“Excuse me, my son, but you are going to have to speak up. I didn’t understand you.”
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three years since my last confession.
“My son, have you been drinking?” Under his breath, as if hoping the parishioner would not be able to hear him, he added, “God, you stink.”
With mounting frustration, he tried again, concentrating fiercely on speaking coherently. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been three years since my last confession.
He heard a sigh coming from the next booth. “My son, I’m very sorry, but I still can’t understand what you are saying. Perhaps you should go home and sleep it off. Come back when you are sober.”
No, he cried out, please, I need to be forgiven!
“Jesus Christ,” the priest exclaimed, fear evident in his voice as the realization of what he shared the confessional with dawned on him.
He could sense the fear, hear the rattling as the priest struggled frantically with the doorknob. No! I need to be forgiven! His fist came up and pounded against the thin wall separating him from the priest. The thin barrier shattered under his assault, and his hand grabbed instinctively for the man. His fingers brushed material and his hand closed reflexively. He pulled the struggling form towards him. Forgive me, Father! The man’s body was pressed up against the hole in the wall. There was no way the priest would fit through that hole, but he continued to pull.
The cracked wood began to splinter, and the hole split open further, the jagged pieces of wood like teeth in a predator’s mouth. They scraped along the flesh of the priest as he was pulled through, leaving thin scratches that seeped red with blood. The priest was mouthing a prayer to the God who had deserted him. The smell of the blood washed over and settled on him like cheap perfume, and it ignited his hunger. Forgive me, Father. Three years. Forgive me. His thoughts became jumbled as the need to eat became overpowering. He pulled the man of the cloth closer and opened his mouth, pressing his lips to the priest’s neck. His teeth found purchase and he bit down hard. The priest screamed as teeth ripped through flesh. A distant memory flashed through his deteriorating mind, the priest, a different priest, offering up his body and blood with the words, “Take you and eat, this is my Body. Drink you all of this. For this is my Blood of the New Testament which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins.” The blood flowed from the gaping wound and he sucked greedily at it. After a week of abstaining, the thick red fluid was sweeter than any wine he had ever tasted when he was alive. As the stream of blood slowed, he started in earnest on the flesh, ripping and chewing ravenously.
He left the hollowed out bones on the floor of the confessional and shambled out, leaving behind bloody footprints. The hunger still burned, but he could tolerate it now. Could think. He caught sight of the crucifix out of the corner of his eye and remembered why he had come here in the first place.
Forgiveness.
Thought fragments flashed through his head. Body…blood…do this…forgiveness…sins... The weight he’d been carrying around for so long felt as if it had been lifted. He no longer felt that gnawing ache in his chest, and realized he had partaken of the body and the blood. His sins had been forgiven.
He shambled towards the door, his nature taking over and his hunger burning, when he happened to glance down and notice a bulletin left behind by a parishioner. On it, bold letters proclaimed: GOOD FRIDAY MASS, STATIONS OF THE CROSS.
And he realized. . .
Oh fuck! I’m so going to Hell.
The Overpass
By John Lemut
I lost track of the days. Once I fled the colo, I started walking west again. The colo seemed like the perfect refuge; I kept thinking of it as a technology-age fortress. But things had started to fall apart even before the attack; it would’ve been time to move along soon enough anyway.
It would be days between encounters with another person. I wasn’t so lucky with zombies; I’d usually run across at least one a day. You have to put them down. If you don’t they’ll just follow you at their leisure, moaning all the way, attracting more as they go.
I found myself traipsing through a large forest. I’d walk until I felt tired, foraging whatever I could to supplement the few provisions I was able to save, and then crash for maybe an hour of uneasy sleep at a time. There’s no quick and easy way to fortify your position in the woods. I took chances, just plopping down against a tree or in some brush. But you can usually hear them coming. Even with their throat ripped out, they make plenty of noise shuffling through the underbrush. Not always, though, hence the uneasy sleep.
At least a couple weeks after I escaped the colo I emerged from the forest and began following a six-lane road. The Mississippi was between me and the colo, so I guessed I was in Missouri. Just as night was falling, I saw dirty smoke in the distance. As I got a little closer, I made out a highway overpass with a few fires dotted along its length. Zombies freeze if it gets cold enough, but they can’t make fire. I’ve heard they’re actually afraid of it. With so many fires going, either I was coming up on the aftermath of some awful accident or struggle, or there were people up there.
As I approached the overpass, I stepped lightly and tried to stay out of direct sight. When I got within a couple hundred feet or so, I could hear fires popping, voices…and an occasional laugh. I was so enthusiastic at hearing more than just one or two voices, I ran parallel to the overpass so I could climb the embankment and get on the roadway. I hopped the guardrail and slowed to a jog when my soles hit road. Silhouettes were scattered across both sides of the roadway—there must have been a dozen people. I smiled, raised my hand to wave, and just as I was about to open my mouth to greet them, I tripped and fell right on my face with a grunt.
Glass smashed from ahead of me and the voices fell silent. I had a mental image of a startled person dropping their Mason jar full of moonshine. A moment later, I lifted my head and saw one of the silhouettes running toward me. He had a long axe in his hands. When he got a bit closer, I hear him say “Thunder” with some urgency every few steps. I rolled onto my back and sat up, gingerly touching my face. I had left behind some face skin on the pavement.
I realized I was moaning—clearly not appropriate. It took me another moment to shake off the fall and make myself speak, “Wait! I’m a person!”
I tried to get up, only to stumble and fall on my ass. I put my hands out and begged the approaching man with the axe to stop. He didn’t slow; he was now screaming one syllable with every step, rhythmically, “Thun-der! Thun-der! Thun-der!”
I tried to reach for my own weapon, but one end of it was pressed against the roadway, pushing it against the harness I used to attach it to my pack, keeping it firmly and uselessly on my back. I glimpsed past the axe maniac and saw three others now running toward me. They were yelling, too.
The axe man was very close now and shifted his grip on the axe to swing it. I rolled to my right, got to my feet, and freed my weapon in one quick move as the axe man ran past. He never swung, just charged past where I had been sitting. My four and a half pound weapon was in my tense grip, ready to swing or jab.
The axe man stopped and turned back toward me, his axe held loosely down at his side. He was puffing from the run, but was otherwise calm. He spoke, “I say ‘thunder,’ you say…”
“…What?”
The others reached us, and I turned toward them quickly: two men and a woman. None held a weapon. I lowered mine slowly. The woman yelled, “Tim, what the hell is wrong with you?”
“Oh relax. I wasn’t going to kill him once he spoke,” the axe man said. “But he didn’t answer the challenge properly.” Tim turned back to me with a half-smile and scolded, “When I say ‘thunder,’ you say ‘flash.’ Thunder…flash. Get it?”
I was so confused and filled with adrenaline I couldn’t speak. One of the other men said to me, “Hey, guy, just relax. We’re friends. Tim’s trying to be cute. It’s some old World War Two code the Americans u
sed.”
Tim held his ground, “Bullshit cute. The Allies used to say ‘thunder’ as a challenge to identify friendlies. The response, ‘flash,’ kept you alive, because if you said anything else, you’d get shot.”
The woman shot back, “Zombies can’t talk. You don’t need a secret code.”
The bickering calmed my nerves a bit and I finally said something, “Shouldn’t ‘flash’ come first? I mean, first you see lightning...then you hear thunder.”
Tim started walking back to the fires and muttered loudly enough so I could hear, “I should have just killed this smartass.” The woman and the man who hadn’t spoken followed him. She continued scolding Tim.
“I’m Baines,” the remaining man said with his hand out.
I shook it and asked, “World War Two, huh? Wasn’t that like a century ago?”
“Yeah, just about ninety years. Come on,” Baines motioned toward his camp, “let’s get warm. Tim! Get back here and rig the trip line.”
* * *
Baines brought me close to a fire, introduced me to a few people whose names I forgot as soon as I heard them, and had someone take a look at my face. As this “nurse” tended to me, I fell asleep and stayed asleep for nearly a day. They could have lied; it could have been three days. I hadn’t slept so well since my early days at Camp Perry.
I woke up with a blanket over me, the sun was ready to set, and I had to piss badly. When Baines saw me moving, he came over and led me to a row of three portable toilets. I climbed inside the one that was unoccupied and emptied my bladder. Even though the light was fading, I could see the road running twenty-five feet beneath the overpass; the base of the portable toilet was broken away as well as the roadway directly under it. They even cut away the rebar. As I zipped up, I thought it was a pretty smart setup.
Baines was waiting a respectful distance away from the toilets and offered a quick tour of the camp. “It’s a pretty simple setup. We have the three shitters set up here, on the outskirts, for privacy and the smell. Then we have our wood and other main supply stores; we each take what we need—and only what we need—and we all pitch in to restock. Past that, we have a few hovels, or shacks, if you will, on this side. The other side is pretty much all hovels with some areas for fires and commiserating.
“There are three planks set up to cross back and forth across the two sides—it’s only a couple feet, but when you’re carrying wood, the planks make a world of difference. We set up trip lines some distance from the camp as you found out.” Baines pointed to my face. “A zombie starts walking up the road, it triggers the alarm system, gives us plenty of time to react. When a trip line gets tripped, it drops glass bottles or tin cans to the road right in the middle of camp so we hear: glass for the south lines; cans for the north. They get tripped all the time. So far we’ve been lucky and it’s only been one or two zombies at a time, easy enough to take care of. I imagine you know this already, but zombies don’t notice things like trip lines, and even if they did, they can’t pick up their feet.
“In the event of an emergency, you know, fire, tornado, cabin decompression, uh…multiple zombie attack, that kind of thing, we can pull the planks to keep the zombies on one side, or just to split up their numbers. We also have easy egress using the road if a large group comes from the north or the south. If things get totally fucked and we get zombies all around us, we have four rope ladders off each side of the overpass we can deploy and climb down.
“A couple miles to the north there’s a small town, mostly empty. There’s a larger town to the south about four miles: less empty, but better supplies. There’s a clean river and lots of farmland not far to the west and a forest with plenty of wildlife to the east.
“We have twenty-three people here right now: thirteen men, seven women and three kids—that’s people under the age of thirteen. You’d be twenty-four, that is if we agree you can stay…and you want to.” We walked as my tour, safety lecture, and quasi-invitation to stay went on. By the end, we were at the northeast corner of the camp, the opposite end and side from where we began. I was invited to sit by a fire burning in a steel drum where five men and women were already seated; Baines joined them. As I sat, I tried to remember the last time I saw so many living people in one place.
I decided it was in Indiana before I found the colo. They were heading east, a group of seven. Nobody goes east. “Have you been bitten?” It was the oldest looking man around the fire who asked me accusingly.
I had been through this drill before. I wished I had been stricter about it on more than one occasion. I stood, stripped to my underwear, and slowly turned around with my arms out to the sides. Some places want you to strip completely, but these people were too modest or naïve to insist. Satisfied grunts told me I could dress.
“What are you carrying?” Tim asked me this. I hadn’t noticed he was around the fire until he spoke.
He meant weapons. People only cared about weapons now. “Aside from the steel on my back, I have a nine millimeter pistol. No ammo.”
“What can you do?” Baines asked.
“I can tie a noose,” I said absentmindedly. Expressions ranging from slight amusement to fear flickered in the firelight. “I can do anything.”
“Do you want to stay?” A woman who had a small face and an even smaller voice asked this. She looked kind, like somebody’s mother. I tried to imagine her making breakfast for her kids on a weekend in a kitchen with a stove and a refrigerator. I had some trouble seeing it.
I knew the question was coming, but I hadn’t actually stopped to think about it. After an uninten-tionally long pause I told them, “I’ll stay for a while.”
Baines stood up. “We have to talk first. Why don’t you head down there,” he pointed toward the other end of the overpass, “and get yourself something to eat. There’s some raccoon being grilled. It’s not too bad.” Baines gave a smile that was really more of a grimace.
I walked away, led by my stomach.
Baines was right, the raccoon was okay. While I gnawed on a leg bone that the cook handed me from a raccoon on a spit, one of the three children in the camp was peeking at me from behind the nearest pieced together shack. I gauged his age at eight. His left ear was deformed, probably from birth. It was withered and smaller than his other ear, but it stuck out farther. If that was the extent of his deformities, he should count himself lucky.
I found myself staring at the child, trance-like, when Tim sat down next to me. I was seated on a small crate, so for him to fit, Tim practically sat on my lap. Even then, only half his weight was over the box. “How’s the ‘coon?”
“Just fine.”
Tim breathed in deeply through a badly congested nose and out his mouth with a sigh. “Well…you can stay. It wasn’t unanimous, but you got my vote.”
I nodded, tossed the leg bone over the side of the overpass, and stood up quickly. Tim was unprepared for the move. Most of his weight not centered over the crate caused it to tip, spilling him to the pavement. He rolled once and started to laugh when the suddenness wore off.
I stood over him and extended my hand to help him up. “Good stuff,” he said when he was on his feet. “So, you said you have a pistol. Can you shoot?”
“I’m decent from up to fifty feet, but hitting a zombie in the head with a pistol shot isn’t easy. I never had the discipline to keep or properly shoot a rifle, but I can hold my own. Bullets being so scarce, I’ve been using the steel for a while now. No reloading.”
“Speaking of ‘the steel,’ I only saw it briefly when you were about to attack—”
“Defend,” I corrected.
“—me with it. Mind if I take a look?”
I unfastened the simple harness and pulled the steel off my pack like a ninja drawing his katana, but this was no sword. Tim took it from me and almost dropped it. “That’s fuckin’ heavy. What the hell do you carry this for?”
“This is the best thing I’ve found yet. It’s called a ‘Fubar.’ It’s only a foot and a
half long, which is nice, being so compact, but the heft makes even half-hearted swings count. On one end you have a pry bar which I’ve stabbed through more than one zombie’s head. I also use it to force doors, and as a lever…great for prying up manhole covers. The other end I use more frequently. On one side there’s a hammer head, also excellent for killing zombies, cracks their skulls like an egg. You can break through a brick wall with it, given enough time. On the other side there’s that double-tiered jaw system with teeth. That longer one will go into a zombie like a syringe—nice and easy—plus, it’s perfect for pulling stuff loose: wires, boards, rebar, you name it.”
“You should have been a salesman,” Tim said, taking a couple practice swings and thrusts.
The cook walked up to me and demanded, “Where’s that bone.” It was not a question.
I pointed off the edge of the overpass. He got very close to me. “I’m going to make raccoon stock. You ever had raccoon stock?” I shook my head, but kept my eyes fixed on his. Tim held my weapon impotently out of reach. “It’s delicious. But I need raccoon bones to make raccoon stock. You do that again and I’ll send you over the side to fetch it.”
He was right; I was wasting food. “It won’t happen again.”
The cook stormed back to his fire. Tim came close and stood by my side. “I’m glad we didn’t let him vote.”
“How is the raccoon stock?” I asked.
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