“He refused my love. But you, Hemingway, have not. I can see it.”
Hemingway thought about mimicking the starry gaze Marco’s followers had. He decided he’d be more believable if he maintained his stoic expression and simply nodded.
“And I have no doubt you could pass the love test,” said Marco. “You’re a big, powerful man, and I heard about your exploits outside of town.”
There was a commotion in the crowd. Guards hustled Keats from the pews to the front of the pulpit. They stripped his shirt off. Underneath it was a boney chest and a nearly concave stomach.
“What the hell is this?” said Hemingway.
“A love test should be just that,” said Marco, “a test. You’d mince the former Mr. Flak here in a split second. But your leader here, why, he’s not much more than a bag of bones. Skinny before the outbreak and positively skeletal since then, right? But love can provide all the strength he will need.”
There was more shouting from the crowd. Marco’s tone turned brittle as he continued speaking.
“For others among us, however, there need not be a test, but a penance. It saddens and enrages me to report that we have a piece of filth traitor in our flock.”
Two guards brought Bart forward and held her right outside the fighting pen. Flak was practically running in place against his constraints.
“She didn’t do anything,” said Keats.
A new voice from the crowd rose up. “You don’t have to lie.” It was Tommy.
“She planted that seed of doubt,” he said. “Lied to us about Marco. Tried to use us so she could escape. To what? She’s so blind with hatred that she doesn’t even have a plan. Just keep running and running—”
“You rat piece of shit,” said Hemingway as he lunged at Tommy. A guard hit him with a rifle butt and pointed it at him until he stood down.
“You’re a good man but too weak to lead,” Tommy said to Keats. “But Marco understands. He likes you. Loves you. You’ll pass this love test, and everything will be OK.”
“And before the test,” said Marco, “comes the penance. Bart’s last moments shall be spent being devoured by Flak here. We’ll tie her up just in case she has more fight in her than it looks. After that, you should be able to pass the test with no problem. Walkers don’t have the same, ah, bite to them when they’ve had a meal. Excuse the pun.”
He signaled to the guards, who tried to tie Bart’s hands together but were having problems. She headbutted one of them in the nose, sending a stream of blood shooting across the floor. Flak reached towards it in hunger.
Two more of Marco’s men jumped in and grabbed Bart’s legs. As she kicked and screamed, Pike maneuvered from the pews to the aisle. Others in the church looked at her in curiosity. She stretched up like she was about to exercise, then grabbed something from under her seat. It was her spear. She hurled it into the neck of one of the guards.
Someone raised a rifle at her. “You’re fucking dead!” he said, but he stood dumbfounded as Pike unveiled a dagger and flung it into his eye. Everyone else froze. Even Marco had no words.
Several other people raised their rifles and looked at their leader for answers. People in the back of the church ran towards the exits. Someone with a machete swung it at Hemingway, who grabbed his wrist and flung him into the fighting ring.
Flak’s handlers couldn’t hold him any longer. He broke free from his constraints and fell upon the machete-wielder, who shrieked in agony.
Chaos broke out. Keats grabbed Pike by the arm as she moved about the scrum, bashing Marco’s men in their heads and dodging their counterattacks. “What the hell is this?” he said.
“No bullets,” she said. “Their guns don’t work.”
Someone slashed Hemingway’s arm with a bayonet. Hemingway lunged at him but missed. When he turned around, Cochise had shoved his finger so far up the man’s nasal cavity that he pierced his brain.
“You gotta work on your quickness,” said Cochise, smiling.
“What the fuck,” said Hemingway.
Pike yelled out, “He’s with us.”
There were more screams from the back of the church as people surged back inside. They began to barricade the doors, even as more townspeople beat on them desperately to be let back in.
“Walkers!” said an older man with blood streaming down his face. “About twenty of them right outside the church!”
Marco’s men stopped fighting and circled around their leader, who had retreated to the pulpit. Some of the townspeople ran towards the basement door for safety, but when they opened it, two walkers, both former residents who had failed the love test, burst out and attacked them.
Keats, Pike, Cochise, Hemingway, and Jamie hastily gathered by a wall. “Who else is with us?” said Hemingway.
“Duck’s outside,” said Pike. “He’s the one who cut the fence, but he was supposed to warn us if walkers came through.”
Keats stuttered in anger. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.”
“Will you look at these people?” said Hemingway. Although many of the townspeople panicked, there were several, Katie among them, who kept a cool demeanor as they piled chairs on the doors and gathered weapons. Others, their faces glowing with religious ecstasy, put down the walkers inside the church.
Keats looked towards the pulpit and caught Tommy’s eye. Tommy raised a shaking finger at him and shouted, “You! You infected this church with hate!”
Marco emerged from behind him and lifted his revolver. The information Cochise gave to Pike wasn’t entirely correct; there was still one gun left in the compound that was loaded.
Marco fired at Keats. Jamie pushed him out of the way and grunted as the bullet pierced the flesh between her neck and shoulder.
“Jesus!” said Pike as she grabbed the girl and pressed her hand on the wound. Marco aimed for a second shot but was pushed by his own men towards the basement, which had finally been cleared of walkers.
Hemingway gathered the unconscious Jamie in his arms. Pike climbed a pew and smashed a window. Jagged plates of stained glass crashed to the floor around them.
Cochise was the first over the wall. He helped everyone else down just as a group of five walkers noticed them.
Hemingway charged and clotheslined them into a pile, allowing Pike to guide everyone down the street towards their escape. Before they could turn the corner, she heard a bullet rush by her head.
Marco had escaped through the outside basement door. “God’s vengeance is firm and cruel!” he yelled as he fired again.
Keats and the others ran, crouching, down another street and through several yards to the place where Pike had arranged for Duck to cut a hole in the fence. Next to it was a pile of red bones and torn clothes. Keats recognized the shirt; it was Duck’s.
“Goddammit,” said Pike. “They surprised him. How did they know to enter here?”
“We’ll have to worry about it later,” said Hemingway.
He was right. A newly dead walker burst from the trees and nearly clawed into Keats. Pike went to grab a weapon from a bag stashed nearby, but the walker was on the attack again.
As it struck towards Hemingway, who still had Jamie in his arms, the same Rottweiler Keats encountered earlier sprung out and pulled the walker to the ground. Pike then drove a hammer into its brain.
Bart whistled, and her dog bounded towards her, tongue wagging. “My ace in the hole,” she said. “Don’t worry, he’s a sweetie.”
On the other side of the fence, Pike bound the hole closed with wire.
“We don’t have time for that,” Hemingway said.
“There are innocent people here,” she said.
“It’s not a matter of—” Cochise cut him off by grabbing his shoulder. Hemingway almost headbutted him before he saw that he wanted him to lower Jamie to the ground.
Marco’s former top lieutenant looked at Jamie’s neck. “There’s an exit wound,” he said. “We’ll need a way to disinfect it, but she’s ok for now.�
��
“So, you’re a doctor now?” said Hemingway.
“Nurse, actually. Thanks for asking.”
The group moved further from the fence. People shouted, and walkers snarled, but no one ever appeared. “What now?” Keats said, covered in a sheen of sweat, still shirtless from the battle at the church.
“We’re headed east from here,” said Pike. “There’s a county road about half an hour away. We can start a fire there and cauterize Jamie’s wound.”
Keats stared at the ground and said, “Thanks.”
Jamie groaned. Hemingway relaxed some of the pressure he’d applied to her neck.
“We better get moving,” said Cochise.
Bart’s dog pointed his ears back and growled. Pike grabbed her hammer and looked towards the fence, but the Rottweiler faced the other direction.
“Cute dog,” said a voice.
Before anyone in the group could do anything, three men with handguns were upon them. They didn’t look like anyone Keats had seen in the compound.
The man in the middle lowered his weapon. He was handsome, like a soap opera villain, with dark curly hair and a long scar on his cheek.
“What do you think, Roth?” said one of the others.
“I think we flushed out some folks who doubt their faith,” said Roth. “Apostates.”
“Wait,” said Pike. “You sent walkers in there?”
“Amazing what a few sharks can do in a pool full of minnows.”
“You got our friend killed.”
“You’re one to talk. Ask that sicko leader of yours what he’s done with our people.”
“He’s not our leader,” said Keats. “I am. We’re trying to get the hell out of here. Please, do you have a camp? Do you have alcohol, anything for wounds? She’s not bit.”
Roth looked at Jamie for a moment. “Let’s go,” he said. “And shut that dog up.”
Within the compound, the sounds of chaos began to silence.
3 The Skeleton People by Matthieu Cartron
It doesn’t rain much in New Mexico, but for the first time in a long while, I feel cold, heavy droplets against my arms, and then on top of my head, trickling down my long tangled hair and onto my face. As thunder echoes across the desert sky, I can feel the rain wash away the dirt, blood, and sweat that has clung to my battered body. From the back of a pickup in front of the Walmart, I have a clear view of I-40, but there are no cars that pass by, and no people on foot either.
I hop off the back of the pickup and turn around, facing the highway. My nose bleeds from the dryness, and my hands crack like the parched earth around me. The store is like any superstore, huge, but I can’t stay in it for too long before feeling like I might be trapped in there forever. I think about heading out west to California. But if I make it that far, what will I find? I’ll run into more of them—that goes without saying. But what about those unaffected like me? By then maybe we’ll all be gone—maybe we already are. If only there were a safe zone somewhere. . . .
“Safe zone,” I scoff, shaking my head. I haven’t been able to pick up any kind of signal from anywhere. Just static on the TVs and radios inside. In the movies, there’s always some safe haven to get to when the world ends, a safe place with people who aren’t too far away from finding a solution or something close to one. But that’s in the movies. I spit on the ground, letting the droplets of rain dissolve and tear away at the sizzling white bubbles.
I hear a gentle whooshing sound. I look up to where it’s coming from, squinting. At this point, I can hardly trust my senses anymore, and I wonder if the events of the last few days have maybe sharpened them, or have instead made me go numb. No. I see it. A small speck at first and then quickly something I can recognize.
A navy-blue car, approaching fast, and behind the wheel, a man with little time left.
***
The paper-thin walls and the restlessness of my roommates made it always far more difficult to study than it should have been. Instead, I’d go to Dane Smith Hall, a three-story building on the northwest side of Main Campus, sometimes between classes and sometimes at night. People would ask me why I’d go all the way over there to study when there were so many better, closer options like the Zimmerman Library. And that’s the thing. The “better” options were the ones with people, the very thing I was trying to avoid.
In the first few seconds of waking up, it’s hard to make sense of anything—it’s like your brain has to warm up, and if it doesn’t, it might just unravel into stringy, purplish brown threads. I feel the coldness of the syrupy floor first, peeling away my tanned face as I draw my head up to look around, my eyes still groggy from what must have been a long nap. I sit up on my knees and rub my eyes. I can see that the hallways and stairs are empty, which is strange. It doesn’t matter if students are in class or not; there are always some people around, maybe studying or waiting for their next class. I pull my phone out of my pocket and check the time: 9:20 a.m. I must have come here to study last night and fallen asleep instead. “Typical,” I mutter. And to add to that, my phone is only minutes away from dying.
I drag myself onto my feet and bumble to the nearest classroom. If the halls are empty then there have to be people in the classrooms—maybe there’s been a lockdown? But when I peer through the small, rectangular window in the door, I see nothing. Just empty chairs and an erased chalkboard.
“Shit,” I mutter.
I check the next classroom. Same result. Then the next one, and the one after that. Every classroom on the second floor empty. It’s Wednesday, I remember. I check my phone again just to be sure, hoping I’m wrong and that I’ve just lost my bearings, but no—the little white letters on the home screen agree.
I head down the steps to the first floor and check those classrooms as well. Nothing again, and my heart is now beating a little faster.
There are several entry points into Dane Smith, some of which I probably don’t even know about. Most people use the doors on the south side, which open up to a concrete sitting area with several gum-ridden benches and cigarette-stained tables. I’m nearly at one of the two entrances on the south side when I realize that I forgot my light jacket—the blue one I always carry with me—on the second floor. I race back up the stairs and return to the place where I’d fallen asleep.
My jacket is on the floor a few feet from the window. I pick it up and flap it against my knee to shake it out, and out of the corner of one eye, I see it, through the smudged window, just on the other side of campus.
A wide column of smoke. I can see the chemical gray and black rising into the somber sky, but I can’t see what’s burning, except that I know my dorm is in that direction, and maybe just about that far away. I pull out my phone again—god, it needs to be replaced, the screen is cracked in so many places, and the volume buttons haven’t worked for who knows how long. It’s my fault too. Every time you drop something like that, you care a little less about the next time it hits the ground.
I’m not connected to the internet, and when I try to connect, my phone says it can’t find the UNM Wi-Fi address—or any address, for that matter. And no service, not even the one bar you get sometimes in the middle of nowhere.
I turn my gaze back down to the window. It seems that the more I look around, the more questions I have, and nothing is making any sort of sense. Just over the grassy hill that separates the dull, concrete patio from the street, I see the figure of a man, contorted and prostrate in the grass, his head concealed beneath one of the bushes. There are homeless people around campus, but they don’t sleep like that. No one does.
“What the hell?” I whisper.
I run down the stairs, this time with my things, to the south entrance. I open the front door and prop it open with my bag; I don’t know if I might need to go back inside, and I’m not sure if I’m locked from the outside. Carefully, I walk across the patio toward the stricken figure in the grass. He’s well concealed from the front doors—invisible, even—which is probably why I m
issed him when I first came down.
He can’t be much older than I am, and he’s short, and his ankles are turned unnaturally inward. He’s shaking, ever so slightly. As I approach the man, I can hear him whimpering, or maybe panting, soft but harsh at the same time. I can’t see much of his face, but the skin on his neck and arms is wet from the sweat pumping from his bubbling pores. Once I’m standing over him, I crouch to the ground and ever so delicately place a hand on the back of his head. I want to recoil when I feel the warm, clammy moisture, but I force myself to hold still, hoping to stir a reaction so that I might be able to help him.
A few seconds go by. And when I grab his shoulder to try and turn him onto his back, his head swivels around, cracking like a snapped branch, and the soft whimper turns into a vicious, inhuman snarl. I jump back, horrified by the sight of the ghastly creature. The man’s face is discolored, and his eyes are bloodshot, the skin on his sickening face half-peeled away and his teeth sharp and rotting. Desperate, I take off back in the direction of the door, not daring to look back at the crazed, grotesque human. I grab my things and quickly shut the door inside Dane Smith, and as I do, I feel the impact of the man slam again the steel frame. The creature is astonishingly quick, and his limbs move with the frenzy of a flailing insect. He’s looking at me, through the glass, and although his pupils seem to twitch in a panicked fear, I know right away what his intentions are.
I sprint back up the stairs to the window on the second floor. I know that from there I can watch the creature, and if need be dart into the classroom that lies only a few feet away. The creature continues to pant by the door, looking at the place where I stared back. I begin to collect my thoughts, but I don’t dare leave the window—what if I were to lose sight of that thing? Then what? I think of my family and our home in El Paso. But then I close my eyes. No, I say to myself, I can’t let my thoughts wander in that direction. It would be foolish of me to think that what I’ve just seen might be more widespread.
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