by Tim Waggoner
Nicholas watched as Kate pulped the little zombie’s head or, more accurately, watched Kate’s face. He drank in every detail of her expression. The way she gritted her teeth, the way she swallowed as her bile rose, and—this was his favorite—the way she kept her eyes open wide when what she really wanted to do, more than anything in the whole goddamned world, was squeeze them shut.
He thought about Marie’s suggestion for killing the zombie, and he wondered what it would be like to hold his knife up to one of Kate’s eyes and gently, so very, very gently, press the tip of the blade against the surface and push. He wondered how long it would take for the eye to pop like a fat, ripe grape, wondered what sounds Kate would make when it did.
His dick stiffened.
“C’mon,” he said, his voice betraying no hint of the excitement he felt. “Let’s go.”
The three of them left the yard and began walking down the street, heading for home, keeping a constant watch for zombies.
Nicholas’s cock stayed hard the entire way.
Chapter Three
David ran until he couldn’t go any farther. He then staggered into a barren yard, lungs heaving and heart pounding, and sat down against the side of the house to catch his breath. The structure was in a state of advanced decay, like all the others, and the wall sagged when he leaned back against it. For a moment he feared it might collapse beneath his weight, but the wall held. For now.
He was pretty sure he’d left the campus area, but the town’s nightmarish transformation made it difficult for him to recognize his location. Everything looked the same, like a devastating war or natural disaster had happened overnight, leaving Lockwood nothing but a collection of lifeless ruins. He couldn’t even use street signs to figure out where he was. All the ones he’d seen so far had been either rusted over or covered with that weird mold. He’d run blindly from the demon, without heed to direction, and while it looked as if he’d gotten away from her, he had no idea where he was. Maybe Simon—
He turned his head, expecting to see the teenager sitting next to him, but Simon wasn’t there.
David frowned. He remembered Simon accompanying him when he fled from the demon. The boy had kept up with him easily, running without any apparent exertion, his energy never flagging. David remembered seeing others as they ran too. No more gun-toting demons, thank God, but people, maybe a dozen or more. A few had turned to look at him as he ran past, but most acted as if he weren’t there. Some wandered through the streets, moving slowly and clumsily, as if they were half-asleep. Others were engaged in far more disturbing activities.
He’d seen a group of people gathered in a yard, pulling glistening wet organs and loops of intestine from the ripped-open belly of a scabrous creature the size of a large dog. They fought over the grisly prizes they extracted from the dead beast, snarling wordlessly, as if little more than animals themselves. Soon after that, he passed a man and woman kneeling in the middle of the street around the prone form of a demon child. Boy or girl, he couldn’t say. Too much blood covered what remained of the body to determine its gender. The man’s and woman’s mouths were covered with crimson, as were their hands, and their clothes were absolutely soaked with it. They each held pieces of meat in their gore-slick fingers, biting off chunks and chewing rapidly, expressions of beatific ecstasy on their faces.
Part of David was sickened to his core by the unthinkable depravity he’d witnessed. But another part of him felt only a single, almost-overpowering sensation in response: hunger. Both times he’d found his pace slowing, as if his subconscious was trying to get him to stop and join in the feast. He’d increased his pace and continued running, but it had taken an effort of will each time.
Is that what had happened to Simon? Had he experienced similar temptation, only to give in to it? Was he even now gorging himself on the flesh of the doglike creature or, even more disturbing, that of the dead demon child?
Maybe Simon wasn’t here because Simon wasn’t real, he thought. Maybe none of this was real. Maybe he was asleep and dreaming. His dreams were usually more realistic than this, though. He’d be stuck in a hellacious traffic jam that was going to make him late for work, or he’d still be married to Sarah, still living in the house with her and the kids. He’d dream they were all having dinner together, or that the kids were playing outside while he mowed the lawn, stuff like that. He couldn’t remember ever having a dream this bizarre before.
He let his hand fall to the ground, and he scratched at the dry, hard soil with his fingers. His nails made thin furrows in the earth, and when he held his hand up to his nose and sniffed, he smelled a faint unpleasant odor that reminded him of rotting flowers. He couldn’t remember ever dreaming in such vivid detail before, either. Strange as it was, this distorted version of his town looked real, felt real, even smelled real.
And this dream was going on so long… His dreams were usually a lot shorter than this. At least, that’s how they seemed.
Maybe…maybe he’d had some kind of accident, been in a car wreck or something. Maybe he’d suffered brain damage and was in a coma. People could dream during comas, couldn’t they? And he’d just keep on dreaming until he came out of the coma—if he ever did.
Or, he thought with a stab of fear, maybe he was crazy. Maybe he’d had some kind of mental meltdown, was buckled into a straitjacket and lying on the floor of a padded room somewhere, hallucinating that he was sitting with his back against a rotting house on the verge of collapse in a world with a phlegm-colored sky, where ivory-skinned demons carried rifles and people killed and ate monstrous creatures raw.
Any of those possibilities could be true, he thought. They all explained why he couldn’t remember how he’d come to be walking down the street with Simon. And they all explained why the world had become such a nightmare. Anything could happen in a person’s mind, especially if that mind was sick or damaged. And as frightening as either of those prospects was, it beat the hell out of the last possibility, the unthinkable one, the one that despite all reason his gut told him was the truth.
This was happening, all of it. Really happening.
He’d rather be in a coma or insane. Either way, he’d be the only one trapped in this bad dream. But if it was real, then everyone—everyone who was still alive, anyway—was suffering along with him.
It was easier to think now than it had been earlier, almost as if he’d been asleep and was finally starting to wake up. And now that he could think better—and didn’t have a demon trying to kill him—he needed a plan. He couldn’t keep sitting here. He wasn’t exposed, but he wasn’t hidden, either. He needed to find a place where he would be safe, at least for a little while. Someplace where he could rest and try to figure out what the hell was going on. But first he needed to call Sarah and make sure that Steve and Lizzie were all right. He reached for his cell phone, only to find his pockets empty. No phone, no keys, no wallet.
All right, then. First order of business: find a phone.
Assuming the phones still worked, that is. He hadn’t seen any sign of the power being on in any of the buildings he’d passed so far, and if the power was out, maybe the phone system was down too. If that was the case, then landline phones would be useless. Still, he had to try.
He considered investigating the houses in the neighborhood, but they looked as if they would collapse on him the moment he entered. He needed to find a more stable structure, one that not only wouldn’t fall down and crush him, but somewhere he could hide from the demons. Someplace that had a phone. He suddenly felt like an idiot. He had a phone. He reached for his pocket, then stopped.
He’d done this before, hadn’t he? Reached for his cell, only to find it gone. He didn’t remember, not the exact details, but he felt it was true.
Maybe he wasn’t thinking as clearly as he’d believed. He wished Simon were here. The boy was strange, but he’d seemed clear-minded enough. At least he’d be someone David could use to double-check his perceptions. But he’d lost Simon somewhere alo
ng the way, so he’d just have to muddle along alone. He’d take it slow, keep things simple. Hopefully, there’d be less chance of his getting confused that way.
Okay. Safe shelter. A phone. Close by.
Country Time Buffet was close by. Kind of. Closer than his apartment or the house he’d once shared with Sarah and the kids, anyway. He didn’t know how sturdy the restaurant was since it was housed in a strip mall. It wasn’t as if those things were built to last a hundred years. And as much as he might wish otherwise, he doubted the restaurant had been untouched by the weird decay that had befallen what he’d seen of the town so far, but it was a familiar place, and right now he figured he could use a bit of familiarity. He guessed it was time to go to work, then.
He stood. He started to take a step, but then he paused, frowning. There was a reason he’d gotten up, he was sure of it, but he couldn’t… Then it came back to him. The restaurant. It frightened him how fast his thoughts slipped from his mind, and he told himself to keep concentrating on the restaurant as he traveled, to make sure he didn’t forget it again.
He began whispering to himself over and over. “The restaurant, the restaurant, the restaurant…”
In addition to speaking the words, he fixed an image of Country Time Buffet in his mind—the bright-yellow letters of its sign, the faux-granite façade, the large picture windows that let in plenty of light for the serving line.
The thought of the serving line and the food it normally held on any given day—fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, roast beef, steamed carrots, corn, coleslaw, fresh biscuits—woke the endless void at the center of his gut, and it howled to be filled. For a moment the hunger drove everything else out of his mind, but then he thought of his kids, of Steve and Lizzie, and while the hunger didn’t vanish, it receded into the background, still present but manageable.
He continued whispering “the restaurant”, continued picturing it, and when he felt he was ready, he started walking.
But he only made it halfway across the yard before he stopped. An older gentleman was coming toward him, an African-American man in his sixties, bald, medium height, stocky, wearing a blue sweater, tan slacks and black shoes. The man smiled as he approached, but there was something pleading, almost desperate in his expression.
“Don’t leave. Everyone leaves. Can’t catch them. Knees aren’t what they used to be. Can’t move fast enough.”
The man’s lurching, back-and-forth gait was evidence of his words. He looked like he was in danger of toppling over with every step he took, but somehow he managed to maintain his balance.
David felt an instant wariness upon seeing the man. He wasn’t sure why. The guy wasn’t a…wasn’t a… An image flashed through his mind: bone-white flesh, burning-coal eyes, sharp teeth. Wasn’t one of those things, whatever they were. Did they have a name? He couldn’t remember. Still, he had a feeling that he needed to be careful around the man, that the man couldn’t be trusted, that maybe he wasn’t right in the head. He had a dim memory of two, no, three people standing around something. A pole? A tree? He tried to bring the memory into sharper focus, but it was like attempting to grab hold of a handful of mist, and the memory swiftly faded.
The man kept coming. He stepped onto the sidewalk, lurched into the yard.
“So hungry. Just need a little. Take the edge off. Couple bites, no more.”
The man spoke in a dreamy, almost singsong voice, as if he were in some sort of trance. But his gaze was sharp and clear.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” David said. Without realizing it, he took a step backward.
The man drew nearer. Another few seconds, and he would be within arm’s reach. “Just don’t move,” he said, almost crooning. “Only take a little. Promise. Promisssssse…”
He raised his arms, as if he intended to give David a hug. And then, with a sudden burst of energy, he lunged forward, eyes wild and teeth bared.
For a split second David stood frozen, but then his hunger welled up within him with the force of a tidal wave. It grabbed hold of his consciousness and swept it away, and the last thing he was aware of was baring his own teeth and rushing forward to meet the other man’s attack with a feral growl.
Joe Robbins stood on the roof of Lockwood High School’s central building, trying to look like he wasn’t worrying, when in fact it took a major effort of will to keep him from pacing back and forth. There were four armed sentries posted on the roof, one for each side of the building, and while Joe knew them—hell, he knew everybody in town who was still alive—he didn’t consider them friends. And the last thing he wanted was for them to find out how he was really feeling. He didn’t want them to see him as weak. In this new world, which he thought of as AB (After Blacktide), weakness of any kind was looked down on. If you were weak, people couldn’t rely on you. That made you a liability, a potential threat to survival. Besides, he was Joe. So he put on his best stoic face, and stood still, hands in his coat pockets, and kept watch silently.
The sentry closest to him, a middle-aged guy named Pat Holland, bald, with a snow-white beard which made him look something like a malnourished Santa, noticed Joe and walked over to him. He smiled.
“Checking on things?” he asked.
Pat’s eyes were white and clouded, his skin yellow and leathery, dry cracked lips drawn back from jagged bloodstained teeth. Joe drew in a shaky breath, closed his eyes and told himself that there was nothing wrong with this man. He wasn’t a zombie. He wasn’t!
When Joe opened his eyes, Pat looked human once more.
Joe released the breath he’d been holding and managed to smile back. “Just making the rounds.”
He hated it when he experienced what he thought of as one of his “blips”, those times when his imagination insisted on seeing people as zombies. It didn’t help that he knew everyone, himself included, was a potential zombie. Just because Blacktide hadn’t changed the survivors right away didn’t mean the disease, or whatever it was, wasn’t lying dormant in their systems, ready to activate at any moment. And if you got bitten by a zombie, you’d get a direct dose of virus in your system potentially strong enough to override whatever immunity had protected you from the initial outbreak.
We’re all zombies, he thought. Some of us just don’t know it yet.
Pat wore a brown winter coat, hood back, the front unzipped to reveal a black hoodie. He carried a rifle slung over his shoulder, his hands kept warm by fingerless gloves. He needed those fingers free to work the weapon’s trigger. The other three sentries were dressed—and armed—in similar fashion. The rifles were mostly a precaution, though. The ground floor of the high school was well fortified against break-in, and, more importantly, the sound of a rifle shot would only serve to attract more zombies, not to mention waste ammunition. Still, there was no sense in taking chances, hence the sentries.
These security measures, like most in place at the school, had been Joe’s idea. It was why he was regarded with such respect by Lockwood’s survivors, why he was Joe. He didn’t like it, not at all. The way the others looked at him, spoke to him, came to him when they had problems…it all made him uncomfortable as hell. He was twenty-five, for Christ’s sake, a computer science major who’d never managed to graduate college and who now lived in a world where a bicycle was considered hi-tech. Sometimes, he wished everyone would leave him alone, that they would take their problems to the Council. Well, there was one person he didn’t want to leave him alone: Marie.
He was facing north at the moment, and he could see over the rooftops of the houses closest to the school. They looked like black-shingled islands rising above a sea of orange, yellow and brown leaves. The sky was a striking crisp blue, with only a few wispy white clouds off in the distance, atypical for November in Southwest Ohio, where the sky was usually overcast and gray. It was amazing how much clearer the sky was since most of humanity had gone the way of the dodo. All in all, it was a beautiful postapocalyptic afternoon. Shame he was too worried to
enjoy it.
“Any sign of Kate and Nicholas?” Joe worked to keep his tone even, and he avoided mentioning Marie.
“Not yet. I wouldn’t be too concerned, though. They’ve only been out a couple hours.” Pat chuckled. “Besides, those two can take care of themselves.”
It wasn’t them that Joe was worried about.
“Thanks,” he said.
Pat nodded and returned to his post. Joe was relieved. Pat could get gabby sometimes, and he really didn’t feel like talking right now.
He walked over to the roof’s edge, but he didn’t stand too close. He had a thing about heights, and while the high school had only two stories, it was enough to trigger a mild attack of vertigo if he wasn’t careful. And even though he knew it was unlikely to happen, he feared he might get so dizzy that he would lose his balance and pitch forward over the side. If that happened, he could only hope to be lucky enough to die in the fall. Because if he survived he’d be too injured to move, and he’d be easy prey—grade A prime zombie chow. The goddamned things had hearing sharp as a dog’s, and sound would draw them—his cry of terror as he fell, the meaty thud of his body hitting the ground.
He imagined them coming for him: men, women, children—all with yellowed skin, overlong hair; their clothing stained, tattered and torn. Eyes wild with hunger, hands outstretched, fingers curled into greedy claws, eager to grab hold of his flesh and start tearing off bloody chunks, mouths open wider than would seem possible, as if their jaws could unhinge like a snake’s, milky-white eyes clearing at the last second before they started biting, ripping, chewing… And worst of all, before darkness rushed in to claim him, he’d hear the soft, low sounds they’d make as they devoured him. Sounds of zombie foodgasm.
MmmmmmMmmmmMmmmmm…
He felt a sudden surge of panic, accompanied by an almost overwhelming urge to void his bladder. But he didn’t head back downstairs. For one thing, he hated using the in-house, as they called it, more than he absolutely had to. They’d dug it in the school’s boiler room—and hadn’t it been a bitch to bust through the floor? The stink was awful, and ever since the early days of Blacktide, he associated bad smells of any kind with them. Besides, zombies were attracted to human waste like…well, like flies to shit. Zombies had a dog’s sense of smell too, and where there was poop and piss, there were people. Every time he used the in-house, he felt like he was sitting atop, and adding to, a mound of redolent zombie bait.