by Jack Hamlyn
DEATH PIT
Wild Bill and his boys gathered up the corpses, including me, and threw them in the back of pickup trucks. I don’t know how many of us there were and I wasn’t about to open my eyes and find out. The corpses on top of me were peeled away and pitched into trucks like bales of hay. Covered in mud and clay, splattered with gore, I didn’t really look any different from the rest of the dead. Up I went into the heap, a few more dumped on top of me.
I didn’t dare move.
And it was no easy thing. The dead were in various states of decay and the smell was sickening. I could feel the maggots in them tunneling and feeding. Wild Bill and the boys were discussing things, but their voices were muffled and I had no idea what they were saying.
After a time, the truck I was in started to roll and off we went, bumping down the road, the zombie corpses around me bouncing and shifting, spilling brains and rancid blood on me. My greatest fear was that we were being taken to a burning pit to be incinerated. I couldn’t allow that to happen. But even if I started moving around when we got there, the boys would just shoot me down, thinking that I hadn’t been completely dead when they threw me in the truck. Even talking wouldn’t save my bacon. The dead never spoke beyond a few garbled words, but when it came to the newly-risen, an old adage held true: shoot first and ask questions later.
I had to think of something.
I hadn’t gone through all the suffering of the past few months, and the past few weeks in particular, to get toasted like a marshmallow on a stick.
I started jostling for position, but doing so carefully and slowly, keeping in rhythm with the bouncing of the truck so as not to draw any attention and get any lead flying. I was near the tailgate. I knew that much. I kept timing my movements with potholes and dips we thumped over. After about twenty minutes, I was able to lift my head up enough to get a look behind me.
I was screwed.
There was another pick-up following us about two car-lengths back. Despite the drizzle and haze, it was still daylight and there was no way I could make a leap for it, not without taking a few rounds for my trouble. At best, I’d probably break a leg in my condition and at worst, take a couple in the head.
Screwed hardly covered it.
I was done.
So I settled back in with my dead brethren and waited for death, which I was sure was going to be desperately ugly because one of us had gotten Georgie and Wild Bill wasn’t about to forget it. So on we went, me and the deadheads bouncing around like potatoes in a basket.
Get this: I fell asleep.
It seems a ridiculous, even appalling thing under the circumstances, but it happened. Heaped with a baker’s dozen of rotting corpses like a pickle in a very nasty barrel, I went out. It just shows what complete exhaustion—and a little hillbilly root poison—will do to you. I woke up when the truck stopped and a particularly loathsome female corpse flopped over and gave me a cold hug. I felt the truck backing up and then it stopped again. Out came the boys, grumbling, smoking, and swearing.
“I want ‘em all in that pit,” I heard Wild Bill say and it wasn’t a casual request. “And I want it done now.”
Who knows? Maybe the boys had been a little derelict in their duties of late. Wild Bill expected it to be done and there was no debate about it. You could almost feel him leave. One minute, the boys were quiet; the next, they were complaining and bitching the way guys will when their hardass supervisor is out of earshot.
Wearing protective gloves, they started grabbing stiffs and yanking them out of the bed of the truck, not being real gentle about it. When my turn came, I forced myself to go limp as a rag so as not to give the game away. The good thing was I smelled no smoke nor felt any heat of the sort that might come off a flaming pyre, but the bad thing was I had no idea where they were dragging us to.
They took hold of me and pulled me out like a frozen salmon. I was thrown on the ground at the edge of a pit. Again, there was no escape. Through squinted eyes, I could see men with shotguns and rifles standing around like a Mexican firing squad in an old movie.
One of them put his boot against me and gave me a shove.
And down I went.
I was in freefall for at least fifteen or twenty feet, just waiting for the solid impact that would snap my neck. What saved me from that, I suppose, was that I hit the dirt wall two or three times and that slowed my descent. Then I landed. The impact took my breath away, despite a soft landing on a heap of spongy, moist bodies. My first instinct was to roll free, even with my slowed reflexes. But I fought against it. But when two, three, then four and five zombies corpses tumbled on top of me, one of them nearly knocking me cold, and another splitting open like an overstuffed meat pocket and nearly drowning me in carrion…I couldn’t help myself.
I fought and clawed free, wiping gore from my face. The gaseous stench almost put me out cold. More bodies dropped around me, some of them coming apart at the seams, throwing gouts of blood and viscera around.
Then a voice above said, “Hey! One of those maggotheads moved!”
I could see the boys gathering around up there, peering down. I think Tiny—the guy Wild Bill beat the shit out of—was up there.
“Which one?”
“I don’t see nothing.”
“Probably the gas. Makes ‘em move sometimes.”
I kept still as a stone, hoping they didn’t open up with some random potshots. But the dead and I were down in the pit, out of their fear zone and they weren’t much interested in pegging corpses.
After a bit of good-natured ribbing, they lost interest in anything but tossing the rest of their kills down and out of sight. Then, I waited for them to leave and it didn’t take very long. The trucks started up and pulled away.
I was alone with the dead.
Still, I took no chances. I laid there with two deadheads who gave me camouflage and looked around. The pit was maybe thirty feet deep and roughly forty feet long. It reminded me of the one we’d used for our Claymore ambush back at Tuck’s tower compound…which seemed like years ago. It wasn’t long after that that the dead took Ricki from me—
But I couldn’t go there.
I couldn’t wallow in depression and self-pity over my wife’s senseless, brutal death. I couldn’t go back; only forward. I had to be strong. I had to be a survivor. Nothing else would get me back to Paul. Nothing.
On the good side, the root poison had run its course and my body was reacting again with its usual speed and alertness. The weird Necrophage after effects seemed to have passed.
The pit was a definite problem, though.
It would not be easy climbing out of it. Most of the walls were very steep, save for the far one. But I had bigger problems and I saw them coming in my direction: at least a dozen zombies. They were coming for the corpse heap I was laying in.
Wild Bill, apparently, had some pets.
They came on, shambling forward. I could hear them sucking on their ragged lips, tongues licking and teeth gnashing. I wormed deeper into the death heap, trying to bury myself in carrion. I did a pretty good job of it like a kid tunneling into his blankets. I had a peek hole between two bodies. I watched the zombies feasting on the sprawled corpses at the edge of the pile. They tore open bellies and yanked off limbs, bit into throats and peeled faces like oranges.
They were ravenous.
I saw that my original count was way off. There was not a dozen, there was more like two dozen. Wild Bill and the boys must have kept them starved. It didn’t take them long to reduce the sprawled corpses to red-stained bones. Then they turned their appetites loose on the death heap. Greedy, gluttonous, they tore into the bodies, pulling them apart, fighting over the choicest cuts, clawing and tearing, biting into throats and bellies.
My barricade of bodies was disappearing fast.
They were eating their way to me.
BLOOD SPORT
It didn’t take long until things reached a critical phase. By that point, my body was feeling like it
s old self. My muscles wanted to be used. My legs wanted to run. My fists wanted to strike out.
The zombies kept at it, of course.
I remembered when the madness of The Awakening began, when Necrophage began stalking the human race and bringing the dead up out of their graves. My son, Paul, a veteran of zombie wars in comic books and video games, said to me, “There’s no such thing as a full zombie, Dad. They just keep eating and eating.” And how right he was. I’d seen it time and again, that insatiable hunger that knew no natural bounds.
The corpses all around me were trembling.
Moving.
Shivering.
Jerking.
They were like that swimmer in Jaws as the shark hits her again and again. The zombies were hitting the dead, tearing and biting at them. Minute by grim minute, there was less weight in the heap.
I got ready for action.
I pushed myself down deeper in the heap and got my boots beneath the bodies above me. It took some squirming, but the dead didn’t know the difference; they were in such a wild feeding frenzy by that point that they were oblivious to just about everything.
When one of the last corpses on top of me was yanked away, I tensed my legs and ejected another body like a catapult projectile. It jumped up, flattening three deadheads in the process.
Then I moved.
I followed in its wake, springing up like a Jack-in-the-Box. I knocked aside two deadheads via sheer velocity. I smashed a zombie woman in the face, stomped the kneecap of a man missing his left arm. Two teenage girls with faces like stringy mucilage came at me and I kicked one, spun and delivered a forearm to the nose of the other. It was no attempt at fancy TV Kung Fu, it was sheer desperation.
But there were more.
Many more.
They wanted me. So much for my theory of Necrophage making me “smell” like them. It had been the masking effect of the mud and clay all along.
A gang of six came at me as I shoved an old man out of my way and I did the only thing I could think of. Something that I had done more than once. I ran straight at them, jumping and tossing my body sideways into them. I bowled them over and scrambled to my feet, crawling right over the top of them.
I was doing pretty good at that point.
I had my sights set on the far wall. It was not as sheer as the others, like I said, and I figured with a little luck I could climb it. But things were going too good. As I shoved a woman into a man with no true face to speak of, just a set of chomping jaws, one of them grabbed me from behind. I kicked another bearing down at me and flipped the one that held me into a couple of others. Three more came at me. I punched and kicked at them and it was like driving blows into sacks filled with jelly. I tossed another aside, but two more grabbed me and another seized my left wrist in its jaws.
At that point, time slowed and reality, such as it was, turned inside out.
Things moved in slo-mo. I was no longer aware of the two that grabbed me, I could only see the bleached, pulpy face of the woman that bit me. Her eyes were like moist grapes. Her jaws clamped down on my bare wrist. There was a jolt of agony as her teeth pierced the skin.
I felt the teeth sliding in.
Every awful second of pain.
Maybe I screamed. Maybe I shouted. Maybe I fought.
I don’t really remember doing any of those things. The teeth bit and I went numb inside. It was the greatest fear of we survivors—getting bitten, getting infected by Zombpox. Nothing put the mutated bug in your bloodstream quicker than the filthy mouths of the walking dead.
It all went through my mind as they say it does right before you die: the struggles, the pain, the despair, those rare moments of joy, the hardship and desperation that made those brief periods of safety and comfort so precious. All of the things that had happened to me and my little orbit since The Awakening. I saw it all. But mostly what I saw was my son. I had done it all for him really. All the fighting and scavenging had been to protect him and give him some stability, some sense of security and hope. When my wife had died, I promised her soul that I would keep our boy safe.
Now I had fucked it all up.
It was beyond my power to do anything.
I was infected.
In a few days, I would be a zombie.
It all landed like a load of bricks, knocking the wind out of me. All of the above went through my head in the space of a few seconds. Then it passed and I was filled with rage. How dare these maggoty, walking carcasses destroy my life and take my future away from me. How dare they make me betray my promise to my wife. Dirty, cunting, motherfucking shitheads. I tore the woman off my wrist and drilled her in the face with like three or four quick shots that dropped her. I shoved one of them that had grabbed me into a tangle of three or four others. I head butted the other with so much force that I felt his pulpous skull cave-in.
I scattered a few others and jogged over to the wall.
I could taste blood in my mouth and for one crazy, frightening moment, I thought it had begun. I thought I was chewing on my own lips. But no, I had a cut on my lips and that’s all it was. Besides, the auto-cannibalism thing was a late-stage symptom. I was hardly there yet. I got to the wall. I think under different circumstances, I might have paused and doubted my ability to scale it. But with Necrophage inside me, I knew my time was limited. I had to make it count. I climbed the wall, pulling myself up with jutting roots and using stones as rungs for my feet. I went up it remarkably easily. I don’t remember much of that. A few minutes later, I scrambled out of there and was crawling through the grass.
I laid there for ten or fifteen minutes, catching my breath and trying to get a sense of what I was going to do next.
There was no time for that.
I would think on my feet.
I had already decided on a plan of action. I would keep going, following the road, navigating by the movement of the sun. If I came across a house or a cabin, I would loot it for weapons. I would kill with my bare hands to get them. Whatever it took. But one thing was for sure: I was going to get to the farm of Bobby Hughes. I was going to see my boy one last time before I took my life.
It gave me direction and purpose as I slogged it down the dusty road.
After I’d gone well over a mile and probably closer to two, I stopped.
I stood there and thought.
All which had gone through my mind since being bitten was knee-jerk stuff. I hadn’t carefully considered the consequences of my actions. If I was going to be a cannibal corpse in a few days (or less), was it such a good idea to find my son and my friends and insinuate myself into their lives? Chances were, they had already mourned for me and accepted my death. Did I want to put them through that shit twice?
“They think you’re dead,” I said under my breath. “Maybe you should be dead.”
I couldn’t decide if I was being selfish or callous. I’m sure, even if I was dying, they’d want to see me…but I had to consider the bigger picture. I had to consider it calmly and rationally. Putting them through it all again was bad enough, but what might be worse was bringing the infection amongst them because there was no way in hell I wasn’t infected. The foulness of Necrophage was even then coursing through me. It was only a matter of time before the fevers, aches, and nausea overwhelmed me. All that first-stage stuff would incapacitate me. It would probably hit long before I got to the farm. Back at Tuck’s tower compound, there were a couple orphaned kids, Maria and Davis. Davis was bitten. Within twelve hours, he started showing symptoms of Necrophage infection.
If that held true, I would start going downhill by tonight.
I came up with another plan. I would try and get to the farm. If I was sick, I’d hide in the woods and see if I could catch a glimpse of my son before I died. Then, I would slit my wrists. Simple.
First, however, I had to get there.
I started walking again.
SACRIFICE
I walked another three or four miles, all the while keeping an eye on the
path of the sun across the sky so I knew I was moving west. I came around a bend in the road and below me, in a little clearing, was a town. More of a village than anything, but it was something. I saw a few buildings and houses fronting a main road, some farms spread out behind. Just a typical little burg, but what interested me were the vehicles I saw parked in the streets. A few of them were burning. I saw a few bodies sprawled on sidewalks. It looked like a small pitched battle had been fought down there. And where there was a battle, there was bound to be guns. I needed a weapon and I needed a vehicle.
My instinct was telling me that I was making a big mistake, but it wouldn’t be the first, and really, what did I have to lose? I was going to die anyway. Maybe I’d go out in a blaze of glory; the last earthly wish of an idiot with a gun in his hand.
First, though, I had to get that gun.
I wasn’t careful in the least. Usually, I would have been sneaking around, darting tree to tree like a Hollywood commando, but fatalism is very liberating. You walk tall, strong, and proud because you have absolutely nothing to lose. You march into a situation like you own it, with complete confidence. Once the fear of death is removed, you’re unshackled. Completely. So I made my way down there, almost daring anyone to take a shot at me or for some drooling deadhead to take a bite from my ass. I walked across the yellowed grass of the clearing, past a few houses and graying barns, and then I was on a little main street. I still saw no sign to tell me what the village was called and, honestly, I don’t suppose it really mattered.
There had been a pretty good shoot-out, I figured as I checked out the bodies and burning vehicles. Probably some time last night. The plate glass windows of stores had been shot right out. There was blood on the walks, splattered against the brick faces of buildings. I counted twelve corpses in the first five minutes. I went from one to the other, looking for a weapon. I found a hunting knife with a sheath on the belt of a guy who’d taken a few heavy-caliber slugs at close range. His chest was a great hollow. What had been in it was sprayed over a bench.