“I believe it.” Dax’s hands shook as he dropped Number One off next to Bosey. A couple of minutes later, Number Three was deposited in the pile.
We stared down at them.
Dax cleared his throat. “Are they going to come back?”
I eyed the pistol at his hip. “You should make sure they don’t.”
I’m pretty sure something died inside him when he shot the two dead men, but he did it.
The wall of smoke got closer. I pictured the fire leaping from building to building, racing unchecked through stalled emergency systems and burning through paper, electronics, and furniture. Something else gusted over us—rot. Decay. The scent of death and dirt mixed in with the smoke and flame…
And there they were, staggering down the street as fast as they could manage. I pushed my thumb against the top lever on the gun, taking precious seconds to see how many rounds it had.
I could only see two.
“Oh, shit.”
I rushed back inside. “We have a bigger problem!”
“What now?” Tony straightened out whatever he’d stuck on the back end. “Vampires? God, I hope it’s vampires.”
Actions probably spoke louder than words right about now, so I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him to the door. “Now what do we do, O Fearless Leader?”
He gaped for a few seconds. “Fire and zombies? This isn’t fair.”
“What do we do?”
Dax shook himself loose from his stupor. “We leave. Get the shit together.”
“We’re not packed—”
“Then take what we can!”
This must be what it’s like to evacuate. We flung our stores into the bags. Anything we might possibly need went in—the first aid kit, the cell phones, the socks from the Rock Weekly clothing locker, a few odds and ends.
“Really?” Tony asked when I slipped in the box of anti-diarrheal pills.
“You really want the runs when the dead are coming for you?”
I donned my chaps and jacket, and jammed my feet into the as-yet-untried biker boots. We all looked pretty badass in our black leather getup. It was the sort of shot you uploaded to Facebook, assuming Facebook survived the apocalypse.
“Not sure how this is gonna work.” Tony held up a towel and strapped it onto the back luggage rack. “Female won’t leave without the freaking dog, so…”
“We can eat her if it gets tight,” Dax said. “The dog, I mean. Not the female.”
Tony looked at him with new respect. There’s nothing like life-and-death situations to make men put aside their differences.
“Hrrrr.”
I leaned out the door. Not five feet away, a slobbering mess of a corpse toddled around on the sidewalk, strings of its shirt—or maybe skin—dangling around its knees. “Where the hell did you come from?” I asked it.
“Hrrr.” I don’t think it was trying to speak so much as its vocal cords were just rattling around as it moved. Air rushing through exposed neck muscles will do that. I just stood there staring at it, fascinated and repulsed at the same time. It might well have been the ugliest thing I’d ever seen…but also the strangest, and therefore worthy of a little inspection.
It reached out a hand. Or rather, it extended gnarled digits that looked more like claws than fingers. There was nothing human left in that hand, or in the blank, staring eyes.
Blank, staring, shrunken eyes.
BLAM! I must’ve pulled the trigger without realizing it. The thing stumbled, backed up a step or two to catch its balance, and looked at me…at least, I thought it looked at me. Its head turned in my general direction, teeth clicking together softly.
BLAM! This round skipped it entirely, ricocheted off the building, and disappeared into the ether.
One dried, gnarled hand grabbed at the gun. Its grip was surprisingly strong, considering how, well, dead it was.
“Vibeke!” Tony yelled. “Stop playing with the dead thing!”
“Come get me!” I wrenched the gun away from the ghoul and slammed the barrel across the side of its head. The impact jarred my wrists, but the thing hardly reacted.
VROOM-VROOM! That sounded like the Road King. I lifted the shotgun over my head and slammed it down against his skull, flinching away at the wet sound it produced. I kept pounding at his head with the shotgun, my arms aching, hands stinging, until his head crunched inward, spilling dark blood and brain matter onto the ash-strewn pavement.
I didn’t kill him. He was already dead. I repeated that mantra in my head, hoping—maybe in vain—that it would stick.
I looked up and realized he’d brought friends. I hurled the shotgun at the nearest ghoul and yanked the big rifle into my hands, fumbling around with it blindly. How do you use this thing again…
They crushed in around me, bringing their stench, their growls, their awful, stretching hands. They blurred out the fire’s light, smashing closer, their fingers plucking at my jacket. Blue-gray hands grabbed my arms, my gun, my neck—
My finger jerked the trigger.
The big rifle swung wide to the right, coughing out bullets at an alarming rate. The ghouls in the immediate vicinity fell back—either I’d gotten their heads or the force of the bullets simply knocked them aside.
It gave me a little room. I threw myself to the side, tearing free of the grasping hands.
“Vibby!” Tony’s voice sounded over the throng. “Stop shooting!”
Stop shooting? And let myself get chewed on?
“Hit them!”
I charged to the right, following the path the big rifle had cleared for me. My right arm was starting to hurt, so I hefted the gun into both hands, clutching it like a club. I had no idea how many shots I had left, or if there was a way to switch it to a single-shot mode, or even what the hell was happening. Smoke clogged my eyes and throat, and burned the lone part of my sinuses that hadn’t already been violated by the stench of the dead.
They kept coming.
I swung the rifle in front of me, slamming the old metal against arms, shoulders, and heads. My elbows and wrists vibrated with each impact, and I was afraid to see what it was doing to my hands, but I couldn’t look down now. Wouldn’t. If I stopped now, I would stop everything—would stop fighting, would stop running, would just stand here—and that would be the end of me.
The noise. The fucking noise...
They lifted their voices up into the heavens, their moans lifting into some sort of awful song, rising and dipping and backtracking into a conflagration—
—and I stood there, utterly frozen.
“Vibby!” Gunshots sounded beneath the wailing of the dead. “Vibby, listen to me!”
The thing in front of me had been a woman once—I was pretty sure of that. Someone or something had taken apart half her face, leaving her skin and muscle dangling beside her neck, white-red skull gleaming as she clacked her jaws together. Her front teeth had already cracked from the force of her biting.
I stood there, riveted. It’s almost like a terrible symphonic metal concert...
She tottered closer, her face almost brushing against mine. The scent of putrescent flesh and congealing blood cut through the wailing, and I saw her coming toward me in hellish backlit color, bloodshot eyes streaming rivulets of black fluid.
I screamed and swung at her, lashing out blindly with the rifle.
The gun slammed into her neck, sending her reeling in the other direction. The spell broken, I darted to the right, sprinting through the area that seemed slightly less swamped than the rest.
“This way, Vibby!”
I ran blindly in the direction of the voice and the grumbling sound of the motor beneath it. The bike finally lurched into my line of sight, the flames from the other side of Astra casting it in a sort of reddish-gold light—I had to say, the fire lent the bike’s banged-up paint job some much-needed color. Tony sat in front, Dax in the back—and yes, there was Evie, strapped down on the rear luggage rack, whimpering pitifully.
I stared at
the bike, then at them. Where the hell was I supposed to sit?
Tony grabbed my arm, and before I knew what was happening, I was sort of straddling the gas tank, pushed down low over the handlebars. My cheek pressed against cold metal, and I had to work to keep the gun from sliding entirely out of my hands. The speedometer jabbed my temple, and my feet scrabbled against various parts of the bike until Tony snapped at me to hold still.
The critical mass of dead people was close enough to make out facial features.
The view changed as the bike slowly turned around. Positioned as I was atop the tank and engine, I felt each vibration coming up through my ribs, and my entire body jounced around. If I break a freaking tooth, so help me—
“Tony,” I tried to yell over the engine, “Tony, I don’t think—”
VRRRRRRRRM! Anything I wanted to say was carried off by the howl of the V-Twin, and suddenly I had to cling to the gas tank like a bug on a stick as the bike screeched away down the street. The tank thrust up, striking my cheek as we jounced over a pothole. The engine swallowed all sound—the walking dead, the fire, my complaints, Evie’s barks—until it consumed everything, regulating me to just a watcher with a sudden headache instead of a participant. I felt the handlebars moving around overhead, and tried to ease myself into a more comfortable position.
“No,” Tony hollered, planting one hand firmly on my back. “Don’t move!”
The bike rocked, and the tank slammed into my cheekbone. I pulled my face up a little, only to have Tony whack me again. “Stay down!”
“It fucking hurts!”
Evie howled.
I got one arm up between my face and the tank. With my head slightly elevated, I could witness the burning buildings in all their glory as Tony did his best to weave around abandoned cars, shopping carts, and trash in the road.
“Look out!”
The brakes screeched. The Road King jerked violently to the side, and I soared through the air—ohshitohshitohshit—
Crunch. I landed hard in something soggy and wet. My fingers closed around grimy fabric, and I scrambled to my feet, hoping I hadn’t just landed on anything that might have once been a person.
The object had some give to it, and soft edges. Square-shaped. A suitcase?
“Vibeke? Vibeke, get back here! No reconnoitering!”
“Thanks for the concern,” I muttered. I took a step forward, but liquid pain shot through my leg. I ground my teeth and tried to hop.
“Vibeke, look out!”
Warm hands latched onto mine. “Help.”
Shit! Where had I dropped the gun? The woman who grabbed at my arms wasn’t dead, though she might as well have been by the way she stank. I could just barely make out the whites of her eyes. Ragged fingernails scraped against my hand. I stifled a gasp and tried to back away.
“You got a way out?” Her voice sounded raw, tired. “That bike’s yours?”
I looked around wildly for the rifle. “Not—technically—”
“Vibeke!”
She grasped the front of my jacket and pulled herself up. She had a dim oil lantern beside her, and I finally spotted my gun lying a few feet away.
I tried to tug free, but her grip was like iron. “Sorry, miss…”
“Take her. Please.”
She offered up a small, sodden bundle. I must’ve landed right in her fort: the suitcase was hers, and so were the camping tent and bicycle upended next to it. “You want to give me a blanket?”
Nothing made sense anymore.
“My husband went to go see what was happening,” she rasped. “He didn’t come back. Heard things on the radio. Things out there. Bad things. One bit me.” She held out the bundle again. “Take her.”
I leaned closer until I saw the grayish skin underneath the blanket.
Oh. A baby.
Well, shit.
“Take her. She can have a better life.”
Footsteps slapped against pavement. “Vibeke!” Dax, covered in soot, matched the permanent darkness around us. “Vibeke, we have to go.”
“She’s fine,” the woman babbled. “She’s fine, see? She’s so quiet. Never cries anymore.”
“Tony’s going to—”
“Please take her. Take her wherever you’re going.” She tugged on my hand. “She deserves a chance to live. I can’t get out. She can.”
I guess that’s the role of the mother, after all: to make sure the offspring can get away and lead a normal life.
“There could be nothing where we’re going,” Dax said, clasping my arm. “Vibeke, come on.”
“Don’t leave her here. Don’t do it.” Her fingers dug into my palm. “Please. Your mother would have done the same.”
I’d never seen a gray baby before. “How long has she been quiet?”
“A few days. She knows she needs to be quiet. It keeps us alive. She’s such a good girl…”
Dax, damn him, looked like he was thinking it over. “What would we feed it?”
You idiot, it’s dead. “We have nothing to feed it,” I said slowly. “We barely have food for ourselves.”
“You can’t just leave her!” she shrilled.
I did my best to extricate myself from her claws. “Miss, your baby—”
“Please!” Tears streamed down her face. Dead things were probably getting closer with each moment we hesitated. “Please, just take her. Please. I know I’m not going to make it. But you—you’re young—you can take care of her—”
Dax looked hopefully back in the direction of the Road King. “We can just carry her—”
“Dax.” I shook my head. “Look closer.”
He stepped closer, and the woman eagerly shoved the baby at him. I took the opportunity to wrench myself free and hobble over to my gun.
“Oh,” Dax murmured. “I see.”
“She’s just quiet is all! Just quiet!”
I picked up the rifle. “We can’t help you.”
“Can’t we just take it?” Dax looked at me pleadingly. “It’ll make her feel better.”
Yeah, and what if it came back and bit us while we fled? I latched onto his arm with my free hand and pulled him away from the woman, ashamed I couldn’t look her in the eye. “It’ll weigh us down. We’re off-balance already.”
“Why won’t you take her?” The voice went up several octaves. “Save her.”
The steady puttering of the motorcycle engine was suddenly eclipsed by the thin, reedy moan I’d heard entirely too much of lately. Dax swung his gun wildly back and forth, aiming it at a flimsy-looking wooden wall nearby. “Hey, lady, how solid is that fence?”
She rocked her dead baby, her thin shoulders shivering. “My husband put it up…he wanted to make us a shelter…I don’t know where he went…”
Dax looked at me, his eyes getting so big I feared they’d roll out of his head. “Vibeke. Let’s go.”
The wall leaned forward, and the moaning increased. I couldn’t see all that much in the poor light, but it seemed to have been thrown up between two buildings, essentially sealing off an alleyway.
Apparently the husband hadn’t counted on the recently reanimated dead throwing their weight against it when he built the thing. At least, he hadn’t counted on a lot of the recently reanimated dead.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s split.”
The woman seized my arm, her fingers digging painfully into my jacket sleeve. “No, you can’t, you can’t leave without my baby…”
“Let me go!”
The wall shuddered, then collapsed entirely beneath the weight of all the flesh. My mouth fell open an inch or two as the gray, staggering figures piled over it, reaching out with rotting hands that were missing chunks of flesh and even entire fingers.
And the smell—oh, God, the smell…
The woman screeched, leaping upward with her dead child clutched to her chest. “They’re here!”
Dax seized my arm. “No shit, Sherlock. I vote we leave.”
“Seconded.”
We scrambled back the way we’d come, but the dead people swarmed up around us, their moans seeping through my ear canals and into my brain. My legs might as well have been lead, but my arms still worked, and I batted the rifle around frantically, trying to force a path for myself.
“Vibeke! Vibeke, Dax, where are you?” Tony sounded frantic—and close.
The swarm closed ranks.
“Tony!” My voice was buried beneath their howls, and any answering reply from him was carried away. They clumped in closer, rotten fingers clutching at my jacket and hair. One of them got in too close, its hands bumping along the side of my gun, and I heard a soft click as something shifted. Its face lunged toward mine, greenish-gray teeth clacking, clacking—
I snapped the butt up and bashed it into the dead thing’s face, sending it staggering backward.
It disappeared into its similarly smelly compatriots. I pointed the rifle in the general vicinity of their heads and yanked the trigger.
The rifle leaped up and dragged my arms to the right, unloading a solid spray of bullets into the crowd as it went. I went with it, eyes going wide as the quivering mass of undead flesh in front of me seemed to diminish exponentially.
I took my finger off the trigger, and the gun stilled in my hands. Damn, the thing had a hell of a kick.
I took off through the mob, trying to ignore the cadaverous faces, the gnashing teeth, and the glazed, milky eyes that nonetheless held a sort of ferocious intensity.
The steady pop-pop of gunfire caught my attention, and I switched directions. What’s the world turned into if I’m running toward gunshots?
Evie’s barks abruptly shifted into a howl. She sounded like she was coming from the other direction—away from the gunshots. I looked blindly between the shuffling, staggering figures, my eyes blurring in the stinging air.
Somewhere out there, a zombie aficionado would probably kill to trade places with me, provided he hadn’t already been vaporized a few days prior.
A hand clamped down around my shoulder, and I wheeled around, nearly clobbering the woman in the face. She flinched aside in time, the rifle’s barrel passing just past her nose. This way, she mouthed, pointing behind her. She pulled me deeper into a swath of smoke and ash, and I lifted my left arm to my mouth, trying to breathe the scent of my jacket instead of the stuff in the air. All I ended up doing was breathing in leather-scented ash.
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