Paths

by David DeSimone

  “Goddammit!” He continued wiggling side-to-side, up and down. He was a fish caught in the grip of a merciless fisherman squirming to break free, but his efforts afforded him another couple of inches, sliding slowly but steadily downward.

  From below azalea bushes were ready to catch him.

  Bursting into the bathroom, arms outstretched, the zombies went straight for him, several hungry fingers already touching his shoelaces when his feet finally slipped through the window.

  He landed in the azaleas headfirst, his arms folded across his face for protection as tiny branches and twigs tore at the leather of his jacket, jabbed and cut into exposed skin around the top of his head, neck and hands.

  He rolled out of the bushes and struck the topsoil with a grunt barely audible under the shouts and cries coming out of the casement window above his head, their hands reaching out.

  Drew found himself lying flat on his belly between the wall of the food mart and the azaleas.

  He crawled to an opening in the bushes, surveyed the terrain. Across the street was a man staggering like a drunkard on an all-night binge. The man stopped abruptly in front of a fast food restaurant, looking down at his feet as though he lost his keys. Despite his clean-cut appearance, his pale face, blank expression and arms dangling limply at their sides clearly indicated that he had turned.

  A woman in a blue maxi dress came up from behind the man and stopped. The two stood stupidly next to one another for a few seconds, and then the woman turned away from the man and walked off in another direction. Like the clean-cut man, she too bore a dull look on her face as she shuffled away.

  From the far right of the woman a young man was crouching in the middle of an intersection wearing a pink button-down shirt that surprisingly showed little wear since its recent dry cleaning, scratching his head as though plagued by fleas.

  After several seconds of ripping at his shirt, the young man tore through the cotton layers and began tearing at the skin underneath.

  Drew looked away.

  Two metallic pops gave Drew a start. Turning his head upward he saw, with growing alarm, the support brackets holding the window in place had snapped. The window hung loosely forward. The compromised hinges groaned in protest.

  His worst-case scenario was happening: the zombies were climbing over each other and forcing their way through the opening. Their mindless rush to get out created a human blockage, buying Drew a few more minutes.

  There was an apelike grunt.

  Drew turned, saw the young male zombie across the street rising to his feet, his torn pink shirt now soaked in blood.

  The woman in the blue maxi dress and the man standing by the fast food restaurant froze and took notice, followed by another, and another, until every zombie across the street gazed at the food mart.

  The young male zombie cocked his head to one side, then another, like a puzzled dog. As his damaged brain made rudimentary connections, his expression shifted from confused to knowing and began huffing like a bull about to charge.

  The woman in the blue maxi bared her teeth. Others began to twist their faces into hideous snarls, poised to attack.

  Drew peered down a long narrow clearing made by the wall and the azaleas. At the end of the clearing to the left was the corner of the store’s west wall, which led to the front of the gas station and the pump islands. It was also where, on the opposite end, the east side of the gas station, he parked the Acura in which his wife was trapped, screaming for help.

  Drew rose shakily to his hands and feet, doing a half-ass job at assuming a runner’s starting position.

  The young male zombie, Mr. Pink Shirt, broke into a run.

  Other zombies quickly followed suit.

  Just as Ms. Blue Maxi broke into her own sprint, the casement window over Drew’s head finally gave way. It hit the packed dirt with an explosive crash.

  By the time the window struck the dirt with glass flying in every direction, Drew was already gone.

  Mr. Pink Shirt and another male zombie converged at the window’s crash site and collided. The azaleas collapsed under their combined weight. The two male zombies fought wildly to untangle themselves from each other and the ensnaring branches.

  A third male zombie, who looked as young as the first two zombies but slighter in build, vaulted headlong over the bushes. He looked like a skydiver riding the air before pulling the ripcord. There was a wet crunch as he struck the wall on the other side, his head snapping as far back as the shoulder blades. He crashed down on the shattered window causing more bits of glass to fly. On the wall a red, gooey patch of blood and brains marked the point of impact.

  The diminutive zombie did not get up.

  While the third zombie leapt headlong into eternity, Drew, crab-running on his hands and feet, stopped abruptly midway through, made a sudden right, and dove into the hedgerow, wedging himself deep into the bottom of the thickets. From every direction spiny branches and twigs jabbed at him, some digging into already inflamed skin. Ignoring the pain, he folded himself into a tight ball, tucking his head under his hands. He closed his eyes and prayed for the first time in twenty years. His plea to the Almighty was simple and direct: Please God, don’t let them see me!

  They struck the hedgerow like scattered cannon fire, human projectiles slamming randomly into the wall of azaleas, each impact accentuated by a violent thrash of leaves and branches snapping.

  Lying in the womb of the azaleas, among the thickest most robust parts of the bush, Drew stayed protected. The branches, which were more like small tree trunks, kept the hurtling zombies from reaching him.

  They kept coming, several at a time and from every direction.

  Zombies that made it through the azalea barrier converged below the window, tripping and climbing over one another to get face-to-face with the zombies on the other side clambering to get out. Fights broke out. There was hair pulling, clothes ripping, and a lot of biting.

  The squirming human pile around the window got bigger, becoming dangerously close to Drew’s hiding spot.

  And the zombies kept on coming.

  They seemed to come from out of the woodwork, between the gangways, the alleys, from the tree-lined streets and behind the rows and rows of pleasant colonials and cozy capes, like moths drawn to a lamp.

  The protective shroud surrounding Drew was becoming undone. Soon he would be exposed. If not found by sight, then he would be discovered by more direct means, physical impact. Inevitably, a zombie was going to ram him.

  Ms. Blue Maxi took the roundabout way around the bushes, deciding the tops of the bushes were beyond her ability to surmount. It was a close call for Drew, for just as she rounded the corner and started down the corridor, Drew had stuck his head out. When he saw her approaching he ducked his head back in. A moment later, Ms. Blue Maxi passed by. She never noticed him.

  A boy, who looked to be about twelve, got entangled within an arm’s length of Drew. He flailed violently. More branches gave way. Drew felt open air blowing across his right hip. And then he felt something brush across the top of his head. It was the boy’s fingers. He had gotten so close that he actually touched Drew. His hideout was failing rapidly.

  Still flailing and kicking, the boy fell out of the bush, landed on his back. He sprung to his feet, broke into a run, and joined the crowd.

  Dear God!

  His break finally arrived, and Drew responded instantly, reflexively, as though his body got the message before his brain did.

  Before today, he had been a man of thought more than a man of action. It wasn’t that he was such a deep philosophical thinker; he just didn’t like easy answers. He distrusted them more than politicians. Easy answers were shifty, deceiving.

  When confronted with a problem, whether building formulae into a program subroutine or racking his brain over an email message, getting it right was paramount to keeping order in the world. Drew’s approach was far from foolproof but he loathed spontaneity. Helen Fairwood, his mother, always said tha
t he thought too much. A nervous boy, he couldn’t let things roll off his shoulders.

  But in this new and deadly world it was time to stop overthinking and take action.

  And so he jumped out of the bushes and made a break for the end of the clearing.

  From behind, the crowd’s noise dropped noticeably.

  Drew felt their eyes fall upon him as he fought through the hedgerow that tried to slow him down.

  Noise returned at full volume directed at him.

  Cold sweat formed across his brow.

  Sounds of shuffling, rustling of branches and bodies hitting the ground were all around.

  He didn’t dare look back and he didn’t have to. Zombies were chasing him.

  Along with the pack on his heels, there were also zombies dead ahead.

  Reaching the end of the clearing he turned left at the corner and ran toward the front of the lot.

  Ahead he saw the F-150. The gray pickup sat about sixty or seventy feet away. To Drew it felt more like sixty or seventy miles away. He stopped when he came to a nine foot high, chain-link fence, which separated the front and rear lots, and stretched all the way to the neighboring building, an auto parts store.

  He jumped on the fence locking his fingers tightly around the links, the metal digging painfully into his skin.

  He struggled to climb link by link, almost losing his footing a few times, his arms trembling. Nearing the top of the fence, out of breath and desperate to regain control of his shaking limbs, he paused. Christ, he was out of shape.

  But the zombies caught up, their hands grabbing at his heels.

  With a burst of reserve strength, he pulled himself over the fence and leapt to the other side, landing clumsily on both feet.

  Zombies crashed into the fence shaking it violently, causing the support posts to creak and the chain-link mesh to bow under the weight.

  Soon zombies began spilling over the top of the fence.

  Drew sprinted past the dark sedan where inside the large middle-aged black woman and her husband, now both bearing a sickly ashen pallor, were pounding on the window at him.

  To his left, about thirty feet away, the mob surrounding the Acura had his wife trapped inside.

  He reached the first pump island when the fence finally collapsed with an ear-splitting crash. Several zombies stopped and took notice. They broke from the Acura to join the chase.

  As he reached the Ford pickup Drew whipped out the dead trucker’s keys, grabbed the door handle, pulled it open.

  The zombies closed in.

  5

  EVA

  Eva screamed, but her scream was outdone by the screams of everyone outside. She cupped both palms firmly over her eyes. The light was excruciating, not so much in terms of pain but in pressure. Even though her eyes were covered, it still felt as though the light was crushing them. She folded herself into a tight ball inside the footwell.

  Around her the screams of the suffering began to fall away, to be replaced by moaning cries. Unseen in the blinding light, they sounded like the anguished cries of disembodied spirits in search of salvation. Cars screeched, collisions rang out and distant explosions shook the ground with small but terrible tremors.

  Eva tore open her purse, fumbled for the sunglasses she knew were in there, found them, put them on. She had to see what was going on. She would later wish she had never done that.

  To block the light from bleeding around the frames, she cupped her hands over the sides of the sunglasses. Eva rose slowly from the floor. As she did, she gazed disbelievingly across the span of the lot. What she saw made her heart leap into her throat.

  Everywhere stood skeletons.

  The light had turned everyone transparent, so that their skeletons were visible, as if they were standing inside an earth-size x-ray machine. There were skeletons with bony hands raised to cover empty eye sockets, skeletons hugging their skeleton children, skeletons wavering on their feet, their bony jaws snapping open and closed, skeletons running for shelter, and skeletons bumping into parked cars or running about on the streets and sidewalks.

  She refused the temptation to look at her own body, fearing that she’d see nothing more than living bone. She was nearly at the breaking point as it was. This would have caused her mind to snap.

  All at once the skeletons collapsed.

  One moment the landscape was a pandemonium of screaming, panicky skeletons, the next it was a flickering, milky white wasteland strewn with piles of human bones.

  She produced a groan of such deep revulsion that hearing it come out of her mouth surprised her, and seemed to confirm the horror of what was happening. Squeezing her eyes shut, she threw off the sunglasses, and fell to the floor.

  All went silent.

  If Eva had to describe the surreal quality of the moment, she would only come up with this: that it produced a sensation that all of reality was disappearing, swallowed up by the whiteness.

  We’ve got it all wrong, she thought with almost cold indifference. Oblivion isn’t a black void. We don’t fade into darkness. We fade into light.

  Despite the quiet, Eva cupped the palms of her hands over her ears and waited for the light to take her.

  6

  The light didn’t take her. She was still alive, hunkered down on the car floor when the light began to weaken. It did so incrementally, with each pulsing cycle getting smaller and smaller, the intensity growing weaker as it seemed to recede into the, what, portal; rip in space/time; black mass in the sky? Whatever it was began to shrink away with the dwindling light, until it all had vanished.

  In its wake was a burnt sky of an unearthly greenish tint.

  In the quiet, Eva listened for nearby voices or human activity. What she heard instead were the distant scattered sounds of recent destruction: the pop of a car explosion, walls collapsing, the crackling of flames.

  She pushed herself out from under the dashboard, looked around, her mind filled with terror and wonder.

  Bodies lay scattered across the pavement, but without the harsh white light they no longer looked like skeletons but like normal people again with flesh and blood and clothing.

  The explosion was over, yet instead of relief that the world was intact (no buildings were flattened, trees remained standing tall, the sun shone in a now cloudless sky), she still felt she was in danger.

  Green haze still loomed in the sky.

  Smoke billowed from crash sites that littered the streets.

  Cars jutted from holes in storefronts.

  Street lamps stood crookedly after being struck by out-of-control cars and trucks.

  The longer she stared at the destruction the more it looked like a war zone.

  She was overcome with an uneasy feeling of being watched.

  The last time she felt this way was when she used the tire iron to get her cellphone to work and had seen the small blonde boy staring at her from the silver car across the lot. It was amusing then, if not a little embarrassing.

  She felt no amusement now, only dread as she whirled around.

  Through the partially fogged window stood the little blonde boy. Behind him, the silver car’s back door was half open.

  Must have crawled out during the explosion.

  In the front seat the mother was slumped over the wheel, and although the teen and the other girl were not in view, Eva assumed that they too were still in the car, since the doors on their side were unopened.

  Back to the boy, there was something very odd about him.

  Normally, Eva would have immediately gone over to help the boy but, paleness aside, he appeared unharmed.

  He stood perfectly straight, his arms flat at his sides like a nutcracker soldier. He cast a sickly pallor, his skin a chalky white.

  Seeing him standing motionless with a blank expression, going from a lively boy to a breathing statue, the transformation was shocking. She felt a chill run down her spine. The kid was wrong, all wrong.

  Then the people lying on the ground began to stir
, writhing slowly as if waking from a deep and troubling sleep. Their faces were as pale and sickly as the boy’s. Eva hesitated. Like the boy, they too had changed somehow. She expected someone, anyone to show signs of alarm, fear, a call for help, or looks of confusion and worry.

  None of that happened.

  The closest they came to showing any sign of discomfort were a few grunts and groans here and there.

  They began to rise, and the grunting and groaning sounds coming from them increased, but they still showed no indication of alarm. The blank expressions on their terribly pale faces only fueled Eva’s mounting fear. They were like corpses rising from their graves.

  “Oh, my God,” she said pulling away from the window. “Oh, Jesus…”

  Once on their feet, the dazed looking people began milling about, looking around as though lost. Some, like the boy, stood like statues.

  A man turned and spotted Eva.

  This caused others to look in her direction.

  The boy broke into a sprint and ran straight for Eva, slamming into the door. The car rocked with surprising force.

  Eva uttered a cry of shock and terror.

  Two little hands shot up from the lower edge of the window frame and began slapping at the window.

  Swiping the tire iron from the floor, she held it in front of herself for protection against the crazed imp.

  Something struck the car from the other side. She turned around and saw the blonde lanky man with the mirrored aviator sunglasses, a blood-soaked eye glaring at her through the crack of the left lens. Mr. Aviator Sunglasses threw his head against the driver side window, drew back, and slammed it against the window again. He continued bashing his head against the glass, which caused the right lens of his sunglasses to shatter into pieces. What was left was a crooked wire frame. Shards from the shattered lens protruded out of the flesh around his eyes. Blood streamed down his cheeks like red tears. Mr. Aviator Sunglasses growled and slapped at the window, snapping his jaw at her while head-butting the glass.