop the curb at forty miles an hour and smash the fence down. It folds easily under the knobby tires and we zip across the grass.
“You’re a crazy man,” announces Devon.
“It’s gonna save us time,” I tell him.
“My Grandpa is buried in this cemetery,” Colleen’s eyes are drooping.
“I’m sorry,” Devon mutters.
“It’s okay
. He passed when I was a kid. I forget to go see him, even though I live so close,” her words come slow and are slurred together. I steal a quick glance over at her. She is a beautiful woman, but what I am looking for are dark veins running up her arm from her wrist. I don’t see anything on her. Yet.
I get to the gravel road that runs through the cemetery. There is no infected anywhere in sight.
“Look over there!” Devon reaches into the front seat and points his arm in front of my face. A young girl is under attack. The infected have her on the ground. Wait. Her attackers are not infected they are four teenage boys. Two of the boys fight to get her pants off and the other two pin her arms to the ground. I can’t believe this shit. My face goes flush.
“Jim?” Colleen slurs.
I tap the brakes and turn the wheel. I cut back across the graveyard. They are so busy with their disgusting act they don’t notice the Bronco. I jam on the brakes and come to a skidding stop.
One of the assholes works to get his little penis out of his jeans. I am so full of rage, I am not thinking straight. I am not thinking at all. I am on autopilot. The ones holding her arms have their backs to me. I quickly step away from the Bronco and I stomp down hard onto one of their lower backs. The hard rubber sole of my boot grinds down his vertebrae. He lets out a high-pitched scream and falls to the ground, clutching his spine. This alerts the other three assholes that I am not here to be friends.
The rest of this happens so fast it is only the click of a few seconds. I hit the one holding down her other arm, with a fast hammer fist. I aim for the top of his sternum. It crunches. He falls to his back gasping. To make sure they don’t go anywhere I stomp down on their thighs. You hit someone in the iliotibial band that runs down the side of their femur and they can’t walk. I know because I have been kicked there and needed to take five minutes before I could keep going in my class.
The girl on the ground fights back and lands a solid kick. She gives the kid a bloody nose. He falls backwards and tries to crab walk out of here. I take a few quick steps towards him and throw a kick. My boot lands hard in his ass crack. I hit him so hard that he falls on his neck and does a backwards somersault landing on his stomach. He screams like a baby with his face down in the dirt. I drop a heavy knee down onto the back of his neck. It forces his face down deep into the grass. He panics for air. The last one still has his little pee pee hanging out of his pants. I reach out and catch him by the collar of his shirt. Stepping off his buddy as he turns to face me, I have my other knee ready to greet him. My hands are around his skinny neck as my knee hits every square inch of his exposed privates. He doesn’t scream. He grunts. I use his neck to slam him to the ground. I come down on this guy and it is all elbows. I keep a tight hold of his throat and hit him in his teeth and nose. Colleen yells my name. It brings me back to my senses. I look at the bloody mess I made. His face looks like raw hamburger meat. I think I broke his eye socket. I get to my feet. The girl works to get her pants on. I have never been in a real fight before. I have only sparred in class. I have forty or fifty pounds on each of these punks lying on the ground writhing in pain, but I am going to count it as a fight that I won.
“You okay?” I already know the answer but I still ask. She kind of shakes her head.
“You got any family?”
She has her pants on and works on her one shoe that fell off. “No.”
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sara,” I am still not thinking straight. I have never been this mad before. My wife, family and coworkers tease me about never ever getting mad or losing my cool, but I have never had a day like this. I am a normal husband and father. I sell appliances to people that have first world problems.
“Are you coming?”
“What?” she asks. I walk to the Bronco and pull the lever that releases the front seat so it falls forward.
“Get in.”
She moves quickly for the car, pulls her hair back out of her face and readjusts her clothes. She is a beautiful young redhead, about five seven, a hundred and ten pounds and twenty years old. She climbs up and into the back of the Bronco next to Devon. They sit there awkwardly. What is he supposed to say? I climb back into the driver’s seat and slam the door shut. I take one last look at the little turds on the ground.
They are kids. What the hell were they thinking? Why aren’t they home with their families? Even though I shouldn’t feel bad for them I still do. They deserved what they got, but I fucked them up so much they will have a tough time getting back to safety. I might have sentenced them to death. I probably could have scared them away. I didn’t have to beat the shit out of them. I didn’t have to elbow the kid in the face so many times. I don’t know what to think. My moral compass has a magnet sitting next to it.
I punch the gas and head back for the gravel road. Colleen turns around in her seat to face Sara.
“It’s going to be okay,” she tells her.
“I knew them,” Sara gets her seat belt across her lap and clicks the ends together.
“Sweetheart, I’m so sorry,” Colleen holds out her good hand and places it on Sara’s knee. Devon shifts around in the back seat. He slides a sheathed knife off his belt and hands it to Sara.
“You can have this,” she takes it.
“Thank you.”
“These knives are awesomely sharp. So like be, careful,” Devon nods his head at her. She reaches over the drivers seat and grabs my shoulder.
“Thank you,” she says to me.
“You’re welcome,” it sounds awkward when I say it. I don’t know how to talk to kids. The deeper I get into my thirties the more uncomfortable I feel around them. It is why I struggle to talk with Devon. They make me feel old. I am not old, but they make me feel that way for some reason. “Do you live around here?”
“Yes,” she says softly.
“You want me to drop you off?”
“No. It’s not safe,” she stares out the window.
“You got any place to go?” asks Colleen.
“No.”
“You can stay with us,” Devon tells her. I look up at the mirror and back at her. I wish I had something I could say to her and help her feel better, but I have nothing.
I head for the farthest northeast corner of the cemetery. There is no outlet back onto the main streets. It is all fenced in. North of the cemetery sits a row of houses and their backyards butt up against the fence.
“I’m gonna go through it,” I tell them. “Hold on,” I aim for what looks like a space between the houses. I hope I don’t hit a parked car or a kid. The fence folds under the weight of the Bronco. A couple of feet later we hit a wood fence. I aim for the spot between the two posts that anchor it to the ground. The two by fours snap and the fence crumbles. We have entered into a small alley that separates the two houses.
At the next intersection there is a burning car in the middle of the street. Gangs of monsters run from house to house looking for their next victims to feed upon. There is a dump truck crashed halfway into a house across the street. A horde of infected has spotted us.
“Keep going, man!” Devon yells.
I punch it and pull away. The street comes to a dead end. There is a row of four-foot high scrubs blocking us from the next street. A parking lot sits on the other side of the bushes.
“Drive over it!” Devon encourages me. I put the pedal down. We blast over the plant divider. An apartment complex sits to our right and a bunch of people are packing up their cars right in front of us. I almost run over a few kids carrying armfuls of toys. What are these parents doing? Strap the kids into the car or leave them in the apartment until it is safe. The horde has entered the lot behind us. I screwed up. Shit. I led the lions to the lambs. Most of the people are single moms and their kids, a couple of old folks. A dozen infected spill out into the lot. I have to fix this. I slam on the brakes and throw the Bronco into reverse and step on the gas. I head right for the infected.<
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“Get down!”
Devon and Sara duck down under the backseat. A spare tire hangs from the back of the Bronco and it takes the brunt of the impact. The Bronco takes down six of the dead bastards. I mash on the brakes. The tires slide on blood and guts. I grab my spear.
“Come on, kid!” I yell back at Devon. One of the infected lies on the ground under my door, its legs destroyed, but it still grabs and claws up at me. I open the door fast and hard to bang it in the skull. I step out from the vehicle and stab its brains. Devon struggles to cross over Sara’s lap but he finally gets out and is right behind me. I lunge at the next infected and slice at its head. The blade takes the cranium off with one easy swipe. Its body falls forward and its neck hole shoots me with, what feels like, every ounce of blood it has to offer. Devon jumps out with his spear and stabs an oncoming infected in the face. His first solo kill.
“Sweet,” I tell him. It was all he needed to hear. On the other side of the car the last few infected scratch and claw at the windows. Colleen’s first up close look at the infected. She is frozen with fear. I run around the front of the car and I stab the one staring at Colleen. Blood spurts up onto the window. Devon is a second behind me and he takes out the last one. He lets out a battle cry as he cuts the monster’s head in two. I scan the parking lot. That was the last one in this area. I turn to face the people.
“Stay off the roads! Find a weapon and get back in your house,” I quickly get to the drivers side and let Devon in first. The people stand silent and in shock. They stare at us like we are aliens.
“Move it!” I bark at them. They snap out of it and run back into their houses. I climb back into the Bronco, slam the door shut and get it back into gear. Colleen shakes in her seat. I grab her wrist and pull it towards me. I slide her sleeve back to expose her forearm. There are no black veins.
“What are you doing?” asks Sara.
“She was bitten,” I let go of Colleen’s arm.
“You let her live?”