Anarchy

by Peter Meredith

  He had lowered his shoulder and had smashed into the creature with all his might, launching them both into the dark, wet night air.

  Time went from one extreme to the other and the two whipped past Maddy in a blur, accelerating towards the street as if a rocket was hurtling them down. They crashed atop the roof of an old Nissan Sentra, crushing it inwards as if it were an aluminum can. Its windows exploded out in thousands of crystalline cubes. The zombie’s black brains blew out of its ears in much the same way.

  Bryce was at least somewhat cushioned by the creature’s bulk, but that didn’t mean he was right as rain and ready to fight his way through the crowded street. He moaned and sat up, his mouth hanging open, his left arm dangling oddly, his body covered with lacerations and more than one chunk of him was missing.

  For the moment, the zombies in the street did not know what to make of him. And their confusion only increased as grey bodies started to fall from four stories up. The first few fell into the crowd, but the fourth hit the back bumper of the Nissan and the fifth thudded onto the car’s trunk. Maddy saw that eventually one would leap with enough force to land on Bryce. She vaulted over the rail of the fire escape and jumped. She was only some fifteen feet up and her landing target was a Porsche SUV—a sacrilege of a vehicle in her book. There was only one other car between her and the Nissan, and leaning up against it was the zombie that had Bryce’s pole jutting from its mouth. She slid it out of the zombie like she was pulling Excalibur from the stone, except the pole came out with drabbles of lung tissue.

  “Get up!” she hissed as she got to the hood of the Nissan. Surrounded as they were, she needed to watch in ten directions at once and that included above her. As her eyes couldn’t handle the load, she let her mind see what it needed to see: Victoria taking advantage of the distraction Maddy was making to scamper down the fire escape unmolested; a slow-reacting zombie realizing that she was human was just reaching for her; two more were pushing each other to get at her first; the spider-demon above was picking up one of the smaller beasts and was about to fling it down on Bryce, who was only sitting there, his eyes going in and out of focus.

  Maddy darted forward and grabbed Bryce by what remained of his shirt and hauled him down the front to the hood just as the demon threw the zombie. It landed square on the corpse of the giant causing a green sludge to erupt from the thing’s mouth.

  Bryce went the same color green.

  “You gotta get up!” she cried, before she turned and swung the pipe as if it were an over-sized baseball bat. It came around, slowly at first, but gathered speed until it connected with the side of a zombie’s neck. She had never swung a bat before and her aim was off, and yet there was so much weight and force behind the pipe that it crushed vertebrae and the beast collapsed stiff and twitching.

  She brought the pipe around a second time to take out the next closest creature. The zombie came in closer during the swing which took a great deal of the power out of the strike. Her aim was better; however, and the pipe cracked the skull open and leveled the monster. By then she knew the pipe was just not her sort of weapon. She yanked out her axe and began swinging away, yelling over her shoulder, “Come on, Bryce! Move!”

  The zombies were converging on the two and it was all Maddy could do to hold the closest of them off as Bryce teetered after her, gasping for breath. His head was ringing, and his body throbbed where it wasn’t completely numb. He needed a moment to get his bearings, but the dead were everywhere. He clambered up onto a truck…no, it was a delivery van. The vehicle seemed sturdy but when a dozen zombies attacked it, the roof began to rock back and forth, and he along with it.

  “Hey!” Maddy screamed into his face. “Take your pipe.”

  She shoved it into his hand. He tried to take a grip with it, only his left arm refused to operate properly. He could twitch it slightly and that was about it. A glance down and he saw that his arm was popped right out of its socket. Maddy screamed at him again. This time he caught every fourth word and none of it made sense.

  “Jump!”

  “My arm,” he mumbled.

  Her eyes went wide at the ugly deformity—the silver in them gleamed. They’re so beautiful, he thought as she grabbed his arm and wrenched it upward. There was a heavy thunk sound deep in him and he was struck by waves of pain; this was the breaking point for him, and he turned and vomited a brown/green mix into the upturned face of a zombie.

  “Are you okay?” Maddy asked. Bryce was glazed with sweat and his blue eyes were dull and out of focus. He nodded distractedly as he tried to lift his left arm. His arm came up, higher and higher, and as it did, he seemed to regain some of his focus and stared around. They were on a van surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of zombies. More of the creatures were coming from the building he had just leapt from. Some were falling from the same fourth floor fire escape, while many more flowed like water from the lower windows and the front door.

  “We have to jump,” Maddy said again.

  Although he didn’t mean it, he nodded. He was already half-dead, numb in parts, his body aching beyond belief in others. And he was so dreadfully tired. Tired beyond anything he had yet felt. Dying just then seemed to be the simplest thing in the world. Death called to him.

  “I will make my stand here,” he told her. “You go on. It’ll be for the best.”

  “Bryce!”

  He shook his head. His mind was made up and she would not be able to talk him out of it. They both saw that.

  Chapter 23

  “It’s the demon,” she told him. “It’s trying to force you into giving up.”

  Bryce sighed and said, “It’s doing a damned good job. You have to go before it comes. It’ll come for me first.” And against the fiend he would last maybe thirty seconds.

  “I’m ordering you to come with me!” she declared. This actually made him smile. Compared to the demon and the brute power of its mind, she was like a child—a perceptive child. “Is that what you think? You think I’m a child?” Before he could answer, she grabbed him and pulled him close until the tips of their noses touched.

  She’s going to kiss me! Bryce’s eyes went wide and all he could think was: I can’t kiss her. I just threw up. This drove everything else from his mind.

  She caught these thoughts, too and smiled. “Yeah, you did. Now, look at me.” His eyes were clearer now, his mind slipping into focus. “The demon had you, but you’re okay now. Your legs are fine; you can jump. You have to.” She pointed over the groaning masses at a truck eight feet away. A small Toyota was wedged between the two vehicles and on its hood, zombies were playing king of the mountain as they fought to get up.

  With grey bodies piling up all around the van, and hands reaching for his sneakered feet, he knew she was right, he wouldn’t be able to stand there much longer. Bryce could jump, down at least. He didn’t know about up to the truck’s hood or the roof of the cab, and he certainly couldn’t do it holding the slick pipe, which suddenly felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. Cocking his arm, he threw the pipe and speared the passenger side window of the truck.

  Maddy gave him an odd look. She had no idea what he had been aiming at, but didn’t think the truck’s window was it. Afraid that he was on the verge of giving up again, she shoved him towards the Toyota, forcing him to leap or fall. He chose to leap and nearly went too far. His momentum carried him partially off the roof of the car. Luckily, there were zombie heads aplenty to step onto. His foot came down on a face and had the creature not tried to bite him, the foot might have slid right off. Its mangled teeth gave him traction and he shoved off.

  Once more, he found he was stronger than he had expected. Of course, he expected next to nothing and he didn’t land on the hood feet first. No, he slapped against the side of it with one foot on the wheel and the other on something that squished and shifted beneath him as he struggled up. That foot seemed to catch on something and then a wild screaming pain raced up from his ankle. Then Maddy landed lightly on the hood o
f the truck. She turned, knelt, and swung her axe all in one motion. The pain peaked and was gone.

  More hands reached for him and it was all he could do to hold on as they tried to pull him into the mob. With one hand on the side mirror, Maddy leaned out over the mass of creatures and hacked and hacked until Bryce felt suddenly light. But even without the weight of a dozen zombies pulling at him, it was a struggle to get on the cab. His left arm was still almost useless and the rest of him wasn’t much better.

  “My pipe,” he said, just before Maddy pulled back. She grabbed it from the window and stood back, nudging into Bryce who took the pipe and leaned on it like an old man would lean on a staff. He stared out, seeing only a grey river of zombies, broken here and there by larger vehicles. Hoping that she would be overlooked, Victoria was lying flat on the roof of another truck some forty yards away.

  Maddy had her eyes unfocused as she stared around. She was looking for possibilities in an impossible situation. They had maybe a minute before the zombies in back crushed enough of their fellows in front to get at the two.

  “I don’t know,” she said, speaking to herself. Everywhere she looked her mind saw that the darkness was deep. Zombies were still flocking in, filling side streets and alleys. The buildings around them were almost all locked up tight with their cages down over their store fronts. Only two did not. The first was a jewelry store and she knew the door would be locked and thick as hell. The second was a dry-cleaners; its front window was completely smashed in. There was a chance they could get to it, however, what then?

  More running? More fighting? The horde hot after them, hounding them until they were too tired to go on? Victoria couldn’t go much further and that was if she would even leave the temporary safety of the truck’s roof. And Bryce was just about done in, too. The fall had taken something out of him. Although he hadn’t hit his head as such, he had decelerated from sixty miles an hour to zero in a fraction of a second. It was likely he had a concussion and maybe burst blood vessels.

  Maddy turned slowly in a circle, searching for a way out of the trap. Midway around, Bryce touched her hand and mumbled, “There’s a fire.” Sure enough, when she spun about, she saw a great orange light that had come from nowhere. It was the only light as far as the eye could see and seemed to be centered on the dry-cleaners. Already smoke billowed from the broken window like a volcano venting before an eruption. “That’s it!” she cried. “Victoria! There’s our chance.”

  In the dark, Victoria’s pale face went stark white. She started to shake her head.

  “We’re going,” Maddy called across to her, ending the short discussion before it could really begin. Victoria would either come with them or die and there wasn’t much Maddy could do either way. With Bryce and his addled wits, she had enough to deal with already. “You see that car?” He looked blearily the wrong way. She pointed him to the left. Ten feet away sat a boxy Volvo SUV with a particularly flat roof. “Then,” she said pointing at a Jeep. Her finger drew a line through the zombies across the top of cars and trucks, ending at the dry-cleaners. “You go first. I’ll be right behind you.”

  The twenty seconds worth of rest had done next to nothing to aid in Bryce’s recovery. He leapt to the Volvo, a jump even his old self would’ve made. The new and semi-broken version, barely made it and with the rain, he slipped. The vehicle’s never-been-used roof rack kept him from sliding off and into the crowd of zombies. Maddy landed nimbly beside him a quarter second later and helped him up as the horde surged at the car.

  “Faster! We have to go faster!” She practically threw him at the Jeep. Thankfully, the vehicles on this side of the street were almost fused together; always bumper to bumper, but also frequently so close that their doors couldn’t be opened more than a few inches. The two bounded from car to car with the horde surging across the street very much like a wave. They washed over the smaller cars and poured through the crevices between the larger ones, and when the western portion of the grey wave struck the southern wing there was a cresting pileup.

  Once more, the two were the center of attention and Victoria was able to summon the courage to get up and run across the cars as well. She attracted attention and zombies came at her as well, but she didn’t dare take her focus from the cars and her leaping feet. Faster and faster, she went until she realized that she would get to the dry-cleaners ahead of Maddy and Bryce. And then what? There was no way she was going to rush into the burning building first. Then again, she didn’t want to be last, either. That would mean having to fight through the zombies.

  Her only choice was to arrive at the same time, and so she took a bit of a detour, bounding away from the fire for a few car lengths before turning back. This caused chaos within the chaos and soon zombies were killing each other to get at her.

  She skipped right by and ran for the cleaners, meeting Maddy and Bryce as they jumped down in front of the burning building. There were fewer zombies here, not more than a dozen and most of these were smaller or lame. Maddy flung herself bodily into them, bowling three of them over. Bryce came next with his pipe held horizontally across his body; he leveled two more and staggered after Maddy who was heading into the burning storefront.

  Victoria could’ve been right on their heels; however, the heat coming from the store was shocking in its intensity. She had been soaked to the bone and freezing; now steam was rising from her coat and her face was cherry red from the heat. A grey hand scraped across her leg and she jumped back. “Fuck!” she cried and jumped down among the sprawled zombies. Flinging up her hood she bent and followed Bryce into the building.

  As bad as the heat was for her, at least she had the thick coat and the hood. Bryce and Maddy wore nothing but the tattered remains of shirts and pants. After only five steps, Bryce went light in the head and collapsed right in front of Victoria, his pipe clanging. The heat was so bad that Victoria was crazy to get away from it and tried to duck around his body. Maddy pulled her down. “Get his pipe!” she screamed into Victoria’s face.

  The metal was already scalding and Victoria had to pull her sleeve down in order to grab it. When she looked up again, Maddy was dragging Bryce under a counter and deeper into the inferno. The room was filled with odd-looking machines and long lines of closely packed shirts, pants, dresses and coats—all of which was burning like crazy. The heat was unbearable. It shriveled the eyes and blistered any skin that was exposed for more than a few seconds.

  The zombies did not shy away or shield themselves or even attempt to duck down from the outrageous heat. The first came stomping right up to Victoria as she crawled forward. The heat difference between crawling and standing was about a hundred and ten degrees and the thing’s eyeballs began to boil in their sockets. The air ate at its lungs, baking it from the inside. It came to stop just above Victoria, its eyesight gone, its mind overwhelmed.

  She didn’t even notice as it toppled back into the other zombies pressing forward. Her world had shrunk. For the most part, it consisted of pain the like she had never felt before and outrageous, near incomprehensible heat. There was almost nothing else to it. She had her eyes closed and her face down, not quite touching the scorching hot linoleum as she low-crawled forward. Ahead of her, Maddy was grunting as she pulled Bryce along.

  Maddy didn’t look up. She let her mind guide her toward the backrooms. Twenty-five feet into the building they reached the zenith of the heat. She grit her teeth and forced herself on, but Victoria cried, though not a single tear hit the floor. They evaporated before they fell from her chin. Then the heat began to decrease, degree by degree until Maddy reached a door that led to a back hall.

  “Stay down!” she yelled to Victoria. By then, Victoria could crack her eyes and through the roiling black smoke she saw that the flames were reaching across the ceiling in their direction. Although the fire had started somewhere in the middle of the store, it wouldn’t be long before the entire building was engulfed. Ahead of her, Maddy was reaching up for the door handle. She pushed it open, s
omething that took a great deal of strength as there was a hurricane force wind blowing from the corridor beyond. This stoked the fires into a maelstrom of smoke and flame, and where things had been terrible before, they were now beyond Victoria’s ability to withstand.

  She leapt up into a crouch and slammed through Maddy and over Bryce, desperate to get out. The air in front of her was like ice, while behind it felt as though whips of pure flame were lashing her back through her coat. She tripped over Bryce and fell into the doorway whereupon the door crushed in on her. The fire had created a vacuum of epic proportions.

  It was all Maddy could do to keep from being sucked back into the growing blaze. She pushed Victoria through the opening and then fought Bryce’s unconscious body from the room. By the time she made it into the hall, her hair was smoldering and her back was one continuous blister. The door crashed closed behind her and she had just enough strength to crawl from it and lie down.

  “We can’t stay here,” Victoria said.

  “I can’t go on,” Maddy mumbled before passing out.

  Chapter 24

  It was Bryce who woke Maddy fifteen minutes later. He was far more clear-eyed than he had been, but he was still pale and when he moved, it was with a gimp and a groan. “Wake up. Maddy, wake…Oh good. I was afraid I was going to have to carry you.”

  Although it felt like she had just been pulled from a coma, one that had been deliciously void of pain or searing heat, she forced her eyes open hearing the urgent note to his voice. Bryce looked like hammered shit; she barely noticed. The door to the dry-cleaners was venting black smoke around the edges. The smoke was collecting at the high ceiling of the concrete corridor, but as thick as it was, she could still see the new cracks running across the ceiling. Little chips of cement were beginning to rain down.