by Jack Hamlyn
“Now what?”
“Now we strip,” I said.
“At last.”
I took off her hood and gas mask, very careful not to touch her skin with my chem gloves. I was worried about some of the agents we had come into contact with. I was guessing that the river would have washed most of them away, but certain ones, like blister agents and VX nerve gas, were very, very persistent and it did not break down easily. I helped her out of her smock and bib trousers, stripping away the boot covers and gloves. She had stayed dry for the most part under her NBC gear. That was good.
When she made to help me, I stepped back. “No, there might still be contaminants on me.”
I pulled off my mask and sucked in unfiltered air. What a joy. I tossed my hood and mask aside, pulled off the rest. Last came my gloves. Once one was off, I had no choice but to grab the other with my bare hand. But there was no stinging or burning or anything else.
We were both a little damp, but not drenched. The air was chill, though. We could see our breath.
“Let’s find a place to crash for awhile,” she said.
We searched around and could find no farmhouses, not so much as a shed. In the end, we spotted a big oak tree all alone in the middle of a pasture field. We sat there against it, holding onto each other to maximize our body heat. Her head on my shoulder, Robin went out almost immediately. I was awake for some time, tense, vigilant. But there was no threat. Staring up at the rising, mystical mountains of the Catskills, I drifted off.
PERRYVILLE
Just after sunrise, we were on the move. Robin had a pretty good fix on where we were. She said if we followed the river for about three miles, we should hit Perryville, which, population-wise, had been one of the largest towns in the Catskills with like 4,000 people. If you were from NYC or even Yonkers like me, 4,000 was nothing. That’s how many tourists showed up on a slow weekend. But 4,000 was sounding good. We could maybe get some food, weapons, and a vehicle. It would be a start.
We walked on for hours.
It seemed like we were getting nowhere. The countryside was hilly, up and down, up and down. My legs were getting tired, but all the walking helped work the kinks out of my back. Robin insisted that she knew where we were going. I was secretly doubting it, but I wasn’t going to say so, because she was a little on the sensitive side and did not take criticism real well. Then we came over another rise, and lo and behold, the valley below was Perryville. All the streets were lined with houses and buildings. That was the good part. The bad part, of course, were all the buzzards, crows or whatever they were, circling high above the town.
Even from our vantage point, we could see it was a dead town.
Nothing moved down there. Nothing at all.
It was just like every other town: a graveyard.
We cut our way down through some thickets and grassy fields, pastures and overgrown orchards. We saw desolate farmhouses, but no vehicles. Nothing that temped us. We pushed on down to Perryville and it was pretty typical in all ways. Abandoned cars and overgrown lawns, broken windows and bullet holes, skeletons in the streets. Just another graveyard. What really bothered me was the smell, the heavy, almost violent odor of the decomposing dead. It blew down the streets in a hot, nauseating pall.
“It’s pretty ripe, ain’t it?” Robin said.
Ripe. That was a good word for it. Like this was an orchard and they were growing corpses. If that was the case, the crops were ready to be picked. “We better go slow. That smell isn’t a very good sign.”
I kept my weapon up and she walked by my side.
It was coming. I knew it was coming; trouble. I was just waiting for it to show itself. As we walked the byways of the town, the feeling grew until it was an absolute certainty that was making my guts roll over. The smell was getting stronger as we moved down what passed for a main street. What bothered me, in ways I couldn’t at that time even fathom, were all the skeletons in the streets. There were bones everywhere. And not just human ones, but what appeared to be the bones of dogs, cats, even a squirrel or two. We even found the remains of what I thought was a horse by a little park. There was a cart there as if maybe someone had hauled it into town with the horse…and then, I don’t know. I supposed the zombies had gotten them. But here was the thing: I had seen plenty of gnawed bones by that time. They always looked the same with clear teeth marks set into them.
But these bones were not like that.
They were completely barren of everything. There was not so much as a nub of ligament on any of them and there were no teeth marks. They were all polished smooth, not so much as a bloodstain to be had. That was freakish. Even birds or rats did not clean up remains that methodically. And what made it worse was that the skeletons I was seeing—and I had mentally counted at least thirty of them on the main drag—were…recent. They were very white, very clean, almost bleached looking as if whatever had happened had happened yesterday or the day before.
But what was that?
I felt a sudden rumbling beneath the pavement. Robin and I stood there looking at each other. It came again, then was gone. We didn’t hear it anymore. It was perplexing.
“Was that a…a whaddyacallit? Earth tremor?”
I shook my head. “Hell, if I know.”
It was very strange and the thing was, earth tremor was not what I had been thinking at all. It sounded to me more like the rumbling of an empty belly and that filled my mind with the worse possible images. There were lots of cars at the curb, many others abandoned right out in the street. None was serviceable, though. Tires were flat or stripped away. Keys were missing and when they were present, batteries were dead. It had been many months now since The Awakening…I honestly wasn’t even sure how many…and most of these had been sitting ever since.
We stepped into a drug store.
It had been ravaged somewhat, but mostly the pharmaceutical area. People had come here for the drugs. Some for their first aid needs, but others to grab prescription painkillers to feed their habits. The snack food aisles were in pretty good shape. I stuffed my ammo bag with candy bars, canned pasta, and Cheez-It crackers. I found a couple of can openers and some bottled water, and one of those first aid kits you keep in your car. I took a couple bottles of hydrogen peroxide, some bandages and sterile tape. I filled my ammo bag with anything I could get. It was no big deal. I only had one magazine left for the MP-5.
Robin found a case of bottled water and we had ate cold Beefaroni, Cheez-Its, and Mounds bars. Health food. She found a couple cartons of cigarettes and we sat around smoking, letting our food digest.
“Well,” she said, “what now, oh pathfinder?”
I just shook my head. “A vehicle. I want to get back where we were before the Death Angels showed.”
“That’s about five miles from here. We could walk it if we had to. I know a few shortcuts through the woods.”
As I pulled off my cigarette, I felt defeated. Really, truly defeated. All the fighting and suffering and near-misses I’d been through. All the filth and dirt and madness. What if it was all a waste of time? What if my son was dead? And Sabelia and Jimmy and Diane and Tuck and all the others? What then? I had been setting my sights on them for so long, I honestly didn’t know what the hell I was going to do if I no longer had that. I would have to accept it. Robin would be my world then. I liked her. She was a good kid. But she was also a responsibility. Ever since I’d gotten separated from Tuck and the others in the Bronx, I had been alone. I had no one to look out for but myself. It had been easy that way. Now I had Robin. She was tough and capable, but, let’s face it, she was still a kid. I didn’t give a damn how worldly and cool she thought she was, fifteen was still fucking fifteen.
The fact that she had a crush on me was kind of flattering. A teenager with a crush on a guy in his thirties leaning towards forty. Sure, it was flattering as hell. Who knew what she saw in me? Maybe I reminded her of someone else. She was a cute kid. Even I had noticed that. Hell, she was pretty even with
her blue eyes, oval face, and those full sensual lips. If you got around the piercings, tattoos, and acid attitude, she was striking in her own way. She would have been a real looker if she would have allowed such a thing. But the bottom line was that she was fifteen and I had done a lot of awful things since The Awakening that I thought I would never do—I mean, shit, I’d eaten human meat, maybe not by choice, but I had—but I was no drooling pervert who lusted after teenage girls. I would be Robin’s friend, her brother, her favorite uncle, but never anything more. I wasn’t oblivious, of course. The last woman I had slept with had been my wife many months before. I definitely felt the need, but when and if the time came, it would be with a mature woman, not a teenager.
Hell, you had to have some kind of standards even if the old world was dead.
As if reading my mind, Robin said, “Have you thought about what you’re going to do if we can’t find your son and your friends?”
“Yeah. I’ve thought about it.”
“And?”
“I guess I’ll be stuck with you.”
She glared at me. “Yeah, well fuck you too, Steve Niles.”
I laughed and so did she.
Then we stopped laughing. We heard that weird rumbling below. Maybe we didn’t hear it so much as we felt it. It was weird. My mind tried to find a reason for it. Maybe subsidence. Maybe the whole damn down was about to get sucked down into a sinkhole. Maybe there was gas building up below. But nothing I came up with really made a squirt of sense.
We heard it again.
Then we heard something else. The backdoor leading out into the alley was just beyond the pharmaceutical counter. Somebody was pounding on it. In fact, I heard more than one set of fists.
Robin swallowed. “Steve…” she began.
By the time we got to our feet, the door crashed in and shapes were picking their way towards us. The dead had arrived.
NATIVES
The first zombie, a teenage boy with bullet holes in his chest, came right around the counter and knocked a display of Nyquil out of his way. He was gnashing his teeth. He saw us and came down the aisle at us. I only had maybe six or seven rounds left in the MP-5 mag and I was saving the other one. I put the selector switch on semi-auto, raised my weapon, and put a round right through his forehead. He twisted and jerked, tipping over into the aspirin section like a felled tree.
But there were three others.
They might have been a family—a woman in a nightgown, a naked man missing one eye, and a little girl who carried a brick that was stained brown from the heads she had knocked in with it. I took out the man and the woman with two clear headshots. The girl almost got to me. As she raised the brick, I blew her head apart.
Robin let a short economical sort of scream.
Two more zombies had come through the front door. Both of them were old ladies with blue-rinsed hair and hanging jowls. One of them carried a well-gnawed human arm that she brandished at Robin. I put both of them down quickly. But there were more. They were coming in through the front and backdoors. I killed a Catholic priest whose Roman collar was stained black from the drainage running from his mouth and took out another guy in an apron.
Then I was out of shot.
Backing Robin behind me, I ejected the clip and inserted the fresh one. And barely in time. A purple-mottled arm reached out to seize Robin by the hair. She ducked under it and it grabbed me by the shoulder. I saw a big guy standing there. He was naked and had been pretty pumped-up in life. His belly was black from livor mortis, the settling of blood after death. His mouth was a ragged, drooling hole. He pulled me towards him, his jaws opening.
Robin gave him a kick and he grunted, but he didn’t let me go.
I shoved the MP-5 right in his face and blew his head apart with a three-round burst. He stumbled back, the displays splattered with his gore. He made a gulping sound and black fluid ran from his mouth.
Then he hit the displays and took about a hundred boxes of cold tablets down with him.
Even with his head shot apart, he was still moving. Some sort of auto-reflex with the onset of brain death. His arms flailed, his legs kicked and thumped against the floor.
Two more zombies approached.
One from each end of the aisle. One of them was carrying a shard of glass about the size of a scimitar. I shot him down first and blood sprayed from his head in a fountain. He tripped over his own legs and fell into three more, two of which happily began to eat him. I killed the other one and then Robin and I raced towards the front door. No good. More zombies were coming in and there had to be at least a dozen in the streets converging on the drug store. More were coming through the back door. We were sandwiched.
HEMMED IN
There was only one way out and we took it.
We made our way through the store to the plate glass windows that looked out on the avenue. I opened up with the MP-5 and they shattered and fell out onto the sidewalk. Out we went into the streets of Perryville, which stank like an open grave.
We rushed across the street, zombies everywhere like window shoppers. We cut down an alley and came out the other side, around a corner…and something smashed into me. I didn’t even know what it was. It hit me hard and I went down, seeing stars. I blinked my eyes and forced the cobwebs out. A zombie was standing there, reaching for Robin. She threw herself to the ground and grabbed the machine pistol. She opened up on him, slugs ripping through him. She corrected her aim and his head flew apart, shards of bone and brain matter splashing against the window of a florist’s.
Another zombie was coming.
I took the MP-5 and dropped him. We were thick in a nest of them and my weapon was getting low on shot. I drilled two more with single shots. A little girl crawled out from beneath a car and grabbed at Robin’s ankles. She kicked her in the face with her motorcycle boot and then punted her head two more times. That did it. The kid was pretty decayed and her head broke apart. She convulsed on the ground for a moment in a pool of brain goo, then stopped moving.
Zombies were coming from every direction. I was dropping them, but burning a lot of ammo. Ammo I couldn’t afford to burn.
We had to get to some kind of shelter.
And we had to get there fast.
Then someone started shooting.
SHOOTER
A bullet drilled into a mailbox not four feet from me. Another went into the corpse of the girl. We were being targeted by someone across the street. There was no time to figure it out. Bullets were zinging all around us.
I looked up, figuring the shooter was on the rooftop, but I couldn’t see him. The dead were coming from every direction. I dropped three more, then dragged Robin behind a car as bullets ripped into the street. One of them, by chance or intention, split a zombie’s head open and he fell over. Another went into the brick wall of the building behind us. Two more went through the windshield of the car.
More zombies.
We had to break from cover. More rounds landed around us. Robin cried out and fell. She was hit. A bullet grazed her leg and there was some blood, but she would be all right…at least, if that asshole would quit shooting.
“HEY!” I called out when I got us out of range in a doorway. “QUIT FUCKING SHOOTING! WE’RE HUMAN!”
That got absolutely no response but a hail of bullets. I knew the sound of that weapon: it was an AK-47 rocking on full-auto.
We were trapped between the zombies and a crazy sniper who, thankfully, wasn’t much of a shot. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I only knew one thing: we couldn’t hide in that doorway. The dead were coming. A pack of at least twenty or more were moving in our direction. I had to think and I had to think fast. Robin was wounded. She was bleeding. She needed to be tended to. There was no other choice as I saw it. We had to go into the building itself. If that sonofabitch wanted to come down after us, let him.
I went up the steps and checked the door.
It wasn’t locked. In fact, the knob just spun around in my hand. The
mechanism was broken. Something on the inside was wedged up against it. I put my shoulder to it and it moved maybe an inch or two.
The zombies were getting closer.
“Hurry,” Robin said.
Charged with adrenaline, I rammed the door with everything I had, hitting it like an enraged bull. It opened maybe a foot. I helped Robin up. She squeezed through sideways, tripping and falling inside and crying out. I pushed my bulging ammo bag through, and then I wedged myself in as the zombies came up the steps.
For one frantic moment I was stuck. I couldn’t seem to go in or out.
I was going to be trapped there as those awful things tore me apart. I swear to you, I wiggled slicker than a pole dancer at that moment, compressing my somewhat stocky frame and squeezing through. As I hit the floor on my ass, what I saw was like something out of an old zombie movie on TV: eight or ten reaching, grasping hands came through the partially opened door. They were pale, graying, speckled with grave mold. One of them had barely any flesh on it.
By then, I was on my feet.
I threw myself at the door with everything I had, smashing those hands against the frame again and again until they withdrew. Then I forced the door shut. I saw what had held it closed—a huge desk. As they beat on the door and Robin did her best to keep it shut, I pushed the desk back into place until the door was forced closed. It was a massive antique thing that had to weigh 500 pounds. It did the job.
We were in some sort of lobby and judging by the light that was coming through the boarded windows, it had once been an office. Our shooter was on the roof.
“What now?” Robin said, wincing against the pain.
Good question. “Let’s get you somewhere safe and get your leg patched, then we’ll sort it out.”
It was murky in there. I went over to one of the boarded windows, peering out into the street. The dead were everywhere. Many of them were converged outside of the building. The windows were high enough that I dared yank off one of the top boards. There was no way the dead could reach that high. Light filled the room instantly. Supporting Robin, I led her down a short hallway. There was a heavy, carved oak door at the end. It looked very sturdy. Maybe it was the boss’s office in the old days. I went to the door and it was locked.