All Things Zombie: Chronology of the Apocalypse
Page 46
Officer Viktor appears in the archway holding his grab-stick, I watch Mellon instruct the rookie. He points at the grabber, then mimes the twisting motion used to adjust the tension and release the claw. He points over at me, and traces a line toward the other side of the room. Following the path of his finger, I see Granny has stopped pounding, and with the exception of her tongue flailing wildly, she’s standing still.
Her complexion looks a little off, a bit too pale and shiny as though there is a thin film of slime shimmering on the exposed areas. The sheen is a primitive attempt to make the flesh appear 'alive.' Goosebumps rise as I recall the moist leathery feel of it. Prior-humans that have not been reclaimed are now a rarity in this part of the country. The truly ‘undead in the wild’ are ashen gray, and their skin doesn’t fit their bodies properly. The skin loses its elasticity, sags and hangs without the reclamation surgery to tighten the fit. Epidermis is the only organ that still lives when humans die; it's what keeps their bodies together. If it's cut or torn off, it will continue to survive, twisting and squirming to seek out body heat. If it touches living tissue, it latches on, eating into the flesh, spreading the infection. Thankfully, without sustenance it won't survive very long. Back in the jungle we saw a lot of it moving on its own, sliding along the ground or hanging from trees reaching out like leeches feeling the air for something warm. That's why the plasma grenades that claimed Nicco's arm were invented. What's the point of killing your enemy if they're just as dangerous re-dead if the skin is still intact? Use a standard grenade on a Prior and you blow living shrapnel all over the battlefield.
I close my eyes and rub my temples. My skull is pulsing. Thinking about the war always brings on the pain.
Granny’s blank, black eyes stare at me as she takes a half-step away from the pantry. Then, as if she remembers the ‘family’ dinner waiting for her inside, she returns to beating on the door. Her connection, the memory of those cowering inside is strong, the taste she's already had is pulling her back toward them.
I do have empathy for the family that chose this path. No matter whose palms got greased, or what favors were called in for this debacle, they wanted their matriarch around awhile longer. It’s hard to let go if you don't need to. Still there's always something different about a related Prior. The retained memories can influence their reaction to any situation.
My left eye twitches; I rub it with the palm of my hand and rethink my life choice of alcohol abstinence. Being blind-drunk in the jungle eased the throbbing and made the unsavory acts we had before us easier to commit. This pain is going to suck if it worsens. I'll deal with it later. It’s time to put the game face on and earn my pay. I nod to Mellon as I turn the handle, ready to open the door.
Our plan calls for the patrolmen to enter the dining room and draw her attention. She should react to easy prey, forego the meal she has to work for and attack the patrolmen giving me a chance to come at her from the other side. In theory, we should be able to get grabbers on her and hold her long enough for Nicco to get a blinder over her head. That’s the plan anyway. But what is that Robert Burns quote about schemes, mice, men, and going to shit?
I watch Viktor step into the dining room with Mellon directly behind.
She’s an old, wise Prior; she knows what’s coming. Like a big fish in a small pond, she isn’t taking the bait. Instead of moving toward the two men entering from the living room, she turns and heads for the outside door as I open it.
Her move takes me by surprise. I can’t imagine what the two uniforms think, but right now, as I stand alone in the kitchen doorway, it’s her against me. The patrolmen are cut off from my side by the dining room table.
My instincts take over, knowing that I’ve got to drive her back towards the other two men I thrust at her with my grab-stick. She must have seen the business end of a claw before and as I lean in, she sidesteps and moves back giving Viktor a chance with his grabber. Without taking her attention off of me, she catches his claw in her hand and pushes Viktor back.
“Close the grip!” I yell at the rookie, but he panicked and let go of the handle. She throws it at me. Thank God she’s never used one in human life; because I’ve got a feeling she would have used it against us.
I jump forward and catch her arm with my stick, but before I can clamp down to hold her, she swings and swats at my head smashing me in the temple with her meaty open palm. My eyes clench closed as if she’s stabbed me through the skull with a spike.
My training has ingrained in me that it's generally not a good idea to lose sight of your foe in hand-to-hand combat. Stumbling back to buy some time, knowing she'll follow her wounded quarry into the kitchen side of the room, I let my momentum take me down in that direction. I tuck and roll into the kitchen. Snatching a spooler off my hip as my shoulder hits the ground, I thumb the release,
I release the weapon blindly to her exact position, I get lucky and the wire encircles her meaty left calf. The balls clack together and the reels retract with their familiar high-pitched whine. The razor-sharp cable slices through her bloated flesh, meat, and bone taking her leg out from under her.
She is in full-speed pursuit when all the support of her massive ‘granny-ness’ is cut out from under her.
I'm always amazed at the reaction speed of Priors, and our falling Grandmother is as fast as any I've seen. She never even hits the ground. Using her stumpy left leg as if she were an amputee for years, she plants it onto the floor to stop her fall, pirouettes on the spot, and turns back toward Mellon and Viktor, neither of whom have moved since she took the stick from Viktor’s hands. Mellon now retreats a step. Viktor isn’t budging, his eyes are open wide.
Fear in these situations leads to panic. Panic leads to pain. Pain leads to death.
I’m done playing with this Prior. She’s done. I grab the other spooler off my belt.
“No Auggie!” Nicco yells as he runs past me with the blinder hood in both hands.
He’s going to try to bag a loose Prior!
Before he reaches her, I tackle him crashing us into her back as she steps and slides towards the frozen man in the archway.
Officer Viktor thaws. He snatches Mellon’s grab-stick and spears it out in front of him in a move that appears to be intended more to keep her from falling on him then as an offensive maneuver. The grabber's claw snaps closed, seizing her floral print muumuu, along with a good size chunk of the flabby skin underneath her flabby bicep.
Her momentum pushes Victor back into Mellon. Holding his ground, Mellon shoves against Viktor trying to hold them up. Instead of stopping her advance, the pole slides in Viktor’s sweaty hands as the two Patrolmen struggle in the doorway. Granny continues to move towards them.
Her dead weight, no pun intended, combined with the angle of the pole, tears through her garment taking with it the hunk of fatty meat held in the grabber’s metal grip.
It looks so smooth, so choreographed, as though she planned the whole thing from the moment my spooler chopped off her leg.
She tumbles to the floor. The sudden release of resistance forces both men to fall toward her open arms. Mellon can only save himself by pushing off Viktor, forcing the rookie to land on top of Granny.
Her strong, swollen hands wrap around the back of Viktor’s head, pulling it towards her gnashing jaws.
Viktor throws his arms forward, trying to keep his face out of Granny's open mouth. His skinny, forearms are completely engulfed in her massive breasts. Mellon regains his balance, takes hold of the back of his partner’s vest, and leans back with all his might trying to pull Viktor away.
He's losing the deadly tug of war.
"Please, don't let her get me!" Viktor’s head is swinging from side to side as he tries to stay alive. "NO, Plea...”
The sound of my slug gun, and the ensuing snap of her spinal column, cuts Viktor’s pleas
off in mid-scream.
I stand behind the now, re-dead—grandma, a fistful of her perma-wig in one hand, and my still vibrating slugger in the other. The dull, oval slug retracted back into its chamber a split second after it shattered her spine. Patterned after the captive-bolt pistol used to stun cattle; the gun works by cutting off the muscle that controls impulses from the brain to the muscles. It’s used primarily because it doesn’t cause any skin to break off, which brings issues of its own.
The rookie’s pale head is still in her inanimate hands. I pull her lifeless body into the kitchen and let it fall to the floor. My instincts tell me to look for any bits of flesh that may have been torn off during the struggle. I see the wad from her fatty upper arm crawling toward me. It's just trying to survive, seeking out heat from something living to latch on to.
Crushing it under my boot, I imagine a tiny squeal of pain as it's ground into a pink smear on the white marble floor.
The pain of a thousand needles bursts through my temples, my vision goes white.
My friend, Nicco is pissed, “Jesus, Auggie. We were supposed to capture her, not leave bits of her all over the kitchen.
Hands buried into my eyebrows, I massage my splitting skull. “Sorry Nicco. That fucking rich prick, Mayor Dipshit, would have accepted the sacrifice of a couple of the city’s finest in order to give his mother what she wanted, a living brain to feast on.”
The world and civilization came very close to ending; and still may, but entitled jack-offs still think they can do, or buy, whatever they desire.
Releasing the family from their sanctuary, Nicco interviews the family and discovers that the mayor had her reclaimed at a well-known outlet for servants of all kinds, ‘Johnny’s Prior Sales.’ Most of Johnny’s business is legit, but I’ve investigated some of the backroom deals he’s made. It's inevitable; where there’s the lure of an easy buck, laws and regulations will be broken for a fat envelope of cash.
I decide to leave the follow-up for another day. I need an antiseptic shower and a visit to my father-in-law. As the nation's leading researcher in all things post-apocalypse, my wife’s dad will have something to help the pain. He always does. Because right now, my head feels as if there's a freakish clown inside trying to smile, and his blood red lips want to split my face from ear to ear. Those of us who have died and been brought back as human need a little of the Reclamation-juice to stay on this side of the ethereal plane. I need it like a Prior does, just in a smaller dose.
I also need to see my love, my reason for living since I returned from the swamps of hell. She keeps me alive, sober, and sane. Thinking about those years of pain, fear, and death—both temporary and final—always brings the headaches. Something unnatural is alive inside me and it wants me gone, it wants to control me. For her and my bastard son, Adam, I have to maintain control. But that too, is a story to be told another time.
---END---
Miguel A. Rueda/Wayne Hills
Born in Manhattan, New York City in the last year of the 1950’s, Miguel grew up during the turbulent Sixties. The racial, political and social upheavals of the next three decades shaped the way he views the world around us.
Miguel has been published in numerous anthologies under Miguel A. Rueda, and his pen name, Wayne Hills. Although most of his stories are written in the horror and fantasy genres, he’ll adapt to whatever submission calls fit into his schedule.
You can find samples of his work on his WordPress blog, or follow him on his Facebook page.
www.waynehillsauthor.wordpress.com
www.facebook.com/AuthorWayneHills
All Things Must End
By Aria Michaels
“Fuck you,” I grunt as I pull my knife from the rager’s skull.
I wipe the blade off on his shirt and crawl out from beneath his lifeless body. I’m exhausted, and my leg hurts like hell, but I’m still breathing. That’s about all you can ask for these days. It takes some doing, but I manage to wrestle the vile thing out through the back door of the train. It tumbles to the tracks in a bloody heap and disappears beneath the empty passenger car behind me. For a moment, I consider following him.
“Don’t, Jamie,” Claire says.
I slam the door shut and spin on my heel, but she’s already gone. She was never there. She’s been gone so long. I wonder if I’d even recognize her ghost. I miss her terribly but I take solace in the fact that she didn’t have to see the kids go.
Though circumstances and biology prevented us from having our own children, Claire would not be discouraged. There were thousands of kids in the system waiting for a home. She would have taken in every single one of them if the state of Florida had let her. She was amazing at being a foster mom. Me? Not so much.
Still, when everything fell apart, when I lost my Claire, the kids gave me the strength to keep going. Six days ago, we celebrated Teddy’s birthday on this damn train. We sang to him, he blew out five invisible candles, and Chloe and I watched as he gobbled up what may very well have been the last Twinkie on Earth.
“So, what’d you wish for, squirt?” Chloe asked.
“Nice try, Sissy.” Teddy grinned as he smashed the last of the spongy goodness into his mouth. “If I tell you, it won’t come true.”
“Whatever,” Chloe said rolling her eyes in that dramatic way only twelve-year-old girls can. “Wishes don’t come true anymore, anyways.”
Beneath that tough exterior, Chloe was just as scared as her little brother. She never let him see her cry, though. Not once. She’d already spent half her life trying to protect that boy. It’s a shame she never got a chance to let her guard down.
“I wished we could see Mama Claire again,” Teddy whispered as he snuggled up next to me later that night. “I miss her, a lot.”
“Me, too, Teddy-bear,” I said, hugging him close. “Me, too.”
An hour later, a rager busted through a nearby window and ripped Teddy from my arms. Chloe dove after him without a thought. I grabbed the back of her jacket but she wriggled free and scrambled out of the broken window before I could stop her. I’m not sure if she did it because she thought she could save him, or because she knew I couldn’t.
We boarded the windows after that.
I haven’t eaten more than a few hundred calories in over a week and the water ran dry days ago. I can’t remember the last time I closed my eyes. That’s okay. I don’t want to.
“Grawwrrrr,” a rager bellows at my back banging on the window.
“Seriously?” I roll my eyes and turn to face the malicious beast.
A young girl in a tattered pink hoodie stares back at me, teeth bared like a rabid dog. She latches onto the train car like a June bug on a screen door. One hand bangs furiously against the glass. Eventually she pounds hard enough to crack it. Her hand is badly broken, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
Fetid flesh dangles from her braces. A silver locket hangs open around her neck; the heart shaped halves caked with blood and gunk. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen when she turned. I wonder if her parents are still alive. I hope not.
I bet her name was Sarah, or maybe Megan.
She sneers at me through a curtain of blood-soaked, blonde hair. Her shoulders heave with each rapid breath. She looks like the girl that used to pick on Chloe at the bus stop. I knock on the window and flip her off. She hisses and snaps at me, spittle flying from her mouth onto the glass.
The train bucks as it rumbles over a body, no doubt another industrious rager from amongst the writhing pack. Her face collides with the glass knocking out a handful of teeth and dislocating her jaw. Her mandible dangles from her face like a tire-swing but her hungry eyes never leave mine.
“Fuck off, stowaway.” I slap the window leaving a bloody palm print that partially obscures her face.
She stops thrashing and presses her face against the glass, sniffing along the cracks. Her head tilts at an awkward angle as if considering deep thoughts. She splays her shattered palm over the bloody ha
ndprint I left on the window.
I’ve never seen a rager do anything like this before but I’m too tired to consider what it means and far too damaged to care.
There’s a rusty pry-bar laying beneath the last row of seats. I think it belonged to that Asian kid we picked up at the station in Omaha. He was gone by the time we reached Lincoln. Munson reprogrammed the auto-drive and we stopped picking people up after that. I grab the kid’s discarded weapon and hobble back to the door.
“No ticket, no ride.” I slam the crowbar through the glass and into the girl’s gaping mouth.
Her body goes limp. She dangles from the metal bar like a marionette hanging in the attic. The girl is dead, only, this time, it’ll be permanent. I tell myself it was a mercy killing, but Sara-Megan and I both know better. I squint at her through the spidering glass. I could swear her cloudy eyes still follow me so I smear more of my own blood across the broken window to obscure her view.
My leg finally gives out on me, and I sink to the floor. My aching back rests against the vibrating walls of my tomb. There are thousands more of those things out there, one for each of my sins. The screeching and scraping outside the walls never stops. The ragers want in nearly as much as I want out.
They scramble alongside the train for miles at a time; mouths open wide like a greyhound chasing after that stupid stuffed bunny. They don’t give a damn about winning the race. They just want to feed.
I don’t know why they bother. I’m the only one left and ragers don’t eat the dead.
“Stupid piece of shit,” I groan as I loosen the thigh straps on my bio-prosthetic.
As a final parting gift for my years of dedicated service, the United States Marines decided to squeeze me into a beta-test group for a new prosthetic prototype called the Gheko. After seven reconstructive surgeries, a year of painful injections, and countless anti-rejection meds I was honorably discharged and sentenced to a lifetime of stocking shelves at the local Bag-n-Buy.