The problem wasn’t escaping from one tight corner. The problem was that there weren’t any not-so-tight corners left to escape to.
Remember what I said about thicker cities and thicker zombies? Well, we were getting pretty good at making it through that kind of rough patch, but this time it wasn’t a patch. This time, as impressive as all the progress we’d already made had seemed at the time, it was getting hard to argue with Peter’s original assessment of why the whole plan was certifiable.
“Pretty much all the human bodies that existed on earth, the ones that were annoying when all they usually did was make places crowded, are now actually, actively trying to kill us and everything else that moves, and your plan is to go into Manhattan?”
There was no getting past the cities anymore. Just a few hours past Charlottesville, there was nothing but city, no way to tell where one ended and the next began.
I know that sounds kind of like how things are back in the valley, too, in fact, I’d never really pictured a city having actual edges until I saw the ones in the desert, but this wasn’t even close to the same. Other than the fact that they don’t end, except on the map, and, you know, the way they’re basically made up of roads and buildings, there’s nothing the same about California cities and New England cities.
Not for zombie surviving purposes, anyway.
There aren’t any side streets, for one thing. Just streets. More of them than back home, yeah, but more cars, too, and more people, or in our case, former people. There was no way to guess from the maps where we might find passable space. We just had to keep trying, one route, then the next, then the next, and for a while I was actually considering the possibility that there was no right answer to find, like on one of those circular mazes in kid’s activity books, if someone just drew an extra line across that one gap in the wall to the next inner circle. Or more like if whoever designs those mazes had just forgotten to leave the gap in the first place.
The route options got even more limited at the Delaware Bay, the way they always did around water. It felt like a small miracle that the fifth crossing we tried was actually passable, but we all knew there was more water to come, more miracles we’d need to get past it.
After crossing well over three thousand miles in five days, including the day we’d spent sitting in one place, guess how many we got behind us before we started to lose the light of the sixth day?
Fewer than three hundred. Well, based on the map. The odometer racked up quite a few more.
That day was harder. There’s no denying that. There wasn’t a lot of laughter, not even with all the easy New Jersey material just waiting to be put to use. It’s hard to fault one particular state for smelling like death when the ones around it do, too. There was no getting away from the stench anymore, just like there was no getting away from the city wreckage. You do get used to it eventually, even that too-sweet, tangy-in-the-wrong-way, blood-and-compost smell, but there are the moments when the wind changes and you catch a hint of it again and try not to remember that it never left you.
I was still among friends, that feeling never wavered, but it only really showed itself in the smoother, easier way we rotated driving, directing, eating, resting, and other things. There were no pit stops, at least not if you have to slow down and open a door at the same time for it to qualify as a pit stop. That combination just wasn’t worth the risk.
How did we manage that?
One word: Bucket.
Yeah, I know, it’s an even less sexy word than “corpse,” but given the choice between the two, it’s the preferable option, even when the “bucket” in question is the even less sexy substitute of a gallon water bottle with the top cut off. At least our latest vehicle had plenty of room in the back to use it.
So far.
The big, comfy shuttle was part of the problem, and we all knew it. If we were going to finish what we’d started (and after all we’d been through, no one was willing to suggest the idea that we might not, never mind suggesting it to Rory), it was hard not to start thinking about contingency plans.
I was thinking about them every moment, but not in any way I could put into words with a straight face.
None of us knew anything about boats, and I was pretty sure the little, recreational kinds that we might be able to figure out weren’t meant for the distance we still had ahead of us. I couldn’t think of anything I trusted completely to cut through those streets short of a tank, and three years later, I still don’t know how to hijack one of those.
I didn’t say any of that. No one did. We just kept trying the streets, driving up on the curbs, inching a little closer, a little closer, doubling back and inching a little closer, a little closer again, like we still had a hope of making it to dinner with Lis on West Fifty-Fifth before it was time for breakfast, like I hadn’t already screwed up one promise with another one just waiting to follow.
I was almost glad when Rory finally said something other than, “I think we can squeeze through there,” even though she said it from the back row, the bucket row, and the thing she said was also beyond the old boundaries of television.
“What’s wrong?” Norman called back from the driver’s seat, nervously trying to watch the cluttered and squirming road at the same time.
“Nothing,” said Rory, “just . . . Cassie, do you have anything?”
That particular inflection of “anything” is another bit of Girl Talk that did happen to be in my spotty, hit-or-miss mental phrasebook.
“Just one,” I said, digging in my duffle bag for my solitary, emergency maxi pad. I wasn’t due for a couple of weeks myself, so I hadn’t wasted space on more. “Um . . . you don’t?” I asked with as little judgment as possible.
Rory shook her head and looked like she felt more like slamming it against the railing in front of her with regret. “The camping trip would have been over by now. I forgot to worry about afterward.”
“Don’t you guys feel it coming in advance?” Norman asked, very kindly not pointing out how verbally I always felt it.
“I used to,” said Rory, that slight constriction audible in her sinuses again, “too much. But I barely feel it at all since they put me on the pill.”
I didn’t say anything about that, but I was thinking three things:
How much further out of touch we’d fallen than I’d thought.
How relieved I was to know that she hadn’t come by her perfect skin and extra two cup sizes without a little help.
How long that one emergency pad was going to last.
Rory was onto my last train of thought, at least.
“It’s okay,” she said. “People got by before they sold these in drug stores. I’ll manage with something. We’ve got . . . socks, and—”
“No,” said Hector. He kept his eyes forward, away from us and the bucket row, but he spoke as easily and directly as if we had eye contact.
“I can—”
“No,” he repeated. “Look at this.” He nodded toward the nearest window at the constant background of straggling screamers. “If anything happens, if we need to go outside for anything, we all have to be completely mobile. That’s not going to happen using socks, is it?”
Rory leaned her head back against the window and looked at the ceiling like it was doing this to her.
“No,” she admitted.
“Okay. So we have to find more. Simple as that.”
Of course, there were very few things that were less simple than that.
“That market in Oklahoma,” Rory moaned, “gas station bathrooms, so many chances before now.”
She said it. No one else needed to.
Instead we agreed that if we were going to leave the shuttle for anything, it was going to be somewhere secure enough to barricade into for the night.
Pharmacies are actually pretty good for that. Even in a city as innocent-sounding as Cherry Hill (it sounds more innocent if you leave out the “New Jersey” part at the end), even moving at a crawl through the wreckage
, it didn’t take long to find one that had the metal shutters intact over the door, already fortified against armed robbers before zombies had ever entered the picture.
Norman put on an extra burst of speed right before parking, nice and close to the wall, to give us a little extra distance from the dozen-odd zombies whose attention we had at the time.
He was on the roof of the shuttle and then the roof of the drug store before the first few started to catch up and the next wave started to trickle in from the surrounding buildings, drawn by the screams.
It’s remarkable, really, how much ground one set of human bodies can cross in the time it takes another set to climb just ten vertical feet.
Right foot on bike hitching post, left hand on shuttle door railing, left foot to left hand, both hands to roof overhang, swing both feet up to one side.
Sure, having a bag or two over your shoulders doesn’t help, but it still doesn’t sound so hard, no worse than a good climbing oak.
With zombie-walk progress to measure it against, it feels like a slow motion replay. Half speed at best.
The funneling angle of the shuttle gave most of the zombies an extra left turn to take before they could get to us. Norman still had to intercept eight of them with the crowbar in the time it took us all to go through the climbing steps in sequence and Hector to drag Rory the last few feet by the hood of her sweatshirt. She’d never climbed a tree in her life, but at least she wasn’t very heavy.
Intercept, not deflect. Those eight went down on the first swing, a hole clean into each of their skulls, and didn’t get up again. We wouldn’t all have made it if they had.
When he handed the crowbar over to me to break through the roof at the weak spot around the air conditioner vent, I got a flash in my head of one of those security footage shows, sure that I’d seen one of those dumbass criminals get a back full of glass trying this exact move on a liquor store.
I did it anyway, of course, but I stood back and felt for a good support beam under my feet before I started prying up an opening. It didn’t end up mattering much. We weren’t over the liquor store section, just the stockroom loading dock area, right over a pallet of paper towels.
I whistled between two fingers to get the attention of anything already inside before jumping down, saving my remaining firecrackers for more dire circumstances. There was nothing there, just us and the disposable kitchen linen and the motor scooter and thermal saddlebag of some unfortunate, long gone pizza delivery boy.
The pizza box itself sat open and empty. I could still smell the pizza. I’ve never understood that, how finished food can still smell good after it would have gone bad if no one had eaten it.
I opened the evil bunny bag and distributed a few handfuls of those little explosive caps they sell at Halloween and Forth of July.
Used to sell at Halloween and Forth of July.
“Hey, we’ll find a breakthrough tomorrow. Isn’t that always how it goes?” It was Norman who said that with a hand on Rory’s shoulder, so cheerfully that she actually tried to nod back.
“You take the left and work right, you take the right and work left. Rory and I will take bird’s eye and watch your backs until we all meet in the middle.”
I’m the one who said that. I’m the one who opened the door for us to sweep the sales floor, helped Rory climb on top of the first row of shelves for a better view, and then did the same on the last row myself, the way Peter would have done it.
We had only taken a few steps down the first aisle when that growling, throaty screaming started from somewhere closer to the middle, answering the first cap Norman dropped.
I spun around to find the source, knocking over bottles of store brand Tylenol under my feet, Suprbat ready in both hands.
“Coming at you from the front,” I warned Norman, following what I could see of the thing, stumbling its way around the checkout counters. I could practically see the gagging smell wafting off of it from under its bright red hat and jacket. There were streaks of congealed blood all over it from an old, probably fatal neck wound.
Norman backed into some shelves as close as possible to a blind corner, to make it march almost past him before it could change direction, and buried the wrench in the back of its skull. For good measure, he pushed it away with the whack-a-mole mallet and kicked it onto its back, whooping as if he’d just beaten his high score.
“Think we found the pizza boy,” he called.
I had to squint a little in the twilight to read its hat from my perch. He was right.
The little pops of gunpowder, both from Norman in the aisle beside me and Hector at the far end started off frequent and steady like always, then tapered off, partly from needing to ration how many caps were left, partly from the rising certainty that if there were anything around to hear us, we would have heard it already.
After a few aisles with nothing more to kill, Norman stopped at a display of cheap winter accessories to try on a pair of hideously bright gloves, and I had to remind him that we’d have the place to ourselves all night once we’d finished the safety check.
“Seriously, though, who designed these?” Norman turned his hands over in front of him to see the gloves from all angles. They were purple with rows of shiny silver yarn. “They’re not even in children’s sizes!”
“You put them on,” I pointed out.
“Duh, it’s different when I do it.”
“Yeah, a guy who can fit in women’s glove sizes. That’s different, alright.”
“Think they’d look better on a girl?” he asked, reaching up to me.
I grabbed the ends of the fingers and pulled. One got stuck on his thumb, but I got the other one and put it in my bag. “After the sweep,” I said again.
Leaving him with one glove didn’t get us there any more efficiently. If it had been hard to focus on jumping between aisles already, listening to him dancing down them singing “Billie Jean” didn’t make it any easier. I didn’t entirely want him to stop. It was better than thinking about West Fifty-Fifth and the possibly impassable maze between it and us.
The last section where all of our paths converged was in that half-assed food section that big pharmacies always have, with the freezers full of now-melted ice cream and rows of chips and candy and soda.
No one was particularly worried by then. We’d pretty much checked everything, and Norman was doing the moonwalk along the freezers to the beat of the last few caps in his share while Rory and I flanked Hector down the last aisle when we found what had killed the pizza boy.
There was a reason we hadn’t flushed it out sooner. The pizza boy, or someone before him, had put up a hell of a fight. Both of the zombie’s ears had been roughly stabbed, probably made useless, but the vital parts of its brain were working, and it could sure as hell see Hector when he passed by the bargain display it had been shoved into. When it crawled out after him, I could see the punctures all across its chest as well as the weapon—a jaggedly broken electric toothbrush, still sticking out of its throat. It must have been lodged right in its larynx, or something else vital to vocalization because it looked like it was trying to scream, like they all do, but it only made this low, rasping sound that could hardly be heard through the noise we were all making.
Still got your eyeliner and skinny jeans handy?
Sorry. I’d like nothing better than to hand this part over, but I can’t do that this time. There are details that someone else’s guesswork, however impassioned and eloquent, might miss, things that I can’t pretend aren’t important to the whole truth.
I won’t say I could have gotten there in time. Suprbat was poised in my hands, and I wouldn’t have lost a single second smashing another skull myself if this one hadn’t been impossibly far on Hector’s other side.
What I had to do was much simpler. One crisp, clear verbal directive, “look behind you.” That’s all, the kind of thing Peter could do even better than he could smash skulls, the kind of thing he had done in his sleep, but I couldn’t.
>
Maybe he knew that about me. Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t let me guard him at that very first gas station because he knew it, just like he knew I would safeguard his journal for the rest of my life, or until I could find some revived scientific movement solid enough to make use of it. I don’t know. I sure as hell didn’t know it about myself before then.
I saw the distance closing, the few seconds of my window running out, and I wanted to swing, I wanted to swing, but I had to speak, and all the possible phrases, “behind you,” “turn around,” or even just “zombie,” all the words that could have done the job just fine by themselves all crowded together in my throat and came out of my mouth sounding as broken and useless and indistinct as the zombie’s rasping attempt at a scream, and then the seconds were over and the teeth were in and it was my fault.
It was my fault.
Norman didn’t see it, he didn’t see me freeze, and he never believed me, no matter how many times I tried to tell him. He just heard Hector’s scream, and the chorus of his rendition of “Billie Jean” ended in mid syllable. He came sprinting around the corner from the perpendicular aisle, both the wrench and the mallet flailing, though anyone could see it was too late.
Hector looked up at me, not angry, not judging, not pleading, not wise or calm or reasonable, just sad and scared, too sad and scared to be anything else at the same time.
I landed hard on the balls of my feet when I jumped down to help, swinging Suprbat at the back of the thing’s head, but not nearly as hard as I wanted to, in case I hit Hector or Norman and his wrench instead.
“Get out of the way!” Rory shouted above me.
This part happened so fast that even in detached Chase time, it wouldn’t have been possible to think. Rory didn’t wait to see if we’d obey before showing us the reason, so please don’t interpret it as complicity, the way I grabbed Norman by the collar and flung him down the aisle under me, away from the hundreds of pounds of soda can boxes she sent cascading down on the dead and almost-dead man with a few well-placed shoves.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 15