Now, in the world I knew, before zombies, when people used to imagine what it would be like to fight them in movies and stuff, guns were a pretty popular theoretical option. Norman and Hector and I actually discussed this pretty extensively back then, and it turns out our analysis of them was pretty much spot-on: They’re not well-suited for the task.
Guns do a lot of damage to the very narrow spot they hit, but zombies don’t go down just because of a lot of damage to places like their hearts and stomachs and spleens and stuff like live people do. And headshots aren’t easy. Yeah, guns have range, but zombies don’t. Taking down one particular zombie doesn’t become a serious priority until it’s within point blank range anyway, and once it is, you don’t feel like lining up the perfect shot. You just want a solid, blunt, idiot-proof tool to get its head as far away from you as possible.
The biggest problem with guns, though? Reload time.
That’s the problem the goatee was dealing with. I was dusting the dried blood off of Suprbat and angling my scooter inland while he was fumbling with the next clip, trying to outpace the nearest set of teeth.
The first zombie got its fingers into the neck of his undershirt just as that clicking sound announced that he’d figured it out. He fired immediately, right through its neck, but like I said, zombies don’t care about things like necks. Not their own, anyway. The second shot managed to find the vital part of the zombie’s head, but by then, that head had attached itself to the guy’s cheek.
I should have been back on the move by then, but I stayed and watched him swat the fragments away, shoot the next closest zombie dead between the eyes like it would make up for lost opportunities, and then reach up to feel the ragged edges of the bite. As bland as his face was, it was capable of expressing that he knew what it meant.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been the cause of a death, but it was the first time I’d kind of done it on purpose, the first time I wasn’t completely sorry. I think that qualifies as one of those moments when you can’t expect to be able to think with perfect clarity, so that’s the excuse I’m taking for why I was still standing there with only one foot on the scooter when Norman and Rory made it back around to the road by the coast, with the mustache and the stubble on their tail.
Norman had pushed his helmet back far enough to look at me, frantically questioning. It was too late for me to be able to catch up with him fast enough to stay ahead of mustache and stubble. If he slowed down, all of the undershirt guys plus all the zombies in the area would be able to surround the three of us in seconds. And if he circled again, the undershirts would know his route, and with that advantage, they probably had just enough sense to corner him.
Years of paintball strategy told us to split up, act a little less like fish in a barrel, but without the promise of comparing scores over coke and pizza come dinnertime, it feels a lot different. I guess that goes without saying.
The goatee limped back to his scooter, set it back on its tires, pointed his weapon at me, and called me a word a lot worse than slut. He was close enough that he only missed me that time due to the Whack-a-Mole mallet bouncing off his head at exactly the right moment. I don’t know why Norman included that of all things in what he brought from the pharmacy, and I didn’t stop him to ask. I started my own scooter again suddenly enough to make the goatee miss me one more time, heading southwest, perpendicular to Norman’s course. The mustache and the stubble had gained on him too much already while he slowed to wait for a sign from me.
“Baked potatoes!” I shouted.
Norman and Rory both nodded, and Norman dropped the helmet’s shield back over his face. Still pointed in our separate directions, we both hit the gas.
TWENTY-ONE
Hide-and-Seek to the Extreme!
The mustache and stubble continued after Norman and Rory. The goatee picked me. Big surprise. I still didn’t have a clue why any of them had attacked us in the first place, but since then I’d given that one, the one continually wiping the blood off his face as it replenished itself, plenty of reason to want me dead.
Level One: ride on a scooter.
Level Two: ride on a scooter while swinging a blunt object at flesh-eating corpses.
Level Three: drive the scooter.
Level Four: drive the scooter while swinging a blunt object at flesh-eating corpses left-handed while following a map of New York City from memory.
Level Five: do all of the above while also trying to ditch a pursuing gun-wielding maniac.
It’s funny how each of those sounds impossible until you find yourself doing the one after it.
One plus to New York’s layout is those neatly numbered streets. They’re not perfectly intuitive, but they spared me enough of the fear of getting turned around to let me focus on knocking the dead pursuers out of my way and zigzagging fast enough to be really difficult for the live one to hit. I wondered if it had been naïve of me to assume that something as small as the zombie apocalypse would make it safe for three west coast kids reeking of sheltered wealth to wander New York alone (well, safe except for the zombies, I mean), or if this whole gun-wielding maniac incident was really as bizarre and improbable as it felt.
I’m still not a fan of the excess of skyscrapers, yet for that one round of Level Five, I was temporarily glad they were there, blocking the goatee’s line of sight as much as mine. The zombies too, for that matter. The way they scream when something agitates them was the only thing making the sound of the pizza scooter even a little challenging to trace.
I just needed a place I could shelter from them long enough to take advantage of their help. Then, as soon as Norman had managed the same, Rory would be able to guide him to her old hangout on West Fifty-fifth, and I’d figure out how to meet them there.
Or was it West Sixty-fifth?
I couldn’t remember just at that second. I’d let myself take too long a straight stretch, allowing the goatee to get close enough to bounce another bullet off the asphalt upsettingly close to my rear tire. I wasn’t too worried about the difference between a couple of numbers just yet.
I waited until the last possible second to take a left and loop around a particularly tall, thin building with a bank logo on top, so the goatee had to slow a little to take the turn without scratching up another side of that powder blue paint job and possibly ending up with a matching limp for his other leg. In the few seconds I was out of his sight, I took another quick turn, to the right that time, and finally saw something promising.
The glass front wall of an apartment building’s lobby had already been shattered open. There were a few zombies milling around it, but I could see a door inside, other than the ones to the dead elevators. The office had a door. The office had a door, and it was closed.
I steered the scooter in through where the front entrance had been and all the way to the office, flattening two zombies on the way. I killed the engine and tried the handle, hoping it was only closed because zombies lack the sense to do things as subtle and delicate as opening a latch unless they do it by accident.
No such luck. It was locked.
I tore through the nearby desk left-handed with Suprbat raised in my right, half watching the zombies from the street pour in after me, half examining the contents of each drawer I emptied. I listened to the goatee’s scooter getting closer, hesitating a street away, trying to decide which way I had gone.
The key with the tag that read “Manager’s Office” turned out to be hidden under a green, three-ring binder right next to the blank space left by a stolen computer monitor within easy reach from the start.
A zombified, hunchbacked old man, mouth crusted with the blood of a kill at least a day old, had lumbered, shrieking, into the space between me and the door, and his thick glasses shattered all over the maroon carpet when I knocked him out of my way.
I pushed the scooter into the office first, knocking over a rolling desk chair, and squeezed myself in after it, closing the door most of the way behind me, far enough that n
one of the zombies could reach more than a few fingers in after me. I left enough of a gap to aim my last bottle rocket at the open front wall, pleaded with one of my lighters for a few seconds to hold a flame, and set it off.
Zombies who already have fresh meat within sight aren’t distracted by loud noises, so I had to hammer for a few moments on the hands reaching in for me to force the door all the way closed, and even then it didn’t stop them from clawing at the outside. The explosion of the rocket against the building across the street still drew a nice crowd of the ones that hadn’t seen me. From my hiding place, I could hear them screaming at the wrong skyscraper.
It would have been hard for anyone to hear me over the sound of the zombies outside, even if I’d been calling out, but I pressed my hands over my face anyway to keep my breathing slow and calculated and silent, listening.
The goatee’s scooter turned onto the street I’d come in from almost as soon as I’d secured my spot. It slowed in the section right in front of the apartment building with the zombies screaming their lungs out on both sides. There was one critical moment when the goatee could have seen the zombies scratching at my door before they saw him, when he could have guessed what they were after and followed their lead.
He was going to find me. That pulsing, feverish feeling said that it was a foregone conclusion. He was going to find me, and I would be cornered.
And then a shot went off, meant for one of the zombies out on the street, no doubt, and the scratching stopped, the ones who had been digging for me drawn away to more likely prey, dissipating any evidence of where I had gone.
Another shot shattered glass across the street, opening the way for the goatee to explore my false trail. I listened and waited for it to dead end.
Black socks never get dirty. The longer you wear them, the blacker they get.
I don’t know how long the goatee took searching that building. I only know that I spent it kneeling on the floor of that office next to the dim crack under the door, which was the only interruption of the darkness, resisting the urge to waste any more lighter fuel just to look at more of the ugly maroon carpet, and I know that I’d silently sung every campfire song I knew at least five times over before I heard him outside again, swearing loudly enough to be understood over the screams. I could hear him trying to exhaust his rage at being a dead man walking (figuratively, soon to be literally) and if those curses and shots hadn’t been sounding with me in mind, I would almost have felt sorry for him.
Finally, I heard him speeding off back to the southwest.
I started breathing out loud again after that. Louder than normal, in fact, sounding uncannily like Rory in my own ears, and it was several seconds before I was sure that I wasn’t going to cry or puke. I hadn’t felt that way since pretty early after learning that zombies were real. You’d think that once zombies can’t do it to you, nothing can, but there’s something different, something disturbingly personal about a real member of your own species trying to kick you out of it.
I sang the camp songs all over again, just to be sure, before starting up the scooter again and setting off to the northeast.
Everything I did felt excessively loud, like I was sending up a signal flare with every rotation of my wheels, every swing of Suprbat.
I followed Sixty-fifth Street all the way from Central Park to West End Avenue before I became certain that it was Fifty-fifth I was looking for after all. I followed the Hudson south to it, took a left, and tried again, still picking up every little cringe-worthy noise.
The sound of another human voice nearly startled me off the road.
At least, it did before I recognized the Five Guys logo hanging over Rory’s head as she waved me down.
I jumped for the roof before the scooter had even settled onto its kickstand, before any of the gathering zombies could close in, not even wondering for a moment what exactly was in the rain gutter I grabbed onto. Rory was kind enough not to pay any attention to the sludge it left on my fingers as she took Suprbat and then pulled on my jacket collar to help me up.
Once my knees were planted on solid tar paper, I collapsed into her arms, trying to keep that teary nausea from rising up again. She didn’t say anything at first, and I couldn’t either. My vocal cords, still the only part of me prone to the deer-in-headlights effect, were scared rigid again, refusing to ask for the information my eyes were scanning for across the empty roof.
Then I felt a kiss on the cheek from behind.
I let Rory go and turned to reach for Norman. He must have been watching the back of the building for me from the other side of the giant sign. He reached for me, almost hugged me, and then tickled me hard between the ribs, right where I’m really, really, ridiculously over-sensitive.
“‘Baked potatoes’?” he demanded.
“You . . . knew what . . . I meant!” I gasped as clearly as I could. I would have gestured at the meeting place we’d all safely found, but my arms were wrapped around my middle as a shield, and they weren’t going to move any time soon.
“I didn’t know when you meant,” he said. “Where the hell were you?”
He finally gave up attacking my sides and crushed me to his chest so hard that this change didn’t improve my respiratory capacity even a little. I thought about the dark, timeless hiding and the agonizing detour along Sixty-fifth and decided it was the sort of story that had a nice, long shelf life.
“Where did you guys lose them?” I asked.
“Broadway,” Rory said softly, numbly. It was strange enough for me, seeing one of those standard, world-famous backdrops, one you see in every other high budget TV show, ruined and infested like that. I couldn’t imagine how it would feel if it had been half of my home. “Norman took us under this semi that was propped up on one sidewalk. We were gone by the time they found another way around.”
That sounded like Norman. It also sounded a lot scarier than a wheelie in a safely barricaded stockroom, but her tone wasn’t complaining.
“So, what was that?” I asked the obvious question. “Did you know those guys?”
Rory shook her head. “Never seen them before in my life.”
“Then what the hell was their problem?”
She shrugged. “How should I know? Maybe they thought they were the only people left alive and decided they wanted to keep it that way.”
That was easily the lamest reason I’d ever heard for shooting at strangers, but I couldn’t guess a better one.
“Whatever,” she said. “They can’t patrol the whole world, and if they want the city that badly, it’s theirs.” She sounded a little like a kid declaring that some toy was stupid anyway after having it taken away. I tried not to think about the places I’d never see again and how I’d end up redesigning them in my mind to make that okay. “We’ll just find what we came for, and then we’ll be gone before they even have to notice us again.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Let’s just hope they like to sleep in.” I took the evil bunny bag off my shoulder, fished out what little there was in it that could fit into the category of “amenities,” and stopped when I realized that Norman and Rory’s bags were still zipped. They’d obviously been waiting for me for some time, but they hadn’t unpacked anything.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, we’re here,” said Rory. “We’re finally here. Lis is in this city, twenty minutes away, at most, considering that there’s no traffic at all—”
“Except for the zombies and murder gangs,” I pointed out.
“Those aren’t going anywhere in the morning,” she countered.
“No, but—”
“We can’t stay here anyway! Two of the windows are missing. We can’t barricade that. The roof’s the only safe place. We don’t have a tent, or blankets, or anything worth burning, and look at that sky!” She pointed at the clouds like I didn’t know where to look to find sky. “It’s going to rain again. I can’t believe it hasn’t started already!”
Even lying out in a downpour
all night sounded like heaven to me at the time compared with getting back on that scooter again—its engine perpetually signaling my position, forcing my mind to fit shapes and distances together, drifting farther than an arm’s reach from Norman and Rory, too far to keep reminding myself by hand that they were really there. Those clouds above us weren’t just threatening; they were also already getting noticeably pink. My baked potato stunt had gotten us all to the same place without giving the undershirts any hints, but it had also taken us clear across the island from the Psychiatric Center.
“So we’ll find a better building,” I said. “This place is kind of full of them.”
“Cass, please,” Rory said. “I can’t wait one more night. I can’t. I know the way from here. Twenty minutes, I swear, and we’ll be stretched out on hospital beds before we even need a flashlight.”
Norman hadn’t said anything. Not that that was unusual, but the way he held his closed duffle bag said more than his not-saying-anything usually did.
“You’re on board with this?” I asked him.
“It’ll take both of us to drive,” he said, “so it’s your call, but yeah, I’m feeling a little extra sympathetic to the difference a few hours of waiting can make today.”
Ouch. How exactly do you say no to that?
I started stuffing things back into the evil bunny bag.
“Okay.”
Rory hugged me, not the condescending way you hug someone to apologize for manipulating the hell out of them, the genuine way I would have wanted to hug someone right about then if they’d been able to offer me an evening in a securely fenced-in, functioning hot tub.
“Okay, okay,” I said, “but we have to do it right now, and we’re going as far around to the north as possible, so we can at least hope those guys like to stick close to where we found them.”
“Thank you,” was all she said.
Ever get that feeling, like your brain has accidentally zoomed out of the close-up view where it belongs, and you’re suddenly aware that you’re only living one little life out of billions like it, that yours is just one name on a really, really long roster? Maybe that was a trippier thought back when there were more than a handful of those billions of lives still actually in progress. It’s still disorienting, kind of like trying to watch Lost starting with a random episode out of the middle of a season.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 20