Share in your activities and interests. If you’re going to kill zombies anyway, why not do it together?
In the group who greeted us, there were two zombie Starbucks attendants (probably from different Starbucks if I know Seattle), a zombie nurse (real this time, not a stripper), and at least one zombie fireman in full gear, along with a bunch of plainclothes zombies gathered around our car just… staring at us. Almost like they were waiting for us to say something.
For a minute we all stared back. I think we didn’t really believe it was true.
I mean, we’d faced off with more than one zombie at a time before, but never this many and never in such an open, unprotected place. To make matters worse, most of our weapons were still locked in the car. We’d almost certainly have to get to them at some point if we wanted to survive the battle surely to come.
“C-Could we pretend we were zombies, too?” Amanda whispered in a tiny voice filled with fear. “D-Don’t they sometimes do that in zombie movies?”
I gave Dave a side glance. “We could try it, right?”
“I guess so,” he said slowly. Then he shook his head. “Yeah, I suppose it couldn’t make things any worse.”
I slid my bag of supplies up on my arm so that it hung out of my way and then I hunched the same shoulder lower, bending partly at my waist to give myself an off-balance appearance. I kept one hand at my handgun, though, hoping the horde wouldn’t notice I was really at the ready.
Dave made a similar pose and we lurched forward as a team, making little moaning and whining sounds just like they did. Amanda followed us, her little fake zombie moans more like kitten mewls.
The zombies stared, their heads turning in that odd doglike way that was so off-putting. I think we confused them.
Okay, I know we confused them. I mean, they looked at each other with a few grunts like they were saying, “‘What do you think, Zombie Bob?’ ‘Well, I don’t know, Zombie Pete, let’s see what they do next.’”
But it seemed like, against all odds, our ruse was working. I mean, I almost thought we had it made. We were almost to the car, almost to a reasonable level of safety, or at least to a way to blast through a few of the zombies who were in the way of our freedom.
And then Dave dropped his keys.
I think he must have been trying to fish them out of his pocket in a herky jerky zombie way and they slipped from his fingers. However it happened, they hit the ground with a jangle and he bent down out of habit to grab them. But the smoothness of his movements, or maybe the fact that he was trying to get his keys out like a human would, put the kibosh on any deception the zombies might have believed.
With a roar, four of them rushed forward at once. The rest followed at a slower pace, swinging their arms and gnashing their teeth.
“Guns!” I screamed, leveling my handgun and squeezing the trigger carefully.
My aim must have been getting better because one of the lead zombies crumpled as his forehead exploded like Fourth of July fireworks over Lake Washington.
Dave fired his rifle in rapid succession and another two zombies fell to the side, but now they were closing even faster. There was no way we were going to be able to drop them all from a distance, especially since Amanda was still standing behind us, staring at the approaching horde with a blank, terrified look on her pretty face.
“Amanda, God damn it, FIRE!” I screamed at her as I reloaded my gun with shaking hands.
But it was too late for that because the zombies had reached us.
The nurse zombie went for me and I flipped my gun around as her clawlike hands swiped toward me. Swinging, I hit her in the temple with the butt.
She moaned and whined as the rotten skin on her temple split, but her teeth still snapped at me even as I pushed her away.
My arms were starting to get really tired from all this hand-to-hand combat I’d been indulging in lately, so I shook as I tried to put enough distance between us to either smack her in the head again or fire off a shot.
“No,” I whispered as the struggle began to overwhelm me. Oh shit. This was it. I was about to die, er, undie and it really sucked.
But then, just as I felt the zombie’s breath on my neck, Amanda ran up and swung the butt of her shotgun. It connected with the nurse zombie’s skull and the light went out of her eyes as the side of her head caved in like a soda can being smashed by a sledgehammer.
I panted as I pushed the body off me. “Thanks,” I said before I flipped the gun around and put a shot into the skull of another approaching zombie.
Amanda jumped in the opposite direction, hurling out a guttural war cry as she sprayed shotgun fire into the zombie crowd.
“Die, fuckers!”
I couldn’t help but laugh at the phrase coming from Amanda’s cheerleader/pretty girl voice that was far better suited to say, “Go team!”
As I fired again, I grabbed for the extra bullets I’d put in my pocket before we went inside. My hands shook as I slid one bullet after another into the cylinder. When I closed it up, I pinched that piece of webbed skin between my thumb and forefinger.
As I swore, I kicked a zombie in the chest like I’d once seen somebody do during an MMA fight David had made me watch. The zombie wore a trucker hat and a flannel shirt and was a big guy, so I assumed he had been a trucker. Or a whacked-out Ashton Kutcher/grunge fan.
Whatever, once I’d put some space between us, I shot him between the eyes. Right in the middle of the “Really?” logo on his dopey hat. Black sludge seeped out of the hole I left and stained the white fabric as he hit the ground face first with a crashing thud.
“Yeah, asshole,” I said. “Really.”
“Sarah!”
I spun to see that Dave had made it to the car and managed to get it unlocked.
I ran toward him, firing my handgun at a couple of zombies who had begun to turn in his direction like a weird herd of cattle. Rabid, flesh-eating cattle…
“I’m here, I’m covering you,” I said as I put my back to his and continued to take aim at the zombies who were coming for him as he worked on weapons.
Even as I shot, I found Amanda. Although she’d started off the day screaming like a banshee over three zombies, now she seemed to have hit a rhythm in her killing method.
She blasted her shotgun through zombie heads, taking them off at the neck when they dared to get too close to her. She’d even gotten good at swinging her gun to get herself some space when she needed to reload.
“I’m out of shells,” she called as she popped the last two into the barrel.
“I’ve got you, girl,” I promised as I put a bullet in the last zombie who was lurching toward her.
She ran down to the car, smacking a stray zombie in the throat and sending it careening backward across the parking lot. I fired off a shot as it staggered back to its feet and it fell where it stood.
Dave handed off a box of shotgun shells to Amanda and a handful of bullets to me and popped out of the car with a handgun in his belt and a reloaded rifle at the ready, but as we looked around the parking lot, we realized there were no more zombies left to battle.
“Holy shit,” I said as I looked from one of them to the other. “Did we just win?”
Dave laughed. “I think so. Nobody got bitten, right? Everyone is okay?”
We each looked down at ourselves and each other, but aside from some blood and a bit of gore splattered on us from the dead, everyone was actually okay.
“Good, we must be getting better at this,” he said with a relieved sigh.
I nodded. “We could make it a career.”
He chuckled as he took the bags of extra supplies we’d gotten into this predicament to obtain and tossed them in the backseat. “Yeah, I can see it now. Zombiebusters! Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Wait,” Amanda said. “I have to pee now.”
Dave’s eyebrows went up. “What?”
“I really have to pee.” Amanda said as she squirmed. “We cleared the store, righ
t?”
Dave was counting up the supplies and he rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Just hurry. We don’t want another horde getting to us while we wait.”
She was already running toward the sliding doors, her shotgun over her shoulder. “I’ll be really fast! Don’t leave without me.”
I frowned at her last statement. Once she was gone, I turned back to him.
“You should be nicer to her,” I whispered.
He looked up from the bags in the backseat with a glare. “C’mon Sarah. Whatever.”
I stared at him. I didn’t like this David who seemed to have no empathy. But maybe he just didn’t get where Amanda was coming from.
“No, really,” I insisted, searching for a way to explain. “I think she knows you didn’t want her with us in the first place. She’s trying really hard. And she did get to killing when we needed her.”
“I guess,” he grunted. “But I still worry she’ll slow us down at some point.”
I stared at him. How could he so coldly dismiss someone who had basically helped keep him… and me… alive?
“And what about me?” I asked. “Would you ditch me too if you had a chance?”
He didn’t look up from his cataloguing of our new supplies. “That’s totally different and you know it.”
“No, I don’t. What I do know is that you looked for a divorce lawyer online,” I said.
He froze in his spot for a few seconds, then slowly set the bags of food and other supplies onto the floor on the driver’s side of the car.
“And how do you know that, Sarah?” he asked without turning around.
I shrugged. “Because I did, too. I found it in your search history.”
He stood up from the backseat and faced me. His face was like a mask, it was so still and emotionless. I don’t know if he was trying to think of something to say, I guess I hoped he was, but he didn’t get the chance. Before we could get into it, Amanda ran back to the car.
“I’m ready.”
“Me too,” Dave said, shoving around us to open the front passenger side of the car.
Because I was upset, I stopped looking at him and instead glanced at Amanda. She was disheveled, her hair messed up and her hoodie was torn.
“Hey, didn’t you have less blood on you before you went in?” I asked.
She nodded, though her cheeks paled a little. “Yeah, um, there was a zombie girl in the bathroom. A little girl. I had to fight her.”
I sucked in a breath at the idea. “Oh my God, are you okay?”
Dave hopped out of the car and stared at her. “Jesus, we didn’t check the bathroom. Stupid!! Did you get bitten, are you hurt?”
When I think about it now, I remember that she hesitated. But at the time I was so freaked out by the fact that we’d just fought off a full zombie horde and then Dave and I said the “d” word we’d been avoiding for months.… I guess I didn’t recognize it.
“I’m not hurt,” she said as she smiled brightly and got into the car. “Let’s just go.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She shut the door but I saw her nodding through the blood-smeared glass. Dave didn’t look at me, but got in, too. So I shrugged and went around to the driver’s side and we headed back down the hill toward the highway.
Build mutual friendships. Just be ready to end them when your friends start trying to eat you.
I lied.”
I glanced away from the road to look at Amanda in the rearview mirror and Dave lifted his head from the glove compartment, which he had been searching through in hopes he could find something of use. Yeah, it probably sounds weird, but ask yourself, how often do you go through your glove box? There could be all kinds of useful shit in there and you’d never know it.
Of course all he’d found so far were four expired insurance cards and a pack of gum that was just this side of petrified. Still I respected him for making the effort. I certainly hadn’t thought of it, myself.
“What? What did you lie about?” I asked as I slowed the vehicle to move it around another mass of cars. Several of them were on fire, broken husks of the life their probably undead owners once lived.
Amanda blinked like she was holding back tears and then she slowly began to roll up the sleeve of her hoodie. I couldn’t see what she was doing in the mirror, but I heard Dave suck in a hard, harsh breath as he looked back at her.
“Oh fuck, Amanda,” he said. “Oh shit, fuck.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw what the fuss was about. Amanda had a huge bite mark on her arm where her sweatshirt was torn. Already, it oozed the telltale black sludge of a future zombie.
“Amanda!” I cried in horror.
I looked back toward the road and my horror turned to terror. There, sticking halfway into my lane, was a flipped semi. I swerved the wheel sharply to the left and just barely avoided a potentially fatal sideswipe, but I overcorrected just like they always tell you not to in Driver’s Ed. We careened toward the guardrail with David bracing on the dashboard and Amanda just letting her body swish around limply, like she didn’t care. And I guess at that point, why should she? Her fate was sealed one way or another.
With my heart pounding, I gripped the wheel and somehow managed to steady it before we slammed into the metal and concrete of the divider. The tires screeched in protest and the car tilted painfully, but we didn’t crash.
Once I had the vehicle back under control, I glanced back at Amanda. How was this possible?
“I’ll pull over,” I gasped, hardly able to catch my breath as the reality of this situation sank in more and more. “I have to pull over so we can look.”
“No!” Dave cried, motioning around us wildly. “Look, there are about a hundred of those things standing by the side of the road. You have to drive, Sarah. We can’t stop right now or we’ll all get bitten and that won’t help Amanda.”
My breath came out as a sob as I saw the zombies. He was right. They were standing by the side of the road, flinching and writhing as they watched our car roll by.
They were hunters now, the only thing left in their infected minds was the desire to eat flesh, suck marrow from bones, and draw whatever nutrients they got from brains. If we stopped, they’d charge and there would be no keeping them out of the car. We’d run out of ammo before we’d gotten rid of half of them, especially without Amanda to help us fend them off the way she had in the parking lot.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Dave asked, his voice loud, but strangely not angry. “Why didn’t you show us this back at the gas station?”
I could see tears leaking from Amanda’s eyes in the rearview mirror. To my horror, they were grey, not clear, and not because of runny mascara or anything.
“She was so little,” Amanda said as she tightened her grip on her injured arm. “No more than five or six, probably. She had blond hair and an American Girls doll that’s just like the one my niece has.”
She sobbed for a moment, but neither of us interrupted.
Finally she continued, “She was standing in a stall all by herself and I swear I didn’t know she was a zombie until she was on top of me. I just thought I could help her and then she was on me, growling and squirming and she-she bit me.”
“Oh no,” Dave breathed. “Oh, Amanda…”
“I-I thought you would leave me,” Amanda sobbed. “I didn’t want you to leave me so I lied when you asked if I was okay and I hoped I would be somehow. B-But now I can feel myself changing.”
“Feel it?” David asked softly.
She nodded. “I want to bite you.”
“Which you?” I asked as I swerved around a group of three zombies. Their fists pounded against the sides of the car as we passed them.
“Either one,” Amanda sobbed. “It doesn’t matter to me, really. I can smell your blood and your brains. I can smell them.”
Dave stared at her. “I don’t know what to do. What do we do?”
She swallowed, but it was clear that even that simple act was diffic
ult.
“In the zombie movies, there’s always a friend who gets turned. A-and they always have to kill them.”
Dave shook his head. “No! No, Amanda. We can’t kill you.”
“You have to,” she cried. Her voice garbled slightly and she had to suck in a breath before she continued, “In a minute I won’t be able to stop myself from jumping forward to attack you. I’ll go for Sarah first since she’s driving and she can’t defend herself. I’ll dig my teeth into her neck and suck on her skin. I’ll bite her until I taste her frontal lobe.”
“Amanda,” I said, unable to keep the shock from my voice.
As she turned into a monster, she actually sounded so much calmer, almost more intelligent. But I guess it made sense. As her brain shut down, what was left was stronger, if only for a moment. Kind of like a person who lost their sight and could hear better.
Only soon Amanda would be gone. She wouldn’t retain any intelligence or humanity. She would be a thing. An ugly, horrible thing that didn’t remember we were friends.
“David,” she screamed. “Shoot me. Please kill me! Kill me now before I hurt you!”
He lifted the handgun that was on the center console between us. His hand shook as he leveled it on her, aiming for her head.
“Dave, no!” I cried, even though I knew as well as he did that this was the only way. Still, it was a sickening thought. Even after everything we’d already done, this was so different. “God, please… please! It’s Amanda!”
“Do it,” she moaned, but her eyes were starting to turn red. I saw the glitter of the iris in the rearview and my heart felt like it was exploding in my ears.
“Do — arggh,”
And she was gone. Amanda was gone. With a growl, she vomited black sludge across her pink tank top and she tilted her head at us. Then she smiled, her teeth greyed from the sludge and her tongue black.
“Kill it!” I screamed.
My attention was so split that this time I didn’t notice the car that was turned on its warped and twisted side ahead of me. I wrenched the wheel like I had with the semi, but I slammed against it anyway, flinching as metal ground on metal. Dave’s door split like a rotten banana as a long piece of the other car’s bumper tore through the metal panel. Dave yelped and scooted toward the middle of the seat to keep from being sliced by the shards.
Married with Zombies: Book 1 of Living with the Dead Page 9