by A. J. Sikes
It was like some kind of monster movie. His grandma’s eyes were yellow slits now.
Jed reared back as she let out a loud hiss. He’d thought she was just making a face at first, but now he could see what happened to her mouth. It was like a suction cup, all round and with a bunch of sharp ass teeth like little pins inside.
Jed watched, with his throat closing up, as his grandma clamped onto her own arm and chewed out a chunk of flesh. Lifting the Glock, Jed said, “I’m sorry, Grandma. Sorry—” He squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. His grandma twitched her head at him and shrieked so loud he almost had to drop the gun so he could cover his ears.
His grandma came at him, jumped forward and landed between him and the glass door. Jed racked the slide and fired. His shots went wide, but he corrected his aim, putting rounds into his grandma’s chest and face. She went down in a heap. Her brains blew out the back of her head. Jed heaved again, coughing up whatever was left in his stomach as he staggered past her body. He kept the Glock on her as he stepped out the balcony door. He looked up the ladder and thought about going higher, safer. Then he remembered the one thing his squad leader said that felt helpful.
“You don’t go up to get safe. Going up leaves you only one way out. And that’s down.”
Jed went down the fire escape and ran. He made it to the end of the alley before he heard more screams behind him, and some other sounds. Shrieking, like some wild animal shit, and then the heavy chop-chop-chop of a Ma deuce from down at the end of the alley. The unmistakable sound of boots on pavement echoed down the alley then, and for the first time in a long time, Jed smiled at the thought of being around the military again.
Four army dudes came running down the alley, all with M4s and covered in battle rattle. One of them called up to. “You okay up there? Have you contacted any infected?”
Jed looked at himself all over, checked his pants and sleeves. He was clean.
“I’m good. No blood, man. I’mma come down. Okay?”
“Okay, but hands where I can see ‘em. Gotta know you’re friendly.”
Jed switched the Glock to his other hand so he could hold it by the slide and with his fingers away from the trigger. He held the gun over his head and slowly went down the ladder, one foot down, then the other. A team of soldiers waited at the bottom, eyes out on the alleyway and all the balconies above them.
Shit, if Grandma was infected . . .
“We gotta move, Sarge,” one of the soldiers said.
Jed looked up, following the soldier’s line of sight. Three of the monsters crawled down the side of the building, lips all puckered and sucking together like leeches out for blood. Their arms and legs bent at weird angles and their joints popped and clicked.
“Go men. Go!” the sergeant yelled. He fired off a burst at the lowest of the monsters and it came down, falling like a dead bat to land in a messy heap. Its flailing arms banged off a balcony railing on the way down.
The other soldiers bailed with their sergeant on their heels.
Jed thought about trying to cap one of the monsters on the wall, but two more emerged from a window on the top floor. They jumped from the window and landed on the building across the alley. Now four of them, with their greasy looking white flesh and bloody yellow eyes, crawled down at him, and from both sides.
“C’mon!” the sergeant yelled at Jed from the end of the alley.
Finally Jed’s feet got the message his brain was trying to send, and he ran like hell after the soldiers. They’d made it to a Humvee at the end of the alley and were piling inside. The top gunner swiveled his Ma deuce and opened up on the creatures tearing down the walls after Jed. Bits of brick peppered down on Jed’s head as he ran, fearing any second that one of the shrieking horrors behind him would land on him and clamp down on his neck.
Upper East Side, Manhattan
Meg lifted her axe from the counter edge and sprang forward, putting a foot on the desk and climbing over the counter. She swung the axe up and brought it down just as the monster was thrusting its face through the shattered window.
The axe split the creature’s skull and splattered gore onto the floor at Meg’s feet. Meg took a stance away from the bloody mess on the floor and carefully removed her axe so she wouldn’t spatter any blood on herself. She had to be ready for the man to try and break in. But she only heard the screams of people running away outside. The corpse of the one she’d killed hung half in the window, with clawed hands reaching toward the floor as if to scoop up the brains and blood.
She could hear Rex almost whimpering behind her. “Where is it? The other one. Where is it?” he said.
“Not here, genius,” Meg said, finally fed up with the bigger man’s candy-assing. “Eric! Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, coming up behind Rex. He had a nozzle under one arm and the hose held around his waist with the other hand. “Let’s put up a barrier or something. We’ll have to hold them off from the app floor.
“What if people come in and need help?” Rex asked.
Meg curled her lip up and looked at him like he was an idiot. “If they need help, we have to make sure they’re not infected first.”
“What if they are?”
“If they are, we can’t help them.”
“She’s right,” Eric said, still eyeing the body hanging through the window. “If anybody comes around with blood on them, they’re already lost. We’re probably on our own.”
They retreated into the app floor and shoved a folding table and some trash barrels into the doorway. It wouldn’t hold anything bigger than a squirrel, and Meg knew it. But it was all they could do for now. The engine and truck were gone, making the floor just one big open space with gear and now cots piled up around the edges.
Eric held the hose on the door while Rex and Meg suited up in their full turnout gear, including face shields. Once she had her gloves on, Meg held the hose so Eric could get suited up. When he was ready, she passed the hose back and retrieved her axe, finding comfort in the familiar weight of the . . . weapon.
“Eric, keep the hose aimed at the door. Rex, let’s get some better barricades set up. We can use the dirty lockers for starters.
Without waiting for a reply, Meg marched toward the lockers at the back of the floor. They weren’t secured to the wall, so they could be shoved into place to block the open doorway. They would only cover the bottom two thirds of the opening, but it would create a funnel for the things to get through, and that might give them a chance at survival until help arrived.
Meg hesitated before she set her axe down. She threw a look over her shoulder at the heavy shutters that shielded them from whatever was happening outside.
They were safe. Only for now, maybe, but still. They were safe.
Rex hadn’t moved. Eric aimed the hose at the doorway to the chief’s office.
“Rex,” Meg said. “Let’s go.”
The big man shuffled toward her, looking back over his shoulder every few steps.
“They’re not inside, Rex. And if they get inside, Eric has the hose. He’ll keep them from getting to us while we move this.” Meg slapped a hand against the lockers and the metallic clank echoed. Rex jumped. Then he seemed to shake off whatever was eating at him and bent to help push the bank of lockers across the floor.
The metal case squeaked, creaked, and groaned as they shoved it together. Meg pushed from the top and Rex squated down to use the power in his thick legs, shoving from the base of the lockers. A loud shriek startled them and they halted their progress, both of them looking to Eric to see if he’d heard it.
He had. His face was slack when he said, “That was you guys. The locker scraped on the floor.”
Meg and Rex leaned back to push the locker again. But Meg screamed a warning instead.
The man from before was back, and he’d fully changed. He was no longer a man, just a monster hanging upside down from the ceiling in the chief’s office. Its ghastly white face stuck through the doorway. The
creature’s bloody yellowed eyes were fixed on Meg and Rex. Then it flicked its predatory gaze to Eric and opened its sucker mouth. The thing let out a shriek that nearly split Meg’s eardrums.
Eric aimed the hose up and opened the valve, releasing a torrent straight into the thing’s sucker mouth. The creature shrieked and flew backwards from the spray, landing out of sight in the entry office. Eric kept up the spray and Meg thought she heard the sound of the monster scrabbling on the floor or climbing the walls.
“The axe, Meg! Help!” Eric shouted over the rush of water.
Meg reeled away from the lockers, leaving Rex to the task on his own. It was something simple, something he could be good at and that would keep him out of her way. She snapped up her axe from where they’d started pushing the locker, and cursed herself for ever leaving it behind to begin with. In a second, Meg was past Rex and standing beside Eric, holding her axe at the ready.
The monster was pinned to the far wall of the chief’s office, behind the secretary’s desk. The jet of water crushed into its chest. Its arms flailed and its head whipped side to side, with a thick tongue snaking out of its sucker mouth. Shrieks echoed around the app floor like something out of a carnival horror show.
Meg stepped to the side, avoiding the flow of water, and brought her axe up over her head. She kicked the trash barrels aside at the doorway and waited for them to roll clear before she shoved the folding table with her foot. It slid a foot or so, but got hung up on the door jamb. Rex appeared on the other side and yanked it out of the way. When the path was clear, Meg slipped around the jet of water and into the chief’s office. She stepped forward and sliced down in a single motion, burying the blade in the monster’s skull just as she’d done with the first one.
Eric kept the hose on it until its arms stopped clawing at the air and it drooped against the wall. Meg backed away as Eric turned the flow off. The wet slop slop of Meg’s boots on the floor almost mimicked the sound of the creatures as they smacked their puffy lips together.
“We’d better see if the other people are still outside,” Eric said, keeping the hose up and at the ready.
Meg agreed and, with her axe in one hand, went to the shutter doors. She climbed up on one door and looked through the window. Outside, the street seemed quiet and deserted, about as unusual and haunting a sight as Meg had ever seen.
“I never thought I’d see what New York looks like without all the people in it.”
Then Meg spotted them, the crowd from before. They shuffled out of their hiding places in alleys and doorways, like a crew of homeless people coming for the dinner bell.
Rex was at the shutters. He only had to stand on tip toe to see out the window.
“We should help—”
“We should wait to see if any of them are infected first,” Meg said.
A siren whined from the up the street and Meg felt her mood lift instantly. “The engine’s back!”
Eric kept the hose up, but he backed away, across the floor. Meg stepped down and moved to open the shutters. Rex put a hand up and shouted for her to stop.
“I don’t think it’s them,” he said. His voice shook as he continued, “It’s not— It’s not them.”
Meg heard a screech of metal on metal, and the heavy thunk of a vehicle colliding with another, and then another thud. She lifted herself up to look through the window, fearing what she would see. The engine had stopped just before making the turn that would aim its rear at the station so they could back in. They’d swiped two cars parked on the street and had smashed head on into another as they rounded the corner.
“What’re they doing?” Meg wondered aloud. The cab of the engine shook. Blood sprayed out the side window, and then more of it came in a gout. Rex whimpered beside her as Meg watched in horror while their friends were killed. It was over in less than a minute, and Meg, Eric, and Rex stayed silent for longer than that, just staring into the emptiness around them. Meg wanted to find a way out, some way to leave the city, to go somewhere safe. If she’d listened to Tim . . .
We’d both be dead. We couldn’t have escaped.
Meg looked out the shutter windows again. She tried to move her attention away from the remains of their crew, now emerging from the truck and tumbling to the pavement, kicking and clawing at the air. Then the first of them rose as an infected creature. Meg didn’t want to look, but she had to watch.
She could see their bodies changing as they moved. She recognized faces in the instant before eyes yellowed and blood ran in rivulets down pale white cheeks. Before mouths popped open in a horrific O with rows of sharp needles where teeth had once been.
Meg’s friends died out there on the street, only to be reborn as monsters. The creatures crawled along the street with joints audibly cracking as they moved, like freakish spiders—
“The people!” Eric shouted from behind her. Meg snapped her gaze to the small crowd that had been hiding in the street outside. They had all grouped together and shuffled backwards, away from the transforming firefighters. Rex was still useless, watching it all unfold through the window and doing nothing to stop it.
Without a second thought, Meg rushed for the dirty lockers they’d been shoving along the floor. She snatched a turnout jacket and sped back to the chief’s office, kicking the trash barrels clear out of the way this time. At the front door, she yelled for the people to come her way. She put her axe against the wall and used the jacket to cover the dead thing hanging through the window. With the jacket as a protective cover, Meg grabbed the body and heaved it over backwards.
An older black woman outside ran up and dragged the corpse off to the side.
“Don’t get any blood on you!” Meg shouted, reaching for her axe in the same motion. The woman had a look on her face that said she was ready for whatever was coming. She held up her hands to show she was wearing yellow latex gloves.
“It ain’t much, but it helps.”
Meg gave her a look of relief as together they opened the door fully. The woman waved her gloved hands to usher everyone into the house. The group was mostly women with a few children, but a couple of men were at the back.
Meg hefted her axe as she went outside with the survivors, holding the door open and waving the people forward. They were all colors and ages and shapes. People from everywhere in the city, it seemed. She looked closely and tried to make eye contact with each of them as they came in. Some of them smiled, and Meg did her best to smile back. But she wasn’t looking at them as people yet.
They all look clean. For now.
A shriek tore Meg’s attention from the group for a moment, and she watched as a former friend of hers, now a monster, leaped from atop a car to tackle a man at the back of the line. With a shout, Meg ran forward, past the line of survivors making their way into the house. She lifted her axe as she ran and swung with all her strength, burying the axe head in the monster’s back just as it lowered its mouth to feed on the man it had brought down.
Elmhurst, Queens
The sun was climbing higher by the time Jed and the soldiers connected up with the military’s main element at Newtown High over in Elmhurst. Jed remembered lying in the middle of the track when him and Chips were stoned late at night, and sometimes running laps on it during the day when they did show up for gym class. Now the track and ball fields were a motor pool and command point. They’d come in with Humvees and some old open-bed trucks, and even a Bradley. Tents were going up in between lines of vehicles, and patrols of twos and threes walked the fence line with their weapons up and at the ready.
“Fuck me,” Jed said.
“Yeah, man,” said one of the soldiers next to him. “Shit’s on with a vengeance.”
“All this for some zombies?”
The soldier looked at Jed like he was crazy. “They ain’t zombies, brother. I don’t know who told you that, but— Believe it. Fuckin’ monsters out there. Zombies would be easy as the BRM range, all slow and shit. You’d hit ‘em at two hundred meters, no problem
. These fuckers, man you got lucky back there. I seen just two of them tear into a whole squad. They took out the SAW gunner first, like they knew he was the big threat. I swear. They ain’t zombies. Zombies don’t think or plan their attack.”
Jed’s eyes went wide at that and he kept quiet for the rest of the ride. Finally, they pulled up beside an idling Humvee and the sergeant by the tailgate told everyone to dismount. The soldiers hopped off and moved out to the ball fields where a platoon was lining up in formation. Jed jumped down with the soldier who’d talked to him. The guy gave him a nod and jogged off to join the formation. Jed figured he should follow, but another NCO, some thin Asian dude, came around the truck and put a hand on Jed’s arm, holding him back.
“You got a name there, Hardcore?”
“Jed. I mean— Welch, Sergeant. My name’s Welch. Private Welch, USMC.”
The guy blinked once, and stared at Jed like he’d spoken a foreign language. He didn’t believe him. Jed could tell. But it was the only play he had right now.
“Marines are out in the field mopping up. What’s with the civvie gear and the gat stuffed in your pants?”
The sergeant was at least an E-6. Jed didn’t know Army rank that well, but he knew authority when he heard it, no matter how many stripes it had on.
“I’m home from Iraq, Sergeant. Just got back. I was hit—”
“Uh-huh. How about you hand over the gat and we talk to the First Sergeant about connecting you with your actual.”
Jed had to resist the urge to pull the Glock on the man. He’d be taken out in two seconds if he tried anything. But he wasn’t going to give up his gat. Not that easy.