by TW Brown
There was a bookshelf, and I was guessing that not one of those books had ever had its spine cracked. It was a plethora of biographies and a vast array of the popular self-help philosophical crap about how to succeed, be a better person, and make the most out of yourself. In just my brief exposure to her, I knew she hadn’t done much on that second item.
“We have all the blankets and towels in the hall closet,” Betty called from somewhere out of sight.
I headed to that closet and opened it to find that it was indeed packed with a variety of towels, blankets, sheets, and comforters. I grabbed a stack and decided that it would be better to just start toting things out to the truck. I might’ve been a little influenced about my earlier premonition regarding monsters arriving just as I went inside.
Stepping out onto the single step landing, I looked around to discover that not one thing had changed. The boy was still hugging Chewie, and she was rewarding him with a generous if not slobbery swab of her tongue every so often. I dropped my load in the open cargo area and rushed back inside. While the situation seemed calm, I had no desire to tempt fate.
It was as I came out with my third load of towels and blankets that I was finally rewarded (such as it was) with a single zombie shambling towards my parked truck. It was coming from the direction of the neighborhood away from Holgate. And I wasn’t the only one to notice. Chewie was on her feet in the back of the pickup and looking forward in the direction of the zombie. The hackles on the back of her neck stood on end, and she had taken a position between the boy and the approaching threat.
Grabbing my axe, I started towards the creature. It had been a man in his fifties or so by the looks. He had a fringe of gray hair that looked like a wreath as dead as he was; and he somehow had managed to still be wearing his glasses. There was a nasty rip on his right shoulder that left a dark stain down the front of his hideous checker patterned button-up short-sleeve shirt. His tan khaki shorts were kept up by a tightly cinched black belt and he wore black socks with sandals. The more sarcastic part of my brain said that maybe this guy was better off dead. There was a dark stain around his mouth and all down his front which told me this guy had already gotten his teeth into somebody.
I shoved that aside and moved in to end the man’s existence once and for all. Just as I got to within a step or two, the report of a rifle made me flinch and duck for cover. The man toppled and fell face first on the street, his head cocked my direction. There was a nasty exit hole in the man’s face that had obliterated most of his nose. Somehow, his glasses had stayed mostly in place, although one lens had shattered and the other had apparently popped out. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I was fixated on that fact.
At least I was until I heard the crunch of approaching footsteps. I cursed myself for leaving my pistol on the front seat of my truck and prepared to lunge out and cleave whoever this person was that had just damn near killed me.
“Hey…whoever you are…sorry,” a timid voice called.
I peeked up over the top of the hedge that I’d dove behind for cover to see a very young girl standing in the middle of the street with a rifle almost as big as her slung over her shoulder.
“It was a bad angle and I swear I didn’t see you until it was too late,” the girl apologized.
“You coulda killed me,” I snapped, tucking my axe back in its loop and dusting myself off. Just as I did, I heard the screen door slam open behind me back at Betty’s house.
“What’s going on?” Julian was yelling.
“Hey,” I whisper yelled, “can we quiet it the fuck down before we bring every zombie in a hundred-mile radius down on our heads?”
I turned back to the girl. “And you…how old are you? Eight? Nine?”
Her expression switched to that of youthful indignance. “I’m eleven and three-quarters…almost.” That last word was added rather sheepishly.
I glanced to the corpse in the middle of the street with a near-perfect shot to the center of the back of its head, then back to this waif of a child. “Where did you learn to shoot?” Honestly that was the only thing that I could form up and push out of my mouth.
The reaction I received caught me totally by surprise. It was almost instantaneous. Tears welled up in the girl’s eyes and began streaming down her cheeks.
“What in the world is everybody doing just standing out here on the porch?” Betty’s voice cut through me and caused me to snap around.
“Can you people just shut the hell up and get the truck loaded. What part of this whole zombie apocalypse thing are you missing?” I took a few steps toward the house and forced myself to lower my own voice. “Just finish grabbing whatever you can and then we have to go. I’m pretty sure every zombie for blocks around is heading this way.”
I was almost certain I heard derisive comments regarding the gunshot being much more likely to be the cause, but I didn’t care and already turned my attention back to this pre-teen version of Annie Oakley. She had wiped at her tears, making a dark smudge across her face that only emphasized her youth.
“I hate to bring up something bad, but I am guessing that, by the way you’re reacting, your parents are gone.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word ‘dead’ to the girl. No sense hitting her in the face with what looked pretty obvious.
“Mister Wills did it.” She shot a look over her shoulder and even from just the profile of her face, I could see the eyes tighten and the lips press together in fury as she glared at the corpse. I guess I knew who Mr. Wills was without it being much of a stretch.
“I’m sorry.” Damn, what else can you say to an eleven-year-old kid who probably saw her parents eaten alive? I thought. “Look, we have a small group, but we have room for one more if you want to join us.”
The girl sniffed, and then she took a step back. I was caught off guard when the rifle slid from her shoulder and was in her hands.
“You’re a stranger.” That one statement had all the suspicion a person might’ve expected a day or two ago if they’d approached a strange child and invited them to just jump in their vehicle with them and take off. The problem was, this was suddenly a very different time. New rules were going to be written on the fly. People would have to adapt.
“Yes, I am. And so are all the people with me, but if both of your parents are…” I didn’t know how to finish that statement.
“My mom is in the bathroom. She’s just sick. As soon as the ambulance comes, they will take her to the hospital and she will be all better. My dad…” And that was where she burst into tears again.
Suddenly, she looked every bit the eleven-year-old girl. Rifle slung in her arms or not, this was still just a scared child.
“Listen, umm, I don’t know your name…” I left it open and waited to see if she would answer.
If anything, she now appeared even more dubious and suspicious of my motives. How could I blame her? The news was a continuous parade of terrible things happening to youngsters. The “Don’t talk to strangers” mantra was preached heavily and with good reason.
“Okay, but I am going to say something that you are not going to like or want to hear.” I took a step back to give her a little more space when I noticed her hands grip her rifle just a bit tighter. “Your mom is more than sick.” I made it a point to look down at the corpse on the street. “She probably has the infection Mister Wills had, and there is nothing that will make her better. Also, the ambulances aren’t coming anymore.”
I thought back to my own experience at the hospital. If what I saw there was happening elsewhere, and I had no reason to think that it wasn’t, then hospitals are the last place a person would want to be.
As I said those words, I saw the girl’s face crumple. Her tears came in a steady stream now, and her body began to shake with sobs. I didn’t know what to say. My mouth opened and shut a few times, but no sound came out.
I felt a hand on my shoulder as somebody eased me aside. The last person in the world that I expected to see was now kneelin
g before this shattered little girl.
“Hi there, my name is Betty Simms. You’re Trina and Ray’s little girl Selina DuBois, aren’t you?” It wasn’t really a question, but the girl nodded. “And you know me, I’m Missus Simms, I teach at the high school. Had both your mama and your daddy in my classes when they were younger. Now, I know this is really scary, but I think it would be best for you if you came with us. There is a bad sickness that is making people do strange things.”
“Mister Wills ate my daddy and bit Mama really bad,” Selina said through hitched sobs. “Daddy tried to make him go away, but he wouldn’t and he pulled Daddy down the stairs. He hit his head and just laid there while Mister Wills ripped him open. That was when Mama sent me to my room, but I heard the screams. Finally, my mama made him go away, but he stayed at the door and we went upstairs where Mama said she had to go into the bathroom and that I wasn’t to let her out no matter what.”
Betty stood and extended a hand to the little girl. Selina sniffed, and then very slowly took the offered hand of Betty Simms and the pair started for the house. I still stood by my assessment of the woman and her relatively unpleasant demeanor, but I amended it to apparently pertain to adults and dogs.
I rushed inside and began to help carry out more supplies from the woman’s home. Twenty minutes later, we had pretty much most of what anybody deemed useful loaded into the back of the pickup. When I went to climb in, I noticed that Chewie had curled up across the lap of the boy who had not moved or said a word during the entire process. I left her there in back which freed up enough room in the cab for Selina to squeeze in between Julian and Betty.
“Now where?” I muttered as I turned the key.
7
The Journey to Safety Begins
“This is stupid!” Julian hissed as I jerked the wheel of the truck and turned left.
“I told you all that going to this Walmart was a bad idea,” I said between clenched teeth as I avoided the pair of undead that lurched out in front of us as I turned into the huge, mostly vacant parking lot.
The front of the store had been devastated by a tow truck that had smashed through the entrance. I could see zombies roaming in and out of where the large bank of doors used to exist.
“So where do you suggest we go?” Betty said in a voice that was perhaps the calmest of us all. Something about having this child to watch over had practically transformed her into an entirely different person.
I thought it over. I knew that we needed to get out of the city. There was simply too much chaos for us to have any chance at survival. We needed to be out in the boondocks. We needed to be someplace where we were remote enough to avoid the worst of this, but still close enough to the populated areas to be able to scavenge for supplies if this did indeed turn out to be the actual zombie apocalypse.
An explosion nearby made me jump. I looked that direction and saw a plume of black, oily smoke rising skyward. Between the undead, the possibility that some of the living may not be anything we would want to encounter, and then all the fires, we needed to find a location to hunker down for a while.
An idea came to me. It was probably not the best choice, but it would at least allow us to catch our breath. All I had to do was hope everybody else would see the logic.
“Milo McIver Park,” I said.
There was a moment of silence when I thought everybody would start laughing me out of the cab. My eyes were fixed on the zombie laden parking lot as I drove for the exit, but I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I glanced over to see both Julian and Betty nodding.
“That is not a bad idea,” Julian murmured.
The only difficulty now would be getting there alive. I pulled out of the parking lot of the Walmart and made my way to Interstate 205. Merging onto the freeway, I don’t know what I expected. Nothing could prepare me for this new look into Hell.
“Oh, my God,” Betty breathed. I noticed that she sort of pulled Selina in close and acted as a shield to try and prevent the young girl from seeing what was out there.
The first cars we passed were a mangled mess of what had been a nine-car collision. It looked like one of the vehicles had decided to go the opposite direction as everybody else. The mini-van facing the wrong way was the worst part. The side door had been ripped off in the accident and there were two children’s car seats in the back that were an absolute nightmare. The dark stains were bad enough, but one of them still held most of a limbless, headless torso.
I was regretting our decision to take this more direct route almost immediately. We were just passing over what was known as the Springwater Corridor when I heard a loud staccato burst of what I instantly recognized as gunfire. A second later, the truck lurched and shimmied as at least one tire on the driver’s side exploded.
“Hang on!” I called out as I slowed us in the middle of an overpass.
There was a series of shouts and screams as everybody reacted to the truck’s erratic movements. As we came to a stop, I could feel the uneven wobble and lurch from the flat or flats.
Looking out the windshield, I could see them coming. Several undead had turned our direction, most likely drawn by the sound of the metal rims grinding on the asphalt. Looking in the rearview mirror, I could see that we’d sort of attracted a long trail of zombies a la Pied Piper style.
“Everybody out!” I barked.
Opening my door and stepping outside, I could now hear the assorted moans of the undead. But there was something else, and if I’d not heard it come from the mouth of my beloved Stephanie, I might’ve been draw to investigate.
“Is that a baby crying?” Julian gasped, looking in all directions as he sought the source of that horrible sound.
“You would think so…but you would be fatally wrong,” I said as I clipped the leash onto Chewie and then pulled out my Ruger and shoved it in the waist of my pants. Last but not least, I slung my bag over my shoulder with my picture of Stephanie inside.
“I don’t understand.” Julian was edging close to the railing of the overpass, his head cocked as that sound drifted to us again.
“Me either,” I admitted. “But some of the zombies make that sound.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Betty hissed, covering Selina’s ears like that would do any good considering the volume that she used when she spoke.
“Maybe, but I saw it for myself at the hospital.”
“Really?” The doubt dripped thickly from that single word as Betty’s eyebrows rose in emphasis of her opinion on this matter.
I did not have time for this crap. Stepping towards her, I leveled what I hoped came across as a very stern gaze. “It is the exact same sound that came out of Stephanie’s mouth when her eyes opened and she reanimated as one of them.” That last word was accompanied by a few flecks of spittle as I had to strain to force the words to come out of my mouth.
Betty’s face paled some, and I saw understanding dawn in her eyes. “I’m…I’m sorry, Evan. I just don’t know what to do, and I’m so terribly afraid.” She paused and dropped her gaze. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m really not such a terrible person.”
“Fine,” I said, cutting her off before she could launch into whatever she felt she needed to get off her chest. Here and now was not the time or place. “We need to get moving.”
“Where?” was Julian’s plaintive moan as he looked around and realized that we were discovered.
I was about to answer when another burst of gunfire sounded. I heard the rounds smashing into the side of the truck, puncturing the metal and creating what was almost like a metallic echo of the gunshots. Instinctively, I dove for the ground. Chewie’s instincts were different and she tried to bolt, but thankfully I had a good grip on her leash. I dragged me forward a bit until I could yank her back and tug her down with me.
Looking around, I saw that Betty had the sense to do the same thing I had. She’d also kept presence of mind to pull Selina down with her. Carl peered at me from the rear of the truck where he
was pressing up against the rear wheel…or what was left of it. Both front and back tires on the driver’s side were gone and only the rims with fragments of rubber remained. The boy we’d rescued was with him and had his hands over his head as if that might magically stop a bullet.
The only person still on his feet was Julian. He was just standing there, his gaze looking in the direction that I was pretty sure the bullets had come from.
“Julian, get the fuck down!” I hissed.
He looked down at me with a confused expression; then his hands came up to his chest and I saw the dark bloom spreading across his shirt. He crumpled to his knees and his chin came to rest on his chest as he let out one long, rattling sigh. I knew instantly that he was dead.
“We need to get out of here,” I whispered.
“Ya think?” Carl sniped sarcastically.
“What about all the stuff we have in the truck?” Betty’s voice sounded dangerously close to tears.
“We’re screwed in that department,” I said bluntly.
Looking around, I could see legs as I scanned underneath the numerous vehicles stranded—likely for eternity—along this stretch of the interstate. There were too many to count as it seemed like a veritable forest was shambling our direction from all sides. No matter which direction we went, we were going to have to fight our way out.
Scanning my companions, I realized that only Carl and I had any sort of weapon. Not that I felt Betty would be any help, and the two kids even less, but we were not getting out of this without killing a bunch of zombies.
My brain scoffed at the idea of killing something that was already dead, but I quelled that voice and gave the current situation my full attention. The idea wasn’t perfect, but there was no time for planning.