Dead Judgment

by Flint Maxwell

  However, there is a chance that if fires are burning, we might be dealing with a large group of people, an army of people. Dangerous people. And we’re just three, with limited ammunition between us.

  I can’t think about that, can’t worry about it, not yet.

  Up at the top of the parking deck, Lilly turns the engine off, and we get out of the truck. It feels good to stretch our legs. The weather isn’t too cold, either. Crisp with a cool breeze. Light jacket weather. The beard on my face, and the way my hair hangs down to cover the back of my neck certainly helps against the elements, too.

  We go to the edge of the structure. We don’t see much, either. The town is like any of the other million small town places around the USA…well, like how they used to be. The big difference is that there’s no people milling about now. No cars driving up and down the road, no music thumping from the bar, or people standing around outside, drunk and glassy-eyed.

  “The place is deserted,” Abby says. “I think we’re safe here.”

  “No place is ever deserted,” Lilly says. Her hand is over her brow, shielding her eyes from the moonlight, which is bright tonight.

  I get a bad feeling, thinking about that full moon.

  “There are always zombies around,” Lilly continues. “Unless they’ve been cleared out.” She points. “Look up there.” We do. “See all those houses, all those residential streets?” I do. “I bet you there’s a hundred zombies locked up inside. People who caught the sickness and turned in the very bed they thought they could get better in.”

  “Pretty grim, Lilly,” Abby says, but she says it with a smile on her face.

  I don’t know how she could smile right now, not with Lilly talking all low and huskily, like a fortune teller telling us we’re going to get struck by lightning as soon as we leave the place. I should know never to put anything past Abby; her mind works differently than anyone else’s. She practically grew up in the apocalypse. Her entire adulthood has been spent killing zombies and warlords, and doing it all with only one hand. Not to mention I haven’t seen her in a few years—years she’s been under the influence of the District. That alone is enough to drive a person insane.

  As Abby speaks again, and the words she says register in my head, I think she really might’ve lost her mind.

  “We should spend the night there, in one of the houses. That’s a good idea, Lilly!” She claps Lilly on the back hard enough to send her shuffling forward.

  “What?” Lilly says. “I didn’t say anything about staying there. I pretty much said the exact opposite. Are you crazy?”

  Abby says, “I was under the impression you didn’t want to stay here…”

  “Well, no—but I don’t want to stay in a zombie infested house, either,” Lilly replies.

  Abby doesn’t answer, just skips on toward the truck, so Lilly looks at me for an answer. I don’t have one for her. I just smile and give her a shrug.

  “Seriously?” Lilly says.

  I shrug again. That’s pretty much my go-to when I don’t know how to respond, something I’ve brought with me from the old world. Whenever Darlene grilled me—Jack, why didn’t you do the dishes? Jack, did you forget how to put the toilet seat down?—I’d just shrug, and that would usually do it. Usually.

  It doesn’t do it for Lilly. She’s not taking my shrug for an answer, so I add an “I don’t know” for good measure.

  By this time, Abby is already in the front seat of the Ford, key in the ignition. She starts up the engine, and it hums to life. She gets back out.

  “I’ll need to fill her up. Better to do it now than when we can’t. Help me, Jack?”

  I walk forward. Feel Lilly try gripping me, and her grip slipping off as I pull away. I try to play this off like I don’t know she did it.

  “We can’t go stay in one of those houses,” she says. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Look around,” Abby says, waving her hand and her hook toward the sky. “Every last place is dangerous. We’ll go in and clear out the house. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find something useful inside. Like Twinkies.”

  “Twinkies?” I say. “That shit’ll kill you.”

  “Seriously?” Lilly storms over to us, stomping her feet all the way.

  “Seriously,” Abby says, as calm as ever. “Twinkies never expire—”

  “I’m not talking about the Twinkies!” Lilly yells.

  “Shh,” I say. “Unwanted attention.”

  “Like going around and knocking on doors won’t draw unwanted attention?”

  “No one is gonna be there to answer,” Abby says. “C’mon. I know you want to sleep in a bed.”

  “Not if there’s a dead body in it,” Lilly replies.

  “Hell, I don’t care,” I say. “I’d sleep right next to a zombie if I knew it wasn’t going to try to eat me.”

  “You’re sick, Jack,” Lilly says.

  I shrug again.

  Abby unhooks the gas drum and rolls it down the bed. She tries taking it off the truck herself. Doesn’t get very far. Her face goes all red, and she’s breathing heavy.

  “See?” I say.

  She stands up, glaring at me. “Fine, Jack. It’s heavy. You’re right. Big deal. Now help me.”

  I go back into the cab and get the red gas canister, hand it up to Abby. Lilly is perched on the edge of the bed, talking so fast I can’t understand what she’s saying. I don’t know if Abby understands, either. It doesn’t matter, she’s ignoring her as if Lilly isn’t there at all. How she can do that, I don’t know. Lilly is hard to ignore when she gets going like this. I try my best.

  Sleeping in a bed does sound like a godsend right now, and all those houses do look deserted. Sure, I know there’s a chance that they aren’t. A pretty good chance, actually. But it won’t be something we can’t handle; we’re professional zombie slayers. Warlord killers.

  At least that’s how I like to think of myself. I can’t speak for the ladies. Lilly obviously doesn’t have much confidence in us, that’s for sure.

  I’ve joined Abby in the truck bed, and I’m holding the red gas canister open.

  “I’ll tip it over,” Abby says.

  “Maybe let me do that,” I say.

  She frowns at me. It’s a deadly frown, one you don’t want thrown your way. Once she hits you with it, you know you’re in trouble.

  “Why? Because I only have one hand?” Abby says. “I can do more one-handed than you could do if you had three!”

  Her face is redder, though she’s no longer trying to tip the drum over. She’s pissed off.

  “I know, I know, Abby,” I say. “Never mind. Go ahead and do it.”

  She huffs.

  I’m pretty sure she’s going to drop the drum and douse me in gasoline—then Lilly will light a match and just finish the job, probably—but she doesn’t. Abby’s veins pop out all over her arms and in her forehead. Her face is so red that it looks like brick. The gas pours. A perfect stream. It fills the canister up halfway before I see that Abby is really going to lose her grip.

  Lilly sees this too. She lets her worries about breaking into old, abandoned houses go for the moment, and climbs up on the bed to help Abby ease the drum backward.

  I hold the canister up to the moonlight, see the shadow of its contents, and say, “Yep. Looks good.”

  Abby doesn’t say anything for a moment. When she does, she says, “I could’ve done it by myself.”

  “Well,” Lilly says, “you don’t have to. Maybe back when you were with the District you did, but we’re a team. We work together. And when we work together, we get stuff done.” She sighs at Abby’s dejected look. “Man, I had to train Jack, too. Is it humanity in general that doesn’t like working together, or is it just the airheads that came from Haven?” She asks this all with a grin on her face, but Abby doesn’t reciprocate.

  I do, then I say, “It’s just us from Haven. My brother’s the same way. Probably the airiest of all the heads you’ll ever meet. Just wait until you get a load of
him.”

  Abby looks at me, frowns.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I tell her. “He’s the Overlord’s right-hand man. He’s the most brainwashed of them all. Yada-yada-yada. I’m not worried. I believe in Norm. There’s good left in him, trust me.”

  “I hope so.” Abby doesn’t sound like she has much hope at all, but I don’t blame her. She takes the gas canister from me, opens the tank and begins filling up the Ford.

  “Great,” Lilly says. “That much gas will probably get us to the end of the street.”

  Abby and I let her go on. All we can do, really.

  After, Abby asks me in a low voice, “What will you do if you can’t change him back? What happens if he tries to kill you instead?”

  I take a long moment before answering the question. The truth is that I haven’t thought about that. It just doesn’t seem like a possibility…but looking at the seriousness in Abby’s eyes as she twists the tank’s cap back on, the realization that my brother may never be my brother again hits me hard.

  “I guess I’ll do what I have to do,” I finally say. “If he’s standing in the way of the one-eyed man, if there’s no hope for him, and he’s going to continue hurting innocent people, I guess I’ll kill him.” The words don’t sound like they belong to me, but they are my words all the same.

  Abby doesn’t look surprised. She just nods.

  Then we’re getting back into the Ford while Lilly keeps telling us that leaving the parking deck is a terrible idea.

  8

  The rest of downtown isn’t much. Just a bunch of broken windows, washed-out bricks, and dusty and dirty cars with rusted undercarriages and flat tires.

  No people. No zombies. Not even any blood or corpses that we can see.

  Maybe this place managed a clean evacuation when the virus struck. Might have bought the citizens some extra time, even if not for long.

  Well, what do I know? There could be some of them out in the world still. They could’ve been resistant to the disease like we were, could’ve taught themselves how to fight and survive like we did.

  If the zombie plague has proven anything, it’s that the human race is stubborn. Most of us have gone, but some of us stayed behind, fought to stay behind. We’re not going anywhere. Not yet.

  So there’s hope.

  “What about that one?” Abby says, pointing up the dark road.

  A military Humvee has been left behind. It’s in pretty bad shape. The headlights of the Ford illuminate the scorch marks on the side of the vehicle; a starburst of soot, like a grenade went off against it. It’s sitting on four flat tires, and one of the doors is gone. It still sits where it crashed into a streetlight. The metal pole currently rests in the remains of the second story of a house across the street from the one Abby has her eye on.

  Maybe this place didn’t have as clean of a break as I’d originally thought. Aw, well, doesn’t surprise me. Makes my heart a little heavier than before, but doesn’t completely surprise me. I don’t think anything in this messed up world can anymore.

  “Seriously?” Lilly says. “That place? It looks like the Battle of the Bulge was fought here.”

  “Do you even know what the Battle of the Bulge was?” Abby asks.

  “It’s a porno, isn’t it?” I add.

  They both roll their eyes at me. Hard.

  “Typical male response,” Lilly says, shaking her head. “But seriously, this place is, like, probably riddled with bodies.”

  “Doubt it,” Abby says.

  The truck pulls into the driveway, up the sloping concrete. Glass crunches beneath the tires, but like the body, the tires are armored. Rather, they’re self-inflating; if a bullet hits the tire, a system within the tire will keep it inflated until we can patch it up or change it.

  Crazy, I know.

  When Abby told me about it, I didn’t believe it. I got this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, too, because that meant the District had quite a few gadgets up their sleeves—things I wouldn’t expect. All that tech had just been sitting in army bunkers and weapon plants for years, collecting dust. I guess someone had to go for it. Sucks that it was the District.

  On top of all that, the engine basically makes no noise. The truck runs as quietly as an electric car.

  Abby kills the quiet engine. We sit there for a moment, listening to the night. It’s silent without the rumbling under the hood. Then she kills the headlights, and now it’s almost pitch-black, the moon coming through a break in the dark clouds above.

  I’m the first to get out. I got my rifle clutched to my side, a sidearm in a holster on my hip, a hunting knife in my belt. I pull the hunting knife out. If zombies are around, I doubt they’re hanging in a pack; they only ever do that when they know there’s food nearby. Monkey see, monkey eat, right?

  Still, I can’t be too careful. A gunshot would only alert them of our presence, of their food, and right now, all I want is a good night’s sleep, one that involves not being covered in brains and guts. So I pull the knife free from my belt, and approach the front door. Abby and Lilly are on my flank.

  Abby drifts off to the side of the garage door. The white paint has yellowed and hangs in thick chips, revealing the bare metal beneath. I wonder if there’s a car inside. I bet it’s a nice one…or at least it was once nice, before all this stuff happened. Now it’s probably just a rusty bucket of bolts with deflated tires and a dried up gas tank. Useless. Like everything these days.

  Abby peers around the garage, looks back at us, shakes her head. Lilly goes around the other side. She stands on her tiptoes to look over the fence into the backyard. She shakes her head, too. Slowly, not making a noise, I walk up the porch steps. I feel that one of the boards is loose. If I put any more weight on it, it’ll creak; a creak will be loud in the quiet of this town, so I ease off of it, decide to skip that step all together. On the porch, I smell nothing but mildew and old wood. No rotting corpses. No blood. No opened bodies.

  That’s good, I think to myself. Real good.

  The front door doesn’t have a screen in front of it. It’s just a towering slab of oak. There’s a gold knocker, still pretty resplendent. Below the knocker, there’s no doorknob, but an iron handle with a thumb latch.

  I try the thumb latch.

  It’s so quiet, the silence feels like it’s pressing down on me, like I’m suffocating. I try ignoring my rapid heartbeat. Fail.

  The door is locked. I give it a slight jimmy, but it doesn’t budge.

  Back down the porch steps I go, avoiding that creaky board.

  “Locked,” I whisper.

  “That’s a sign,” Lilly says. “A sign we should go back to that parking deck.”

  Abby ignores her. “You two go around the back, try the other doors.” She says this like she knows for a fact this place is going to have other unlocked doors.

  “What are you gonna do?” I ask her. I’m still holding my knife. Holding it pretty tightly. I see the whites of my knuckles shining through my sunburned flesh.

  “I’m gonna check out that Humvee,” she replies.

  “By yourself?” Lilly says, surprised.

  “Yeah, by myself. Might be some weapons or something in there we can use.”

  We’re always needing weapons. I had thought about checking out the Humvee earlier, but it seemed like finding a place to crash for the night was a lot more important.

  Until now.

  “Just wait until we get inside,” Lilly is saying. “We’ll settle down, and then go check the Humvee together.”

  She makes a good point, and I can see the fire this starts, simmering in Abby’s eyes. She wants to prove Lilly wrong about this place, she wants to show her that it’s safe.

  Lilly looks at me for help, but I step back and put my hands up. I’m staying out of their arguments from now on. No reason to make enemies out of either of them. Hopefully they’ll learn to get along. Hopefully it’ll be sooner rather than later. But who knows? Just as long as we stay alive, I don’t care if
they fight.

  I guess.

  Abby decides there’s no point in arguing. She just turns her back on us and crosses the street.

  Lilly stands, shaking her head.

  “C’mon,” I urge her. “If we stay here staring at her, she’ll never budge. She’s one of the most stubborn people I know.”

  She sighs. “Where do you find these people, Jack?”

  “Same place we’re going, Woodhaven,” I say. I pat her on the back, and she finally turns.

  We go around the garage. The backyard is pretty normal, considering the circumstances, and is one of the better backyards I’ve seen since the apocalypse began. It’s pretty big, about fifty yards. Fenced in. We go through the gate, which is standing open, the hinges rusted and frozen in time. Near the back fence are a couple of trees. They’re standing sentinel over the empty house, waiting for the owners to come back. About smack dab in the middle of the yard is a swing set featuring a white slide, and covered with old leaves and pine needles. One of the swings’ chains has snapped—it sits in the tall grass like a preying snake. The metal is rusty.

  I wonder what happened to whoever this set was built for. I wonder if they were grown up before all this shit happened. If they got out alive.

  Lilly leads the way to the backdoor. It’s a sliding glass thing. The curtains on the inside are parted. Flowery. She approaches the glass and cups her hand around her face as she peers in.

  “Anything?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” she answers.

  She reaches for the door handle, and begins pulling it open. It’s not locked. I grab her shoulder before she can open it any farther.

  “Huh?” she says.

  “Wait,” I say.

  With the handle of the hunting knife, I tap the glass. First softly, then a little louder. We can barely hear it.

  Lilly looks at me, understanding finally coming over her face, and she frowns.