Dead Nation: A Zombie Novel (Jack Zombie Book 3)

by Flint Maxwell

  The zombie woman without a chest pushes up against me like she’s about to give me a kiss — in a way, that’s exactly what she’s going to do. A kiss of death. Before I know it, trying to push her off of me, another zombie is joining in on the fun. I’m flailing my arms, trying to block them from drawing blood, whether it’s by bite or scratch, I’m on the edge here. My legs kick out, hitting nothing but thin air. The smell of their dead breath is like a fog. It dulls all of my senses by sending them into overdrive. My eyes and nostrils burn. My lungs fill with horrid air, feeling like they’re about to spontaneously combust. The zombie pressing on my right wears glasses, much like Doc Klein’s glasses — thin, wiry frames. One lens is cracked in the shape of a jagged lightning bolt. As he presses his face closer to me (I’m able to push the emaciated woman away with my right forearm), snapping his jaws, thin lips stretched over cracked teeth, I block him with my left. Something jingles behind me, something scrapes concrete. I’m dimly aware of it being the hook embedded into the low barrier. With my right hand, I reach for it. I squeeze my eyes shut. I can’t bear to look at this rotted man, his hair standing up in gray tufts, his cheekbones poking through his face, teeth still full of meat chunks.

  The claw is cold in my hands, but as my fingers close around it, a warm burst of lightning (hope) surges up my arm. I shout something unintelligible, meaning to sound cool and awesome, but really just sounding like a frightened jackass, and the claw comes down on the zombie’s head. Three of the four hooks embed themselves into his cranium. Blood runs from the new holes and into his eyes, dulling the glowing yellow embers. Then, right before me, his eyes turn white, as if they’ve rolled back to get a peek at his dead brain. He falls slack at my feet. I yank the claw free. Now it’s the woman’s turn. My breathing is raspy. I taste the death and decay and the tangy, slightly rusty tinge of blood in the air. I’m scared out of my mind, I’m pissed and I’m tired, but I have to do this. If I’m going to save the Doc, I have to.

  The woman is already on her way back, in the world-famous Frankenstein pose. I don’t know what would happen if I let her press into me again, let her force all that dead weight into my sternum. I might pass out. So I don’t let it get to that point. I can’t.

  The dripping hook slicks the rope it’s attached to with gore, and I grab the goriest part, unfazed. Cocking my elbow back, I snap the rope at the zombie woman’s face with all the strength I have left in my body. And it turns out to be the right amount. Her head explodes. I’m not that strong. No, her head was just mushy to begin with.

  I exhale a great burst of breath and wipe my face clean of this woman’s infected-yellow brains.

  Behind me, the chorus of growls hits its highest note. Except, it’s not music to my ears at all. I turn around to see Doc Klein hunched on his knees.

  I snap my head back to where I came from. There’s more zombies. Always more. They move in a pack. I have to work fast.

  “Klein!” I yell.

  He doesn’t answer me. My cupped hands go to my mouth. They’re slimy with zombie brains. I do my best to ignore the texture and smell.

  “Klein!”

  He looks up. He’s clutching a bag to his breast, trying not to lose his balance as the zombies rock the trailer back and forth with their collective mass.

  My hands begin working, pulling the rope up over the overpass. My fingers have never moved so fast, not even when I used to write shit like this.

  “I’m gonna toss you the rope!”

  “I’ll never make it!” he shouts back.

  “Not with that attitude,” I say.

  Doubt at a time like this? That pisses me off.

  He is about fifty feet away from the bridge and the drop is maybe twenty or thirty feet.

  He pushes his glasses up on his nose. “The probability of me making the swing is almost ten-thousand to one,” he says. “Given the centripetal force needed for me to gain enough momentum — ”

  “Shut up!” I yell back. “Now’s not the time for scientific B.S.”

  “But the odds,” he says. I see his shadow quivering.

  Pretty soon, as the zombies stack up, pressing into each other, what will happen is the dreaded meat mountain. They’ll pile up enough for the stragglers to crawl up the mass of bodies. I’m hit with a picture of the hatch on the roof of the Woodhaven Rec Center. There was about a quarter of the zombies there than there is here. I risk another glance over my shoulder while I coil the rope around my fists. The zombies are closer to me than Klein is now. I have to take care of this.

  “Hold on!” I shout.

  “The odds!” he screams. “The odds, the odds!”

  “What do you think your odds will be once they flip that trailer?”

  He says nothing in return. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

  The lead zombie breaking the plane of the bridge was once a kid. He still wears a backpack. His eyes sag low on his ashy face. I almost don’t want to do it, but I know a bite is a bite, doesn’t matter who it’s from. My hand fills with a chunk of concrete and I beam it at him, hating myself.

  He drops to the road, head cracked open, brains sliming out…dead. Then, he’s lost under the shuffling, dirty feet of the zombies. They flatten him. I look back to the reserve of crumbled concrete. There’s two pieces left. Fuck. My eyes keep scanning, but it’s hard to think with the low moaning in the back of my mind. My heart flutters as it catches a hunk of black in the blacker shadows. Dimly, I recognize it as a bag — Sean’s bag…I’d forgotten about it. Maybe there’s enough ammo for me to brain all of them.

  My legs go into overdrive, shaking all feelings of pain. I pick the bag up.

  Nope, no gun, no ammo.

  A smile spreads across my face. I probably look like a maniac, because through the fabric of the bag, what I feel is better than a gun or bullets.

  It’s a grenade.

  51

  It’s not what I expected a grenade to look like at all. It’s not green. It’s black and small. There are no grooves. It doesn’t look like a pinecone. If anything it looks like a smoke bomb, the type you would’ve seen the high schoolers tossing into the festival’s crowd at the Woodhaven Fourth of July bash…never again.

  I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? I throw the duffel bag at the opposite end of the bridge. Insurance. No need to burn up the goods with myself.

  Part of me wants to bring the grenade up to my mouth and bite the pin and pull it free with my teeth. Knowing me, I’d probably just blow my face off.

  And the dead don’t care for style points. Not at all. Who cares if I look cool?

  So I take the grenade and hold it out to the side as far away from me as possible and pull the pin out. I squeeze the lever with every ounce of strength in my body. Don’t blow up, don’t blow up, for the love of God, don’t blow up. Then my grandmother’s voice is shrieking in my head just as she shrieked at Norm and me one Fourth many years ago when we were playing with firecrackers.

  “You’re gonna blow your fingers off! Maybe even your hand!”

  Not mine, Grandma.

  I throw the grenade into the crowd of zombies, turn and run as far as I can down the overpass, slimy fingers plugging up my earholes.

  It takes three seconds before God’s wrath in the form of a little, metal egg singes the back of my neck and pushes me flying through the air, the rope still in my hand.

  The explosion is so loud, I can barely think, but I’m thinking, Grandma, if my fingers get blown off and I can’t flip you off in the afterlife, I’m gonna be pissed.

  52

  The explosion’s echo pulses in my eardrums. The afterimages of bright yellow and orange tattoo the back of my eyelids. I’m facedown, eating concrete. I turn around at precisely the wrong time. A demented storm cloud has burst overhead.

  Luckily, my reflexes aren’t lacking and I put my hands up to shield my face from the red and black rain, the body parts — hands, legs, arms, chunks of torso. Teeth and bones and debris rattle against the road
. Zombie hail. Death hail.

  All of a sudden, my heart drops, my body with it. I’m sliding through red sludge. The bridge has collapsed, the road tilting. The concrete crumbles. I hear the chunks of rock cascading downward, then the slam of the bridge on the road, which is so hard it rattles my back molars. Sounds of zombies squashed beneath the bulk. I’m sliding, sliding. The rope is in my hand still. I see the end of the road and the beginning of the highway. The crushed cars, the husks of pulverized meat and bodies. The zombies who’ve survived the worst of it, who’ve been pinned to the ground at the waist, still reach up with greedy hands. Anything for a meal, I guess.

  They’re like people worshiping to the heavens and I’m the gift God has bestowed upon them. I’m the Last Supper.

  I close my eyes, trying to figure what will be worse, getting ripped apart by dead teeth or landing in the heap of mutilated corpses.

  Please, God, make this as painless as possible. Please help Darlene get through me never coming back. Please let Abby live out the rest of her life in peace. Let Norm find love. Let Herb thrive.

  Please —

  Then, there’s a metallic clink. It’s quiet, so quiet. And my hand, the one with the rope once coiled around my closed fist and now unraveled, burns with pain. Knuckles rub together. Skin strips off.

  The zombies groan in anticipation. Now, those groans are tapering away. I look up the length of ruined bridge, seeing the wire frame beneath the surface sticking up, rusty orange and red, and I see the gleam of bright silver snagged on this wiring. It’s the rope’s claw and I’ve never been so happy in my life. I almost yell out, “Thank you, Grady!” but ultimately don’t because I’m too busy screaming.

  Careful now. My other hand strikes the rope and clasps around it. Probably not careful enough. I feel the collective breath below me, dead lungs pumping in and out unnecessary air. I smell it’s putrid stench. A car is buried in rubble. Zombies look like smeared bugs on a windshield. I turn my back on it all, the hell below, the chaos. And I make like the old Batman television show and I climb up the rope, except this is no stage trickery. This is real. My hands are slick with my own blood and sweat. I’m shaking. I almost slip in the guts slimed up the rippled concrete. Body parts roll down by me and I don’t know if they’ll ever stop. Out of my peripheral vision I see Doc Klein still on the semi truck’s trailer. He’s curled into a ball, his hands covering the back of his neck. The zombies around him have thinned. Not enough to get down and turn tail to safety, but enough for him to maybe better his odds.

  I get to the top of this particular mountain, reaching the crack in the bridge where it snapped. There’s about ten feet of room left on this overpass. I don’t like being up here. I don’t know the extent of the structural damage the bridge sustained, but I’m betting an exploding grenade never helps it. Not one bit. Now I’m diagonal to Doc Klein. The distance from him to me is farther, but the rope will reach. If it doesn’t, then I’ll get down there and clear a path for him. I might not survive and it might be totally stupid, but that’s what I’ll do.

  Mainly, I think this because I know the rope will reach. This damn rope. If I never marry Darlene, I’m going to marry this fucking thing. It saved my life more than once.

  “Klein!”

  He looks up with wide, white eyes. A few zombies turn to the sound of my voice. Fuck them. Klein looks like he’s seen a ghost. “But th-the odds!” he says.

  “Screw your odds! I’m throwing you the rope and you’re getting out of there!” I shout back.

  He stands up. I’m expecting him to give me more crap about his odds, and if he does, I’m going to tie the rope into a noose so I can hang him, but he doesn’t. Instead, he tightens the strap around the messenger bag and edges the trailer. I can tell he’s trying not to look at the monsters below him, the ones whose fingers are shaped like dripping claws, who slap and scratch at the metal just for a chance at chewing on his guts, their features lit up by the flaming bodies below.

  “Throw it,” he says. He does a good job masking the waver in his voice. But I hear it. I guess I’m attuned to it because I’ve been there so many times before. I know exactly how he’s feeling. I’m the guy who was once trapped on a roof of my hometown gym, cornered by a psychopath and zombies, the guy who was thrown into an arena to duel a Brooklyn cowboy, the guy whose dick was almost the main course at a cannibal dinner party.

  I’ve seen it all. I’ve done it all — gotten through it all.

  This, well, this is going to be a piece of cake.

  I hope.

  53

  I throw the rope. It seems to float through the air for an eternity, going and going, untouched by friction like a meteor hurtling through outer space. I don’t think it’ll ever get there.

  Then it does. The heaviness of the rope clangs against the metal trailer. I take the hook and wrap it around what’s left of the bridge’s railing. The pulley idea and creating enough leverage to easily pull Klein up to me went out the window with the explosion of the grenade. Now, I’ll have to use my brute strength…yeah.

  Klein grabs the rope and starts tying it around his waist.

  “When I say ‘Go’ you jump as high as you can and you Tarzan over to the bridge,” I shout, tugging on the rope to make sure it’s secure, heart beating frantically in my chest. “Keep your legs up, don’t let them grab you!” I’m trying not to think of the weight of this situation. This is the man who can supposedly bring an end to the plague, who can put the dead below us where they belong. If I fuck up and he dies… No, I don’t even want to think about it. In a sense, the weight of the continental United States — maybe even the world — is on my shoulders.

  Stop, Jack.

  The rope tightens as I give it a tug. We have to move fast. The grenade explosion will no doubt drive more traffic to us. Dead, or maybe even what’s left of the cannibals. There’s really no time for a full safety check. The only thing we have to go on is hope…and a fraying rope.

  “Okay,” I say, gulping. “Go!”

  Klein’s chest rises and falls as he takes a breath loud enough for me to hear over the ringing in my ears and the death rattles of the dead.

  Then, he goes. Screaming.

  Both of my hands are on the rope. The coating of blood and guts isn’t doing much to dull the burns. I’m gritting my teeth, looking at Klein as he swings through the night air through slitted eyes. He kicks out. Didn’t listen to me. His shoes clobber a couple zombies in the face, slowing his momentum. It causes more tension on the rope and more fire in my palms. I swear I can smell my flesh burning. I swear I see little puffs of white, skin smoke. I scream out, too.

  Metal grinds into the concrete.

  The chorus of the zombie shouts, screeches, and rattles increase. It’s enough to drive a man insane. But we hang on. Klein, literally. I feel the rope twang as his weight reaches the bridge.

  “Climb!” I shout. “Climb!”

  He can’t reply. This is not a man you’d see climbing ropes. This is a man you’d see behind a computer, skinny, weak. But, my God, he tries. If I can just meet him halfway.

  I pull and pull, hand over burnt hand. Blood fills my mouth. I’d opened it to yell and my jaw clamped on my tongue. Veins bulge and pulse from my arms, now wired with the type of muscle you can only get from bashing zombie after zombie.

  My lungs catch fire, burning worse than my forearms and fingers and palms.

  Klein screams as a zombie snatches his foot. I’m pulled forward, heels gritting against rock and rubble, wedging against the embankment. Fuck. I want to let go. All the pain in my body, the agony, it’s shouting for me to let go, to drop this man I’ve never met.

  No. I won’t.

  “Fuckkk!” I shout.

  The extra weight disappears. I’m pulling so hard, the top of Klein’s head materializes out of what seems like thin air. The rims of his glasses sparkle in the moonlight, his lazy eye peers at me. I let go of the rope and claw at his shoulders. His collar bunches up in my fist.<
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  I pull and pull.

  Scream and scream.

  He reaches the edge. White knuckled hands dig into the concrete. He’s grunting, yelling, bellowing. Blood runs from his fingernails. I reach his belt running right above his ass and give another great yank. His screams are cut off as the breath whooshes from his lungs.

  He’s safe, I’ve got him. I’m scrabbling, pulling him closer —

  He screams and bucks from my grip. The messenger bag that was cinched around his shoulder almost skin-tight has snapped or come undone. I don’t know, all I do know is Klein has let go of the bridge’s edge and now has the bag in hand as he dangles over a sea of starving zombies and as my arm slowly tears from its socket.

  “Drop it!” I yell. “Drop it, I can’t hold you up by myself.”

  He starts to swing. “I-I can’t,” he says, the words choked. I feel tendons slowly unraveling and popping somewhere deep within my shoulder.

  But then the thought is gone. Klein flings the bag over the edge and his skinny arm smacks the concrete again. Blood droplets fly in slow motion, some dot my face. It’s the least of my worries. I pull him the rest of the way. We both collapse to the small stretch of blacktop — what’s left of the bridge. I’m breathing hard. We both are.

  A few seconds pass, and when I get my breath back, I say, “Fuck you, man. Really. Fuck you.”

  Klein just laughs like a maniac.

  54

  “Thank you! Thank you!” Klein says after the laughter is done. There’s tears in his eyes. Tears of fear and pain and happiness. He’s up on his knees, now, hugging me. “Thank you! Thank you!”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I say, shoving him off of me. Now’s really not the time. We aren’t out of the woods yet. “You almost got us killed over…what, a fucking bag?” My voice sounds harsh.