by Lowry, Chris
"You can't get in there," Malik stuttered. "I was with some others and we came over there and looked. They's too many of them."
"Yep," I said.
"All them Zombies is going to get us if we try to go in."
"Then we won't go in."
"What you got planned? You going to fly over them or something?"
That made me pause. Damn, Malik had a good idea and there were only two reasons it wouldn't work. We didn't have a hot air balloon or blimp, and second I didn't know how to fly one if we did. I suppose in a hot air balloon you just heat them up and rise, and hopefully you catch a good wind. A blimp was probably more like a plane, and since I didn't know how to fly, we'd put that damn good idea on hold.
I wouldn't mind finding a pilot though. That would turn my seven hours to Arkansas into just two. Or if we ran across a crop duster, I might chance it myself.
Crop dusters couldn't be that hard to fly, could they?
"Do you know anyone who has a crop duster around here?"
"What's that?"
"A crop duster? The planes they use to spray crops?"
"I thought they used tractors for that."
"They do. But they use planes for it too. Fly low to the ground and dust the crops with pesticide or herbicide."
"In a plane," Malik stared in wonder at the empty sky. "I know they had them little planes for flying people but I ain't never seen one like you saying."
Maybe we had to be closer to the delta for a crop duster. I wasn't sure if they used them on other types of plants besides cotton and soy beans.
Flying to Arkansas would have to wait. Just like flying over the fence in a hot air balloon would too.
We would have to see if this plan would work instead.
I hauled on the rope from the hardware store and pulled the lawn mower toward the larger of the two gates. Malik pushed.
"I still don't know what you is going to do," he grunted.
I liked that he just kept helping though. He might be curious, sure as hell was scared but Malik was ready to do what it took so he could stick around. It was a great work ethic and I took a moment to appreciate it.
We rolled the lawnmower up to the gate and turned it around.
I ripped open the bag of long zipties and used them to lock the steering wheel on a straight course back up the road we had just dragged it down.
The Z had noticed us and had started veering our way, shuffling and lumbering for the gate, the sounds of their moans growing louder. It had an effect on Malik. Sweat popped out on his forehead and his hands and fingers jerked in tiny birdlike movements, twitching and fidgeting as he tried to figure out how to best help.
His big eyes kept watching the fence, watching the Z beyond as if there weren't a barrier between us holding them back.
"Start it up," I told him and took the bolt cutters back to the fence.
There was a padlock on the gate. A quick swipe and it clinked to the ground.
Malik twisted the ignition key on the mower and it whirred in a loud burr before catching. The motor broke the silence like a banshee.
"You ready?" I shouted over the roar.
Malik nodded.
He began jogging up the road.
"Damn it Malik," I screamed after him, but he thought I meant run and took off even faster.
He was supposed to put the lawn mower in drive as I opened the gate and we could run off together.
I looked over my shoulder. There were about a dozen Z rapidly approaching the gate and a dozen more behind them. I shoved against the fencing and rolled it open with a creak that could almost be heard over the rumble of the motor.
I jogged to the tractor, dropped it into drive and jumped back as it lurched up the road and began a steady thumping.
A moan sounded in my ear.
Call it instinct, call it natural drive for self-preservation, call it what you will but I jumped.
Straight into the arms of a waiting Z.
He was faster than the others, a burly foreman type with tattered coveralls and gore covered work boots. He was taller than me by a head or more, and quiet until he reached me.
The Z latched on to my coat sleeve and started to haul my arm to his mouth.
I didn't scream.
That wasn't me.
It had to me someone else making the uhn uhn sound as I struggled to yank out of his tight grip.
He pulled, relentless and stuffed the sleeve in his mouth. I yanked harder.
He bit down. This time it was me screaming.
I slid the buck knife out of the belt pocket and fumbled it open with my left hand, then jabbed the sharp point through his eye straight back into his zombie brain.
The foreman dropped like a sack, arms sprawled wide, mouth clenched tight around the sleeve of my coat and dragged me off balance.
The other Z were approaching now, the tractor motor pulling a few in that direction towards the noise and the movement, but a few others were vectoring in on the fight between me and the Z.
I pushed up off of the dusty blacktop and ignored my throbbing arm. I didn't want to look at it yet. I started moving up the road, walking fast at first, but that turned into a jog and then I was sprinting, sight blurred as hot tears filled my eyes and streaked down and back on my face as I left the depot and tractor and zombies behind.
I reached the tree line but couldn't see Malik in the shadows.
This was far enough ahead that they couldn't see me veer off the road and into the woods. I took ten steps in until there was enough cover to hide me from the road, leaned back against the rough bark of an oak and glanced down at my arm.
The canvas sleeve was covered in slobber. I twisted it and looked, studied the material but it hadn't been broken.
I slid my arm out of the coat so it was half on, half off and looked at my elbow. The long sleeve shirt was whole.
I barked out a guffaw of relief.
Just to be sure I unbuttoned the sleeve, rolled it back and checked. The skin under the bit was already turning purple and yellow, a huge bite shaped bruise, but the skin was intact.
I grinned like a maniac as I buttoned up and slid my arm back in the coat. Were the layers hot? Hell yeah. Did they restrict movement? Like that kid in the movie with the snowsuit, and if we were farther North I'd be dressed in one of those or in as much Kevlar body armor as I could find. But the uniform of layered clothes I had worn since Day one of the Z Armageddon had saved my life.
I may have looked like a homeless hunter, but I was a still living, still breathing, none flesh eating zombie homeless hunter.
Who was unarmed.
In the woods.
A roadway full of Z passing by twenty meters away.
I shifted the coat, rotated my arm just a little and took off through the woods.
It was easy to stick to the edge of the tree line. In the South, when a new company or business decided to build, the economic development committees of those towns would drive the owners or site selectors around in tax funded SUV's. They would look at wooded natural sites and envision what it would look like with the new parking lot and ugly plain structures there instead.
I did wonder once before all of this why they didn't choose old warehouses, or older sections of cities that had been left to rot and urban decay, or factories on the edges of town that were lost to a political whim and loose regulation in the 90's that opened up Mexico and Canada. They economic development folks never showed those sites, as if they were haunted by ghosts of a failed past.
They almost always chose a section of town or county that needed to be cleared and developed. I suppose it was to create even more jobs for locals, who had to bulldoze down the trees, and prepare the site. Though in my experience most of those companies brought in outside contractors and subcontractors based on lower bids, so whatever the goal of the county officials might have been, most of that construction money lined someone out of state's pocket.
This particular site was no exception.
The underbrush of briars and brambles were thick in areas where light slanted in from the open space beyond, so it slowed down passage as I made my way to the far side of the depot and the other road.
I was out of breath as I checked both directions. It was clear and I stepped out onto the smaller one lane back road.
Malik was waiting.
He stood in the middle of the road watching the guard gatehouse and the lot beyond, and turned as I moved out of the woods. He held my rifle in shaking hands and pointed it at me.
“It's me,” I assured him.
“I know,” he slurred.
I could see then he had been crying, giant swollen tears still standing out on his thin cheeks. His lips quivered and the tremors in his hands made the rifle barrel bounce and dance as he kept it aimed at me.
“I saw you get bit.”
I held up the sleeve and showed him it was whole.
“Just a bruise.”
The gun didn't waver, or to be more accurate, it wavered a lot in a semi tight six-inch roll, circling and jerking as he shook on the roadway. But it did not turn away from me, and I saw his finger tighten on the trigger.
“Malik,” I said and held up both hands, showing him I wasn't a threat. “I wasn't bitten. He just got the coat. I can show you.”
I kept my voice calm because his wild looking eyes were swinging to the sleeve, back to my face, to the woods, back to my eyes again. I tried to catch them when they met mine, hold them so he could see how serious I was.
“Let me show you,” I said.
The barrel swung and jittered as I lifted my uninjured arm to the zipper and slid it down, then shimmied out of the coat. I stood in the roadway again just as I had in the woods by the oak and showed him the unbroken material of the sleeve, then still making sure he was watching closely, I undid the button on the cuff and rolled it up, showing him the smooth white skin of my arm.
“I'm still me,” I assured him. “For now.”
He grinned a little and licked his lips in that habit he had, his tongue snaking out and around, and though he still jittered, he moved the rifle off me and toward the trees while I dressed again.
Then he swung the barrel toward my head, lifted the stock to his shoulder and squinted down the sights.
“Malik!” I shouted.
It was all I had time to shout before he pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER TEN
I heard the bullet buzz past my ear and splotch into something behind me.
“Zombie,” he whispered as the echo of the shot rang out through the trees. I spun around and scooted toward the far side of the road, in case there were more Z after the first and to get even with Malik just in case he felt like shooting again.
I was getting pretty tired of people shooting at or by my head. If I lived pas this Z plague, I was going to be deaf.
A truck driver zombie sprawled in the trees not too far from where I had come out. He must have followed me, and in the pattern of zombies, where one went more were not too far behind.
Plus Malik had just let them all know where we were. And if there were any non-Z predators close by, he told them too.
“We've got to move,” I grabbed the rifle from his hand and started jogging up the road toward the guard shack.
He fell in step behind me, one hand clutched across his stomach as he ran.
I was trying to think of a plan.
A lot of the Z in the lot beyond had followed the tractor or each other through the open gate on the far side, but I counted twenty still moving inside as we approached the smaller rear gate.
The front gate had been built for the diesel trucks hauling trailers out, the roadway twice as wide, but back here the gate was built for employee access, so a single lane road had a single pane of fence on track.
It was padlocked too and I realized that the bolt cutters were on the side of the road where I dropped them next to the dead foreman Zombie.
“Damn it,” I muttered.
The Z inside had watched us approach, moving closer to the gate and fence, and their moans and actions attracted a few others so that the Z lined up along the gate across the road and pressed against the groaning metal.
“Behind us,” Malik said in a high-pitched voice.
It wasn't quite panic but it was close to it. Scared. Almost scared witless, I thought because had he kept his wits, we could have knifed the Z and kept quiet. I followed his pointing finger and saw three Z moving up the road toward us, and even as I watched one more moved out of the woods and joined them.
I could also see through the fence to the other side of the depot and Z were changing their angle from the tractor to move across the cleared open space outside the fence line toward us.
My grand plan for the tractor to play pied piper and lead the Z away from the depot had almost worked and but for an errant shot we were in the clear.
“What do we do?” Malik licked.
Z to the left of us, Z to the front of us. I felt like one of those soldiers in the charge of the light brigade, only there were no roar of cannon, no Grenadiers tossing musket balls down a narrow canyon slot to strew a line of bodies up the defile. Just Zombie.
“Shoot them,” he whined.
But that wasn't the answer.
More shots would draw more Z, more predators. If we ran up against Bandits or Marauders with just one rifle and a buck knife, we wouldn't have to worry about the Z.
And I was thinking ahead. Thinking past the depot and what would happen on the road back to the camp.
I was thinking about that rifle and three or four more just like it, and every bullet saved could be one used later to free my people.
Task at hand though.
I took a couple of deep breaths. We had time before any of the outside Z arrived. We had no bolt cutters, but the press of bodies against the fence was forcing it to bend out. The hurricane chain link was designed to delineate a line, not be an impenetrable wall. More weight against it would force the gate down.
“Skee-daddle,” I told him.
“What?”
“Skee-daddle,” I explained with a grin.
He licked his lips.
“Look man, I don't know what that means.”
“Into the guard shack.”
I hustled across the road and lifted a booted foot to plant against the doorknob. It busted in with two swift kicks, and bounced back on the hinges.
An old security guard gone Z tumbled through the half open door as momentum took it back into the dark shadows.
Malik hopped back and squealed.
I grabbed the rifle by the barrel and did my best Babe Ruth, swinging for the fences. The stock connected with his skull and smashed it like a ripe melon, scattering the contents across the wall of the shack in a gray Rorschach test.
Malik drive heaved in one long grunt.
The old Z dropped and I stood back to see if he was alone.
It was, but the inside of the gatehouse smelled like rotten Z had been trapped in there for weeks. Black unidentifiable stains marred the vinyl floor, the walls were covered in dried drips and scratches. There was a small window beside the door that let in meager light, and a window on each of the other three walls, designed for cross ventilation. The natural light created deep shadows in the one room hut, and I wasn't able to see behind the desk, but motioned Malik inside anyway.
I shut the door behind him and we hid.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The stench was almost unbearable. Fear roiled off Malik in waves, a pungent sickly miasma that filled the narrow 8 x 10 shack, competing with the smell of rotten zombie that permeated
the walls.
“Just relax,” I whispered from behind the desk for myself as much as for him. “Just stay calm.”
I studied the interior layout. There wasn't much we could use in the way of weapons, no back door, just the windows on each wall and the front door. Z shadows darkened the window panes on two sides as they passed by going to the guard shack road, and by the door. They weren't smart enough to look through, look inside. I knew this deep in my gut, but there was still the fear they might.
If the Z ever got smart, it was the end of the human race. There were just too many, too many chances for them to turn you, to catch you and eat you. Transmission by biting seems like the easiest thing to avoid. I hadn't been bitten since I was a kid, not by another human. Dog bites and nips, sure, but even my kids weren't biters. Or maybe they had been and I had just blocked that memory.
But you just don't expect to get bitten, not by another human.
Z's were predators too, and being formerly human, no on expected the bite. It's why the virus or whatever it was spread so quickly.
A paramedic leaned down to give a victim mouth to mouth and got bitten. A mother grabbed her infected child and hugged her close. A lover wiped the sweat soaked brow of another.
Empathy is what ended the human race, or at least dropped the population by five or six billion. I can't say Mother Earth wouldn't be pleased with the results and nature was already beginning to reassert her dominance over the world.
It still left a couple of billion zombies roaming around trying to infect, kill and eat the rest of us survivors.
Right now they weren't looking in the window.
They were just passing by and blocking sunlight. Malik whimpered with each shadow, whining with each faded patch of darkness that moved across the floor.
The back window.
It faced the fence, barely eight inches between the wall of the shack and the chain link. I glanced at the window, waited until it was clear and clomped across the plywood floor t the window and raised it.
Or tried to lift it.
The sash was stuck. I planted the heels of my palms against the narrow metal rim and shoved. The window squeaked as it forced all the way open. I ducked down into the darkness.