by R. J. Spears
I froze in place. Frank must have caught the movement out of the corner of his eye because he quickly changed his direction making a beeline for the creature, bringing his axe up as he bore down on the thing.
The zombie reached out for him expectantly as Frank closed the distance. It seemed desperate to get a hold of him, and Frank seemed equally desperate to meet this creature head on.
Zombies are notoriously slow and while Frank was big and somewhat lumbering, once he got going he brought a lot of momentum to the party. He was sort of like the Titanic without the iceberg to stop it. Just as they were about to collide, Frank brought the axe down with vicious force. The motion was followed up by a sickening crunching and gushing noise. The zombie went to the pavement in a heap sans its head. Frank gave it another whack for good measure, then he booted the head down the street where it caromed off a couple cars before spinning into the gutter.
Frank turned to me and gave me a; “What the hell are you doing back there?” look. I shrugged, relaxing a bit. That was when the two zombies came out from behind the house off to my left and started towards me. One was a short woman with half her face missing and a badly mangled leg. She didn’t worry me because she moved in a staggered, start and stop motion, almost losing ground with each step. The other one seemed to have no bodily impairment and was moving along at a good clip on its way to me. He was a big one. Not as big as Frank, but still a good six-two and probably 280. That gave it three inches and a hundred pounds on me.
I had two choices: hold my ground or turn and run.
You’d think in the face of a world-wide apocalypse, the rules of the school yard would no longer hold sway over us. Old habits die hard. Running would make me a coward. Despite the fact that I wanted to piss my pants, I decided to take the thing on, hoping my agility and speed could outmatch its size and strength. I also prayed I could out-think the dead thing since it had virtually no cognitive processes in its atrophied brain.
I backed up to the nearest car and hopped up onto its hood, hoping that getting some elevation might help me. It closed on me, its beefy hands extended to their fullest, clutching wildly, trying to get a hold on my legs.
I timed my first swing for maximum impact, waiting until it was just about on me. I gave it everything I had, swinging for the fences. The meat of the bat impacted a few inches below the temple producing a combination of sounds -- the ping of an aluminum bat and the crunching of bone as I nearly knocked the thing’s jaw off. Despite the fact that I had hit dozens of zombies over the past months, there was something deep down that clinched up inside me every time I hit one these undead sons of bitches. They were once human. Hitting humans was bad. Or it was once bad. In the end, to survive, I had to get past these deeply ingrained taboos because they held none of them.
While I had been able to get a lot into my swing, my aim was off. These things didn’t feel pain. They didn’t care if every bone in their body was broken. They were driven by one imperative - hunger. This one didn’t mind it at all that its lower jaw was hanging on by just a few strands of muscle and tendons. Dinner was waiting.
When taking down a zombie, you had to shut down the brain. They could still function without arms or legs or even half of their body. I had seen my share of one-legged undead creatures hobbling along or crawling.
I wouldn’t say this zombie was unfazed, but it was still intent on taking me down. It swung one of its tree-like arms and took my legs out from under me like they were made out of popsicle sticks. My head flew backwards, smacking against the windshield. I blinked away a shower of orange and yellows lights and yanked my legs up just as the zombie started clutching for my ankles.
While on my back, I had little or no way to get anything behind a swing. Instead, I used my baseball bat as mini-battering ram, forcing the end of it against the zombie’s arms and hands, beating it back. I used my legs to push my way up the car’s windshield like an inchworm, and was moving nearly as slow as one. Just as I got my butt up past the lip of the windshield I launched myself backward with a forceful push of my legs and rolled onto my side, over the top, and off the back of the back of the car, ending up face down on the pavement.
The thing was on the move, heading my way before I could get to my feet. I reached down to my waistband for the gun but came up empty. I took a quick glance and saw it sitting on the car’s roof. It must have come out when I rolled backwards.
My mind calculated that I had about one second before 280 pounds of stinking undead flesh rammed into me. If this thing got its weight on me, it was all over but the crying. I was still in a kneeling position when it was just a few inches from impact. Some imaginary collision warning went off in the back of my mind, a klaxon sounding the alarm, and my instincts took over.
I rolled onto my back, drew my legs up against my chest with my feet in a parallel position to my body, and waited for the creature to fall onto me. They aren’t very smart and he did just what I predicted, descending on me and landing squarely on my feet. As soon as I felt all that weight hit the soles of my shoes, I allowed myself to roll backwards using its momentum to my advantage.
As a kid I used to play a game called “Ejector Seat” with one of my older cousins. He’d lie on his back on the ground and I’d sit on his feet. We’d do a countdown and he’d launch me into the air just as I said “Ejector Seat Launch.” It was all fun and games until I landed on the sidewalk, breaking my wrist. Today, there was no fun at all. I had to launch this big bastard if I had any hope of living through the night.
The zombie loomed over me like a large, dark cloud bank, blocking out the moon and stars. I could see deep into the dark maw that was its mouth, its tongue lolling about as it salivated on me, anticipating a morsel of my flesh. Its gray, empty eyes showed nothing.
Judging the precise moment, I pushed off with my feet with everything I had. Moving 280 pounds is no easy task but I had fear and adrenaline on my side.
The combination of its momentum and my push sent the thing up and over me and into airbound. I estimated it flew about 10 feet in a gentle arc, its feet sticking up into the night sky and its head falling towards the pavement. The impact sounded like a watermelon from a second floor window -- only this dull empty thud was accompanied by a crunching noise I assumed to be the thing’s neck breaking.
I lay there panting, watching and waiting for the zombie to get back up but it was down for the count which was a good thing because I was nearly out of steam.
A dark form moved into view, occluding the night sky and I found my steam again -- really fast. It had to be that third zombie.
Then the form spoke. “Nice move, little man,” Frank said. “Where’d ya’ get that -- from a kung-fu movie?”
“Asshole,” I said.
He had dispatched the third zombie while I was playing Ejector Seat with mine.
I nearly crapped out on him and headed back to the church, but he cajoled me into sticking it out since the college was only a block away. Against my better judgment I went along for the rest of the ride because up until now it had been so much fun. Woo-woo. If they had postcards for zombie killing, I would have been sending them to all my relatives.
We both went quiet once we crossed Third Street and arrived at the campus grounds.
At one point this had been a bustling hive of activity with students rushing from class to class and others playing Frisbee on the lawns or just hanging out. While it wasn’t Harvard, Yale, or even the massive Ohio State University to the north, there was a campus life that went on here. Or, at least, had gone on here. Now it was just as dead as the rest of the city and probably the rest of the world.
We passed by the library first, hugging close to the wall. The wind whistled along the jagged edges of broken windows as we made it to the corner. Frank had the lead. He paused there for a moment taking a quick peek, then moved quickly across an open space to the Center for the Arts. Much of the north facing wall consisted of windows, most of which were broken. Frank stepped throug
h one of the openings and into the building. I followed, hoping my sneakers were tough enough to resist any jagged edges of glass. Cuts and infections were a big issue in this new dead world as there was no corner Urgent Care open for business.
We stood in the foyer for a moment.
“Let your eyes get used to the dark,” Frank said in a whisper. “We’ll cut through here,” he said motioning to a dark hallway to the south. “It’ll leave us less exposed than if we cut around the building.”
“It’s your party,” I said. “I’m just along for the ride.”
I couldn’t see his expression in the dark, but I sensed my response didn’t please him.
CHAPTER 16
Nomads
We quietly moved through the building without incident and made our way across Second Street until we got to the administration building. Frank stopped to catch his breath at the southwest corner of the building before we made our way around back.
It was my turn to jab back at him for once. “You going to make it, Old Man?”
He gave me a look, but didn’t take the bait. “I saw them drive around the back of Massie Hall,” he said huffing and puffing, his breathing labored.
“Frank, you really up to this?” I asked.
“Just a little out of breath. That’s all.”
The nomads’ cars were parked as close as you could get to the building, almost kissing it -- probably to avoid being out in the open as much as possible.
Frank took out his night scope and scanned the building for several minutes.
“I see movement. Probably five or six people. There’s one man. He looks old because he’s stooped over. I see two women.” He paused and scanned for a couple more seconds. “There’s at least one kid. Can’t tell the gender. Wait, there’s one more person. Not too big. Could be a kid or a small man. I’m going with kid.”
“Should we call it in?” I asked.
He gave me an incredulous look. “Hell no. If I’m right, there’s only a handful of them.”
“Still, there’s only two of us.”
“But we have the element of surprise.”
“Surprise for what? I thought this was just a reconnaissance mission -- check things out and report back.”
“I didn’t risk my neck to just go back with a report. There’s only an old man and some women and kids.”
“An old man, women, and kids with guns.”
“We’re armed,” he said holding up his gun.
“And what was your plan with the gun? This is just a small group of people trying to get by just like us.”
“They can get by somewhere else.” He stood and we moved around the Administration Building and to the back of Massie Hall. It was four stories and was the biggest building on campus. As we walked, my finger played with the walkie-talkies power switch, but I left it off.
I always called Massie “the Barn” because the roof employed a Gambrel design that reminded me of an old country barn. One of the main entrance doors was ripped off its hinges and laid on the ground. We entered there. The interior of the building was completely dark with the exception of the moonlight streaming through the windows. It was a particularly bright moon which worked both for and against us. I used my pocket flashlight sparingly waiting for someone to shoot toward the light each time I flipped it on.
For a big man, Frank had a stealthy way about him. He wasn’t ready to be a ninja, but he moved with a lighter ease than I would have imagined. He probably thought I was stalling (which I was), but I insisted, just to be safe, that we make sure no one was on the first floor. Our quick tour of the floor took less than five minutes. I wanted to check the basement, but Frank saw through my stalling technique and pushed me to the stairwell and upward.
As he pushed the door to the second floor open, there came loud clattering sound and I froze in place. I started to back up, but Frank reached back with one of his beefy hands, grabbed me, and surged through the door, pulling me along like I was a rag doll. A chair with several soda cans lay strewn across the hall, a warning system announcing our incursion to the second floor. I bent over, trying to make myself a smaller target, in case someone started firing our way. No shots came, but I saw a light flicker out at the far end of the hall as we ran to the first open room. The end of the hall was about 75 feet away, it seemed a mile away. That was until the shooting started -- then it seemed like inches.
It was only two shots, but I could swear I heard a bullet whiz by me before chunking into the wall just over my head.
We dove into the room and I slammed into a chair, sending it flying across the room into several other chairs -- the commotion seeming like a brass band to my ears. I ended up on all fours and when I got back to my feet, I noticed that we were in a classroom. It looked like someone had a done a number on it. Chairs were overturned and papers were strewn across the floor like over-sized confetti. Streaks of dried blood painted a garish and frightening picture of what had happened here.
I had one hand on my gun and the other on the walkie-talkie. Franks saw my hand in my pocket and shook his head, pressing his index finger to his lips. I removed my hand from the walkie-talkie and flipped him off. He just smiled back.
He went to the doorway and slowly edged his head out, peering down the hall. He pulled back into the room, pointed at me, and made a patting gesture with his hand towards the floor, telling me to stay put. He pointed at himself and then towards the hall. I shook my head forcefully, but he ignored me and was out the door before I could protest any further.
I angled myself so that I could see down the hall and watched as he jogged into a room on the opposite side of the hallway. Something in me wanted to break and run. Another part wanted to call in the cavalry, but I wanted to give Frank the benefit of the doubt.
Frank ducked into the room next to mine.
“Hey, you down there,” a man’s voice shouted from the end of the hall. It had a raspy edge to it. “What do you want?”
A little voice in me wanted to say, “Nothing. Nothing at all,” but I remained mute.
“I could ask you the same.” Frank’s voice boomed down the hall.
“We’re just looking for a safe place to land. Away from those things.”
“Why’d you shoot at us?”
“We thought you might be one of the zombies.”
“Where did you come from?”
“From down the River. Ashland. It was overrun. We had to get out.” I could hear a faint quaver in the voice as if it were from an older man.
Frank cleared his voice. “Well, here’s the deal. This is our town and we don’t want any outsiders taking up what we have. What’s ours!”
Unlike the first exchanges, the reply was not immediate. I strained to hear and thought I could make out whispers coming from the end of the hall. The whispering went on for about thirty seconds.
“There’s only a few of us. Portsmouth is a pretty big place. There’s got to be enough for your people and mine.”
“I really don’t see it your way and we would appreciate it if you’d move on as soon as possible. Like now.”
Another whispered exchange filtered down the hall my way, the voices indistinct.
“We can’t do that, mister. We’re ‘bout out of gas and the way I see it, ain’t no one that can claim a town now that the law of the land has up and gone away.”
“We are the law here, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll heed what I say.”
I didn’t like any of this. This was just escalating and Frank was boxing them into a corner. And had Frank just used the word, ‘heed?’ Were we in an old west novel?
“Are you threatening us?” the voice asked.
“Let’s just say it’s a strong word of encouragement.”
The back and forth ended and a heavy silence filled the hall between us and them. I thought I heard sounds of movement and then Frank whispered down the hall in my direction, “Hey Joel, I’ve got them on the run.”
That was when I
saw the silhouette creep by my door. This silhouette was carrying a rifle.
“Frank!” I shouted. “They’re coming --”
I didn’t get the rest of the sentence out as the figure wheeled towards me and cracked off two shots. The first one struck the wall a few feet away and the second one ricocheted off a desk. I was on the ground rolling out of the line of fire before the figure could get off another shot, but I saw brilliant flashes filling the hallway accompanied by the booms of gunfire.
The firefight was brutally quick. There was a sound like sack of potatoes hitting the ground followed by metallic clattering.
My heart hammered away in my chest and blood pounded in my ears. I struggled not to hyperventilate but got my breathing under control.
“Joel, you okay?” Frank asked.
My mouth moved, but nothing came out.
“Joel?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.” I crawled across the floor, gun in hand, to the doorway. “There’s someone lying on the floor outside my room.”
A women’s shriek resounded off the walls from the end of the hallway. “Billy! Billy! You all right down there? Are you all right?”
“You’ve got a man down,” Frank said.
“NO! Oh my God, no,” the woman’s voice said, thick and wet.
“You should have listened to us,” Frank said.
My head jerked back and forth from where the intruders were positioned and back from the direction we had come from -- the way they had sent someone around the back hallway to ambush us. I dug in my pocket and came up with my key chain flashlight. Before turning it on I checked the hallway again, listening as hard as I’ve ever tried to listen to anything in my life. Other than the sound of the woman’s wracking sobs, I heard nothing else.
Feeling like it was safe, I flicked on the flashlight and shined it on the figure in the hall.
It was a boy. Only a boy. He couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen. There was an ugly entrance wound in his forehead, but his eyes were still opening, looking at me -- accusing me. Those eyes held me for a moment and I slipped away into some sort of trance. Reality skewed away from me for a moment as I felt outside myself, swimming along against some murky, blood-filled tide.