I sit here, my erection still protruding. I wonder why I’d flinched from her. Here I am absolutely dying to have sex for months now, and there she is offering it to me, and I run with my tail tucked between my legs. I sit in silence, stewing over this, telling myself it’s a betrayal of Charisse, but that’s absurd since she and I had known each other all of twenty minutes.
“Can I be honest?” I ask.
“Sure.”
“It’s been so long…I was about to explode right there just from you touching my leg.”
She’s quiet. I expected her to laugh. Finally, she replies, “You’re a sweetheart.”
“No, I’m a nervous idiot.”
“It’s okay to be nervous when the entire population just rose from the dead trying to kill you.”
“I mean before that happened. I don’t really belong in this society. Women paralyze me in every way, so I just avoid them. And that’s been my way of dealing with it all pretty much since adolescence.”
“Ever had a girlfriend?”
“Twice. Well, I sort of have one now. But she’s not really--”
A scuff sounds behind us, and we both shut up. Another scuff. Then a clump of boot on wood.
Marsha leans close to me and pulls my ear to her lips. “Don’t move. I’m gonna look out the window.”
She gets up again, quiet as a cat. I can hear the feet outside walking up the front steps, but I can’t hear Marsha moving. I glimpse a tiny crack of light near the window just as she slips the curtain aside.
Quiet hangs heavy—the kind of silence that pushes down on you from above. I wonder if I should run upstairs or out the back door if one of them starts smashing its way in.
Hands startle me, slipping out of the darkness around my head again. “Just one,” she whispers into my ear. “Let’s sit quiet until he goes away.”
Her breath is warm and sour and smells like a dirty ashtray.
“He smells your cigarette,” I whisper.
She laughs with only her breath. “Could be.” She leans her head against me and puts her arms around me. It feels nice, in a nurturing way. Her soft, heavy breast against my arm returns my erection to full strength, ignoring the zombie that was standing 6 feet away from us and pushing on the door.
Charisse flashes into my mind, and I wish she were here.I relax into Marsha’s embrace and feel the safe nurturing sweetness of woman. It reminds me of a moment in my childhood, lying on my mother’s lap on the couch, and we were watching TV--Family Ties, The Cosby Show, something like that. I was probably about eight years old, and my father was sitting on the chair across the room, and my mother was just petting my hair as I lay there on her breast. At that age, her breasts were just these amazing beautiful soft parts of Mom, nothing sexual. She felt so soft that I said, “Mom, you’re just like a pillow. The best pillow!” I felt so much love. It was definitely the last time I remember feeling that innocent child closeness to her.
Then for some reason, I started calling her pillow, and I just kept nuzzling and saying pillow over and over again. Suddenly, my father exploded, “GODDAMN IT, SAM! Stop calling your mother a pillow!”
He was a terrifying man, always switching rapidly from a happy drunk dude watching football into an enraged, roaring giant. I could never see it coming, either. I would go weeks sometimes, feeling close to him, and then suddenly he would erupt because I had left a glass on the table and made a watermark on the wood, and he’d punch a hole in the wall to emphasize how upset he was. In hindsight, it’s obvious I’m not tough because I spent my life living in fear of this violent ape man.
After the pillow episode, I laid there clutching my mom as if for dear life while the show continued. The show was no longer fun; it was just an empty room with me huddled against my mom, my father across the static, all of us sitting there staring at the loving family on the television that wasn’t ours.
I sink into Marsha’s embrace so gratefully. It feels as though I haven’t been able to rest in days.
Chapter 19: Then
Somewhere around Teall Ave, there was an accident blocking the road, but I scooched into the left shoulder and scraped along it, nudging cars aside with the nerve-wracking shriek of grating metal probably summoning every zombie within five miles. One pudgy lady who looked like my third-grade teacher with a bit-off nose lurched between the cars and started thumping wetly against the passenger window, her face expressionless. It really seemed to be Mrs. Landfere, but what are the odds that it could be her. I stared hard and this face brought back terrible memories of a dingy classroom full of right-handed desks, and this woman aggressively trying to force me to write with my right hand even though I’m left handed for the first few weeks of school. It seemed like some impossible dream, an implanted memory, something that could not have really happened.
Then again, the whole apocalypse felt like a dream. Mrs. Landfere looked like a movie extra and 690 West was a movie set.
Then I was past it, and my teacher was quickly forgotten as I watched downtown Syracuse looming ahead. It wasn’t a real city, though, just a sprinkle of tall buildings that weren’t actual skyscrapers.
The highway was pretty empty until I reached the 81 onramp which was on the edge of downtown. 81 was backed up with cars crammed like dead cattle all the way up onto 690, and there was no getting through. Syracusians had probably made some mad pilgrimage toward Infinity Mall once they realized they were fucked. “Our destiny is infinite shopping!” they thought as one!
Syracusians are small town people living in a medium-sized city with not much to do. They became a hive mind, swirling around the queen, which was this mall. If the weather predicted rain, they went to Infinity to stay out of the rain. If it predicted sun, they went to Infinity to enjoy the air conditioning. All other commerce in this city withered when the mall appeared. People were zombies already, but Infinity gave them a place to congregate and Borg-out with each other.
Infinity USA Mall was built on the second most polluted lake in the United States--Onondaga Lake. We’re talking ‘two-headed fish with squid tentacles’ living in these waters. Harris O’Malley said the mall was built on gigantic Styrofoam blocks laid over a toxic swampy landfill, next to the water treatment plant which regularly overflows sewage and feces into the lake. They call it Infinity, USA – like it’s a city -- because it is like a small city, and it has its own zipcode.
The rest of 690 was jammed up too. The eastbound side was clear, but there was no getting my car across the huge concrete meridian.
There weren’t any zombies in sight, just downed cars in a traffic corridor buttressed high above the city. I got out and looked around. No movement nearby, just distant sound. The ground felt cold on my bare feet, and I knew having no shoes could become a problem.
A tower of fire had engulfed the top floors of a tall building I recognized on James Street. It’s where Daune Nelipowitz used to live. I’d been on that roof with her in high school, throwing plastic coat hangers off and trying to hook them on the oak tree in front of her building. Yup. That was definitely her building. I’d been in love with her, truly, deeply, infinitely in love with her. Hanging-out-together-every-single-day kinda love. Friend-zone love.
I stared at that fire for a long time, dreaming that she still lived there, dreaming of myself rushing over there and saving her right now. In my fantasy, she looked up at me with star-spangled eyes, biting her lip and hoping I still loved her after all these years.
A zombie could’ve easily snuck up on me as I dorked out watching my memories burn. Beautiful and painful pieces of my life melted away with the tar on that roof as Daune’s long-lost laughter filled my head. We used to flip through the phonebook and prank call people with weird names. One day, someone we pranked hit star 69 on the phone and called back and demanded to talk to our mother, so Daune got on using her angry black lady voice, and said something like, “My kids did that? Well, I really appreciate you callin’ cuz I’ma beat they asses tonight. Jarran and Shawanda ain’t
gonna be able to sit down for a week!” The guy had stammered that he didn’t think beating kids was a good punishment and pleaded with her not to beat us. “Oh no, suh, I raise my kids better than that…believe you me, my husband gonna kick the shit out of Jarran! He gonna use the hot fire poker on him!”
Fire poker cracked me up so much that Daune couldn’t keep it in either so she hung up on the guy.
Daune and I hadn’t talked in 20 years, but she’s on my Facebook, which means just another anonymous acquaintance from high school melting into the backdrop of self-indulgent posting. She never commented on a single thread I wrote. Most likely she’s Daune of the Dead now.
Other sounds pulled me out of unrequited teenage romance. The crackle and hiss of the fire was audible here, of course, but there was a lot of other sound, too. I could hear distant screams, coming from all parts of the city in surround sound. I heard firecrackers that I knew were gunshots. Those were in stereo. The strangest thing was how much noise there was, yet how quiet it seemed without the steady drone of traffic that punctuates a city. Occasionally, a far-off engine gurgled, but that steady traffic hum that fills our lives had been replaced with screams, gunshots, crashes, and glass shattering.
I decided to continue on foot. Go West, Young Man, as Horace Greeley said. His name used to matter in 1871, but in my generation, nobody knew who he was; they just threw the quote around. Great men like him had been drowned by celebrities whose names were thrown in our face so much that the public actually believed they mattered more than the rest of us. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Matt Damon, George Clooney. Who the fuck are they? Nobody’s name matters now. Celebrities, rockstars, the whole thing was a hoax, perpetrated on our impressionably young species. Play while there’s time to play, children, for soon the wolves will come.
Where was the president now? Did all the important people escape to some remote paradise while the dead fed on us?
I still had no destination in mind, and my bare feet felt icy like a corpse. I knew I needed to steal a dead man’s shoes immediately. But this was minor compared to my other problems, like where the hell do I go now?
The nearest lake was Onondaga, toxic, full of mercury, unswimmable, but right downtown. There was a yacht club along the lake parkway, and I think I had some dim vision of myself untying a boat and just floating around in the middle of the lake until the Army fixed everything. It wasn’t a conscious goal, just some dim escape plan drifting in the back of my mind, pulling me in that direction.
I started walking away from the car, then, as an afterthought, I popped the trunk. I was rewarded with a shotgun in a gun rack, which I happened to have the key to, on Officer MacDougal’s key ring. I pulled it out. I was so stupid that I didn’t check if it was loaded, or if there was ammo. Just the very fact of having a shotgun in my hand gave me a feeling of safety, and I wandered on down the road with it. I was even doing poses with it, trying out the weight, aiming it, pretending I was some guy in a movie. It’s just one of those things that people do, I guess, when you’ve never held a weapon in your life other than a chef knife, and suddenly you have a shotgun in your hand. It was weightier than you’d think, and it didn’t feel comfortable to hold, but I played around with it so much I began to feel like a pro.
Then I tried to cock it. The obligatory Hollywood cock. The thing every person who’s never held a shotgun must do the moment you hold one. And it wouldn’t cock. Sonofabitch! It almost immediately dawned on me that the safety would be on, so I located it and pushed it. Still, no cock. What kind of fucking cop drives around with a broken shotgun? The kind who picks me up, that’s who.
I kept turning the safety on and off, not sure which way was really on, hoping that if I did it enough times it would work. Nope. While I dicked around with it, I heard a scuff behind me. Sure enough, there was a creepy, vacant-eyed old man gimping up on me. He must’ve shambled up the 81 onramp. He was far enough away that I kept trying to cock the shotgun. It kept not-cocking. He got closer. No cock no cock no cock. Finally, I was forced to deal with this situation. He was slow. I could run in circles around the car and he would never catch me. Or I could use the one knife I had kept on me, but getting within grabbing distance of him sucked. I hefted the shotgun in two hands, like a baseball bat. He was two car lengths away.
“Get back,” I said.
He ignored that. So I stepped forward and brained him with the butt of the gun. I swung it like a wood axe, straight down, with a sickening crunch on top of his head. It literally crunched, and he dropped like a ragdoll. His head looked like a deflating balloon head with a misshapen dent in it. It is absolutely the most horrific thing, the first time you crush a head out of shape. We spend our whole lives looking at human heads, and they’re all different, but all pretty much the same oval shape. So when you see one that’s mushed like playdough, it’s beyond grotesque. It’s so wrong that a wave of nausea rose in my stomach and I had to look away, breathing deeply to calm down. Then, like a car wreck, I had to look back at him with the sickest fascination. I had literally shattered bone, and blood was pouring out and pooling while his body convulsed and his vacant eyes stared hungrily at the sky. This time, it didn’t make me sick; I was entranced for a while at how easy it is to break a human body. How tough I felt. Is this how bullies felt when they pushed kids around on the playground?
Victory surged inside me. Life against death. Sam 2, Zombies 0!
Really, Sam 28, if you count all the zombies I ran over in the car. But those didn’t really count. That’s the chickenshit way to kill zombies. Killing them by hand, well, it makes you feel alive like nothing else in the world. It makes you feel like a man.
Until you try to cock the shotgun again and realize that your testicles obviously haven’t quite dropped.
It took about five more minutes of examining the shotgun before I located a tiny lever on the left side of the trigger. When I held it in, the gun cocked. Cha-chunk! I kept doing it, waiting for the shell to fly out, but nothing flew out.
I opened the black duffle bag in the back of the cop car, and voila, located two boxes of shells. It was surprisingly easy to figure out how to load them. There was a hole in the bottom of the gun and you just slid them in. It was like second nature practically, after growing up on Schwarzenegger. Five shells fit in the hole, then I cocked it, and I became the Terminator.
I decided I needed to fire it. I began sighting around at different targets. Finally, I settled on the creepy white mannequins decorating the old train station on the side of 690. They’ve been there since I was born, but right now, it seemed some cosmic force had stationed them there just for zombie apocalypse target practice. The statues stood far away, wrapped with red scarves some artist had put on them. I remembered how much I loved driving by that part of the highway as a kid. I remember the conversation in the car where my father explained to me that it used to be a train platform, and that someone had climbed up and put the mannequins there as artistic vandalism. Even my straight-laced dad thought that was cool.
This was like closing another chapter of my life; looking down a shotgun site at the closest mannequin, remembering that conversation, shooting my childhood.
The first thing that happened when I pulled the trigger is an explosion in my ear, then my arm was ripped off by the force of the gun while I was knocked backwards. Holy shit. How does anyone fire one of these things? I dropped the gun and held my shoulder, which was burning from the pain. “Owww fuck!” I managed, staggering around and feeling my shoulder throb. My arm was still there, of course, but it might as well not have been for all the feeling I had in it. I did not look forward to ever having to fire that gun again. Real terror set in here. I could definitely not protect myself with that gun; I needed a pistol, for sure.
I was shaking when I picked the gun back up, and I grabbed the duffle bag out of the trunk, too. It was pretty bulky and heavy, with a fire extinguisher, flares, gloves, first-aid kit, measuring tapes, and a blanket. There was also a box of trash bags
and a broom and dustpan in the trunk. I took the fire extinguisher out of the bag and left all the other junk in it. What the hell does a cop carry a broom for? “911, what’s your emergency?” I’ve got a messy apartment on James Street. Please send an officer for cleanup.
Shakily, I closed the trunk. Adrenaline had subsided and left me weak and hungry, feeling like a zombie myself, vacant and not quite here. As an afterthought, I looked at the mannequin to see if I’d hit it, but it was intact, no sign that my slug had touched it.
My icy feet throbbed and I suddenly got an idea—I can take the boots off that old guy zombie! I walked over to him and was relieved to see his shoes were a little bigger than my feet. Crouching down, I untied his laces, and that’s when something warm grabbed my ankle--
I screamed and fell backwards and saw the human hand holding me, and the vacant mouth attached, opening and closing. This fucker had been pinned under a car tire, his entire body sprawled beneath the car and his face barely visible in the darkness because he was black. His warm hand on my cold ankle filled me with queasiness, but worse was the strength with which he was pulling me. I couldn’t kick him because he could bite my foot. I had the shotgun, but at this close range, it could blow my foot off, or ricochet off the car and blind me or something.
His other hand scraped against my foot, trying to find purchase on it so he could pull me into his maw with both hands. Oh god fuck this fuck this…I swung the shotgun down on his arm, but he didn’t seem to feel that.
I had no choice so I cocked the gun and pointed it between my legs, at his face. I naturally cringed away with my eyes squeezed shut, mouth closed, anticipating the--
BLAM!!!!
--explosion of gore that splattered me as the gun kicked back into my abdomen, feeling quite like a bowling ball just got dropped off a roof, and wailed me in the gut.
I tried to suck air in and mop the blood off my face at the same time while blind panic coursed through me. The guy under the car was dead, and there weren’t any other guys under any nearby cars, but my body spazzed like it was hooked up to an electric current.
Destiny Nowhere: A Zombie Novel Page 11