by Bryan Smith
I wind up with the bat and give that first undead taint-licker a smack in the fucking face. You know the sound an aluminum bat makes when the sweet part of it connects with a fastball and drills that fucker deep into centerfield? Yeah, that’s what I hear when my first swing lands. There’s a crunch of bone as the dead fucker’s nose basically explodes. I get some more red stuff on me. By then I’m past being grossed out by it. Getting bloody is the price of staying alive.
The dead fuck topples backward and, swear to Christ this happened, he lands atop the shifting mass of zombies. They’ve all got their hands up, you know? They’re reaching for me because all these undead fucktards can think about is that next gooey bite of tasty human innards. But because their hands are up, they catch this zombie I’ve knocked down. So now, rather than letting him fall to the street, his zombie pals are passing him backward over their heads.
I’m watching a zombie fucking crowd surf.
Holy shit. Only thing I can figure is it’s some kind of sense-memory deal. Scanning the faces out there, I’m seeing a lot of middle-aged-looking ex-humans. They probably attended a lot of concerts in the fucking 90s. This shit is probably second nature to them.
Rock the fuck on.
Anyway, I’m kind of hypnotized by this weird fucking shit for a minute. By the time I snap out of it, a couple more undead cocksuckers are about to climb into the truck. I knock one of them down, back into the crowd of moaning dead things. Like the last one, he gets passed backward.
I can’t stop the next one from getting in the truck bed with me, but luckily, he staggers and falls flat on his face. Screaming now as the panic really starts setting in, I swing the bat hard as I can and start bashing in the fucker’s head. I hit him several times while in the grip of this fucking frenzy, keeping at it until the motherfucker’s head is a pile of unidentifiable pulp.
By the time I stop swinging the bat, there are two more zombies in the truck bed. The only thing keeping me alive at this point is the way they keep falling all over each other. As delirious as I am, I can see that won’t keep me safe for long. Pretty fucking soon they’re gonna overwhelm me and swarm my ass.
I take a look behind me and see the street now blocked in the other direction, too. I’m fucking flabbergasted. Where did so many of these undead things come from so quickly?
No idea. All I do know is I’m seconds away from being another drooling dead fuck. I’ve got to figure a way out of this mess, but that’s starting to seem impossible.
Meanwhile, here come more undead things falling into the truck bed. Climbing up on the cab of the truck, I do a quick scan of the area. The street is no longer an option. Instead, I’m gonna have to get into the nearest building and make my way over to another street or alley through a back door. There’s a good chance the next street will be just as zombie-clogged as this one, but there’s nothing else I can do.
Taking the bat with me, I jump down onto the hood of the truck, scramble my way over two more of the many vehicles involved in this pileup, and wind up facing a plate glass window. Through the glass, I see some mannequins in fashionable attire. It’s a dress shop. Some ladies are cowering behind a counter. They don’t look too inclined to open the door and let me in.
And fuck it, there’s no time for that anyway.
I start smashing the bat against the thick glass. The ladies scream. They’re looking at me like they think I’m fucking crazy or something. From their perspective, I guess I look it, but that ain’t my problem. One of them comes out from behind the counter and starts waving her hands at me. She’s screaming something I can’t hear from the other side of the glass. Not that I need to hear it to know what she’s trying to say.
Tough shit, lady, because here I come.
At least I hope so.
Because this is some tough motherfucking glass. Hitting it produces this weird echoing sound. It’s like ringing a gong underwater. The glass kind of shimmies in the fucking frame rather than cracking. It does this, I don’t know, the first six or seven motherfucking times I hit it. I’m screaming again because now the zombies are climbing up on the hood of this misshapen pile of metal and plastic that might once have been a Volvo. Their hungry moans are right in my ear.
But I keep swinging the bat, my bladder letting go and filling my pants with piss as my attempt to smash this motherfucking window is increasingly looking like a futile effort. Then, without warning, without even the smallest crack appearing first, the big window explodes inward, raining glass all over the pissed off shopkeeper.
Not wasting an extra millisecond of fucking time, I dive through the space formerly occupied by the window, landing on the floor and rolling to a stop at the shopkeeper’s feet. I’m bleeding from several new cuts where the glass fragments have nicked me.
The shopkeeper starts kicking me. Okay, so I’ve probably got that coming. I’ve kind of fucked her over here to save my own ass. I know that. But all’s fair in love and war and the zombie fucking apocalypse. I’m doing what I have to do to stay alive. To stay alive and save my hamster. And to maybe reunite with my witchy girlfriend. Or not.
“Get out of my shop, you filthy fucking bum!” the shopkeeper lady yells, kicking me again.
She’s issuing this directive even as zombies are spilling into the shop. There’s a bunch of crashing sounds as undead fuckers stumble through the hole I created and knock over the mannequins I somehow left upright. The bitch is so pissed at me she doesn’t realize how completely compromised her former refuge is.
Twisting my head around, I see the dead almost upon us. Several have fallen to the floor, but now they’re getting back up and lurching in our direction. The next time the shopkeeper tries to kick me, I grab her ankle and give it a hard yank. She shrieks and falls to the floor even as I’m scrambling to my feet. I reach out a hand to help her back up, but by then the zombies are there and she’s basically fucked.
Sorry, lady.
Some of the zombies grab her and start tearing into her. There are ripping sounds as garments and then flesh are torn apart. She keeps screaming and kicking her arms and legs as the blood flies and hands plunge into her guts.
I lurch away from the carnage. Once I get my footing, I start running for the back of the store, knocking over racks of dresses as I go. I hear rapid footsteps behind me. It’s the other lady who was cowering behind the counter with the shopkeeper. Maybe she works here or maybe she was a customer. Who the fuck knows? Either way, she’s coming with me, apparently.
She points to a door and yells, “There!”
There are two doors at opposite ends of the shop’s rear wall, but this lady wants me to go through the one on the left. She sounds pretty fucking adamant, so here’s hoping she’s an employee and is pointing me in the direction of the better escape route. Here’s also hoping she isn’t about to lock me in a fucking closet to avenge her fallen boss.
Through that door is a large storeroom. Lots of boxes and shelving. More dresses on racks. And more mannequins. I’ve always thought mannequins were kind of creepy, but never more so than now. I’m so frantic that at first glance I think these are deader things. I kind of shriek a little, I guess.
But then I realize my mistake. This other lady has her hand on my back and she’s urging me onward. I’ve got nowhere else to go, so what the fuck, let’s go this way.
We make our way through the storeroom and reach an exit door. It has one of those bars in the middle. You have to push it to open the door. I’m running full-out when I hit that bar and bounce backward.
I stare at the still-closed door and scowl. “What the fuck?”
The other lady—much calmer now—goes over to a keypad on the wall. She punches in a code and I hear a click.
We glance at each other.
“We don’t know what’s out there,” I say. “Could be another swarm of those fucking things.”
She shrugs. “Could be. But there’s only one way to find out. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like hiding
out here and delaying the inevitable forever.”
Gutsy lady. Kind of sexy, too.
She pushes the door open and steps out into an alley.
PART III
THAT TIME I PUNCHED
SATAN IN THE FUCKING FACE
LOOK, WE ALL KNOW HOW this kind of thing plays out in movies and books, the whole scrambling to stay the fuck alive while the zombie threat grows and grows. It’s a pretty familiar fucking narrative. And my real-life experience with it went almost exactly the way creators of zombie fiction would have you believe.
Up to a point.
My own story of zombie apocalypse survival wound up in a way fucking different place than anything you’ve seen on the silver screen or on that fucking AMC show everybody and their fucking mother watches on Sunday nights, including, yeah, your old buddy Phil and his own cunt-bag whore of a mother.
Point is, you’ve seen it all before a bazillion fucking times, so I ain’t gonna give you a blow-by-blow account of every little goddamn thing that happened. Instead I’ll kind of cut to the chase here and get to the part you’ll have a lot harder time believing.
But first here’s the short version of what happened after Colleen and I stepped out into that alley. That’s the other dress shop lady’s name, by the way.
Anyway.
Back to live action . . .
There are some dead fucks in the alley, but not as many as I feared based on the zombie throngs clogging Wexler Avenue. I see about a dozen of them, but they’re spread out. If we move fast enough, we can easily thread our way through them and make it out of the alley.
The closest zombie is less than six feet away as the dress shop’s back door swings shut behind us. It turns and lurches toward us. I’d knock it down with the bat, only I’ve lost the fucking thing in the confusion.
As I scan the trash-strewn alley in hopes of finding another weapon within easy reach, I hear the click of Colleen’s heels on the asphalt. The alley only has one open end. I’m alarmed when I see her headed in the opposite fucking direction, but then she drops to her knees next to a green Chevy Malibu parked next to an overflowing Dumpster.
She’s got a hand up inside the wheel well and is patting around for something. Being a certified goddamn genius, I guess right away she’s looking for one of those spare key magnet boxes. Seconds later, she’s on her feet again, magnet box in hand.
She fumbles with it. It falls to the ground. I dash over and scoop it up before she can retrieve it. I open it and take out the key, grinning as I say, “I’ll drive.”
She kicks me in the shin and snatches the key back. “Like fuck you will.”
“Ouch, goddammit,” I tell her. “A simple ‘no’ would have sufficed.”
Rolling her eyes at this, she gets the driver’s side door open and drops in behind the steering wheel. She jams the key in the ignition slot and fires up the engine. I hobble around to the other side and in I go, narrowly avoiding my nine millionth close encounter with the zombie kind just before I pull the door shut.
She executes a shockingly fast and economical three-point turn and gets the Malibu pointed toward the alley’s open end. After revving the engine a moment, she takes her foot off the brake and hits the gas. Tires squeal on pavement as the car jumps forward. She runs right over every zombie in our way, not bothering with anything remotely resembling evasive fucking maneuvers.
It’s pretty goddamn badass.
We take a left out of the alley down a side street and pretty soon we come out on Solis Street, another big thoroughfare. There’s a lot more zombies here than in the alley, but fortunately it’s not yet full of the fucking things the way Wexler was.
Not expecting her to go along with it, I tell Colleen where I need to go. She’ll have her own agenda, I figure, her own people she needs to get to, and so on and so fucking forth, so I’m pretty fucking shocked when she says she’ll do her best to get me there. After that, I’ll be on my own, she tells me, but I’m okay with that. Hell, I fully expect Sue’s place to be the end of the road for me in more ways than one, anyway.
So, we drive and fight our way across town, the chaos continuing to spread and engulf the city as we go. There’s a lot of swirling black smoke in the air from the multiple fires. I hear sirens everywhere and the sound of chopper blades whirring from somewhere not too far overhead. This is what doomsday sounds like.
Somehow, we do make it all the way across town. It requires stopping and turning around and going a whole new motherfucking way several times, but we do finally get to my destination. And the weird thing is how the smoke abruptly clears as we near the area around the apartment complex where Sue lives. In fact, the closer we get to it, the more obvious it is what a blissful little oasis of peace and calm the place is.
Fucked up shit is still going down everywhere else, but it’s like there’s this cone of protection shielding this one little group of buildings from it. Outside the cone of protection, it’s fucking Armageddon. Inside, everything looks normal, except for one thing—the near total absence of any visible human presence.
I say “near” because there’s this one guy slouched down in a lawn chair in the parking lot right outside Sue’s building. If he’s worried about the madness and violence gripping the city, he doesn’t show it. In fact, he looks pretty fucking relaxed when I first glimpse him, which happens as Colleen pulls the Malibu to a stop in the street outside the complex.
She looks at me. “This is as far as I can go.”
I nod. “No problem. I can walk from here.”
She shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean I literally can’t get any closer to this place. I’ve been feeling this pressure in my head. It’s gotten worse the closer we get. I can’t take it anymore. I feel like my head’s about to explode.”
I don’t feel anything like this. “And you’re sure it’s something to do with . . .”
I trail off and wave my hand at the apartment complex.
She nods. “I’m positive. I can feel it. And something else, like an itch under my skin, getting worse by the second. Now get the fuck out of my car so I can get out of here.”
I’m curious about this odd phenomenon, but she’s getting pretty agitated and I figure I better do as she says right the fuck now. She’s giving off a vibe like any second now she’s gonna drive the fuck out of here whether I’m out of the car or not.
I open the door and hop out.
She hits the gas and she’s gone without even a goodbye. My feelings are a little hurt, if I’m being totally honest. We shared some moments. Survived the chaos together. And just like that, she’s gone in a cloud of fucking dust, like none of it mattered.
Well, fuck it. I’m where I need to be, that’s all I really care about.
I walk into the complex and right away I’m struck by how eerily fucking quiet it is. Yeah, I still hear all the shit happening outside the theoretical cone of protection, but it’s dimmer now, muffled-sounding. For the first time, I give serious consideration to the idea there really is some kind of invisible force field around this place. Where it might come from and what kind of power might generate that kind of thing, I have no fucking clue, but what other answer to this fucking mystery is there?
The near total silence here would be pretty goddamn spooky even on a normal day. On doomsday it’s almost unbearably oppressive. Any other time you’d hear voices, kids yelling on the playground, music, or see the glow of TV screens through windows. But there’s nothing at all happening in the complex. All the windows are dark. If not for all the cars parked in front of the buildings, I’d think the place was deserted. Yeah, maybe everybody’s hunkered down and locked in tight until order is restored, but it feels like there’s more to this than that.
And there’s this guy in the lawn chair outside Sue’s building. The closer I get to him, the more puzzled I am. I’ve spent a lot of time here during my years with Sue and I’ve never seen this motherfucker before, I’m sure of it.
He’s sitting
slouched down in the lawn chair. A white panama hat with a wide black band rests atop the fucker’s head, the brim tilted down over a grizzled face. He’s wearing cutoff denim shorts and a red and white Hawaiian shirt open over a deeply tanned potbelly. On the sidewalk next to him are some six-packs of Schlitz in plastic ring holders. He looks to be about four deep into one of the six-packs. The empties are scattered about him on the sidewalk.
He’s puffing away on a cigarillo as I step up to him and say, “Hey, cocksucker. Who the fuck are you?”
He pushes up the brim of his hat and looks at me through mirrored shades. Mirrored fucking shades. Like he’s a cop in some 70s movie. That fact alone makes me want to punch the fucker in the face.
He smiles and says, “I am Satan.”
I laugh.
He laughs, too. “I’m not joking. You want a beer, Phil?”
This weird motherfucker I’ve never met before knows my name. I mean, yeah, technically it’s possible I met the guy while in a blackout or something. I do have those somewhat more frequently than the average Joe. Still, my gut tells me I’m definitely meeting “Satan” or whatever his real fucking name is for the first time. That grizzled face isn’t ringing any bells in my booze-drenched subconscious. So, it’s kind of disconcerting.
But fuck it, I’m thirsty. I’ve killed I don’t know how many fucking zombies. I deserve a goddamn beer.
Right?
Fucking right I do. And shut your cock-hole if you say otherwise.
I shrug. “Fuck it. Sure, I’ll have a beer.”
“Help yourself, then.”
I grab the plastic holder with the remaining two beers from the guy’s first six-pack still attached. The hiss I hear when I pop the tab on the first is music to my ears. I chug it down fast, crush the empty in my hand, and toss it on the sidewalk. I open the second can and take a few big swallows.