by Anthology
“Ssssh.” Dan, walking just ahead of us, waved back with one hand. My heart started pumping against my ribcage until I thought it would spring free and skitter across the floor. I heard why Dan shushed us then, I could smell the thing, too––a rotten, fishy stench mixed with mud.
Davin pushed forward, raising his gun. “Dan, give me a little,” he whispered, and Dan obliged, poking his flashlight around the corner.”
Use a baton,” I whispered, fearing gun’s report and its siren song to other zombies. I reached down to my side and fingered the black rod hanging on my belt.
Davin glanced back at me and uttered a low, “Naw.”
Then I saw it, a little thing, bobbing its matted blonde head up and down as it munched on something—most likely a rat or stray cat. Davin clicked his tongue to get its attention, and the thing rotated to face us. It was a girl, six or seven maybe, although she could’ve been six or seven for years now. The undead didn’t age like us. Her little mouth, blotted with blood, opened and a little moaning sound trickled out. I closed my eyes for a moment and saw my sister’s face.
Davin raised the gun, butted the stock against his shoulder, and said, “bye, bye sissy.” The building shook with his report, frozen for an instant in a muzzle flash, and settled under Dan’s dim yellow beam. Its body slumped over on the ground, headless.
“Nice shootin’, Tex.” Dan thumped Davin on the back. Davin nodded, fished in his pocket for a folding knife, and carved a notch in the stock. I staggered to bench and held my head.
“You alright, ya pansy?” Dan kicked my boots.
“Yeah. Fine. Hand me the jar, okay?” After Dan and I swallowed a few more swigs, he led us out back, to the barrels. In my mind’s eye, every shadow grew arms and reached for us. All the warnings about the guns materialized in my imagination.
“This is what I wanted to show you boys.” He leaned his shotgun against the grey boards of an old fence, a little shelter that hid two black-steel drums. “My brother told me about this shit. Says they used to cook food in it, but even the rot-bags won’t touch it.” His hands worked one of the lids free, and it dropped to the ground with a dull THUNK. The barrel looked to be half full of thick oil, black as midnight blood. The smell—heavy and sweet—knocked me back.
“Can you believe people used to eat this?”
~
The world started spinning while we humped over to the church. Not the whole world, just my piece of it—my brains sloshing around inside my skull, knocking against my ears. I thought maybe it was the booze; loads of stories circulated about bad home-brew. Dan seemed fine, striding ahead like usual, and Davin hadn’t touched the drink.
“Gawd, you’re a pansy.” Dan called after I stumbled and called for a break. I didn’t wallow on his insult, but the shadows started poking their fingers at me. I kept seeing that little girl’s face, smeared and dead, hissing at us as Davin sprayed her brain matter across the dusty tile. We slipped from the relative safety of the compound, only to find our freedom rotten and decayed.
I staggered to my feet after a few minutes. We made the church while the moon was still high, floating overhead like a glowing bobber in a still, blue-black pond. I huffed and puffed up the hill a little more than I’d like to admit. My stomach and head still danced, but I knew once inside we’d loiter a bit and I could lounge, letting my guts come to a rest. Davin spotted something ahead and sprinted out in front of Dan.
“Mother fuckers,” he hollered.
“What?” Dan jogged to his side. I stumbled behind, nearly slipping to the ground on a patch of fresh mud.
“They chained the god-damn door.” A heavy chain was wrapped in repeated loops around the handles, and Davin tapped it with the stock of his gun. “Somebody cries about a few ‘bags and they lock down the fucking church.” He was a small guy, but swelled when angry, his skin burning through a few shades of red. The compound militia had done it; they must have locked up the place.
Davin and Dan took a few steps back. Davin raised his gun like he was going to take a shot at the chain, but lowered the barrel a moment later. This was a thick, coiled bit of steel; a blast from his shotgun wouldn’t scratch it, and we weren’t prepared with anything that could get at the lock. If it was anything but the church, we’d quickly smash up the windows and hop in. All the stories were about the beauty of those windows, and I doubt any of us wanted to smash those stories.
“Give me the jar,” he called to Dan.
I stood apart from the other two and glanced into the night behind us, half expecting a few lumbering undead to stumble from the paper-thin shadows. The waiting, the not knowing, grabbed and twisted at my stomach. I turned back to the church, admiring the long windows decorated with faint images. Grandpa called them stained glass. Almost every other hunk of glass in Old Town had been shattered many times over by guys like us, but something in the artistry of those high panes kept them from harm. I thought how odd and almost blank they looked from the outside, when inside they supposedly burned color across everything.
I looked around at Davin as he tossed an empty jar to the ground, having polished off the last bit. He reached down, palmed a hunk of rock, and stared at the building. “Nobody tells me what to do,” he muttered, taking a few steps closer to the big windows.
The next moment leaked into my eyes slowly, like the whole planet groped through molasses. Davin’s arm sprang forward like a little catapult; the rock tumbled end over through the air, and struck a window dead on. The glass cried out, split, and crumbled in a tinkling heap. It had been the picture of a lady in blue with a little kid on her lap—Mary and Jesus, I think. The frame held, but most of the glass fell, just leaving this odd grey outline of a woman suspended across the opening.
Davin went pale; I think he was struck by how easy the whole thing crumbled. The low buzz of night bugs and bullfrogs slowly swelled to fill the silence. I scanned the slope behind us. Nothing.
“Damn, Davin. Nice toss. Well, might as well head back. Fun’s over, I suppose.” His voice fell flat, like he couldn’t really disguise his disappointment. We’d all expected something else out there, maybe legions of undead that would make us happy we stuffed our pockets with shells. Dan trudged downhill, back toward the road leading to the gate. I followed, still queasy and a little unsteady. Davin’s boots crunched against the gravel behind me, and then stopped. I turned and looked at him, this flat emptiness across his face.
“No.”
“No?” My palms started to sweat. The little guy had a temper. I remember one time he knocked Dan flat, bloodied his nose, just because Dan gave him shit about being so short. I’d seen Davin drop a handful of other guys the same way.
He looked at the moon for a moment, and I caught the shine shimmer off the whites around his eyes. “No, I’m not done yet. The whole world has gone to hell.” He flashed around, hurried up the hill to the side of the building, and tumbled inside the rectangular entrance left by the broken window.
I cupped one hand against my mouth and called down the hill. “Dan!” He stopped about thirty yards away, turned, and moved toward me.
“What? Where the hell is Davin?”
I pointed to the church.
“That little bastard,” Dan said, and strode uphill.
Shotgun blasts rocked from inside the church. Dan passed me and paused at the side of the building. All I had was the moonlight, but some of the glass glistened a bit, wet with what I confused for oil or some of that grease in the old barrel. Dan and I kicked in the rest of the window, hopped inside, and found our buddy reloading his shotgun, his face covered in a mix of sweat and blood.
“Fucking bullshit, all of it.” He raised the shotgun again, pointing at the large windows opposite us. Five more shots in rapid succession rocked the inside of the chapel, shattered the windows, and brought years of dust and debris raining from above. Sheets of bright glass cascaded to the floor.
Dan placed his hand on Davin’s shoulder. “C’mon, man. Let’s get out of
here.” I backed away, ready to flee, afraid of being trapped inside. Surely the noise would bring the dead. My ears still rang with the recent display of firepower, but my eyes jerked to a noise—a snarling, moaning wail from outside the window. I glanced outside and saw a small group of meat bags shambling towards us. Five of them—fifty yards away.
“Guys…”
Davin shrugged away from Dan and rushed to the window. “It’s about time,” he muttered. He knocked out the remnants of the window with the butt of his gun and sprang outside. “Bring it, you bastards,” he hollered, charging down the slope. The dead responded, lurching toward him, moths to a fire. He hadn’t reloaded his shotgun, but hurried toward the ghouls with it raised like a club.
Dan pushed me aside and started out of the window. As I followed, my pounding heart choked the breath from my chest.
Shadows danced in front of us. Davin howled—not pain, but pleasure. He screamed like a berserker, a mad warrior in his final fight. The stock of his gun smashed through a few skulls; one head came completely off. Dan raised his gun, trying for a clear shot, but cursed under his breath. It was over before we were close enough to help.
Davin knelt, panting, in the midst of five ruined bodies. He managed to bludgeon each into submission, a pile of grey flesh like rotten logs. His clothing, arms, and face were caked with zombie sludge, blood, mud—all except two streaks trailing from his eyes down either cheek.
“That… was… fun,” he breathed. His eyes met mine, sparkling in the moonlight. He held up his left arm, leaning on the shotgun like a crutch with his right. A red gash cut across the forearm where one of the things bit into his skin. “That last little bastard got me…” I looked at Dan. His face flushed white. “No…”
“You gotta do it, fellas. I’m toast.” Davin shook his head. “What a way to go, huh?” He grinned, white teeth flashing from a mask of blood and offal.
“No.” Dan dropped his gun. “I can’t.”
Davin looked at me. My hands trembled around the gun. I pushed the stock into my shoulder. The trigger was cold against my finger.
“Do it.” Davin’s body toppled backward with the thunder.
I looked away as I pulled the trigger, ashamed to fear the blood and worried more rot-bags smelled the fresh kill, or heard the shot and would swarm the place.
Dan didn’t move for a few minutes; he just hunched on grass and stared at Davin’s body. The moonlight filtered through a few drifting clouds, casting a somber pall of blue over the scene while the wind whispered across the jagged tops of nearby trees. After a minute I heard this sob, starting low like a moan. I clutched my shotgun with white knuckles and turned to Dan. He was crying.
“Stupid bastard. Stupid, fucking bastard.” He drew one foot back as if to kick Davin’s body but stopped, rubbing a sleeve across his face. “We gotta get him outta here,” he said, almost choking on the words.
I looked back at the corpse. His face was ruined, but in my mind’s eye I saw Davin as he was alive. I saw his cockeyed smile and confident flicker in his eye. I knew what would happen if we carried him back to the compound.
“We can’t take him back.”
“What?”
I thought of Mom; the last time I saw her they doused her with fuel, dropped their torches, and her skin cracked and blackened, sending an angry plume of black snaking into the sky. Maybe the booze did it, worked on my stomach and my brain, but I knew we couldn’t bury him out here—the zombies would make a meal of his remains before the day was out. We couldn’t take him back with us either. “I’m not letting those paranoid bastards make a little bonfire of his body. He didn’t want that.”
“Are you nuts?” Dan slumped into a pew. “Those rot-bags will chew him up if we don’t.” Silence filled the little church before he spoke again. “What the hell do you want to do, stuff him in one of those damn grease barrels?”
I reached for Davin’s gun. The stock was battered now, blotted with dried blood and mud, but I could make out the groove Davin had carved with his knife. I counted thirteen older marks from his father and grandfather. Five more tallies for the dead at our feet would make nineteen. That gun had been his grandfather’s, passed down for generations.
“No, we send him out right.”
~
Dan helped me drag a few pews into a pile, and then I turned over a little table at the center of our kindling. Dan was stronger than me, so he hoisted Davin’s body over his shoulders, lugged him to the front of the church, and laid him out on the table. I pried open our remaining jar of booze and doused his body with it. It tasted like shit, so I knew it was strong enough to burn well. Poking my hand in my jeans, I fished around for the lighter, Dad’s old thing with the initials engraved on the side.
I snapped the lighter open against my leg. With a quick flick of my thumb a small flame lurched toward the dark ceiling of the church, and I touched the fire to the edge of the table, watching it explode as a magnificent pyre fit for our friend. We stood outside the building for a while, chased back by the heat. I wanted to wait until every beam in the church blackened, devoured by the orange fire, and collapsed on itself. Dan and I were silent. The world was silent. As the fire melted into an ash pile we turned and stumbled down the hill. On our way back to the wall I glanced off into the sunrise. We spotted a zombie, a lanky thing stumbling away from us down a quiet street—he hadn’t come with the others, and how many more shambled about in the darkness I would never know. It faced the other way and didn’t see us. Dan raised his gun but hesitated. “Aw hell,” he muttered as he dropped the gun.
Behind the zombie, the eastern sky started to balloon with pinks and oranges, and I took it in, trying to memorize the look of the morning sun cresting a hill. You couldn’t see a sunrise like that in the compound. I realized that the rest of my life would be spent behind the wall, and understood why Davin had charged headlong into the arms of the dead. At that moment, I feared the stifling closeness inside more than the few pathetic, undead bastards that littered fly-over country.
The Beach
TIM LEBBON
“Sunday,” Ray said.
I nodded. “Sunday. Day of rest.” From behind us, the regular crack of rifles.
He sighed. “I’m dead beat. Stiff as a bugger. Do you think there’s any hope?”
Without looking at him, I uttered something between a giggle and a sob. I’d been feeling pretty weird lately. “There’s always hope. So long as we have bullets, there’s always hope.” I drew a shape in the dew-speckled grass, but did not know what it was meant to be.
“Cliché King strikes again.”
We faced the house because it implied normality, a façade from the past. It stood alone on the plain, a supposed retreat from all that was happening. We had come here because we thought it would be safe. We thought nobody else would know about it. Our complacency had marked us out.
Behind us, another cascade of rifle shots. Ammunition was running low. The snipers were using their rounds sparingly, trying to line up two or more to make the most of the shot. Each miss was another two steps closer to the end; each hit was merely one.
“I never thought it would end like this,” Ray said. “When we came here, I mean. I thought it would be safe. We can see for miles around. I thought it’d be safe.” He often used the word safe, as if repetition could imbue it with power over unrelenting reality.
I glanced at my watch, but did not know the time. The smashed face recorded forever the instant of my fleeing the city, where I had abandoned Gemma to her fate. She had been dead already, but I could have done so much more for her. I hated myself for that. I hoped she did not hate me too.
Sometimes I thought I saw her on the distant hillside, shuffling towards the house with interminable, relentless steps. I prayed every night that it would not be my shift when she arrived.
“Our shift,” I said. Ray and I stood, turned from the house––the mental placebo for our sickness––and faced the real world.
I too
k a rifle from Dawn. I smiled encouragingly, but she had been at the barricade for two hours, and her face was molded grim.
The gun was still hot. The rack of magazines was sadly depleted. I’d have to make every shot count.
There must have been a million of them. They seemed to be coming here from all over the world. Dead but walking, all their stagnant attention was focused on our house. We were the centre of the world, and it was hopeless. I wished they would all turn around and walk back the way they had come, but eventually, I knew, they would simply travel around the globe and reach us from the opposite direction.
I took aim and fired. A head exploded into dry brains and shattered skull.
We were an island in a sea of moving dead. They walked over the pathetic corpses of those we had already shot. They came slowly, like a glacier of doom, guaranteed to sweep us away eventually but content in the knowledge that they need not rush things.
I took aim and fired. One went down with half a head, the bullet ricocheting and punching through the spine of another. A bullet well spent.
In the distance, flaming red hair. A smile borne of decomposition, not love. Gemma.
It would be another hour or so before she was near enough to be worth shooting. It was an hour I spent reliving our time together, like an extended flashback experienced by a drowning man. And I was drowning. Choking on the inevitability of things. Putting off the end, as mankind had for decades, the difference being that I had no faith in redemption. I was not waiting for God to intervene; I simply wanted a few more hours of life.