Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of)

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  When we couldn’t stall any longer without being reduced to talking about why, we lined up by the fire escape once more, two scooters this time, me wobbling alone on the front one, hand ready on the bar of the door.

  When Rory started to hyperventilate behind me, I resisted the urge to turn around to look and just pretended to spend a few extra moments adjusting my position.

  Norman rocked the Vespa back on one wheel for a moment with a harmless, out-of-gear engine rev, holding Rory on securely by the hand she had twisted into the fabric of his shirt and landing back on the front tire with such control that it hardly bounced.

  If it had been me, I would have laughed, even if it was only a half-mad, nervous laugh. It would have broken the tension, maybe even reassured me, but Rory screamed bloody murder, dropped the crowbar with an echoing clatter, and wrapped him in a two-armed death grip so tight that he actually choked while she returned to her terrified gasping.

  “Sorry,” Norman wheezed and patted her awkwardly on the hand. “It’s okay. I’m sorry.”

  He sounded more shaken by guilt than suffocation, and after that attempt at encouragement didn’t work, he looked completely lost for what to do next.

  I dismounted to pick up the crowbar for her, but she wouldn’t move enough to take it back right away.

  It was hard to hear through her panic, but she was muttering something that sounded like, “This is it.”

  Like I said, the scooters were really the least scary part of that day.

  “Hey,” I said, “at least they still haven’t been able to make you run for a therapist.”

  That made her look up enough to glare at me for joking at Lis’s expense, like she was Unspeakable, or at least beyond reproach.

  Like a dead person.

  After a second or two, she faltered a little, and she didn’t try to put the glare into words, but she didn’t drop it either.

  Nor did I.

  “It must have been awful for her, watching the whole world fill up with disgusting things after running this far just to be away from one. I bet she really hates them.”

  I’m not sure where I got that. It had never occurred to me before to hate zombies. What they’d made the world into, maybe, in my lower moments, but not zombies themselves, not really. That would be like declaring a bitter rivalry with magnetic north, or asking an earthquake to the prom. They don’t think or plot or feel vindictive satisfaction. You can see in their dead eyes that they don’t. They just do what they do, and I trick and kill and hide from them because that’s what I do. Sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s fun—it’s never personal. But once I’d said it, I was sure I was right. Lis, who hated bees, snakes, spiders, and even rats with such a fierce passion, would despise zombies almost beyond consolation.

  And whatever Lis felt, Rory could sympathize with.

  I couldn’t see Norman’s face through the helmet’s shield, but the angle of his head was apprehensive.

  I pushed back my own helmet and went on.

  “It’s bad enough that they even have to exist, but so many of them, so close to her? Making everything dirty, getting in her way, stopping her from going home to a long, hot shower. That’s the only thing that could make her feel better after a day like last week, isn’t it?”

  Rory didn’t need any coaxing to get her to snatch back the crowbar the next time I offered it, although the I-don’t-care-if-you-hit-me technique for making myself get close enough to her was a little more challenging that time.

  “Just think about that beautiful cracking sound they make when you hit them,” I said before taking my seat again.

  That beautiful cracking sound. I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d gotten so fond of it, but it was definitely the best thing for me to think about when I secured my helmet again, turned the key in the ignition, and gave the signal. I tripped open the door latch and wound up Suprbat in one hand, itching to connect it with the first sick, undead monster I could reach.

  It was me against them, me almost literally against the world—just me and Suprbat riding for the lives of my two oldest girl friends and the boy I loved, and I was ready to kick ass.

  Yeah, it was bullshit, but it was between believing that bullshit and becoming a gasping, gibbering mess. By now I think you can guess which one I preferred to give into.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It’s a Hell of a Town

  Rory did well. After the first few shrieks, I could hear her cheering behind me as the bodies went down.

  We all did well. You’d have to say so, considering what it was we were doing. If you’ve ever played Tetris on one of those glitchy old computers that freeze every so often and then jump forward to where things would have been if they’d kept moving, that’s what it was like scooting further northeast into the infestation together on the wet streets.

  My legs were sore, my hands were sore, my back was sore, my lungs were stinging, my heart seemed to be under the impression that I was maintaining my sensible sixty miles an hour without the aid of wheels and a motor, and the inside of my head sounded something like this:

  Zombie! Oh yeah! Who saw the distance I got on that jawbone? Zombie, zombie! what road am I—zombie—on again? I didn’t miss the turn, did I? Zombie! Did I?

  Oh, thank God, there it—zombie—is! I’ve got it, no, wait, I didn’t mean to lean quite that far! I’m not going to fall, I’m not going to fall, wow, I seriously can’t believe I didn’t—zombie—fall!

  Who screamed?

  Rory screamed!

  Important scream? No, the happy kind. Good. We’ll still have good news for Lis if we find her.

  When we find her. When we find her.

  Wait, that was the right—zombie—turn, wasn’t it?

  For an hour and a half.

  I took us across the first bridges east over the New York state line and then into Brooklyn, so we could take the bridge of the same name into Manhattan. That combined with the fact that, despite being known as the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, the facility Lis’s doctor worked out of was actually on an even smaller island just next to it, added up to four separate bridge crossings in just one direction. They weren’t too difficult on the scooters, I mean, not too much more difficult than everything else was to do on them. There was a little extra incentive to drive straight. The second one, across the Verrazano Narrows, was more than enough to make me feel really stupid for ever holding a shred of hope that we could reach the coast in anything larger. That’s where the islands really began.

  All of New England is pretty crammed together, and the roads are too small, but as soon as you get onto the islands themselves, it’s different. It looks like someone squeezed everything together from the sides so hard that it all leaked upward. Everything’s taller than it should be. Everything.

  I don’t like tall things unless I’m on top of them. That much has been true since before the zombies. I like climbing. I like high ground. I like to see what’s coming. Add the zombies to my natural tendencies, and most of New York was pretty uncomfortable.

  We have skyscrapers in California, of course, but the only place I’d ever seen them really crammed together like that, so close that you can’t see between them, was downtown LA, and I only ever went there a few times a year, usually for museum trips or if I had to visit my parents’ offices for some reason. Even then, it was nowhere near as bad as New England. It’s like the difference between wearing a straightjacket and wearing a straightjacket inside the locked trunk of a car inside one of those machines that crush cars into cubes.

  That’s why I was so glad to reach the highway along the coast.

  The coast. That was one advantage to taking the eastern route. More of the coast. It didn’t quite hit me at those last few bridges that the water we were crossing had become salty with leftover industrial smells and the constant background fumes of decomposition. When we did finally get close enough to recognize the ocean itself, it was a relief I didn’t even know I needed.

  I know it was
n’t the Pacific, not quite the ocean I grew up with, but on that day it was close enough. They all share the same water anyway, that water so salty and deep and endless that even on a frigid, overcast spring day full of death, it still smells like life and summer and long days outdoors. It still moves with that same roaring melody that has been playing before there was even one living cell to hear it, and it will continue playing until the sun burns out or explodes and it freezes or boils away. Just breathing its closeness is like taking an internal shower.

  Oh, and you can see over it for miles and miles until the earth itself curves out of sight. I’d never realized how much I loved that feature of the ocean until I saw it from Brooklyn. I know the escape from the claustrophobia was an illusion. I know we were just as fenced in by the water as we were by walls. I know the bodies that must have wandered into it made it just as dangerous, but I was ready to take comfort wherever I could find it. Even after we had to double west a little to cross the bridge, I was more than happy to keep following the water up the east coast of Manhattan toward the hospital. Bits of land interrupted the ocean view when we got further north, but at least there was distance in front of them, the illusion of space in between, which was more than could be said for the view to my left.

  Zombies aren’t nearly as good at getting out of water as they are at going into it, so even though we were just as confined as we would have been farther into the city, the flow of their attack was a little thinner coming only from one side. Unfortunately, it was from our left side, which makes them a lot harder to hit if you’re right-handed. It was still the closest scooter travel ever got to peaceful.

  Maybe a little too peaceful.

  See, this is where we hit the hour-and-a-half mark I mentioned when my zombie Tetris train of thought was interrupted, but it wasn’t because we’d already made it to the hospital. I was so lost in the sound of the waves and the steady series of skulls offering themselves to the training of my non-dominant hand that Norman had to call my name twice to draw my attention to the presence of something unusual. Once he had me listening, fully listening, I could hear them before I turned my head—the distinct pitches and rhythms of mechanical rumbling.

  I wasn’t being followed by one scooter. I was being followed by four.

  For a split second, I honestly expected to see Lis there, newly and miraculously comfortable on something less stable than a Corvette, surrounded by other smiling, ragtag survivors. Of course, it wasn’t her. Maybe I was dumb enough to think that out of all the people who had been in New York City when the chaos set in, the first few we found wandering it alive would have to include the particular one we happened to be looking for, but I was nowhere near lucky enough for it to be true.

  I slowed down a little at first for a better look at them because I hadn’t seen live humans outside my travelling party since Tulsa, and it seemed like an occasion worth acknowledging. It’s like that old Oregon Trail game they used to have in the school computer lab—how you click the “talk to” button that shows up at landmarks even though you know the digital people probably won’t have anything to offer except overpriced meat you’d rather hunt for yourself because, let’s be honest, hunting was the best part of the game.

  There were three men, two in their early thirties, one a little older, each with his own scooter, none of them wearing helmets or decent windbreakers, so I could see them in good detail.

  All three were wearing what were supposed to be undershirts, all obviously new. Nothing used is ever that white outside of a detergent commercial. You could tell by the delicate skin of their arms that they’d spent their lives in collared shirts. The scooters looked like recent finds, too, especially the one on the right which was a shade of powder blue that Claire would have swooned over. The extra careful way they all tried to keep their front wheels steady told me they’d been practicing barely longer than I had. They all sat straight, legs spread farther than necessary, like they were imagining huge, impractical, intimidating motorcycles.

  You know how people always say a face has “character” when it lacks actual appealing qualities? Well, whoever started that trend had never seen these guys. They didn’t have either. They had that type of complexion that looks like it’s spent so long under fluorescent lights that the artificial color has soaked in, the kind of hair that just sits there, generic, medium brown, and straight as a pin, waiting to get thin and grey with age. One had less than a week’s worth of patchy stubble, the youngest-looking one on the blue scooter had what could almost be called a goatee, but not quite, and the oldest one had a mustache that could have been an illustration in an employee grooming manual.

  I’m telling you this because it’s the only way I could find to keep them straight. They were the sort of faces you can see every day behind the same counter or in the same hallway without them ever leaving an impression, forgettable in every possible way except, in this case, for the incongruous way they were all smiling.

  They were smiling, but not in a way that said, “Welcome, fellow human.”

  It was a way that set my teeth on edge.

  “Nice day!” the mustache called to us.

  I had slowed enough to ride side by side with Norman and Rory. Once we fell in sync, we kept a pretty urgent pace, trying to hang on to some of the shrinking distance between us and them.

  “Yes,” I agreed, keeping my eyes on the closest zombie, in the way you agree with a homeless person who corners you on the street to avoid offering more conversation material than necessary. Like with most homeless people, it didn’t work on this guy.

  “It must be!” he exclaimed, pulling almost alongside us, close enough to look at Rory’s exposed face. “Look who couldn’t resist getting out for a drive!”

  Rory didn’t give any sign that she could hear him, let alone recognize him, except for holding the crowbar a little higher, making it very clear exactly how close it was possible to get to her without challenging its range.

  He looked at Norman and then at me, at our tinted helmets, anyway, and said, “And I wonder who else we have!”

  Norman sped up and closed in on the guardrail to stop the guy from catching up again on the same side, and I filled in the space to their left. I couldn’t have planned better for the next zombie to wander by at exactly the right distance for me to lean left and take an unnecessary swing at it, giving the guys behind us a nice demonstration of my own range, along with a fresh, twitching speed bump to swerve around. I sure wasn’t complaining about the opportunity.

  It didn’t unseat any of them, though it gave us a few extra yards.

  “Hey!” the stubble called when he caught his balance. “Aren’t you going to tell us what happened? Did they take over your spot?”

  He didn’t cross into my striking range. It turned out he didn’t need to. All three hung back far enough that I couldn’t see more of them than silhouettes in my cheap little rearview mirrors without taking my eyes off the road ahead and the zombies shambling over it. For a few seconds, I thought they were going to leave us alone.

  Then I heard a sound that I’d never heard in person before, but I knew instantly what it was, too hard and heavy and pitch-less to be a firework.

  A gunshot. A real one.

  The volume of it alone hit my chest harder than any paintball, so hard that for a moment I actually thought it had been on target. The bullet itself must have missed my left ear by a mile, judging by which of the oceanfront buildings ahead of me lost a chunk of brick at exactly that moment.

  “What the hell?!” Rory shrieked beside me.

  I was thinking pretty much the same thing.

  You know that feeling you get, right when things cross over from kind of creepy to definitely, urgently, mortally terrifying? That pulsing, fever-nightmare, drug-trip feeling that you know will make you do things you won’t feel properly until the next morning? Yeah, the more time you spend surrounded by zombies, the harder it is to feel that. This did the trick.

  The next shot bounc
ed off the concrete. I wasn’t sure whether it was meant for me or Rory. I was sure from what I could see in the mirrors that none of the three guys had the skill to miss that closely on purpose.

  It’s not that I could have told them how to do any better, how exactly their grips should have looked or anything. I don’t know the first thing about how to handle a real gun, but I do know how to tell a noob from a vet no matter what the game is. I can recognize the stiff, self-conscious way a person holds an unfamiliar toy or controller from across a darkened, fog-filled arena.

  The guns these guys all fumbled out of their pockets were just as new to them as the scooters.

  That didn’t mean they couldn’t get lucky, especially at that range. I was blocking them from pulling alongside the Vespa to get close to Rory again, but from behind it, they had a clear, wide shot at her back, if that was what they wanted. No matter how dangerously fast we tried to go, that wouldn’t change. I was sure they wouldn’t hesitate to match us. We were closed in by the water on one side, and they had a shorter path than we did to any given street on the other, so I did the only thing that seemed to have any chance of having an effect.

  I slammed on the brakes.

  A couple of shots went off, but the guys were moving too fast to really aim at me, if you could call what they did aiming. One managed to swerve around each side of me after Norman and Rory, and I took out the goatee who was stuck between them. He turned too fast and too late to avoid me and wiped out, hard.

  Norman cut to the left in the borrowed time, and I could hear his motor leading the two behind him down the first alley that would circle back to me.

  One of the zombies reached for me as soon as I was still enough. After practicing on moving targets with my off hand all afternoon, a two-handed swing solid enough to finish it off was second nature.

  The goatee on the ground, on the other hand, was facing the same problem with nothing but a gun.