by Jack Hamlyn
I made it about a block before I quit running.
I looked behind me, but that thing had not followed. I had to get my head straight. If I wanted to reach the college—and, oh boy, did I want to reach the college—then I had to use my smarts. Panicking and running into God-knows-what was simply not an option. I needed to relax and use my head because it and the gun were the only things that stood between me and some horrible death. I gave myself a quick scrutiny. I was filthy with corpse-drainage and covered in dirt. If anyone saw me coming, they would think I was a zombie. It would be a hell of a thing to get gunned down for being something I wasn’t.
But I nearly did.
Without warning, the dead came out to greet me. I remember being stunned at the sight of them. Why? I don’t know. It’s not like I didn’t expect them. Like a fish bleeding in the ocean, I knew it was only a matter of time before the sharks showed. And showed they did. At first, there were only seven of them, which is plenty when you’re alone and you only have twelve rounds in your gun. They came from three different directions as if on cue, shuffling along, shambling, and driving toward me with that same insatiable appetite. One of them—an old lady who appeared to be toothless—was dragging a plastic shopping bag behind her and it appeared to be full of something. I didn’t even want to guess what that might be. She walked at the side of a businessman who still wore a smart powder gray three-piece suit, save that it was filthy with what he’d been eating and had slobbered all over himself. As he came on, he kept lifting his left arm and looking at his wrist. He did it again and again. I figured he had been some kind of exec with a harried agenda who liked to consult his watch constantly. Like the zombie woman earlier that offered me the flesh she had been chewing on, this guy was simply re-spooling the habits of his lifetime. There was no watch on his wrist, of course, but he didn’t know that. He was a cannibal corpse with a tight schedule. I gotta get this guy’s brains eaten so I can make that meeting with R&D at five. He came on with the old lady at his side.
Both white-eyed and ravenous.
Both absolute monstrosities.
I crossed the street to give them a wide berth and a couple Jamaican-looking zombies with dreadlocks and gnashing teeth stepped out of a doorway. I started going backwards and a couple of boys with baseball bats were bearing down on me, their faces leathery and corded with the texture of beef jerky. My best bet was to run straight ahead before the old woman and Mr. Business Exec closed the gap.
But that way was cut off, too.
A barefoot zombie wearing a chef’s apron stained with gore came striding out. He carried a butcher’s knife and the skin had rotted from his face making him look like something from a dissection room. As he walked, he casually slashed the air in front of him with the knife. I had to wonder how many shanks of rare roast beef he had carved with that knife, perhaps even for Mr. Business Exec and his pals during a three-martini luncheon.
You’re surrounded, asshole. This is what you get when you lose your nerve and go blindly running out of pure animal fear.
The zombies pushed in at me. The chef was cutting arcs in the air with his butcher knife. The two Jamaican corpses approached with a perfectly synchronous lockstep. The old toothless lady dragged her bag at me. Mr. Business Exec came at me, checking his nonexistent watch, gouts of drool hanging from his mouth. The prune-faced little leaguers closed in for the kill.
I chose my targets quickly.
The old lady and Mr. Business Exec. Cut them down, run over to the sidewalk, and jog free of the others. I aimed for the old lady’s head and squeezed the trigger. The slug punched a hole just above her right eyebrow, bounced through her skull and exited out the side of her head, spraying Mr. Business Exec with copious amounts of gore. She fell into him and he shoved her aside. He had barely completed that action and checked his watch before my second bullet caught him in the forehead and blew what was inside his skull all over the sidewalk. His forward momentum carried him right at me and I had to leap over his corpse, hoping that he and the old lady would keep the others occupied for a while.
I got over to the sidewalk and a woman stepped out of a nail salon. She made a low hissing sound and opened her mouth to bite. I felt her ragged nails dig into my arm and I had no time for any fancy shooting. I punched her in the face with three quick, hard jabs that threw her back into the doorway and gave her a sidekick that drove her back inside.
As I did so, I saw that there were two more inside. One of them was a teenage girl who looked like she had bathed in blood like Sissy Spacek in that movie where they dump the pig’s blood on her at prom. She and another zombie lifted up their arms as if they wanted to embrace me and came gliding forward.
I felt rather than heard someone coming up on me and there was the zombie chef. He was close enough so that he could have slashed my throat open. I turned and he jabbed the knife at me and I threw myself back at the doorway. His face, I saw, was locked into some sardonic rictal death grin, all teeth and no lips. As he jabbed again, I cracked him in the face with the butt of my 9 mil which distracted him long enough for me to execute one of my sloppy Chuck Norris moves. Bracing myself in the doorway, feeling the ladies from the nail salon breathing down the back of my neck, I jumped up and kicked him in the chest. I caught him dead-on and with serious stomping power. He flew backwards, right into the path of the Jamaican zombies. All three of them became tangled up together and went down.
By then I felt a cold hand seize the back of my neck and another seize my ankle. I pivoted and kicked the woman who was on the floor and gave prom queen an elbow to the face that made her stumble backwards. It was what they used to call on TV wrestling a “forearm smash”. Regardless, it got me free but already the chef and the Jamaicans had gotten to their feet and were coming at me. But the little leaguers got in front of them raising their bats to knock one out of the ballpark or, in this case, my head. I brought up the Sig-Sauer and drilled both of them. One went down with a headshot, the other had his left cheekbone, and everything around it splashed right off his face.
Chef went right after the one I dropped with the headshot and began hacking his corpse with the knife.
By then, there were nine or ten more zombies bearing down at me led by a monstrous black dude with a baldhead that was now growing with a good crop of grave-mold. He had an angry, sneering look on his face. I shot him through the left eye socket and he fell over straight as a pole into the others. In the back of my head, I was mentally tabulating how much ammo I had left and the magic number was seven.
But I didn’t worry over it.
I sidestepped the Jamaicans and skirted the hungry mob, knocking three elderly women out of my path, but there was more, much more. The sun was just slipping over the horizon and the streets looked red with its blood. And there were zombies everywhere. Like the true night creatures they were, they charged out of their holes now that the light was fading. I rather doubt it had anything to do with that, but there were many more than there had been five minutes before.
There was nowhere to run.
There were so damn many reaching out for me.
This was the part in a movie where the cavalry charges over the hill. I didn’t get any cavalry, but I did get a shooter. Crack! Crack! Cra-ack! Zombies started dropping all around me with perfect headshots. I pulled my 9 mil and dropped three more and dove through a tangle of them as the shooter kept working his rifle, busting caps, and wasting zombies in every direction.
I crawled free and two more were there. I killed the first and the second—a big bearded corpse like a biker—took hold of me in a crushing grip. He squeezed me in a bear hug and I jammed my elbow up against his throat to keep his mouth away from me. Slavering and grinding his teeth, bathing me with the mortuary stench of his breath, he kept right on trying. I put the barrel of the 9 mil up to the side of his head and blew his brains into the street.
Three rounds left.
Two more zombies dropped around me, their heads exploding into sprays of
gore and skull matter. As I got clear of them, I saw my shooter. In the fading light, he was standing at the top of the steps of an old building with an M-14 rifle, sighting and firing, sighting and firing, on semi-auto. That he was a damn good shot, I couldn’t argue with. He had a good weapon and the experience to use it properly. He was a skinny guy in an old olive-drab fatigue coat, his hair long and white as was his beard. The only problem was he’d been spending so much time trying to get the dead away from me, he didn’t see a rat pack of five or six of them converging on him.
“LOOK OUT!” I called to him, shooting a naked man with blackening skin in the head.
He got the picture, drilled three of them, but by then the others were coming up the steps, and they had him. I ran over there, avoiding two more walking corpses and I heard him scream as they got him down and bit into him. I dropped two of them with my last rounds but the third was still biting into him as I got there. It was a man in a jogging suit. I went up the steps, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and tossed him backwards. He tumbled down the steps, smacking his head on the concrete. He got up, but staggered off in the opposite direction as if he did not know where he was.
The old man, my savior, was bleeding badly from the throat. He tried to speak, but his mouth was full of blood. It gurgled through the wound in his throat. He was trying to tell me something and I understood exactly what it was. I picked up the M-14.
He nodded.
He didn’t want to become like them and he had saved my life. Now, he wanted me to save his soul and his dignity. I swallowed.
He nodded again, the light fading from his eyes.
I swallowed again, feeling hollow and dead inside. I put the muzzle of the rifle to his forehead. He nodded weakly. He dropped me a wink, breathing out his dying breath. I pulled the trigger and ended it for him. He was already dead when I did so, but the idea of it sickened me deep inside. It made me feel hopeless and angry. He had an olive drab canvas bag. I pulled it from his shoulder. Probably his worldly possessions. Another magazine for the M-14, a few cans of food, a water bottle that was half-full, a plastic bag of medical stuff, a flashlight, two packs of cigarettes, a few disposable lighters, some odds and ends. I slung it over my shoulder and wasted three deadheads that swooped in for a quick lunch.
By then it was true dark and a big fat moon began to rise over the city of the dead.
M14 Assault Rifle
Type: 7.62 mm Semi-Auto
Kill Range: 500 yards
Magazine: 20 rounds
THE MADMEN
I ran and ran. I knew the folly of doing something like that because it had gotten me into the mess I just escaped from. But the way I saw it, what choice did I have? I wondered if Tuck was still over at the college waiting for me. It wasn’t too far away, but in those streets and with the things that hunted them it might as well have been a hundred miles.
The zombies were mulling everywhere and I needed a place to hide, to gather my strength and think things out. What I really needed was a working vehicle, but everyone I saw was either smashed-up or stripped. Working vehicles were a hot commodity for the living. Of that, I had no doubt.
I ran for about ten minutes when I smelled burning wood like a campfire. It could have been a burning building, something left over from the armored force that rolled through, but I didn’t think so. I tracked it in the moonlight and came to an old fence that was taller than me that sealed off a vacant lot between two buildings. I could see the flickering light of the fire behind it. The fence was an old plank type of the sort that Tom Sawyer had whitewashed and handbills used to be posted on.
“Hey!” I called. “I ain’t a dead one! Can I share your fire?”
“If you can climb it, do it,” a voice said.
I looked around. There were three or four zombies in the street. One of them had taken notice of me. It was now or never. I slung the M-14 over my shoulder, jumped up and got my hands around the top of the fence. As I pulled myself up I felt every ache and pain, all the abuse my body suffered that day. I got up, saw that Mr. Zombie was closing in, and dropped over into a weedy lot that was flanked by a pair of tall brownstone buildings. I figured the lot had been somebody’s private garden back in the day. Now it was overgrown and shadowy.
As I pulled myself to my feet, a voice cried out, “THAT’S IT! THAT’S FAR ENOUGH, YOU THIEVING CRACKER! I KNOW WHAT YOUR TYPE DO! I KNOW HOW THEY THINK! I’LL SHOOT YOU IN THE HEAD! I’LL SHOOT YOU IN THE GUTS! I’LL PEG YOU RIGHT THROUGH THE SPLEEN!”
I held my hands up. “I don’t want any trouble. I just want to rest and warm myself a bit before I push on.”
For a moment or two, there was silence. Then a little African-American guy with a gray beard and shifty eyes came out of the bushes. “That you, Danny?” he said. “You know you’re always welcome as long as you don’t bring old Bobby Scabs with you.”
He sat on a crate by the fire. He didn’t ask my name and he didn’t offer his.
“Well, it’s been some kind of rum luck, Danny. Got so a body can’t trust no one here nor there.” He had a big pistol in one hand and a sharpened stake in the other. “Ain’t like they say in them old movies, Danny, I’ll tell you that much. I went out this morning and raided my secret stash. They were in the streets. Now what the hell were they doing out in the daylight? Supposed to be sleeping in their coffins. Ain’t they got no sense? One of ‘em tries for me, Danny. Right away, one of ‘em tries for me. So I knocks his ass down. Oh, he was something…think it might’ve been that guy ran the fat burger stand three blocks down…got worms in him. Awful. I see this here stake and I ran it through him, right through the ticker. But he gets up anyway so I shoots him right in the head. He don’t get up from that! No sir, these things ain’t got no movie sense.”
No, this guy wasn’t all there and I had pretty good feeling he hadn’t been all there before The Awakening. Probably a bum, a homeless guy, or one of those old drunks that panhandle the tourists, and sleep down in the subway tunnels. I kept my eye on him. Some of them were dangerous.
“Good fire you got,” I said.
“Thanks, Danny. It lit your way home. That’s good.” He pulled out a pint of Jim Beam. “Want a pull, Danny?”
“No, I’m good.”
“Well, screw you, Danny.” He looked angry, and then his features softened. His eyes looked wet. “You bring any smoke with you?”
I was going to say no, but then I remembered the cigarettes in the bag. I pulled them out.
“Oh, that’s good, Danny. That’s good. You mind lighting me one? My nerves ain’t what they used to be.” He set aside his pistol and stake, holding his hands out and they quivered violently. “And light one for yourself. I don’t like smoking alone. Reminds me of Arlene. Boy, she liked to smoke.”
I lit one for him and then one for myself. I didn’t really want one; as an ex-smoker who sometimes fell off the wagon for two or three days here and there I didn’t like to give into my addiction. But, considering the circumstances, I thought what the hell. I lit up with him and the charge of nicotine hit me like it hit me in the old days—right between the eyes. As bad as those things are for you, the nicotine sure wakes you up. My friend smoked his, just staring into the fire. He, of course, thought the zombies were vampires and that must have been some kind of scene when he rammed the stake into that one. It was really hard to tell how old he was. His face was worn and craggy, set with diverging lines. His hair and beard were salt-and-pepper. But if he was a street person, and I was pretty sure he was, then it was really hard to gauge. Those tunnel rats looked like they were sixty when they were thirty.
“You don’t know where I could get a car?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “Ain’t no cars, Danny. All of ‘em are gone. The only wheels now are the crackers in their tanks with the big guns. Boom, boom, boom. All day sometimes. All day.”
He was right on that.
“Maybe come first light, we’ll go get us some track rabbits. Just like in the old days,
Danny.”
“Sure,” I said.
Yeah, no doubt about it. My friend was one of those guys that lived in the tunnels. Track rabbits are what they called rats. I didn’t plan on being around for the hunt. God only knew what sort of horrors might be spawning below the streets now.
I pulled off my cigarette. “How long you been here? Behind this fence?”
He laughed and it was a dry, broken sound. An echo of the fathomless emptiness inside of him which must have been unbearably black and unbearably despairing to turn him into what he now was and maybe had always been. “How long? How long?” He laughed again and the sound of it bounced off the faces of the buildings and came right back at us. “I was here ten years ago and fifty years and I’ll be here a hundred years from now and a thousand. I’m like sand, Danny, just like sand. I blow from one place to another, I scatter and the wind puts me back together again and here I am. Here I always am.”
I didn’t bother commenting on that. What was there to say? I remembered seeing guys like him hanging around Grand Central Station, huddled on pieces of cardboard or ratty blankets. Some of them stank so bad your eyes would water, others were stick-thin junkies with crazy eyes. I always kept my distance. But as I looked at my friend in the firelight, seeing what was inside his eyes and, more importantly, what wasn’t, it occurred to me that if we did not put down the zombies and militias and organized crazies within a reasonable amount of time, every urban area in the country would be peopled by guys like him. These would be the survivors. They had survived in the gutter before and they would survive in gutter now.