by Mark Clodi
Katie wrinkled her brow before responding, “No…I, that’s pretty cheesy,” Randy frowned at the pun, “I would remember that…” It seemed hazy, on the edge of her memory, but she did recall something, “You…you didn’t bring glasses, so we washed out the measuring cup from the laundry detergent bottle and poured the champagne in that!”
“So you do remember it?”
“I…I…fuck. No. I don’t remember much, only the thing with the detergent cup. But I think you’re right, I think it did happen. My head is all fucked up, it’s like the memory is there, but I can’t connect it to anything. It doesn’t relate and makes no sense. You know what I mean?”
“I’m right there with you. We’ll figure this out. Not now. There’s a car coming.”
Katie looked back down the barrel of her rifle and sighted it in on the approaching car; a black sports utility vehicle. The car looked spotless and freshly waxed. Something a doctor would drive. It pulled to a stop in the driveway and two men got out; one was wearing hospital scrubs that were immaculate, the other had on a business suit, black with a white shirt and dark blue tie. The man in the suit had a radio set extending from his ear.
“Get the one with the communications first, if you can.” Randy advised.
“If I can? If I can? What the fuck Randy this is an easy shot, he’s less than thirty yards away! Say hello to my little friend mister suit!” Katie pulled the trigger and the suited up man fell back against the truck clutching his head.
“You winged him! You know that won’t keep him down! Get the other one so we can get out of here!” Randy whispered loudly.
“I hit him dead center that fucker is dead again, zombie or human!” except the man wasn’t, he fell to the ground and rolled under the vehicle out of sight. The man in the scrubs stopped dead in the driveway; paralyzed, looking for where the bullet had come from. Katie pulled the lever back and chambered another round.
The doctor went to the front of the vehicle and knelt down to look underneath it. Katie put a bullet through the back of his head, slamming his face into the bumper hard enough to set off the air bags.
“He’s down, grab the shotgun and go finish the other one before he gets away.” Randy said.
“You know, I used to have a partner who could help out with things like that. You ain’t a whole helluva lot of good like this you know.”
“I know.” Randy said, his voice inflected with remorse.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it. I appreciate your advice.”
“Just go get him so we can move on.”
Katie was already moving into the hallway, she had picked up the shotgun and carried both firearms down to the front door, Randy trailed behind her. She leaned the rifle up against the wall next to the front door and burst outside at a jog, shotgun held at waist level. The zombie was now behind the back end of the vehicle and had a pistol in his hand pointed at the second story of the house, he shifted his aim slightly and popped off three bullets in quick succession.
Katie continued forward and fired a round from the shotgun shattering the side and rear windows of the SUV and tossing the zombie backward onto his back. The man’s pistol went flying and skidded down the slight incline of the driveway to land in the gutter next to the street.
Katie ran up and fired again, striking the man just below the knee, which twisted his body sideways, leaving his lower leg bent at an unnatural angle. She stood over the suited man with her shotgun aimed at his head. He was on his stomach and used his arms to push himself up and roll onto his back.
“The ghost.” He murmured.
“What’s that?”
“You’re the ghost Sentry was talking about. The one we can’t see.”
“I have no idea what you are saying. You’re making noise, but not making sense.” Katie said.
The zombie was in bad shape; the bullet that had hit him in the side of the head had deflected forward and taken out one of his eyes and most of his nose. When he spoke it was with a nasally, wet quality.
“He said there was something here. He thought it was one of his first children or maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
The zombie didn’t reply, as Katie watched his face was pulling itself together, mending in front of her. He tried to maneuver so his leg was more correctly aligned, but Katie shook her head ‘no’ and kicked his limb to a ninety degree angle.
“No way mister, I don’t need you fully healthy so you can jump me, so leave it!”
The zombie grimaced, “But it will heal that way, sideways and I’ll have to have it broken again to set up right…”
“Trust me you aren’t going to live long enough to worry about it.” Katie raised the shotgun to her shoulder and aimed it at the suit on the ground.
“Wait!” the zombie’s eye went opaque and his face started to glow softly in the dusky twilight.
Katie jumped back, startled by the apparition before her. “What the fuck!”
“This is interesting…” Randy said, walking forward.
The suit glanced around, as if seeing things for the first time, his eyes settled on Randy for a moment before shifting ever so slightly to Katie.
“Who are you?” The suits voice had changed, it was slightly higher pitched. Katie felt a pressure on her mind, as if something were trying to squeeze the information out of her head.
She backed up and shook her head, “No.”
“Who are you? You will tell me who you are!” The pressure on Katie’s head intensified.
“Kill him!” Randy screamed, grabbing at his own head with his hands.
The zombie’s face turned to Randy, “Who are you!”
As the zombie’s gaze left Katie, so did the pressure that was trying to break into her brain, seizing control she pulled the trigger of the shotgun, the shell caught the suit on the side of the suit’s head.
“No!” he screamed, grabbing again at the side of his head, the glowing increased and Katie fired again before the zombie could regain its bearings. The second shot hit it square in the face, but didn’t do nearly the damage that Katie felt a shotgun should do as such close range.
With the glow intensifying on the ground, the zombie’s face started pulling together with startling speed, all the while the thing’s shriek intensified, growing to the volume of a train whistle. Katie fired twice more in rapid succession before the firing pin came down on an empty chamber. The glowing had not stopped, but the screaming had. Katie quickly reloaded five shells into the gun and shot the thing in the head five more times, by the time she was finished what was left resembled a bowl full of ground meat that someone had mixed with short, black hair.
“Holy fuck. What was that?” Katie asked Randy, who was still standing beside her.
“He saw me.”
“What?”
“How could he see me? I’m you, remember, not really me. That’s what I’ve been assuming all this time. How could he see me Katie?”
Katie looked at her partner, “Well, maybe you aren’t as dead as you thought?”
Chapter 32 – Ruben
“Where am I?” came the voice from the back seat, startling Ruben. He was in the driver’s seat, trying not to doze off or let his mind wander, things happened when his mind wandered and it was a struggle to keep control. In the passenger seat beside him Stewart snorted softly in her sleep. The two cars were parked side by side in a rest area and Ruben was on watch in one car. Javier had been comatose in the backseat for the better part of eighteen hours.
“Javier? Kid? Are you awake?” Ruben asked softly, leaning forward and then half turning to look at the young man in the darkness. According to Ruben’s watch it was two in the morning, though his watch was set according to a different time zone, so who knew what time it was here.
“Ruben? That you? What happened?” Javier’s voice sounded different, like that of a kid, Ruben realized.
“You got into an accident; you were thrown through the windshield and ended up in the other guy’s car.
You don’t remember?”
“I remember firing at some idiots in a crossover vehicle, then…” Javier paused, thinking, “Well not much after that; sounds mostly; breaking glass and stuff. Then darkness.”
“Well, then you didn’t miss much.” Ruben said with relief. He had been worried about brain damage or other trauma. “How are you feeling?”
“Good. Better than good, really. I mean I feel really, really…hungry!” Javier said, “Man am I hungry!”
“We got our packs in the trunk.”
“That you Javier?” asked Stewart groggily.
“Yeah.”
“Welcome back to the land of the living, such as it is. You okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Just hungry.” Javier said again.
“Cool. I’m going back to sleep.”
“C’mon, let’s get out and see what we can rustle up for you to eat.” Ruben opened his door, which caused Stewart to grumble about the light, but she burrowed down into her fatigues and draped her arm over her face to block it out.
When Bill saw Javier and Ruben get out of their vehicle he opened his door and went to meet them, leaving Max asleep in the back seat. Javier repeated for the third time that he was fine and just hungry as Bill tossed the same questions at him as the others.
Javier tore into his pack and gabbed several of the plastic bagged military rations that had been sent with them. None of them thought they were too bad, not at first, but after a few days of the military food they had started grabbing whatever they could find locally to eat.
“I see why every pack comes with some sort of hot sauce.” Javier said when he slowed down from eating his second meal, “It adds a little spice to them. I mean, I don’t even like hot sauce.” He said this as he dumped the small glass container of the red liquid into the open pouch in his other hand.
“Better than the c-rations we had in my day.” Ruben said.
“I think it is ‘cause they all taste the same. I mean you might call one ‘Chicken with Noodles’ and another ‘Chili and Macaroni’, but they don’t taste all that different to me.” Bill said.
Javier shook his head and said between bites, “No way man, the breakfast one rocks!”
The other men nodded and Ruben said, “It always seems like one meal pack in any generation is better than the others and that everyone will trade anything to get it. I never would have thought packaged sausages and blueberry granola would be in such high demand. So, Javier, what happened?”
He shrugged, swallowed and said, “I don’t remember much, I knew they were going to hit me, I remember that and being just…stuck to the truck. Like I couldn’t move, I wanted to jump out before they hit and I froze up. I was so scared, then..” Javier waved his spoon around at the two police cars, “Waking up. What happened?”
Bill spoke to him about getting the police cruisers and their mad dash through several states over the course of the last sixteen hours, ending with them stopping at their current location.
“Is it safe?” Javier asked.
“Max hasn’t seen anyone close to the main road. At least not really close. He says that there are a lot of dead people out on the edge of his mental zombie radar. He couldn’t see any zombies when we stopped here, so we thought we could get a few hours of sleep. Me and Ruben drew short straws and get to watch first. Max and Stewart will take over in a couple hours and let us get a little sleep. How’s your leg Javier?”
Javier looked down at his legs, “Which one? What was wrong with it?”
Ruben laughed, “Well I guess that answers that.”
“Your leg was busted up ten ways from Sunday when you played ‘stiff man’ on us. I’m no doctor, but what I saw…well you shouldn’t be able to walk on it now. Do you know what happened?”
“No.” Javier shook his head and smiled in the moonlight, “I guess I got something too, huh? I was hoping for wolverine claws or maybe flying like superman, but healing up fast is sort of like wolverine isn’t it?”
Ruben shook his head, he had a hard time keeping track of what the youth of today was talking about. Bill nodded and said, “I guess, bummer about having to zonk out like that though. I wonder what would happen if you got shot or worse, bit? Would you turn? Would you heal it up and be fine?”
“Let’s not find out.” Ruben said.
Javier nodded and reached for his third meal pack.
“Better be careful you don’t burst your stomach, we wouldn’t want you going all comatose for that.” Bill said.
“What? I’m starving here, I missed three meals while I was out and I think I need to make up for them. So what do we do now?”
“Well, Max thinks the guy is over on the coast, from what Aubrey told him, the east coast near the north end of Florida. We got a map and plan to scout the area starting later this morning. Max should be able to scan for the guy as we get closer. I think we are about a hundred miles from the coast, so it’s not like we are on top of him yet.”
Javier kept eating while Ruben and Bill chatted about their plans. Wiping his face after finishing Javier said, “So let me get this straight, we are just going to drive in, find the guy in his Doctor’s office and shoot him?”
“It probably won’t be that simple.” Bill conceded.
“We have the bomb, we might be able to set it close by and just turn tail and run. Nothing ever works out the way it is supposed to, but the simpler the plan the less we have to change when everything goes wrong.” said Ruben.
“Not much of a plan.” Javier said with a shrug, “I don’t have a better one.” He walked around the parked trooper cars, as if testing his legs.
“You have any pain?” Ruben asked him as he completed the first circuit.
“It’s…stiff. Like all tight and stuff. Were you ever in track Ruben?”
The old man gave a derisive laugh, “When I was young there was no internet, no video games and the television only had three channels, of course I was in track.”
“Ah, okay. Well it’s like the first time you get outside for the first day, you are all stiff and tight, it takes you a week to get back into things. That’s how I feel. Like the first day of track.”
“Well, I hope you don’t feel like the first night after the first day of track practice.”
“All sore? Me either. That would suck. Are you sure my leg was busted?”
“It was busted.” Both Bill and Ruben answered together.
Javier kept on walking, leaving Bill and Ruben at the back of the cruiser Stewart was sleeping in. “What does all this mean Ruben?”
“Coming to me for my ancient wisdom? Sorry, I’ve got nothing. Everything changes. I’ve lived long enough to know that. I think of this as the next step. You believe in God Bill?”
Bill shook his head, then stopped abruptly, “No, I mean, I’m not a church goer or anything. I just never caught the bug. Max’s wife was though, she talked about all the stuff she did with the church. I think she was trying to nudge us into it. It was lost on Max though. Why?”
“Well, I went to church. I mean for years. It goes back to that lack of video games and three channels on the television thing; there wasn’t much else to do and church was a good place to meet up with other people.” Ruben paused for a moment, then fished around in his pockets and brought out a pack of cigarettes, “Do you mind?”
“You don’t smoke. I mean, I’ve never seen you smoke.”
“I gave it up years ago, but the last couple of weeks has given me reason to believe that I might not be dying of cancer any time soon. So, I can light up?”
“Sure.”
Ruben tapped out a cigarette and tamped it down on the trunk of the car, he lit it and inhaled a deep breath, “Ah! And the Lord said let there be light! Besides, what if I start? It’s not like they are still making cigarettes, even if I live through all of this, I think the cigarettes will only last a few more months before they are too stale to be worth it.”
“You’ll go through withdrawal again?”
“I’ll deal with it. So you don’t believe much in God. Like I said, I was a church goer, but Bill when you do something year after year, decade after decade, you can’t help but start to see the cracks in the walls. I’ve been to enough preaching that I’ve probably heard the bible a dozen times over by now. It is fair to say I was leaning towards agnostic before all this, if not downright atheism.”
“What changed?” Bill asked.
“Max. Stewart. You. Javier. Me. We changed. Them. They changed. They eat people and get ‘better’, if that makes sense. The dead have risen and among them we walk. The more they consume, the more ‘alive’ they get to be. And here’s the funny part of this improbable situation. If we kill them, we get stronger and better too. A heathen would call it magic. A scientist would analyze the living hell out of it until it turns up being….what’s that made up shit from Star Wars?”
“Ah…the stuff in the blood…midi-chlorians? Fans hated that.”
“Sounds right, I was going for the ‘Force’ though, I don’t know about blood or anything. Well they got it wrong. It’s not magic, it’s not the force, it’s people’s souls. The zombies consume a person’s soul. We can’t do it without them processing it first, but if we are close by we can absorb it from them before it gets free to go to its reward.”
“Interesting theory.” Bill said.
“It makes sense. It throws all the church leaning into perspective. There is a soul. We have seen it at work. Twisted to Satan’s ends, for the most part, but it proves there is a soul. And with a soul, there must be heaven and a hell. It fits.”
“It could, but I am still skeptical, where is God in all of this? Why doesn’t he just step in and end it all? Send down the golden ladders or whatever and close this chapter of the book.”
“Ah, that sounds like a scientist. I don’t have all the answers. I am pretty sure about this one and I am scared Bill.”
“Scared? Why?”
“Well if it’s all true, I haven’t been a very good Christen.”
Bill snorted, “You and the other eight billion people on the planet. I wouldn’t worry about it.”