by Tony Urban
“Stuck?”
“I can’t get him out. I’m not big enough. Come help him!”
With that, the kid took off in an awkward, loping run. It disappeared around the block building. Bundy, refreshed after his recent bathroom adventures, followed.
The boy, and it was a boy he realized when he saw him closer up, stood in front of what looked like a hole in the ground. When Bundy reached the scene, he saw it was a hole of sorts, but a man-made one of the concrete variety. It was a small chute, about 7 feet deep. At the bottom was a doorway one third the normal size and Bundy assumed it was an access door to a crawlspace or service area.
Also occupying the small space was a man slumped against the wall. Bundy could only see the top of his head, which revealed a half-bald pate that had sustained several cuts and gashes. The man sat motionless.
“Daddy! I brought help!” The boy peered into the pit, eagerly waiting for his father’s reaction. Bundy did the same and, soon enough, the trapped man moved.
First, he slumped forward, putting his hands on the ground and crawling onto all fours like a dog. Then, he pushed himself upward where he swayed precariously on his feet.
“Help him out, Mister. Please help my daddy.”
Bundy glanced at the kid and saw his rust-colored hair flip up as a gust of wind caught it, then settle back down when it passed. A constellation of freckles spread across his cheeks and nose and Bundy thought he looked a bit like he’d always imagined Huckleberry Finn.
“Come on, Mister.”
Bundy leaned over the hole. The man rocked back and forth on his feet. He still hadn’t looked up.
“Hey, buddy. Hell of a spot you got yourself in down there.”
The man groaned in response.
“He hurt himself when he fell,” the boy said.
Bundy glanced at the boy and felt sick when he saw the eagerness plastered on his face. “He did, huh?”
The boy nodded. “That’s why you’ve gotta help him.”
Bundy turned back to the man. He’d stopped his marching in place and now looked upward, toward their voices. The right side of the man’s face was smashed in like a partially crushed can of soda. His mouth hung ajar allowing pink drool to dribble out. And, when he saw the two humans above him, he unleashed another groan.
“What are you waiting for? Help him!”
The boy gave Bundy a shove in the ribs. Bundy sat on his rump and stared the boy in the eyes.
“Listen, buddy. Your dad’s not hurt.”
“Yes he is!”
“No, he might have been hurt before. But he’s more than hurt now. He’s dead.”
“No he ain’t. He’s moving. Dead people don’t move.”
He had a point there and Bundy wasn’t exactly sure how to respond. Instead, he stood up and grabbed the kid’s tiny hand which was swallowed up in his catcher’s mitt of a paw.
“You have to listen to me. He’s dead. There was a sickness. It made people die but left ‘em able to move around. All clumsy-like." God, that sounded ridiculous. No wonder the kid wasn't buying it.
“You’re crazy! You’re a crazy man! Let me go!”
Jesus, why did I pick this place to shit, Bundy thought. “Come with me. I’ll show you there are others like him. There’s no saving them.”
Bundy walked and pulled the kid along. He squirmed and struggled but he was little more than a rag doll compared to the big man. They made it all the way to the van and Bundy slid open the rear door. He turned to the kid, ready to lift him into the ride when the boy uncorked a perfectly aimed punch to his nuts.
The breath rushed out of him in a pained “oooooof” and he grabbed his balls with both hands. With that, the kid bolted toward the rest stop. Toward his dead father.
“Wait, kid!” Bundy trudged after him but between his mammoth size and the throbbing agony between his legs, he was very slow going. “Stay away from your dad! He’s a zombie!” When Bundy rounded the corner, the boy was no where to be seen. “Kid? Hey? Where are you?”
Bundy continued on, toward the pit at the side of the building. When he reached it, he paused.
“Don’t do this. Not this time.” He took a deep breath and looked into the pit.
The first thing he saw was the boy’s bright blue medical boot. Then he saw the rest of the boy sprawled across his father’s lap. It appeared as if he was cradling his son. Maybe rocking him to sleep or singing him a lullaby like he’d done before the world turned to shit. It could have been saccharine sweet.
But it wasn’t. Because the father wasn’t holding his son. He was eating him.
When the father looked up at Bundy, his cheeks bulged out like a chipmunk which had been gathering acorns for winter. A stringy strip of flesh hung out from between his teeth and his jaws chomped up and down, up and down until it disappeared into his mouth.
“You bastard.”
The zombie dad growled at him, then leaned in to the kid and bit off his bottom lip. Bundy had seen enough. He headed back to the van and tried to put what he saw out of his mind.
11
The tide had swamped the Saab on the beach but Bolivar didn’t care. The three mile walk in the cool, damp ocean breeze gave him time to clear his head. When he arrived at the village of Lewes and found it overrun with zombies, just like Philadelphia but on a smaller scale, any optimism he’d built up on his morning stroll vanished.
It really is over, he thought. His medic training hadn’t included courses on virology but he knew anything which could spread that fast was beyond control. The world, as he’d known it, was gone. Accepting that proved freeing in some regards.
He gave little thought to trekking to Illinois to track down his father and brother, or to California where his sister had moved the week after she graduated high school. He hoped they had survived, but trying to reconnect was pointless. That life was over.
He suspected the government was over too, but he decided that, as soon as he secured a vehicle, he’d take Sawyer’s advice and continue to Dover Air Force Base, mostly because he didn’t know where else to go.
He’d enlisted in the Army when he was still a junior in high school. His father had fought in the first Iraq war and Bolivar, who was a mediocre student with little athletic prowess, was expected to follow in his footsteps and become a soldier.
The problem was that he couldn’t fathom killing people. He appreciated the structure of the military, the camaraderie, and especially the unknown — in the U.S. one day and halfway around the globe the next — but he thought himself incapable of shooting another human being.
One of his instructors in boot camp, a bespectacled Yankee with a thick Maine accent, picked up on Bolivar’s hesitance during firearms training drills. He pulled him aside one day and confronted him.
“You got good eyes on you, but every time you pull the trigga you close ‘em.”
Bolivar hemmed and hawed and tried to say he didn’t have experience with firearms and that part was true, but the Yankee saw through it.
“Not everyone’s meant to be down in the dirt fightin and scrapin and killin. Some folk’s got to hang back a bit and clean up the mess. I reckon that might suit you betta.”
He was the one who told Bolivar to consider becoming a combat medic and as soon as the words were out of his pinched mouth, Bolivar knew it was his future. He finished basic, then was shipped off to Fort Sam Houston in Texas where he spent over a year learning the skills of the job. He’d found his calling and in more than a decade of service he’d managed not to kill anyone. The zombie he shot through the windshield of the smart car was the only thing he’d ever shot and he hardly thought that counted.
Lewes was a small town with a canal running through the middle of it. As he approached the village, a squat lighthouse greeted him. Painted on the side was “Welcome to Historic Lewes, Delaware. The first town in the first state” and below the writing an old pickup had smashed through the fake, brown lighthouse. Bolivar checked the ignition, and the keys w
ere gone.
The zombies grew thicker the further he got into town and dozens of them filled the once quaint main streets. The buildings were vintage and brick and had carefully painted wood accents. It was the type of place you’d see on a postcard. ‘Wish you were here.’ Wish I wasn’t.
He came upon a Chevy Cruze and a Ford Escape that had tapped together in a minor fender bender and were now abandoned. The Escape was keyless, but he had better luck with the Cruze. Bolivar turned the key and the car started. He’d avoided the zombies until that point but the sound of the engine drew their attention.
As he backed away from the Ford and made a U turn in the middle of the street, a few dozen of them came running after him. Another five approached from the front. Bolivar saw one of them was a young girl with yellow hair and it made him remember the drawings he’d found in the Saab’s trunk.
This girl was dead and, when he drove toward her, she jumped onto the hood and snarled at him through the windshield. Bolivar gunned the engine and the Chevy jumped forward, smashing into two grown up zombies who happened to be in his path. They toppled in opposite directions and the girl lost her grip, rolling sideways off the hood. Bol glanced in the rear view mirror as he drove away and saw all three of them back on their feet and stumbling after him, no worse for the wear.
He took Highway 1 North toward Dover and made good time because there wasn’t a single other moving vehicle on the entire 40-mile drive. He saw a few abandoned cars and several of the crashed variety, but he had the road to himself aside from a few zombies that wandered around appearing lost and alone.
Dover Air Force Base was off exit 35 and Bolivar steered the Cruze down the ramp. When he turned right at the light, the sign out front signaled he had arrived. No soldiers manned the gates which stood wide open. A dirty, camo colored Humvee blocked the road and on it someone had spray painted, “This is the END. Repent!” Inside the vehicle a zombie soldier saw Bolivar and desperately clawed at the window. His fingers left red streaks against the glass. Behind the gates, a handful of dead soldiers were scattered about like roadkill.
Bolivar didn’t bother to check the base. It was obvious there was nothing left to find. He threw the car into reverse and spun the car 180 degrees. As he faced back at the highway, he looked down the barrel of an AK-47.
12
Someone had been following Aben for the last couple of days. He’d never seen them, but heard enough branches breaking and leaves rustling to play Sherlock Holmes and deduce the obvious. It wasn’t a zombie that much was certain. Those clumsy oafs could barely walk a straight line down the highway let alone partake in a rousing game of cat and mouse, so that meant it had to be someone else who had survived the plague.
Aben hadn’t seen a single living person since escaping jail. The idea that someone else was out there and close by gave him more anxiety than comfort, especially if it was the type of person who preferred to stay unseen.
He’d walked about 40 miles since leaving the town, sticking mostly to the highways which were refreshingly free of zombies. He passed dozens of abandoned cars with keys still in the ignition but hadn’t bothered jacking a ride. He had nowhere to go and wasn’t in a hurry to get there. Instead, he raided the vehicles for food and supplies. He lucked into four pistols. Gotta love rural America, he thought, and added them to his rucksack. He still kept Dolan’s gun tucked into his belt and beside it was the hammer sledge.
Aben had used the sledge 17 times so far and it had proved its value over and over again. It was heavy and awkward but one good blow to the head dropped the zombies each and every time. It didn’t matter if he hit them in the top, front, back or sides of their skulls, the hammer produced a satisfying crunch and a dead, or deader, zombie. He hadn’t needed the guns at all.
The western sky was a watercolor painting of pink and purple clouds and the light had faded to the point where he couldn’t see 50 feet ahead. When he came to a rusty Jeep Cherokee, he decided to make it camp for the night. The truck, like most of the vehicles he came across, had its fair share of trash inside and Aben constructed a rough circle of garbage around it. His sleep had been restless, and he was certain to hear anything that stepped on the litter during the night.
Aben sat behind the wheel of the Jeep and ate half a can of beans (maple cured bacon flavor) and an entire bag of barbecue chips. He was uncomfortable being in the driver’s seat, even in a vehicle that wasn’t moving. He hadn’t driven a vehicle in over 25 years, not since the war.
The last time he’d driven, he steered a Humvee carrying himself and four of his fellow marines into an IED. Aben survived with a windshield worth of glass to the face, two ruptured ear drums and a concussion that had him seeing stars and hearing bells for months. Three of the others didn’t survive so, all things considered, he was lucky.
He was lucky now too, and he was thinking about how many times he'd escaped death when he dozed off. It was full dark when the scratching of a soda can against the pavement roused him. He came awake quickly but couldn’t see anything in the black void of night. A flick of the headlight lever illuminated the road ahead, and that’s when he saw it run.
The dog was medium-sized and either muddy brown or dirty yellow in color. It was skinny and its ribs stood out against its short-haired coat. He only saw its ass end and couldn’t guess at the breed as it dashed away from the light and into the trees that guarded the highway like rows of infantry.
Something else survived, he thought. The dog was the first living creature he’d seen since this mess began. He eased open the Jeep door and dropped down from the vehicle. He gave a low whistle and waited. He heard nothing. Probably gone for good. Nonetheless, he took the remnants of the beans and knocked them onto the roadway a few yards ahead of the Jeep, then he crawled back inside and eventually drifted back to sleep.
Just before dawn, he woke again. The beans were gone and so was the dog. Aben repacked his bag and hit the road. Around noon he stopped to rest by a Tastycake Delivery truck that had rolled down the embankment and onto its side.
He gorged on banana pudding cupcakes and powdered mini donuts until his stomach bulged and made him look a few months pregnant. He saw movement in his peripheral vision and reached for the hammer, but as his eyes focused, he saw the dog.
It was 20 yards away but he could see it better in the daylight. It looked like a yellow lab, but smaller in stature and with big, triangle ears that stood straight up. A mutt for sure. He saw the dog had a dark brown spot on its left hindquarter that looked like dried blood.
Aben grabbed a vanilla cupcake, removed it from the wrapper and chucked it at the dog like he was lobbing a grenade.
The dog hopped up and backed away. When it did, Aben could see it was limping. The cupcake bounced and rolled along the grass. The dog looked at it, then to Aben, then back to the food. It approached it, cautious, taking two steps back for every three forward, but it got there eventually.
The dog sniffed the cupcake, then gave it an exploratory lick. It looked again to Aben before snatching the food up in its jaws and running for cover in the forest.
That’s okay, Aben thought. There’s no hurry.
He stayed on the highway and had reached a blink and you miss it town in Maryland when he came upon the most zombies he’d found clustered together since escaping the prison. He knew the hammer alone wouldn’t be sufficient. He wasn’t fond of guns. They were loud and made as spectacle but sometimes they were necessary. Like now.
Aiming the pistol was a challenge with one hand and his first shot went high. As the roar of the report echoed through the valley, the zombies turned in his direction and came for him.
The next four rounds connected. Good, clean head shots. A few of the zombies further back in the pack stumbled over their fallen comrades and he quickly put three more down. Dolan’s pistol was empty so Aben dropped it and dug through the sack for another. The first he found was a cheap Hi-Point 9mm. Earlier, he’d chambered a round, a task which took several minutes an
d the use of his feet, but now he was glad he’d made the effort.
He shot the closest zombie and went to fire again, but the gun jammed.
“Son of a bitch!” he muttered and dropped the pistol. He reached for another but the zombies were within 10 feet of him and closing in quickly. He grabbed the hammer instead and marched toward them.
A raven-haired boy in a Little League uniform was the first to fall under the maul. Then Aben dropped an elderly woman wearing nothing but a pale, blue housecoat. Next was a middle-aged man in coke-bottle glasses and Aben smashed the hammer into the bridge of his nose. His face crumpled inward, and it fell in a heap at Aben’s feet.
Three zombies remained, and they’d surrounded him. A zombie in bib overalls and a teen in a Maroon 5 tee shirt were at his right and a woman in a UPS uniform was to his left. He hit the farmer first and raised the hammer again to take out the Adam Levin fan boy. As he reared back the delivery girl grabbed his arm. He shook free and gave a glancing blow to the teen but only caught it in the jaw.
Bits of teeth fell from its mouth and clattered against the street like tic tacs. Its jaw hung open and crooked and it groaned but kept coming at him.
The UPS driver grabbed him again and Aben could feel its moist breath against the back of his neck. Its wet growls were so close. Close enough to bite.
He swung his left elbow back and connected with the woman’s chest which pushed her back a step, but she didn't let go. The toothless zombie in front pushed against him. It was a full foot shorter than Aben and its face was only inches from his chest. It pressed its broken mouth against Aben’s beard, but its destroyed jaw kept it from biting.
Thank God for small favors.
The zombie at his back closed in again and the guttural sounds of her growls filled his ears. He dropped the hammer and reached back with his right hand, his remaining hand, and grabbed a fistful of her curly brunette hair. She growled again, louder, closer. He tried to hold her off while the teen in front of him crowded in and pushed against him and grabbed him by the shoulders. They both reeked of death. Not to the extent of Dolan’s rotting body in that hot, small room, but like three—day old road kill. The up close and personal assault on his nostrils made a bad situation even worse. Aben was the meat in a zombie bread sandwich.