by Nick Cole
“Nothin’ to it, cowboy!” the gun store owner had said.
Nothing to it.
Dr. Liu squeezed the trigger.
A sudden Baaaang he hadn’t quite expected erupted inside the small pharmacy.
Then his chest was hit by a runaway buffalo plowing into him at full speed. He dropped the gun, bending down and to the left. He had just enough time to put two and two together. He’d fired and hit the metal mesh and the bullet had ricocheted back into his chest.
He knew his lung had probably collapsed. He looked down at blood soaking into his blue button down dress shirt. He was having trouble breathing. Everything wheeled about him and he felt himself stumbling. He reached out for a wall to steady himself and everything exploded in sirens and red emergency lighting the moment after his flailing hand caught hold of the fire alarm, dragging it down. Activating it.
I’ve made things much worse, was his only thought.
Every security door in the store began to slowly open. The fire doors would be swinging wide now so no one would be trapped inside, as DrugCo didn’t want relatives suing for tons of money in the name of pain, suffering, and compensatory loss in case of fire. The steel roll down doors at the front of the store could be heard slowly winding themselves up into the ceiling now. They rose on a tinny, whining screech somewhere beyond the sirens and the flashing red lights.
An automated woman’s voice began to ask everyone to “please leave the store, safely”.
Heather was sitting up, wide-eyed and stoned to the gills on a sleeping pill. Batman had his hands over his ears. The mesh gate to the pharmacy was already halfway up when Dr. Liu looked back at dead Tony.
“Infected subjects are attracted to sound and light.” Another bulletin flashed across Dr. Liu’s mind as doomsday wailed on all around him.
The pharmacy gate up, dead manager Tony reached out over the counter and tried to grab anyone he could get his blue beefy fingers into as he drooled and moan-roared.
Dr. Liu bent over. Darkness closed in about his vision, iris-ing down into a tiny hole for just a moment. That’s probably bad, he thought distantly.
He picked the pistol up from off the floor.
The darkness was almost complete.
He stood up straight and the darkness retreated to the corners of his eyes for a moment.
For now.
Dead Tony fell over the counter at Dr. Liu’s feet, thrashing in slow motion. Then he lifted his head, opening his jaws and sank his teeth into Dr. Liu’s shin.
Dr. Liu didn’t even scream.
Instead he aimed the pistol once more and blew Tony’s brains all over the floor in front of the pharmacy cash register.
I should have practiced, thought Dr. Liu distantly.
Now he couldn’t breathe. Or at least that’s what it felt like.
He turned to Batman.
“Young man!” He gasped above the wail of fire alarms bleating. “Come with me.”
He turned to Heather. Her eyes were wide and vacant as if she couldn’t put everything together just yet.
“Get up please and follow me.”
They both did. He took them to the back of the pharmacy, and then through to the warehouse section of the store and pointed toward the open fire door that led back out into the unused parking lot behind the store.
Heather stared at him. Uncomprehending.
“Go. Now!”
Dr. Liu could hear the groans of the undead back in the store. They were inside, making their way up through the aisles of cosmetics and scented lotions.
“Go! Get out of here.”
Heather ran for the emergency door, grabbing Cory’s hand. Dr. Liu waited until they were out, then put the gun in his bloody, trembling hand up to his head.
Chapter Thirteen
Heather pulled Cory out into the predawn darkness. The smell of smoke and fire hung heavy in the air. The groaning dead seemed distant and yet too real.
“C’mon,” said Heather breathing hard, running for the tree-covered hill at the back of the parking lot to the rear of the mega pharmacy. She scrambled up through dirt and leaves and into the dense foliage, letting go of Cory’s hand as she crawled up the hill. Sensing a game, Cory who was used to following, followed the frantic teenage girl. Halfway up the hill they tumbled into a rough concrete drainage ditch. They sat, each of them panting. Heather’s breathing slowed in time and so did Cory’s. Her eyes were wide in the just before dawn dark. She fumbled inside her designer hippy-ish backpack for a cigarette and a lighter. Trembling hands barely got the cigarette lit as she followed this with a deep exhale and a world weary sigh. She inhaled deeply again on the next drag, her lips hanging open afterward. Her head turned slightly, first to one side then the other, as if she were in the act of forever telling some unseen someone, “no”.
“That’s a no no,” whispered Cory too loudly.
She looked over at him, saw who she was with and what he was wearing, a Batman cape and mask, a man forever a child, and told him to, “Shut up.”
Cory turned away, studying some ants that crawled near one of his gloved hands. He let them. Cory liked ants.
They sat for a while, Heather smoking, in the darkness. Listening to distant screams and groans that seemed impossible to hear until they realized it wasn’t a single groan they were hearing. It was a chorus. A choir. A distant pack of dogs gone feral, surrounding someone. Raving as they closed in. Down through the trees they could see the back of the pharmacy. The groans there were gone, missing, sated.
“I’ve got to go home now,” whispered Heather, still fighting off the effects of the sleeping pill Dr. Liu had given her. Her mind returned to those suddenly awakened moments back inside the store. Dr. Liu was hurt. But there’d been a loud Bang just before. That was what had awoken her. The loud Bang. And then Dr. Liu was telling them to come with him and then go. Leave.
She’d seen them. The undead. She’d seen them cresting up through the aisles like a tsunami she’d once been shown a video of in school. That’s what she’d thought at that exact moment just before they raced out the back. That the undead were like a Tsunami.
Cory was rocking back and forth slightly, occasionally sighing out heavily behind his latex rubber mask.
“Shhh,” she hushed. “We need to be quiet now.” Then, “We need to find help.”
“I’ve got to take this medicine to Mrs. Sheinman.”
She thought about telling him to go. She couldn’t take care of him. She didn’t want to take care of him. He was a liability.
But the thought of being all alone right now frightened her.
Dawn started to rise in the east. It was thin and milky. There were no birds. No songs. No sounds. Even the distant screaming and the pervasive groaning seemed to have stopped for a moment.
She stood up. “C’mon, lets go.” Cory stood also. She brushed the leaves from her jeans. Cory didn’t.
“We have to be real quiet and we can’t let those things see us, okay?”
“Strangers,” whispered Cory. “Stranger Danger.”
“Yeah... stranger danger, whatever. We gotta be real quiet. You make any noise and I’ll leave you, kid. Okay? Just like that.”
Cory nodded.
Heather started up the hill, threading the cypress, olive, and eucalyptus trees that grew along its steep flank. Planted when the developer had wanted to attract buyers to the Neo-Mediterranean-esque housing at the top of the hill, visible from the freeway.
“I know a back way to my house. If we’re quiet, we can make it,” she said over her shoulder while they wove through the dense foliage. Her neck muscles felt tight as they climbed the hill, sweating even though it was just dawn.
At the top of the hill they came to a dirty white stucco wall. Heather climbed on top of the wall and looked down into Kylie Scagliotti’s backyard. She used to pla
y with Kylie when they were little. But High School had changed everything. Kylie was a “loadie” now. They didn’t run with the same crowd. But Heather liked Lane Hardy, the leader of the “loadies”. He hung out a lot with Kylie and the others.
She almost threw up when she looked down into the backyard from the top of the wall. But she held it down. She controlled herself because she knew her life depended on not throwing up and attracting attention. Instead, she lowered herself back down the wall to where Cory stood, watching something.
She couldn’t have seen what she saw, she told herself.
But she did. She knew she did, her mind replied.
The back sliding glass door was shattered into a million crystalline pieces. It looked like a pile of snow. There was a body there too. Or what was left of a body, lying within the pile. But that wasn’t the worst of what she’d seen in that brief half-second atop the wall. She’d seen Kylie’s dad sitting next to the body. He looked gray. His mouth was covered in blood. There was blood everywhere. He was just sitting there staring off into nothing, chewing as he dug through the pile of shattered glass, clawing at the body with his own bloody hands.
Sitting on the ground beneath the dirty white stucco wall, Heather remembered Kylie’s dad picking her and Kylie up from soccer practice and stopping at Baskin Robbins for an ice cream.
Heather began to shake then. She got up and started walking along the back of the stucco wall, each crushed leaf echoing inside her head like a thunderclap or a car wreck, repeating, “What am I going to do?”
She stopped, leaning against the wall again.
Cory stopped too. He leaned against the wall also.
She wanted to scream at him. She wanted to shout at him to “Stop following me!” But she didn’t want to be alone. She remembered the treehouse they’d built as kids, her and Kylie and all the other neighborhood children, all her friends, back when treehouses were built every weekend out in the professional landscaping everyone called “the Woods”.
She remembered Kylie...
“Follow me,” she whispered, and they continued on farther down the wall and when she thought she had the right area within the trees, she found the “Treehouse” still standing in a large cypress. She hadn’t been here since she was a kid, she thought to herself. A long time ago. Maybe three years was the last time. The “Treehouse” was just a large plywood flat nailed between two sturdy branches. She remembered a boy, Tommy, who had always been the leader of such constructions, doing the planning and most of the work. He was older than them all and she wondered whatever had become of him and all the children she used to play with when she was young.
She thought of Kylie’s dad again. Saw the image of him in her head by the body and the broken glass.
“That’s what happened to them,” she answered herself.
She climbed up onto the treehouse and sat, brushing away dry, dead leaves. Cory followed, the wood groaning at his considerable weight as he crawled up and onto the thin board.
If he falls or busts through it, she thought, and didn’t finish the part where she knew she’d just leave him even if he was injured and bleeding.
She smoked another cigarette and heard Cory whisper a soft, “No, no.”
“Yeah,” she mumbled. “These things are the least of my worries right now, Batman.”
She knew what things she needed to worry about now. Or at least she was pretty sure she knew. There was no surviving. Not if this was going on everywhere. She hadn’t even heard any cops or fire trucks coming to help anyone. Nothing. No one was moving. Now she remembered she’d even recently thought things had seemed weird and too quiet for the last few days. But she’d been too busy with back-to-school and work. Her first part-time job for clothing money. Thinking back on the last few days, things had seemed odd. Very odd. And quiet. Too quiet.
“I think those things could kill us,” she whispered. Beyond the trees, out on the freeway, a distant herd of “those things” slowly swarmed up through the frozen cars. All of them gray. All of them bloody. All of them silent at this distance.
Chapter Fourteen
Toward noon the smoke began to thicken. It drifted across the freeway in tides of ash and gray. There was another smell in the air beyond the heavy, almost pleasant smoke. A sickly smell of burning flesh. But where the fire was wasn’t immediately evident to Heather and she began to be afraid of it. As though at any moment she could be trapped by its sudden roaring appearance.
She climbed down from the treehouse without saying a word and Cory followed after her. She approached the dirty stucco wall at the top of the hill again, this time behind a different house, one that she didn’t know who exactly lived at, and pulled herself up on top of the dirty white wall, peering over. She found a quiet backyard, no pool. She climbed on top of the wall and waited. She couldn’t see anyone inside the house at the far end of the lawn. Her parents’ house, her house, she thought, was just three streets beyond this house.
“C’mon,” she whispered down to Cory and dropped onto the spongy lawn on the other side of the wall. It was still wet from the automatic sprinklers that had gone on at some point in the morning. Cautiously, she approached the back of the house.
Behind her, she heard a muffled “Bhuuuwwuush!” from the other side of the wall. Then she saw Cory’s gloved hands and heard him grunting as he climbed to the top of the wall, gracelessly, and then impacted more than landed on the wet lawn. He got up, crouched down and looked around.
Just like Batman. Sort of.
They approached the house, Heather peering as best she could into its shadowy interior.
Would those things come spilling out as they got near the big sliding glass door that opened onto the patio, wondered Heather. Would they?
There was no one inside.
Where would she run to if there was?
Heather pulled on the sliding glass door. It didn’t budge. She tried the other windows and finally found one over the kitchen sink that slid open. She dropped her backpack and climbed through. Inside, the house smelled of dust and old flowers and new carpet. The interior was beautifully put together, but in Heather’s opinion, out of touch. Like it had been decorated in the 1970’s and no one had lived in it or changed a thing since.
There was a massive crystal chandelier, creamy white leather couches, and swirling patterned chairs of green and white. The wallpaper was a two-tone paisley of green and white, and there were gilt-framed oil paintings of willowy women in gardens lit as if by morning sunlight.
A trolley cart of crystal cut glass and liquor stood against one wall. There was even a hairy white rug that dominated the center of the living room. Heather moved through the kitchen to the family room, noticing an old wood grain cabinet TV and stereo set before two rocker recliners that seemed out of place and at odds with the rest of the decor.
She opened the back door and let Cory in. They stood there surveying the out-of-date house.
“I don’t think anyone’s home,” whispered Heather. She went to the fridge and opened it. After digging through its drawers for a moment, she found some lunch meat and started eating.
“Want some?” She held out a plastic bag. Cory shook his head. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s go look out the front windows and see what it looks like. My house isn’t far away.”
Out on the street there were more of those things. Dead people. Only a few though. Standing near the shattered windows and missing doors of other homes within the planned community tract. Beautifully manicured lawns and two story houses seemed odd counterpoints to the dazed grumble-moaning things that seemed interested in nothing at all as the morning sun beat down on the quiet, almost languid neighborhood.
“Maybe we can go out when it gets dark,” Heather whispered to herself.
“I need to take the bag back to Mrs. Sheinman,” said Cory.
“We can’t go out there... t
hey’ll... they’ll kill us. Don’t you get that you big... stupid idiot?” She let the venetian blinds fall back into place and left the ornate living room, grabbing a handful of mints from a decorative glass serving dish that she knocked over as she careened back into the other room.
Cory watched the dish and its contents as they lay spilled out on the creamy carpet.
“I’m Batman,” he whispered.
Chapter Fifteen
The afternoon rode across the sky inside the west-facing windows, turning everything in the house still and warm and heavy. It was an old house, by Southern California standards, built and decorated circa 1975. It settled with occasional ticks and groans just like the living dead that wandered the yards and streets just beyond its walls.
“It looks like they went to Africa on vacation,” said Heather after finding a contact list and a note in the kitchen for someone named Angela. “Must suck to be them right about now,” she finished. “Whoever they are.”
Later she returned to the living room and sat sideways on a low backed couch as she peered through gauzy curtains at the slow parade outside. Cory sat on the bright green carpet, cross legged, rocking back and forth, humming to himself.
“There’s the old guy from the house with the roses near the front entrance.” She gave a low silent whistle. Then she murmured, “He looks rough.”
Later.
“Mrs. Harms is missing an arm.”
And...
“Kevin Watts. What a jerk. Serves him right. Let him stand there in the middle of the street all day with his mouth hanging open like an idiot.”
Other commentaries on friends and neighbors were noted throughout the rest of the day. Heather’s tone lost its innate stunned monotone and eventually shifted into bitter sarcasm. Everyone she’d ever known was...
And then she saw her Dad.
He came out of the Callahan’s house. He just stumbled out an open door that had seemed like a blank space in the house. Or a wound. He stumbled out of the darkness that had been there, inside the Callahan’s all day long. He stood in full daylight on a neat rectangle of lawn like some just-awakened drunk, near a forgotten basketball that must have lain where it was forgotten since it all began. He stood there as his daughter watched him from behind gauzy curtains. His gray face, his hands covered in black gore, his business shirt untucked and rust stained. His neck ravaged. Missing mostly. He just stood there even when Heather let the curtains fall back into place and hide him, as they should have. Like she was hiding from him. Like she’d done this before. Watched him, not wanting to be seen by him. The resumption of a game that had started long ago when she was just a girl of three, and had lost all meaning in the long collection of days since maturity. The rules had been changed when no one was looking. Maybe she didn’t really want to be seen by him anymore in the way he’d always seen her as a little girl. But, maybe it was still some sort of game. Even now. Only on a professional level. No longer Daddy and Little Daughter. Now it was Parent and Teenage Woman. Hide and seek.