The crawler only groaned in reply, pulling itself onto the bed. Angela froze, trying to cope with the overwhelming fear, balancing the option to run and potentially be caught... and eaten, she shivered...against trying to stand her ground with nothing more than a goose-necked lamp for a weapon. As the zombie pawed at her ankle the urge to run became paramount and she threw the lamp at the dead thing’s head as she sprinted toward the door. She expected to feel a gritty hand on her leg, a sudden yank and then a tumble face first to the floor, but she made it out the door without feeling the icy touch of the corpse’s grasping fingers.
She was about to run towards the ruined living room and kitchen but stopped abruptly, almost overbalancing, when she saw a shambling woman coming her way. The woman was dressed in a blood spattered dress, and where her left breast should have been was a raw, red gaping hole revealing sickly yellow-white ribs and dark maroon muscle beneath. Her lips were torn away, the flesh of her nose hanging from a thin string of cartilage. Not torn, Angela thought deliriously, eaten away! The dead woman’s eyes fixed on hers and the zombie produced a wailing shriek, mouth open, teeth gnashing, as it charged towards her.
Angela backpedaled quickly, narrowly dodging the groping hand of the crawler as it shot out the bedroom doorway. She nearly tripped, her arms pin wheeling until at last she caught the frame of her bathroom door. She leapt inside, slamming the door and flicking the small button latch. She grabbed a towel from the rack by the shower and stuffed the thick terrycloth into the gap under the door. She saw that the mirror over the sink was broken but most of the pieces were still intact in the frame, forming a jigsaw puzzle of silver shards. She saw herself reflected on the multiple surfaces, her face pale and drawn, and she began to sob uncontrollably. She crawled into the bathtub as the dead woman in the hall began pounding on the door.
The flimsy bathroom door wasn’t going to last long; it was made of a thin wood veneer over a cardboard core. She hugged her knees close to her chest and sobbed. She didn’t want to die in her bathroom, didn’t want to die in her ratty old sweatpants, but most of all, she didn’t want to die and not stay dead. The thought that she would become one of them, one of these horrible nightmarish creatures, was the worst. She would be lonely forever, lonely and rotting. It made her shiver and twisted her empty stomach into a cold, hard knot. Scratching came from near the bottom of the door, and she knew the crawler was trying to help his grisly companion. The wood around the door latch began to splinter.
A new sound suddenly came from the other side of the door and she thought for one brief instant that the frame had finally given out and the zombies would be on her, but the door was still in place, the battered latch still holding. She heard an inarticulate roar, probably from the female zombie, but underneath that hoarse cry was a wet plopping sound and a grunt sounded too human to come from either of the animated corpses. There was a crash, another slam against the door causing it to buck and quiver but it still managed to stay standing, and then silence.
Angela wiped her eyes with shaking hands, listening intently. She screamed when something crashed through the thin door. It was the red painted head of a fire axe, and as it was withdrawn she heard a voice, a human voice, call out, “Is anyone alive in there?”
For a few seconds she couldn’t respond. Her tongue had turned to lead in her mouth, swollen to three times its normal size, and she couldn’t seem to force her lungs to take in any air to speak. The axe head slammed into the door again, widening the hole. With great effort she forced herself to break the mental paralysis afflicting her voice. “Yes! Yes, I’m alive! Please help, please God, please help!” She could just barely see a man’s face on the other side of the hole in the door, a single blue eye peering through. She got to her wobbling feet, legs numb from fear, and she turned the doorknob, the door sagging in its frame as she pulled it open.
A young man stood on the other side, the gleaming red fire axe in his hands held at the ready, the two zombies decapitated and lying on either side of his wide stance. He was tall with curly brown hair and a strong, square jaw. His face was covered with smears of dirt and ash, but she could still tell despite the grime that he was handsome. He wore a curious long red coat over a stained and ripped cream colored shirt and black slacks. It took her a moment to recognize the jacket as one worn by the doormen at the tower. He flashed a crooked smile at her as she stood dumbfounded before him.
She wanted to say something witty, to come off as a tough, independent girl, but instead she found herself collapsing. He dropped the axe and caught her in his arms. He was toned, not overly so, but enough that she could feel hard cords of muscle in his arms, and she felt safe in his embrace. He helped her to the floor gently and patted her head. “Glad I got here in time,” he said in a voice that sounded to her like that of an angel. “I saw your name on the resident’s list and thought you might still be up here.”
“I...uhm...that is...thank you? I don’t know what to say,” she said as she tried to regain control of her shattered nerves. Relief was slowly filling her, warming her cold, goose-pimpled skin. “Thank you, thank you so much.”
He grinned down at her, his eyes bright. “Aw shucks, ma’am,” he said in a fake southern drawl, “t’weren’t nothin’.”
She wanted to chuckle, to show him she was okay and not shell-shocked. It wasn’t true, though, and she couldn’t get her brain to engage properly. A hundred stupid questions flew through Angela’s mind, but only two made their way to her lips.
“Are you married? Are you gay?” she asked in rapid succession, her eyes going wide a second later as she realized what she’d said. She flushed a deep crimson.
He laughed quietly, “No, and no. Not last I checked any-way. I’m kind of new to this whole rescuing pretty ladies thing, but are you trying to hit on me?”
“I’m kind of new to the whole being rescued thing, so I guess maybe I am.” She looked up at him, eyes wet with tears, and kissed him hard on the lips for the span of three heartbeats before settling back on her heels.
“Was that for rescuing you?” he said with a wry grin. His eyes danced with hers.
“No,” she replied, the first hint of a smile at the corners of her lips. “That was for calling me pretty.”
He nodded, “I’ll have to do that more often then.”
A chorus of groans came from the direction of the living room, interrupting their conversation. “I’d ask you out, but I think we’ll have to wait and see if we survive this first,” he said, standing and helping her up. “I’m Michael, by the way.”
“Angela,” she replied, looking down the hall before glancing back at the two dead, truly dead, things on the floor. “They’re really zombies, aren’t they?”
Michael nodded, “Yes, at least I guess so. Before the television went out they were saying that the military is setting up safe areas around the city. There’s one about three blocks from here. I think we can make it.”
“How did you know how to kill them?” she asked, looking at his handiwork. The heads of the two zombies were neatly sliced free just below the chin.
He shrugged, “I didn’t. I watch a lot of horror movies, and zombies are usually killed with a blow to the head. I tried that, but they didn’t seem to go down, so I went with Plan B.”
“Plan B?” she asked, dazedand still trying to come to grips with the fact that she was having a rational conversation about the living dead.
“When in doubt, chop the head off,” he answered with a grin. “Tends to work on just about every silver screen monster, and I guess it works on these things, too.”
She nodded solemnly. She was about to ask another question, this one about how bad the rest of the building was, when she stepped on something sharp, a bit of bone from one of the zombies. She looked down at her dirty bare feet and grimaced. “Give me one minute,” she said and ran to the bedroom.
While she quickly changed, Michael watched the hallway to the living room. The groans were getting louder. “I think the
y followed me!” he whispered sharply to her as he took a few cautious steps forward, peeking around the corner.
Angela came out of her room dressed in her work-out clothes: a t-shirt under a zip-up green velour hoodie and a pair of black Lycra pants, with a pair of faded purple running shoes on her feet. The clothes weren’t very sexy, but she was going for function over fashion. She had also quickly wiped her face clean with a make-up remover cloth and pulled her hair back with a black stretchy band. She felt better, or at least more comfortable, as she joined her handsome rescuer in the hall.
They could see siz zombies through her smashed-in front door, milling about out in the hall. The undead hadn’t yet figured out where the humans were, though it was just a matter of time. Angela stepped over what might have once been part of an industrial air conditioning unit into her kitchen. She found her big meat cleaver half-buried under the remains of her cabinets.
Michael followed her, crouching low to keep from being seen by any of the walking corpses. “I can see half a dozen. Could be more, though,” he whispered to her as they used her tipped over refrigerator for cover. “Nice cleaver, but that and my axe wouldn’t stop that many. You don’t happen to have a gun or, you know, maybe a flamethrower?”
“Fresh out of both. Ooh, I have pepper spray in my purse!” she said and instantly regretted it. He grinned as she realized that her can of mace wasn’t going to stop a zombie. She smiled despite herself, the first honest smile she could remember since she had left work... Oh, God, she thought, had that only been yesterday?
Michael looked around, a grim expression on his face. “We might be trapped then,” he said. He could see no way out except through the zombies. “Not that I might not enjoy being trapped in a room with you for a while, but eventually our friends out there will figure out where we are, and I don’t think any of the doors in this place can hold them back for long.”
She turned and sat with her back against the white pebbled front of the fridge. An idea hatched in her mind, a crazy, stupid idea, but one that might get them out. She looked at Michael and whispered, “Tell me about yourself.”
“You sure this is the time?” he asked. She shrugged, and he had to admit it looked like they weren’t going anywhere for a while. “Okay, I’m a doorman here, been working here for the past couple of months. I work the overnight shift, which is probably why I haven’t seen you before. I’m twenty-nine, I’ll be the big three-oh in two months. I used to be a swimming instructor at the YMCA, took piano lessons for five years as a kid, and my favorite color is blue. Good enough?” He winked at her.
“Twenty-seven, marketing assistant, can’t swim or play piano, but I can make a wicked good pumpkin pie,” she replied. “And purple. Except during summer, and then it’s green.”
He stifled a chuckle. “So now what?”
“Now we get out of here, I think,” she said. “Sorry, this might get us killed just as much as running out into those zombies. That’s why I wanted to get to know you first.”
“In case we die?”
She smiled, but there was no humor in her expression, “Yeah, something like that.” She inched over toward the broken windows, the wreckage of the air conditioning unit providing cover. She looked over the edge, lying flat on her stomach, some of the glass shards poking sharply into her belly. As she expected, a twisted network of beams led from the gutted apartment tower leaning against her building. With a little luck, and if she could ignore the dizzying vertigo, she could crawl over to the other building. The half-dismembered zombie and his companion had made their way to her apartment via the same route, so she hoped it was strong enough to hold.
She crawled back to her new friend and explained her plan. “We can basically climb down to the other building, and then we just slide down what’s left of the exterior. I don’t think it’s steep enough to get going too fast, and the bottom is flooded from the broken water mains, so we should just drop right into a big pool.”
“This is really crazy, you know,” Michael replied.
She nodded toward the door, “Any crazier than those things? I’ll go get some towels to slide on.” She carefully crouched through the rubble and collected two large beach towels from her bedroom closet. One was a rainbow of colors while the other was pink and had a unicorn on it. She handed the unicorn towel to Michael with a mischievous grin.
The two made their way cautiously to the window. Angela folded up her towel and slipped it under the back of her shirt, giving her a Quasimodo hump. Michael followed suit, tucking the folded up cloth under his long coat. Angela went first, brushing aside the remaining glass from the window as she slipped over the edge and onto the bent girders. She lowered herself cautiously, crawling inch by inch down toward the gaping hole in the collapsed apartment building where she had first seen the crawler and his companion.
Michael’s scuffed black shoes appeared over the edge of the window above her. He started down slowly, holding on to the beam with white knuckles. “Is it a bad time to tell you I’m afraid of heights?” he called down to her.
She continued down, skirting the sunken hole in the building. She found she could actually stand on part of the buckled structure, a crease where the building had folded instead of tearing, and she waited for her frightened companion to join her. He really was having difficulty making his way down, and she saw sweat glistening from his face as he worked slowly hand-over-hand down to her. She grabbed the back of his coat and helped him stand, pulling him into a hug as they stood on the crumpled ruins, the fires in the city around them lighting the night with a flickering brilliance. He hugged her back, wrapping his arms around her tightly.
A wailing groan from above them broke the embrace as they both looked up to see several zombies looking down, the shambling figures silhouetted in the empty window frame. A pair of them began climbing over the edge, one slipping and falling into the dark oblivion below. The other, however, began slowly crawling towards the huddled survivors.
Angela crab-walked cautiously to the edge of the twisted building and looked down at the slope below her. The exterior of the tower had been covered in a combination of glass, which was all shattered, and smooth bronze sheets, which were still intact, though some were warped and collapsed in places. She almost cheered when she saw that there was a straight, unbuckled metal pathway running all the way down to the dark pool of water at the base of the fallen building.
“They’re coming,” Michael said urgently. He had left the axe in her apartment, the weapon too unwieldy to carry with him as he was climbing, and while she still had the cleaver tucked into her belt, it wasn’t going to be of much help if the zombies got to them. “Go,” he said, a stern look on his face. “Get out of here while you can. I’ll buy you some time.”
“What? Are you nuts?” she asked, pulling her towel from under her shirt and spreading it on the lip of the makeshift slide. “Michael, please. We can just slide down...”
He smiled and shook his head, “If those things follow us, and they probably will, they’ll slide right down on top of us.” He took the cleaver from her as she looked at him with large, tearful eyes. “I’m not going to try to fight them, just buy you enough time. You get going and I’ll be right behind you. I promise.”
She nodded, knowing he was lying, and sat down on the towel. She tried not to think about what she was about to do, what he was doing for her. He leaned over and kissed her softly on the forehead. “For luck,” he said quietly, and gave her a little push.
The slide down the side of the leaning building was like every amusement park ride Angela had ever ridden, all happening at once. It reminded her of sledding down big hills as a child in her little home town in the Midwest, sluicing down with no control and only a prayer that nothing was in her way. She was scared out of her mind and excited beyond all explanation at the same time. Twice she thought she would lift right off of the metal slide, her fingers clutching tightly at the terrycloth rec-tangle under her, and once she bounced so hard she
thought her tailbone would crack, but the dizzying ride only took about sixty seconds, and she made it to the bottom safely, skipping once over the surface of the pooled water before coming to a stop and sinking.
She hadn’t realized that the water was filling the entire space that had once been the apartment building’s basement. She struggled, her feet not touching the bottom, and realized her mistake with wide, frightened eyes. The towel wrapped around her, her means of escape, dragging her down into the black depths. Her mind had only an instant to realize that she had survived the incredible ride down the side of the building only to drown at the bottom.
High above, Michael tossed his heavy coat aside and used the meat cleaver to hack into a heavy cast iron pipe. The cleaver wasn’t meant for such a job, but the pipe was old and had twisted severely in the crash. He didn’t look up, didn’t want to see the monsters climbing towards him. “Come on, come on,” he shouted as he brought the metal tool down again and again on a single spot. It dented, flaked rust, showed a bare white metal crease, and slowly started to give.
One of the hungry zombies was almost to him when he finally cracked the pipe open. Gas jetted from the small hole in the pipe, the stink of it almost blocking the wretched smell of the dead crawling his way. He fished a silver lighter from his pocket, struck it and tossed it toward the hissing fissure. A ball of fire whooshed towards the zombies, sending the closest one tumbling from the beam to fall into the darkness below, the burning, flailing corpse trailing a tail of flame as it fell.
The former doorman didn’t wait to see if the gas would stop all the undead menaces. He threw his towel down on the smooth metal ramp and leapt on, gripping the pink unicorn towel tightly as he zipped down the side of the building. He closed his eyes for most of the trip, unwilling to watch the world blur past as he rode the ersatz playground slide to freedom. He splashed down, throwing up huge waves as he crashed into the pool. He quickly righted himself, dropping the soaked towel and treading water as he looked around for Angela.
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