I don’t think, I react, and as he takes a step toward me, I drop my basket of stolen food and think back to my old quarterback days and charge at him, slamming his back against the car with a crunch and a grunt as my shoulder collides with his ribcage.
I step back from him and he slides down the side of the car with groan of “Fuck.”
“Anyone else want some of this?” I gesture to myself, slamming a fist into my chest with a snarl. “And you.” I point to the guy I just slam-dunked against my car, who’s now trying to climb back up to his knees. “Don’t swear in front of the lady.” I kick him in the ribs, forcing him to roll away from me with a cry of pain.
The other two men step away, hands raised in surrender. They glance behind me, turn tail, and run. “Yeah, that’s what I thought!” I shout after them. Hockey stick guy climbs up and stumbles away, clutching a hand to his side.
Jane scuttles over to the passenger side door and unlocks it, and I fling the door open wide and grab her into a bear hug. “You okay, baby?”
“I can handle testosterone-filled boys like them.” She kisses my cheek.
“I know you can.” And I do—she has me wrapped around her little finger, after all.
“They just made me jump, they came from nowhere. I didn’t know what they wanted from me.”
“Something is going on. I don’t know what, but everyone is acting crazy today and I think the sooner we get out of here the better.” I kiss her head again.
Shouting makes me turn and look behind us, and confusion gives way to revulsion. A woman and a man are slowly coming toward us—or lurching, I should say. Definitely lurching. I can’t imagine they could do much of anything but lurch, given the condition they're in.
Two.
“Jane? Get in the car,” I say, pushing her back inside. I bend to pick up the hockey stick, my eyes never leaving the two coming toward us, and I try to take in the entire scene. The woman has blood dripping from a wound on the side of her head near her temple; it looks like it’s been bleeding for a while, by the amount of blood covering her. The man is walking with a limp, growling like a dog every time he takes another step forward, as if it’s difficult to walk and he’s extremely pissed off by that fact. I look down at his feet and see why: he only has one foot. A trail of blood is spewing from the place his left foot should be.
I test the weight of the hockey stick in my hand, trying to ignore Jane’s knocking on the passenger window. These creeps need sorting out, and since everyone else is running in the opposite direction, I guess it’s down to me.
“Come on!” I shout, and I swear these things speed up.
The closer they get, the more of their details I can make out. Their injuries are far worse than I originally thought. The woman, who I thought had a small head injury, actually has part of her skull showing—the skin peeled clean away from the side and back, exposing white bone. A shiver runs up and down my spine and I fight the urge to throw up my bacon sandwich from earlier. Her hazy eyes fix on me, and she opens her mouth wide and growls.
“Steve! Get in this car now.” Jane pushes open her car door, and I put a large palm up to it and slam it back closed.
“Stay inside,” I say to her, my eyes finally leaving the man and woman covered in blood and fixing on Jane’s. I stare at her through the glass, making sure she knows I’m serious, before I take a step toward the bloodied woman. “I think you need a doctor, love. Let me get you some help,” I say in my calmest voice, but she doesn’t listen and instead continues to move toward me with a groan.
As she gets to within arms’ reach, I push her away with the end of the hockey stick. She’s clumsy but strong as she stumbles to the left and grabs the stick in both hands, trying to wrestle it from my grasp. We tussle like this until the one-footed guy gets too close and I keep hold of the hockey stick and push forwards with all my strength, sending the injured woman flailing to the ground. I want to apologize for doing that—the gentlemanly side of me knows that you should never hurt a woman—but the crazy woman starts to get back to her feet, looking even more pissed off than before.
I kick out at one-footed guy, catching him on the back of his shin to trip him up, just as the woman gets back to her feet. I pretend to swing at her but she doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t say anything, just continues to come forwards with yet another odd growl. I jog around the car to the driver’s side just as a young girl comes out of the store, laden down with shopping bags. The injured woman changes course and goes for the young girl instead of me, reaching for her and catching her off guard. As her fingers grip onto the young girl’s shoulder, the woman bites down in a frenzy, sending blood splattering across the sidewalk.
The young girl screams, Jane screams, I nearly piss myself, and the injured woman growls again as one-footed guy reaches for the young girl, too, biting into her calf and bringing her to her knees. Both of them tuck into her, biting and pulling at her, and I’m frozen to the spot, staring open-mouthed at what’s happening right in front of me, even as the poor girl screams and begs for me to help her.
It’s Jane that breaks my reverie, opening the driver’s side door a crack and screaming at me to get in the car before she has to kick my sorry ass into next week.
The young girl isn’t screaming now, but she’s still alive, crying and mewling softly as she lies on the ground and the two people continue to eat her.
It hits me like a ton of bricks to the crotch—or that could just be Jane as she hits me and shouts at me to get in the car again.
They’re eating her. I grip hold of the hockey stick and run back around the side of the car , and , without giving it another thought, I swing back and crack the sick woman across the back of the head. The sensation runs up the stick to my hands and through my arms, making me cringe, but I don’t think as I swing back down again and again until the woman’s skull and the hockey stick crack almost simultaneously, and she falls in a heap, her face buried in the young girl’s neck.
I snap off the end of the stick, since it’s now dangling uselessly, and as one-footed guy looks up to me with flesh hanging from his chin, I ram the stick through his eye and straight into his brain. He stops and drops into a heap instantly. I grab the back of his clothes and drag him off the young girl, but I know I’m too late. She’s gone already, her eyes foggy and unfocused, blood seeping out of her wounds and covering the sidewalk. I stumble back, almost tripping over the woman whose head I caved in, and stagger toward the driver’s side of the car. I pull open the door, sit down, and look at Jane.
She reaches into one of the boxes in the back footwell, and after rummaging for a minute or two, she pulls out two gun cases and opens them up, retrieving our semi-automatic Colt forty-fives.
She hands one to me after loading it and looks me in the eye. “I told you, I always know what to pack,” she says through clenched teeth as she slams her seatbelt back on with trembling hands. “Now let’s get out of here.”
“I could have used this five minutes ago, you know?” I say.
She shrugs. “I forgot,” she adds apologetically.
I look out the window at the young woman dead on the pavement, her blood spilling out of her and creating a puddle of red that trails down into the gutter. As I watch, she twitches—her leg at first, and then her hand. Her eyes eventually blink into focus, or what I presume must be focus. They’re cloudy and gray now as she pulls herself up to her knees.
“Jane?” I say, pointing at the woman.
Jane’s hand covers her mouth as she stifles a sob.
“Time to go,” I say and stick the car in gear.
*
The drive out of the city is nerve-wracking. Every time we stop, people try to get in the car or we see more and more of the . . . injured? Sick? To hell with it, let’s just say it as it is: zombies, that’s what they really are. They can’t possibly be anything else—not to my mentality anyway. That woman was dead, and she came back to life. Those other two were eating her alive. That, in my book, is th
e very definition of a zombie, no matter how much I want to deny it.
I don’t know how or why this has happened, but it has, and we need to get to our camper up in the hills and away from all this madness before one of us gets killed. I look at Jane from the corner of my eye, looking all badass like a mini blonde G.I. Jane. Damn, she looks hot. I smile.
“Keep your eyes on the road, Steve,” she says, continuing to play with the radio channels.
I look away with a smirk. This is not how I planned the day going at all.
The radio buzzes to life and we hear a staticky voice coming through. Jane turns the volume up, but it’s still difficult to comprehend what they are saying.
“. . . stay inside . . . dangerous . . . government will be . . .”
I strain harder, willing the static to disappear.
“Steve!”
I look up and swerve around another zombie with a shudder. “Sorry, baby.”
She glares at me and turns the dial up louder.
“. . . outbreak . . . attacking citizens, so stay away from them . . . deadly force is acceptable . . .”
As relief rushes through me, I look up at Jane to make sure she heard what I did. Those people outside the store would have killed me or Jane in a heartbeat—hell, they did to that poor girl—and I wouldn’t change what my actions were for a minute; but murder is still murder to me, and most likely to the police too. Or that’s what I thought until I heard that deadly force was acceptable.
“Looks like I’m off the hook,” I say to her, swerving around a sharp bend with a three-car pileup in the middle of it. I drive up and onto the curb, ignoring the hammering of fists on the car; zombies or human, I’m not stopping for any of them.
“Did you bring more bullets for the Colts, baby?” I ask suddenly, pulling the car back onto the road.
She tsks at me. “Of course I did, what do you take me for? I was brought up to be prepared for anything, and that’s what I always am,” she says in a pissy voice.
“Just making sure,” I snap back.
She tsks again, giving me a shake of her head as if I’ve asked the world’s stupidest question. “Did I bring more bullets?” she mutters under her breath.
“Damn it, woman, I was just asking.”
“Don’t you go getting all snappy with me, Steve. I take a lot of your shit, but I’m drawing the line at your bad attitude.”
I can tell she’s staring at me, and I know that if I look at her, she’ll have an eyebrow raised and her arms crossed in front of her. So I keep my eyes on the road. She may be beautiful, but she’s got a fierce tongue on her, and I don’t feel like taking a lashing off her today.
“That’s what I thought,” she mutters, and from the corner of my eye I see her divert her attention back out of the window.
Today is making us both cranky, and all it’s doing is making me even more hungry, I think as my stomach grumbles loudly.
Three.
We finally make it out of town and onto the main stretch of highway, but the damn thing is closed up tight with bumper-to-bumper cars. A downside of living in a town with a highway right through its center: there’s only one way in and one way out. I reverse the Suburban to one side so we don’t get blocked into the traffic—from the looks of all the smoke coming from the cars at the start of this jam, getting stuck in the middle of this would not be a good idea.
A helicopter flies overhead, and I wind my window down and crane my neck out to see where it goes.
“I think it’s taking pictures, baby.” It circles back around and then moves on ahead. I pull my head back inside.
“I don’t care what it’s doing, I just want to get as far away from here as possible,” she says, twisting the corner of her cream-colored sweater in her hands nervously. “What were those things?” she asks, her face suddenly fearful.
I take a deep breath before answering. “I think they were zombies.” I raise a hand to stop her objections, but she doesn’t mutter a word. “You believe me?” I ask, confused.
Jane shrugs. “Well you wouldn’t just up and kill two people unless you thought it was serious, would you? Besides, it’s pretty much the same conclusion I’ve come to. What else could they be?” She shrugs again.
“But you asked . . .”
“It was a rhetorical question, Steve.” She frowns at me.
“Right. Well, anyway, what do we know about zombies?”
“Well, from what I saw you do to the two outside the store, we know you have to destroy the head to kill them,” she offers.
“More specifically, I think it’s the brain,” I say.
“That makes sense, I guess. Well, none of this makes sense, but you know what I mean.”
“Yeah.” I rub a hand along my jaw line at an invisible beard. “How does it spread though? Is it in the air?” I look at my open window and quickly roll it back up, watching as the helicopter circles above us again. “Everything differs from books to movies.”
“Steve, that’s all speculation. We can’t trust any of that knowledge—books or movies—we have to think more tactically than that,” Jane huffs.
“What else do we have to go on? There’s no Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse for Dummies guide. Not that I’ve seen, anyway.” I shut down my snarky attitude at the sight of her raised eyebrow. “Sorry, baby, but you know what I mean.”
“I do, but what I’m saying is that we can’t trust that knowledge, not fully. Yes, we can use it as a reference point, but don’t rely on it.” Her eyes wash over me. “You need to change that shirt—if it’s passed through fluids, then you’re a prime candidate for turning into one of those things.” She turns, stretching behind my seat, and unzips one of the cases to pull out my favorite sweatshirt. I smile as she hands it to me.
“You brought it? I thought it was in the wash?” I pull my bloodied shirt over my head, careful to avoid smearing any more blood on myself or the car, and throw it out the window. I won’t be wearing it again anyway.
“Of course I brought it, and it was in the wash, but I cleaned and dried it for you. I know how much you love your comfy sweatshirt.” She smiles.
We stare at each other, both grinning like school kids, until a horn honks up ahead. We both turn in unison to watch what’s happening. One of the sick men—fine, zombies—is beating his fists on a blue sedan’s window. The occupants are screaming and crying, honking their horn and revving their engine, trying to get the car in front to move—but by the looks of it, the owners of the car in front have gotten out and left their car for dead.
I put my hand on my door handle, but Jane’s hand touching my forearm makes me stop.
“Don’t,” she pleads, her sweet blue eyes on mine.
“I can’t leave them like that.” I look back at the car, noticing a crack forming on the window. “I’ll shoot it.” I grab my Colt and step out of the car, giving a loud wolf whistle to get the thing’s attention. It either doesn’t hear me or chooses to ignore me, and instead keeps on beating at the windows of the sedan. “You lock this door and stay inside, and you don’t open it for anyone,” I say to Jane before shutting the door. She does as I ask and I move toward the car and the rampaging zombie, watching all around me in case another one decides to join in the show.
When I feel like I’m close enough, I set my stance, feet shoulder-width apart, raise the Colt to eye level, and squeeze the trigger without mercy. The bullet hits the zombie in the side of the skull. It pauses in its furious banging, hands still raises, growl still issuing forth before finally dropping to a heap to the ground. The man and woman in the sedan turn in their seats to stare at me, looking just as much panic-frozen as they did when the zombie was beating on their window. I know I have a gun in my hands, but I just saved their sorry asses.
“No problem,” I shout and smile, lacing my words with as much sarcasm as I can muster, but still they don’t respond, just sitting there with their googly eyes ogling like I’m the crazy one for shooting a zombie in the head. “Don’t
worry about it, assholes,” I grumble and turn back to go to my car, stopping in my tracks as I see what can only be described as a herd of around twenty zombies closing in on me. They’re still around twenty yards away, but it’s too close for my liking.
“Shit!” I glance back over my shoulder. “Thanks for the heads up.” I take aim and shoot the zombie closest to me. The sound echoes around, until I realize that Jane has gotten out of the car and is firing into the crowd as well.
“Jane, I told you not to get out of the car!” I shoot another zombie, skimming its ear as the shot goes wide. It doesn’t seem to notice, and continues for me nonetheless. I shoot it again, hitting the mark this time, and it crumples to the ground.
“I’m not going to just sit here like a little woman while you’re getting attacked, Steve,” she yells back at me, looking pissed off when a zombie gets too close. I think it looks just like my old high school gym teacher—hell, it actually could be. “I can take care of myself.”
“Is that—” I start.
“Mr. Ingle? Yes, it is.” She aims at him down her sight and shoots him between the eyes without pause.
The gap between us and the zombies is around thirty-five yards now, and I jog back to the car and climb in, shifting it in reverse as I flip the steering wheel around in my hands manically until we’re facing the opposite direction. That’s both good and bad, as we’re now facing the approaching zombies and getting a good look at them—I grimace—but we’re also facing away from the traffic jam, which I’m grateful for. I slam my foot down and we speed away, dodging the zombies in our path.
“So now what?” I say, not necessarily to Jane, but she replies nonetheless.
“I think if you head to the business park on Hyde Road, and see if the old service road is open.” She takes my gun from my lap and I nod at her brilliance. Living in such a small but busy community has its downsides, and one of them is the traffic. With the main highway running right through the center of town, the roads are always congested. A few years back, the city council thought it would be a good idea to make a service road to the business park in the center of town. However, after spending millions on it and finding that it was generally unused, it was closed back down, with a chain link fence closing it off. I think they did it more out of spite than anything else, since it doesn’t actually do any harm having it there. Other people obviously think the same, and as such it gets unofficially reopened every once in a while.
The Dead Saga (Novella Part 1): Odium Origins Page 7