by McBain, Tim
Kids cradled stolen candy in their arms. Baseball bats and other blunt objects maimed the windshields and rearview mirrors of cars that had lost the parking spot lottery.
Goosebumps rippled over his forearms and thighs. Fear gurgled in his gut, lifting acid to the back of his throat so he could taste it. Under the fright, though, some animal part of him was exhilarated by the violence of it all. It made his eyes open wider, made his posture right itself, made his breath tingle in and out of his throat, made him feel more alive. That surprised him. Was that a weird response? He didn’t know. It wasn’t violence against people so far as he could see. It was violence against property. He wasn’t in favor of it, of course, but there were worse things people could do.
Without thinking, he reached over and pulled one of the guns into his lap, kept his hand on it. He glanced down to confirm that it was the Beretta. Good. Maybe he had a favorite after all.
He sped through the next several blocks, endless mayhem unfolding along the sides of the street. He saw no more fire, but he did see more broken glass, more people toting flat screens and jewelry and one guy with an arm full of what looked like chicken patties from a fast food restaurant.
And then he saw the beating, saw the crowd circling, the rise and fall of a crowbar and a piece of pipe and hands and feet, all pummeling a figure on the ground of which he could only make out the limp legs wearing blue jeans, the motionless feet wearing what looked to be an expensive pair of Nikes.
Everything slowed down. Reality filtered down to just that image of weapons and fists raining down on a human being gone totally still. Bashing it. Bludgeoning it. Stomping it. The faces of the attackers looked indistinct. They seemed to tuck back into each other’s shadows, to blur together. A bunch of brows furrowed into the same aggressive shape became the only detail he could discern.
The beating stretched on for a long time. Too long. Thinking back on it, he wouldn’t be sure if he subconsciously slowed down the car to watch it or the sense of time slowing was solely due to his perception shifting into slow motion. Either way, it couldn’t have been a very long time — just a few seconds, most likely -- but it seemed like several minutes went by.
And then the figure beneath the attackers was still no longer. The fallen man bucked his hips, his torso jerking partially upright. The attackers fanned out. They backpedaled a couple of steps in all directions, their movements so perfectly in unison that it either looked like they were performing a synchronized routine, or that they were somehow knocked back physically, like some force field suddenly repelled them.
Their victim looked like a dead man somehow sitting up, like a top quality special effects makeup. His forehead was dented, partially caved in. An exposed section of skull above his right eye looked like a cracked eggshell. Blood and bruises shrouded the rest of his face in reds and purples. His eyes looked in different directions. He bucked again, his body jerking in a way that seemed involuntary, and then he remained still, his expression blank, as the attackers circled him again, adjusting their grips on their various weapons and inching closer.
When the victim’s head leaned back unnaturally and his arm looped out in a pathetic attempt at grabbing one of the attackers, Mitch released the gun to bring a hand to cover his mouth. The motion was somehow familiar, the rigid neck, the inarticulate movements of the fingers, the dim look about the face. It was like Janice, or whatever Janice had become, at least. This thing was back from the dead. Perhaps that’s why they were beating on it in the first place.
One of the attackers stepped forward and swung the crowbar like a baseball bat, his legs and hips rotating into the swing with explosive force. The bar struck the eggshell skull, a solid connection knocking it to the side with a high-pitched sound like a tossed horseshoe colliding with the steel stake. A few pieces of chipped skull fell and skittered across the ground like Chiclets.
The zombie lurched, flailing arms cinching around an ankle before the crowbar guy had a chance to retreat. It brought its head forward, moving toward the captured leg, mouth open wide. The other men swelled around the attacker, tried to help him rip free of its grip. One guy kicked at the thing, but it didn’t help.
Mitch watched through the screen of the passenger side window, suddenly acutely aware that he was one step removed from this scene. He found himself focusing on that eggshell forehead. He couldn’t see the actual bite, couldn’t see the teeth sink into the back of the man’s calf. The leg shielded the face from his view. So he watched the broken skull bob just above the ankle, heard the man’s scream hit a falsetto note, saw the others stumble backward, all of their aggressive expressions morphing into terrified ones.
And then it was all gone. Behind him. Shrinking in the rearview mirror. The car moved on. Time seemed to speed back up, and other flickering images of violence played out on the street side, though none were quite so dramatic.
Travis
Hillsboro, Michigan
48 days after
Clouds blocked the sun and leached some of the color out of everything. He walked down the sidewalk in this muted version of the world, and the dog trotted along just behind him. It felt strange to have a companion now. He looked down, made eye contact with her and watched her tail beat faster. Some part of him couldn’t believe she was still here.
When they’d gotten back the night before, he’d taken a bowl of oatmeal out to the porch and fed her, gave her a little peanut butter for dessert. He didn’t figure she’d want to be inside after all of that time trapped, so he didn’t try to get her to do that. Instead he sat with her on the swing until it was dark and she’d been asleep a long while. He went to bed, expecting her to be gone when he woke, but the next morning she was sitting up on the swing.
Now he needed dog food, and he knew where to look.
The Caslers lived four houses down. Everyone in the neighborhood knew their dogs well enough, three big coon hounds that made noise at all hours. They barked and howled and stood on their hind legs to rattle the chain linked fence of their pen. About twice a week they made weird throaty noises that Travis thought sounded like a man turning into a werewolf.
He’d watched them leave. It must have been five or six days after he buried his parents, weeks ago now. The whole family had been there: The father with the tree trunk legs, perpetually sweating through polo shirts. The mother with big hair that Travis presumed hadn’t changed a bit since her senior pictures circa 1991. The high school aged son, scrawny and pale. They packed most of their things into their SUV, much of it in those big Rubbermaid bins. A few boxes went into the trunk of the son’s hatchback, and the last step was coaxing the three dogs into the back seat of the subcompact, which they accomplished with some difficulty.
Anyway, Travis didn’t think there was any way they could have loaded all of the dog food they must have had on hand. Time to pillage that shit.
He cut through the yard toward the front door. He felt funny as soon as he set foot on their property, like someone would see him, and he’d somehow get in trouble. He hesitated, taking a little half step and pausing. Nothing happened of course.
He knocked on the front door, an empty gesture, he knew, and tried the handle. Locked, of course. Gauzy curtains covered all of the windows. He thought about circling the house to try the other doors, but some part of him wouldn’t have it.
There was no point in pretending any of these formalities were necessary. He had watched all of the people die or leave, could still see many of their corpses bloating around town. This was just an empty building in an empty city in an empty world. He picked up a rock about the size of a softball from a decorative circle of stones surrounding a bird bath. He cupped it in his hand in front of him, hefting it up and down a few times to get a feel for its weight. Satisfied, he chucked it through the big front window.
The rock punched a hole in the glass and flew straight through, ruffling the gauzy curtain and disappearing. There was something very cannonball-like about all of it. The sound of the
glass was percussive. It rang up and down the street like a giant bell. The dog flinched, and Travis couldn’t help but swivel his head around, looking for some authority figure to pop up and yell at him.
Nothing happened, of course.
He threw another and another, big triangular shards of glass falling and shattering moments after the cannon balls knocked out their circular holes. The window frame was now the house’s shocked mouth, open wide. The dog cowered behind his legs, back hunched, tail tucked.
“It’s OK,” he said. “No more rocks.”
Her back straightened a little, though she still looked concerned.
He looked up at the house. A row of jagged glass fangs still hung from the top of the opening, but the bottom was clear. He boosted himself up to the sill and pulled himself inside head first, hands reaching into the shade to find the floor and secure his landing, managing to avoid the glass as much as possible.
He got his feet under him, squatting with rocks and broken bits sprinkled all over the dark wood floor below. The quiet in here seemed pronounced after all of that exploding glass. It made him uneasy. All he could imagine was taking a single step forward to have something pounce at him, attaching itself to his face with two rows of claws or a maw full of teeth before he even had time to flinch. He moved his foot a little, glass grinding into the wood. Nothing responded to the sound. Of course, he knew no one was here. Sean was the only person he’d seen on this block in weeks. Still, he couldn’t quite shake that uneasy feeling.
He shuffled forward a few paces, out of the glass and rocks, still squatting on the floor. He found himself in a living room, a nice one with brown leather furniture that looked like it belonged in a shrink’s office on TV. The space still felt lived in. A nest of pillows and two rumpled afghans coiled into a pile on the couch, like some place a creature would bed down. A nature magazine lay open on the coffee table, opened to an article about endangered jungle species. He could imagine someone emerging from the hallway any second to curl up in the blankets and resume reading, but another part of his brain knew they wouldn’t, of course.
He looked to the front door, considered letting the dog in, but he thought it better to get in and out as fast as he could. He wasn’t sure she’d be too keen on going inside any building so soon after nearly starving to death trapped in a room. Besides, she would wait for him out front, he figured.
He crouch-walked forward, still paranoid enough to be unwilling to stand upright, as though staying low somehow protected him. The air felt thicker as he moved away from the window. Heavy. Dank. A musty smell assailed him right away as he reached the kitchen door. It reminded him of rotting fruit and mold mixed with some sour smell like pickle juice.
Something small crunched when he took a step onto the gray and brown flecked ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor. He looked down. Nothing. Another step brought about another tiny crunch, rocking his foot from heel to toe slowly revealed a series of miniature pops and cracks. What the hell?
Oh. There were no brown flecks on the gray tiles. Instead dead fruit flies covered the floor. They looked bigger than any he’d seen, almost the size of fat mosquitoes, and apparently they’d been here long enough to get crispy as hell. Sheesh. They must have made quite a swarm at their peak, he thought.
He stepped again, the moving air around him pushing fruit flies along like an invisible broom. Bowls of shriveled bananas sat on the counter. He pulled open a few cabinets and drawers to reveal cereal boxes, utensils, spices and a lot of empty spaces.
The pantry held what he wanted: a big tupperware bin of kibble, mostly full. He picked it up, finally standing. As he left the kitchen, he again imagined something leaping on him as he passed through the doorway, but he was fine.
Mitch
Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
42 days before
He watched himself in the bathroom mirror, watched his hand lift the gun to eye level, watched his finger slide to the trigger. He squinted, aimed for the reflection of his face, right between the eyes. He squeezed the trigger and nothing happened because of the safety, so he made a little gun noise by popping his lips, did a pretend recoil where he tipped the barrel up. He felt the need to do this, to run through some kind of mental repetition so that when he got down in the basement, got face to face with this dead thing, he’d know what to do. He’d have something, some kind of ingrained sense or maybe even muscle memory, to fall back on if he panicked.
He ran through it one more: ready, aim, pretend to fire. Satisfied, he lowered the gun and nodded. He looked like hell, purple under his eyes, puffiness to his cheeks. He considered peeling back his sleeve to get a look at his wound, but the image of Janice’s ankle flashed in his head, the missing chunk, the smoky tendrils fouling her flesh. He shuddered. Not now. He couldn’t look. He’d take care of this first.
He stepped out of the bathroom and paced back and forth in the hallway a few times, gun dangling at his side, fingers on the opposite hand brushing back and forth over his lips. The day was creeping into the afternoon now. The kids would be home from school soon, and then the real work would begin. He couldn’t think of that now, though, couldn’t look even an hour into the future. It was too overwhelming.
He still had that bile taste in the back of his throat, that film of acid his nervous belly had fluxed up into his mouth. The taste reminded him of cafeteria pizza when he was a school kid, that grease that sat in the pieces of pepperoni that contorted into cups as the edges cooked faster than the middle. Maybe it was the grease mixed with the cheap sauce.
All right. OK. No more bullshit. Time to do it.
He walked to the basement, opened the door. His hand moved toward the light switch and stopped. It was already on. Right. He’d never turned it off during his post-bite retreat.
OK, that was OK, he told himself, trying to will himself to not be upset. The truth was that he didn’t like it, though. Didn’t like the surprise. Didn’t like feeling out of control before the encounter even started.
He hesitated there, his toes resting on the threshold. He looked down into the chamber below, watched the strobe effect of the fluorescent light flickering around on the floor. He saw no movement down there, heard nothing. Without thinking, he brought the grip of the gun to his forehead, used the rough part to scratch between his eyebrows, the metal cool on his skin.
He started down the steps, pressing forward with some urgency though he was light enough on his feet to remain near silent. His chest heaved, some instinctual pre-aggression deep-breathing thing kicking in, like a boxer sucking wind just before a match starts. He had to really concentrate to keep his respiration quiet.
His feet touched down on concrete, and his head swiveled to locate his target. His eyes flicked their way around the perimeter of the room, both hands on the gun with a twitchy thumb more than ready to flick the safety off.
Nothing.
What the hell?
Could it have gotten out? He tried to imagine it, shoulders hunched, shambling up the steps, hooked fingers somehow opening the door. Impossible. Right? It had to be impossible.
His chest started heaving again, faster this time, shallower. The word “hyperventilation” popped into his head. He stopped himself, forced a long, slow inhale upon his diaphragm, felt his chest get tighter and tighter as his ribcage expanded. Then he let it out all slow, felt the panic subside a touch. Then another deep breath, the expansion of his chest fixing his posture. He squinted as he exhaled, felt the tension ease a little bit more in his neck and shoulders.
OK. He made himself focus. He held his breath and let his eyes do one more rotation around the room, forcing them to take it slow this time.
There. He could see its arm sticking out from behind the folded up ping pong table. The dumbass thing had wedged itself up against the wall. He doubted this was out of some clever attempt to hide. It was just an idiot animal snuffling around at random, falling into motionless dazes like this for long stretches.
He took the
barrel of the gun into his left hand so he could wipe the sopping palm of his right on his jeans. It was still moist, but it was better.
He took a deep breath, making no attempt to be quiet now.
“All right, fucker,” he said. “Come and get it.”
The thing banged into the ping pong table a couple of times before it made it out into the open. It shuffled toward him, its head and shoulders leaned so far forward that it seemed to be falling and catching itself over and over with choppy steps, legs staggering to keep up with the thrust of forward momentum.
He raised his arm just like he did in the bathroom upstairs. He aimed, flipped the safety off and fired. The Berretta blazed and popped. The first shot missed, the bullet thwacking into the concrete wall, but he did it again right away, and the second one hit dead center in the forehead, spraying brains out of the back of the skull. The projectile mess hit the ping pong table with a wet slap, smearing red across it like someone had flung the contents of a full jar of slightly runny strawberry jam at it. The impact stood the body straight up for a split second, and then it bent at the knees and went down, folding up into something small on the ground.
His ears rang. His hands tingled. His head got light. A rush of euphoria came over him then, a feeling of accomplishment like none he’d ever felt. He couldn’t fully embrace it, though. He couldn’t quite celebrate, even for a second. Maybe he wasn’t quite as useless as he’d always feared, but he was finding it out too late. His wife was gone, and he was heading for the same destination rapidly. No victory could erase those things.
He grit his teeth, the muscles in his jaw bunching and unbunching in rapid succession.