by Dana Fredsti
He folded up the map and tucked it into his knapsack, pulling out a bottle of water. He drained half the bottle and handed it to me. I took a swallow and passed it to Griff, who drained it and set the empty bottle on the sidewalk.
I guess recycling wasn’t exactly an option.
“Time to rock the Kasbah.”
With that, JT rocketed to his feet and took off eastbound on Taravel, using abandoned cars and zombies alike as launching pads, and making no effort to travel quietly. He paused on top of an Escalade and executed a quick jig, resulting in a metal denting cacophony and a decent Lord of the Dance imitation.
Damn, that boy can move.
All zombies within hearing distance slowly turned towards the source of noisy Riverdancing, weaving clumsily in and out of the cars, coming out of driveways and up the sidewalks as JT sprinted off, leading them away from Griff and me.
Griff and I waited until the coast was more or less clear, un-hunkered ourselves and moved cautiously westward, dispatching the zombies that drifted into our path like calm, homicidal robots. I used my katana and tanto, depending on whether a decapitation or a schlorp through the eye socket would work better. Griff stuck to his M4, wielding the stock of the weapon with deadly effect, the strength behind the blows more than enough to crush zombie skulls.
By the time we reached 19th Avenue, the sight of crushed skulls, smashed cars, body parts and puddles of gore ceased to register beyond obstacles we needed to circumnavigate. Mangled toddlers, limbless teens, shredded bodies of all shapes, sizes and nationalities, they all blurred together in one gory stew, the only difference being whether nor not they moved.
Other than choosing where to place my blades I didn’t look at them. I didn’t want to discern nationality, gender or age. Especially age. The little ones still managed to pierce what was left of my broken heart.
* * *
JT looked down from the roof of the West Portal Muni tunnel, noting with satisfaction how many zombies he’d managed to lure away playing his version of the Pied Piper.
And wasn’t that a grim story. What happened to all those kids anyway? Did they go to some fantasyland where they’re stay forever young and eat candy all the time or did they end up as food for all those rats?
Oh well, not his problem. What was his problem was backtracking west without this bunch following, which meant some fancy footwork and mega stealth mode. Shouldn’t be a problem, right?
He didn’t want to head back in the direction he’d come because while Ash and Griff were all sorts of bad-ass, they couldn’t move nearly as fast on the ground as he could up above, and the whole point of this exercise had been to clear away some undead meat so they had a chance to put some space between them and the hungry throng.
He scanned the surrounded area. At first glance, West Portal Avenue was a no go, so thickly packed with zombies he doubted he’d get too far even with his unique ability to crowd surf.
He supposed he could hop over the buildings on Ulloa leading to Claremont, but that was heading further east and he didn’t want to get any further off course than he already was.
No, he’d have to risk heading west briefly and then hope to lose his faithful followers with some stealthy rooftop hopping. Or he could stay where he was for a while longer, sing a song or two and insure his teammates had a chance to hoof it to Stern Grove. But if he waited too long, he’d have a hell of time getting anywhere. Too bad the trains weren’t running because—
His gaze sharpened, resting on a series of stalled Muni trains heading out of and into the tunnels on West Portal Boulevard. It looked like they’d been running in both directions when the shit hit the fan. Mostly two cars, but even one rare three car M line stretched out down the street.
The trains were at least 10 feet high so he would be well out of reach of all but zombie basketball players. Even better, there was a train located conveniently beneath the roof of the station, an easy jump for anyone, let alone him.
No one had ever accused him of false modesty.
JT reckoned he could travel south along the tops for several blocks. It would be easier to ninja his way into the neighborhood away from the business district and lose the zoms. The wind had even kicked up, dissipating enough fog to reveal a bloated full moon, which in turn illuminated his path nicely.
He gauged the distance and then jumped, landing on the roof of the train in his best improbable superhero three-point landing, one hand down, feet wide apart in a crouch, one hand on the ground in front of him, the other outstretched behind him. His badass glare was lost on his audience, but dammit, what a wasted photo-op.
Ah well, to business.
“See you later, my peoples!”
With that, he took off at a run down the top of the first train. When he ran out of that train, he bridged the gap to the next on with a graceful leap worthy of Gene Kelly in his prime. He didn’t bother with the picturesque landing this time; just let the momentum carry him down another car length, then another, ducking and weaving around the guide wires.
He was about to run out of train again, but this time there wasn’t another one conveniently in front of him. There was, however, one that had been heading into the tunnel in the opposite direction, only a scant six or so feet across the tracks. Zombies jammed the space in between, hands reaching upwards for the tasty treat out of reach.
JT grinned. He could do this. But first, a little running start would be good.
He went back half a car, flexed his knees once, then twice, and went for it, pushing off with his left foot against the edge of the train to get the full momentum behind the jump.
He sailed through the air, laughing as rotting fingers reached for his soaring body. He felt something brush the bottom of his feet right before they landed on the adjacent train. It wasn’t more than a feather touch, but it was enough to throw him off his game just enough that he started, falling just a little short of his goal. His rear foot hit air instead of metal and he felt his body start to drop backwards. Throwing himself forward, JT grabbed onto a raised outcropping on the roof, landing heavily on his front knee hard enough to make him wince.
But he was safe for the moment.
Damn. That was too damn close for comfort.
JT didn’t exactly experience fear, but he felt something close to it. He flipped over onto his back and lay there for a moment, staring up at the moon.
“Let’s be more careful, shall we?” he told himself quietly. “You get bit and it’s one big game over. Unless you beat the odds and become a wild card, and let’s face it. You’ve already won the awesome lotto so that’s probably not gonna happen. Wouldn’t be fair.”
He listened to the relaxing sounds of hungry zombies for a few minutes longer, then got resolutely to his feet. His right knee kinda hurt. Okay, it throbbed. But he was pretty sure it was just a bruise. And if it wasn’t, he’d deal with it later. His body hadn’t let him down to date; he wouldn’t let it start now.
* * *
“Ow! Motherfucker…”
I uttered both words in a quiet but heartfelt whisper. The hillside path Griff and I took into Stern Grove crumbled beneath my feet when I’d stepped too close to the edge and I’d landed on a pile of broken branches. I’d landed there after a very ungraceful toboggan ride on my ass. Stupid crumbling path.
Griff bounded down the slope to my side. “Anything broken?” he asked quietly.
The sounds of unsteady footsteps up above and breaking branches in the trees told us we weren’t alone.
Great.
Was it too much to ask for even a short break from all the carnage, even if it was just five minutes? Just a nice walk in the park under the full moon with… well, with Griff.
Okay, scratch that.
I let him help me to my feet, wincing at various aches and pains. Luckily none of them were debilitating. Getting injured at this stage of the game would be a bad thing indeed.
At least I’d managed to hold on to both my blades during my undignified
decent. That was something. I sheathed the tanto, tired of carrying both.
We continued through the trees, the temperature down in the little mini canyon we were now in a good ten degrees cooler than it had been in the streets. It felt good after all the chopping and hacking and thrusting.
What would feel even better was a hot shower. Both Griff and I were splattered liberally with blood and other things I didn’t want to think about. Normally one would have to wade through a slaughterhouse to achieve this level of gore saturation.
The narrow tree-lined path opened up into a large grassy area, with an open-air stage on the left and terraced cement seating on the right. A half dozen or so zoms in various stages of freshly dead to uber gooey staggered aimlessly across the lawn. Griff and I moved silently along the back of the seating area, doing our best to stay out of sight.
We made it to a parking lot, only partially filled with vehicles. A curving drive leading out of the park was blocked by an overturned van, the passenger sliding door partially open, an unmoving, half-eaten body slumped partway through as if the person had tried to climb out.
The other cars in the lot looked empty with the exception of an old Nissan hatchback, the interior of the windows smeared with blood. It held two bodies, a woman and a little girl. The woman was dead. The little girl… not so much. It clutched one of the woman’s hands, one of the fingers in its mouth as if nursing on a pacifier.
Ugh ugh ugh!
My brain would explode if I saw one more horrible thing.
I heard growling and turned to see a good dozen dogs of various breeds and sizes worrying on the corpse of a young woman, lying under a sign that read “Dog Play Area.” She’d been wearing baggy pants and a tank top when she died and had a number of dog leashes looped diagonally around her shoulder and torso like a punk rock baldric. All I could think was she might not have minded ending up as food for her charges.
To my surprise, my head did not explode.
One of the dogs, a largish black lab, looked up and growled, muzzle dripping with gore.
“Keep moving,” Griff murmured.
I didn’t argue.
We made a wide berth around the feeding dogs and continued toward the lake, which lay on the other side of the wide open grassy play area.
The fog had completely blown away and the light of the full moon made visibility a snap. The down side, however, were the gusts of wind increasing in strength. Branches in the eucalyptus trees all around us creaked ominously.
Even more troubling was the thought that the copter might not be able to come get us if the wind picked up too much more. I had no idea how many miles per hour the gusts had to be before flying a copter was a no go, but the way the branches were thrashing around, I worried we were getting close to the limit.
Griff and I hugged the edge of the park as a handful of zombies wandered across the grass. A loud crack signaled a falling branch on the other side of the dog play area and a little old lady zombie dragging a leash with an empty collar turned and stumbled towards the sound.
The dirt path intersected with an asphalt walkway leading past a chain-link fence lined with trees that bisected the field.
“There.” Griff pointed towards a little building with carousel animals painted on the wall. I saw a tiger, a giraffe, a unicorn, and a seal balancing a ball on its nose.
We picked up our pace and jogged over to it, ducking around the corner before any of the zoms wandering forlornly through the area could spot us.
There were cement picnic tables and a large grill on the other side, and more painted animals decorating the walls. A sign reading Pine Lake Day Camp was duct-taped to a pillar.
I could see the edge of Pine Lake no more than 20 feet away. We’d made it to the rendezvous area and, wonder of wonders, no zoms. A little rest would be nice while we waited for JT. But first…
I turned to Griff. “I need to use the bathroom.”
“Do you always announce it?”
I glared at him.
“Only when I need someone to stand guard so I don’t get bushwhacked by a zombie clown.”
“A zombie…” Griff trailed off, shaking his head. “Never mind. I’ll stand guard.”
Other than a clogged toilet, there were no nasty surprises in the girl’s bathroom. The faucet didn’t work, but there was standing water in the sink so I dipped my hands quickly in and out and shook them dry. No way I was wiping them on my viscera spattered clothing. I didn’t bother looking in the mirror. I didn’t want to know what I looked like and I didn’t particularly care.
As I rejoined Griff outside, my radio went off in a burst of muffled static.
Quickly unhooking it from my belt, I hit the receive button.
“Hey Ash.” I recognized JT’s cheerful voice even with the fuzzy sound quality. “We have a little bit of a problem.”
* * *
“So let me get this straight,” Griff said as we moved rapidly past the lake towards the end of the park. “All the zoms Monkey Boy led away in the first place are now following him this way?”
“Yup.” I looked longingly back at the picnic area, my plans for a rest shot to hell by JT’s news. “He hurt his knee so he’s moving slower than usual, and a few of them stuck on his trail, and you know how that goes.”
Griff nodded. “Like a big pack of carnivorous lemmings.”
“Stinky carnivorous lemmings,” I amended. “At any rate, he thinks he can stay ahead of them, but not far enough to give us a decent lead time if we wait for him here. He said he’d catch up to us at--” I paused, waiting for my short-term memory to kick in. “—at Wawona and 43rd, a block from the store.”
The path rose up as we passed the end of the lake.
“So much for Operation JT Saves the Day,” Griff muttered, striding ahead of me.
“Save the snide shit,” I snapped as quietly as I could. “He’s done a good job of distracting them so far.”
“And we’ve done a pretty good job on our own so far.”
“It’s called teamwork for a reason.” I sped up my on pace to keep up with him. “But then you’re not exactly a team player, are you?
Griff stopped in his tracks and I smacked into him for the second time.
“Being used as a human lab rat doesn’t engender much team spirit, he said softly. I did what I did in San Diego to save you. I couldn’t save everyone.
“You didn’t try, though, did you?”
“No.”
I shook my head in disgust and started brush by him, but he grabbed my arm.
“If I had tried, we’d all be dead. You, me, the rest of your team.” He paused, then added, “You’ve said it yourself, Ash. You can’t save the world.”
“Maybe not,” I replied, hating him for being right. “But I’m going to do my best.”
With that, I pushed past him, practically running the rest of the way up the hill, wishing I could outrun my memories as easily.
* * *
Clipping the radio back on his belt, JT resumed his journey, leaping gracefully from one roof to the next on a row of attached houses. He found if he ignored the pain, he could move at about three quarters his normal speed. Not bad for lesser mortals, but pretty shitty for him, especially under these circumstances. He really should stop and wrap the knee, but that would use up precious minutes he needed to keep ahead of his adoring fans.
So he kept moving, albeit with slightly more caution than usual.
He’d ditched the Muni trains at 15th where the number of zoms had thinned out just enough for him to cut across West Portal into the residential part of the neighborhood. Unfortunately a few diehard zombies – and yes, he did laugh at his own bad pun, thank you very much – stuck on his trail like the persistent posse in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“Who are those guys?” he muttered, annoyed.
He decided to abandon his plan to slip through Stern Grove and stick to the rooftops. Even if he couldn’t shake them, they couldn’t catch him. And he�
�d be able to catch up to Ash and Griff that much sooner.
“I am totally a leaf in the wind,” he said to himself as he prepared to take a five-foot drop to a balcony. “Watch me soar, yo!”
He hit the balcony, only wincing slightly when his knee complained at the impact, and then swung over the wrought iron railing to the shed roof below. From there he bounded onto the hood of a Prius in the driveway and car-hopped across the street to the next row of houses.
He had this by the ass… as long as he didn’t fall on his.
* * *
Griff and I made it to Wawona and 43rd, ducking behind cars, fences, and sometimes in and out of side and back yards to avoid the ever increasing number of zombies. We put down the ones that got directly in our path, but otherwise tried to stay out of sight.
The houses were all dark. Some had broken windows and front doors ominously open. Others were boarded up from the inside. Every now and again I’d see movement inside, and once I thought I saw the flicker of what could be candlelight coming from an upstairs window, but there was no time to investigate.
And despite my brave words to Griff, I knew I couldn’t save everyone.
By the time we reached 43rd Avenue, early morning light started to streak the sky. Normally I loved watching the sunrise, but this morning it didn’t illuminate anything I wanted to see.
43rd Avenue ended at Sloat, like a small tributary opening up into a much larger river. The intersection was clogged with cars, including a pile-up involving an over-sized Ram truck, a Comcast van, and a bright yellow Humvee.
Who the hell thought owning a Humvee in San Francisco was a good idea?
The pile-up was nasty. The van had flipped on its side, and the truck and Humvee angled into it, front ends smashed to form a sort of inverted “V.” The moonlight clearly illuminated blood and body parts both in and under the vehicles involved. It did, however, also, give Griff and me a relatively safe place to hide behind so we could get close to and take a look at Sloat Avenue and see what we were going to be dealing with to get to the entrance of George’s Zoo.