She saw the thing just in time. There were others, of course, but this one had a bead on Sarah and bore down on her at its greatest speed. Nimbly, she stepped aside at the last moment and she even had the presence of mind to leave an outstretched leg in the zombie’s path. It fell hard, but wasted no time getting up in spite of the fact that its nose was now turned sideways on its face.
Sarah barely noticed. She ran for the nearest building which turned out to be a junk shop of sorts. Though the sign above the door read “Consignments” it looked like someone had walled in a garage sale. It hardly mattered what the building was for. Sarah used it to get away from the zombies that were bull rushing her. Through the front door she went and after zig-zagging through the not so carefully stacked merchandise, she was out the back, slamming the door behind her.
She found herself in a wide alley that looked like it hadn’t known there’d even been an apocalypse. It seemed like any alley she had ever stepped foot in: trash in the corners, weeds sprouting in the seams of the cement, a little graffiti, a bum…
It was a real bum. Not a zombie in rags, but a man, dirty and smelling of urine. His hair was eight months long, matted in parts, and stuck up in an electrified manner in others. His beard was a demonstration of his insanity: under his chin on the right side it was burned away while on the left it was a tangled jungle, home to a bottle cap, assorted fluff, and a paperclip.
“Go away, fucker,” the bum seethed. “This is mine. All of this.” He waved his arms expansively at the dirty alley. “Go away or you’ll get the pipe.”
At first she thought “the pipe” was a sexual reference, but then the bum picked up a length of pipe the size of a baseball bat. He brandished it over his head, but only waited. Sarah wasn’t going to wait. With a great deal of fumbling, she wrestled the rifle from her back and aimed it at the bum.
“What the fuck” he asked in a tone of awe. “Are you guys starting to remember? Are you seeing again? Can you see me? I’m Artie, remember? Me and Beth always did those block parties? I bowled on Wednesdays at the King’s Pin? Remember that? And on Thursdays we’d stay home because Beth always liked her shows. But on Fridays we’d go out to the Megaplex. Do you remember the Megaplex?”
“I don’t know the Megaplex,” Sarah answered when it became clear that Artie was looking for a real answer. “I’m Sarah Rivers. I need gas. Do you have any? Or do you have a car I can borrow?”
“Sarah Rivers? Did you just call yourself Sarah Rivers?”
“Yes. Have you heard of me?” She was worried he had. It would mean the bounty hunter had been through there asking questions, and, judging by the man’s loose mental state, it must have been recently.
“Have I heard of you?” the bum asked theatrically. “Have I heard of Sarah Rivers? No. And do you want to know why? Because there isn’t anybody named Sarah Rivers in Easton. I’d know if there was and there isn’t, so that makes you an imposter. A zombie imposter who talks! What will they think of next?”
“But I’m not a zombie,” Sarah said. With the rains from the night before there were plenty of puddles. She knelt over one and splashed the soot from her face. “You see? I’m a person.”
The bum only laughed at her as though he thought she was still trying to trick him. “Oh no, that won’t help at all. There isn’t a person named Sarah Rivers in Easton. I was on the yearbook committee! You see? I would know. I would know if you existed and you don’t. You’re not a person and you’re not a zombie. You’re nothing. That’s what you are. So go away, nothing. Go away or you’ll get the pipe.”
“Sure thing, psycho,” Sarah said, backing away, keeping the rifle trained on the bum. When she hit the edge of the alley she asked, “What about gas? Do you know where any is?”
“Nothings don’t get gas,” the bum said.
“It’s for the mayor,” Sarah countered. “He asked me to look around for some.”
This caused the bum to begin a mad cackling. In response, Sarah stepped even further away. “Why lie, Sarah Nothings?” the man demanded. “Don’t you know I’m the mayor? If you were a part of this town, you’d know. Elections were held on New Year’s Day and I won by a single vote! I ran a good clean campaign. I didn’t stoop to lies like you did, Sarah Liars. That’s your new name: Sarah Liars.”
“Whatever,” Sarah said. The alley had ended at a narrow, two-lane street. In one direction was a run of cars, parked neatly. In the other direction: zombies. She flung the gun over her shoulder and went into her zombie routine, heading for the parked cars in a slow stumble, making sure to keep her semi-cleaned face pointed down, but ready to sprint away if she was discovered.
There was little chance of that. Behind her, the mayor of Easton continued to call her names in a high voice. Next he took to berating the zombies for coming into “his area.” Sarah didn’t look back.
The cars were all dry. In desperation, she went to the main street and after checking each of the cars there she went to a row of bikes that were chained to a rack. All their tires were flat and the rubber appeared to be degrading faster than she thought was physically possible.
“What am I going to do?” she asked. But then another question struck her: What would Jillybean do? The answer was as obvious as it was useless. “She’d start a fucking fire. That’s what she’d do. Fires seemed to be her answer to every little prob…”
As she was complaining she was picturing a fire: huge, roaring, and billowing black smoke. Jilly would have started it in the Kinkos across from the City hall, because of all the paper. Without gas, she’d need something readily flammable. However all that paper would mean the smoke would be seen for miles and it would surely attract the bounty hunter. He would have to leave his trap if he was going to come investigate.
Sarah smiled at where her train of thought had gone. “Thanks, Jillybean,” she whispered, heading for the Kinkos. The fire would indeed be glorious. It would smoke like a volcano and Sarah was sure it would attract the hunter. But he wouldn’t be the hunter any longer; not when Sarah had a high-powered rifle and a great location to shoot from.
Atop the city hall was a clock tower. In her eyes, there was no more fitting location than a clock tower to turn hunter into prey. But first the fire!
Chapter 15
Neil Martin
Northern Maryland
It was still dark when Neil woke. His first awareness was loneliness, then sadness, then began the biting nervousness that would sit in his gut until he got his first taste of action. He always seemed to be nervous over something. That morning it was the zombies he would have to fight, and the bounty hunter who was after them, and the idea that he was already far too late to catch up to Sarah, and of course, he was afraid of the unknown.
The unknown had always bothered him more than almost anything. Neil was a man of routine. It was his defining characteristic and had been since he could remember. In his old life, people who knew him could count on his routine almost to the minute. He was always fifteen minutes early for work. On Fridays, his numbers would be in by eleven sharp. He had lunch at his desk every day but Wednesdays when he would treat himself to one of three restaurants. Every night he was home by six and by seven he had more than likely trounced the featured contestants on Jeopardy while he ate his carefully prepared dinner
Now, he had to wonder where his next meal would come from, and he didn’t even want to think about their fuel situation. That was a sure-fire way to an ulcer.
To keep from thinking about that or the fact that a light rain was falling—meaning they would be delayed again—Neil crept to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Though he moved with all the stealth of a mouse, Jillybean still cracked an eye and watched him from her nest of blankets.
“Good morning,” he whispered.
After a glance to the window she asked, “Is it really morning? It’s awful dark.”
“Oh yes, it’s morning,” Neil assured her. “It’s just a dark morning because of the heavy clouds. You want to help with br
eakfast? I have a surprise.”
When it came to routines, Jillybean was the opposite of Neil. In her mind, new was, in all ways, better than old. The idea of not knowing where or when her next meal would come from, not only didn’t bother her, it was far preferable to eating the same thing every day.
Clearly, she enjoyed surprises, even gastronomical ones.
“Yes, please,” she said. “What kind of surprise?”
“We’re having pancakes,” he said. Her smile turned false. Pancakes weren’t much of a surprise since he had made two attempts at them already both times with poor results. With the first try all he had to work with was the boxed mix and some grainy water. He added vegetable oil to the second attempt which helped only a little. This time would be different. “I know they haven’t been all that good in the past, but look at what I found yesterday.”
With a flourish, he produced an egg in each hand. Again her look was one of disappointment.
“Ipes says to be careful, because eggs go rotten and you can’t tell until you open them up. We saw that on a cartoon once.”
“Does Ipes know that these are fresh eggs?” Neil asked, partially talking to the stuffed toy. “I saw the chicken myself! It was a wild chicken just walking across the road.”
“You did?” Jilly said, jumping out of her covers and rushing over to inspect the eggs.
Neil bent to start a fire in the barbeque and after gently blowing on the flames to get the coals going, he turned back to Jillybean. “Yep. The chicken just sort of pecked about and then went back across the road for a few minutes and then it re-crossed. It did this for over fifteen minutes going back and forth. Finally, I went to see if it had a nest and sure enough there was a little burrowed out area in the tall grass next to this one house and in it were these two eggs.”
“Cool,” Jillybean said.
She was eager to help and he allowed her to do all the measuring and stirring, but since he was worried about egg shell fragments winding up in the pancakes, he reserved the honor of cracking them himself. Right before he did, she dropped this little bombshell on what he thought was going to be the perfect breakfast to travel on: “You know there might be a baby chicken in that egg.”
He hadn’t thought about that. His hand stopped halfway to the mixing bowl as he felt a sudden queasiness strike.
“What do you think it looks like?” Jillybean asked. Clearly the idea of him plopping a dead baby chicken into the pancake batter wasn’t nearly as unpleasant in her mind as it was in his. “I bet it’s all squishy. I think they come out icky, but then they get like a blow dryer on them that makes their fur stand up.”
Neil figured the baby chicken would be both dead and icky. It turned him off pancakes altogether, but since Jillybean was still looking hopeful, he glanced at the egg in his hand. “I wonder how you can tell if there’s a chicken in there,” he said.
“I dunno,” Jillybean said, picking up the second egg and putting it to her ear. “I don’t hear any peeps or any chicken noises.” She gave it a vigorous shake. “It seems juicy inside.”
Juicy, Neil didn’t like the sound of that. His stomach liked it less. “Maybe I should just chip off the top and see.”
Jillybean gave him a look. “Ipes says this is an all or nothing kind of deal. If there’s a chicken in there you just can’t put the top of the egg back on and think it’ll be alright.”
“So what do we do?”
This struck her as a strange question. “Crack it open in a different bowl if you’re worried. If it’s just an egg then we’ll have pancakes that might taste good for once. If it’s a chicken, then we’ll put the other egg back in the nest…Or we keep it! I can grow it up big and fat and it’ll be all white with a red booger on its beak! We can have eggs every day.”
“Having a chicken would be kind of cool,” Neil said. “Here goes nothing.” He made a cringy face and cracked the egg on the edge of a bowl. It turned out that the egg was only an egg much to Jillybean’s disappointment.
“Do you remember where you got these?” Jilly asked. “I’d like to capture that chicken. I could get a leash and train it to do tricks. Not just laying eggs. I mean, like dancing or counting to twelve, stuff like that.”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have time,” Neil said. “I want to leave after breakfast if the zombie numbers aren’t bad. But if everything goes ok, I think it’ll be alright to come back and look for that chicken. Maybe chicken farming will be our calling if we can ever get to a place where we can settle down.”
“I’d like to farm cats, too,” Jillybean said.
As Neil cooked, the little girl went on about all of her favorite animals which included just about every animal she could name. Eventually, Sadie came in and listened. Neil noticed that she had put on make-up, a first since she had been dragged out of the East River. He didn’t ask how she was feeling, knowing that she would lie.
The pancakes were actually quite good, needing only butter to make them perfect. Neil kept at the grill until everyone was full, something that hadn’t happened in a long while. They took their time since it was zombie-weather outside. Zombies liked the cool mists and the streets were filled with the beasts. It made just running for the Ford Expedition a challenge that could mean an avoidable death.
For two hours they sat in the living room in silence, watching to see if something would draw off the zombies. Eventually the sun got a firmer grip of the day and the mists started to retreat. The second it did the zombies drifted away.
“Everyone ready to go?” Neil asked. “All packed up?” This was a silly question. They hadn’t managed to scrounge enough to fill the back packs they each carried. No one said anything, but when Sadie gave her half-shrug, Neil said, “Then let’s go.”
Axe at the ready, Neil left the house first checking all around. With the coast clear, he gave a low whistle. Out of the house hurried the other three, Nico bringing up the rear.
“So far so good,” Neil said, cheerily, the second the car doors were locked.
“I hope we see another chicken,” Jillybean said eagerly. Nico was quiet and nervous, while Sadie pretended she wasn’t still sick, doing her best not to cough.
Without being aware of it, Neil followed Sarah’s winding route out to the highway and tooled along at an easy pace, doing his best to avoid the many zombies wandering around. He was going slowly enough that he had plenty of time to see the cars draped across the roadway exactly as Sarah had only the evening before. He stopped the Expedition well back.
“Is trap?” Nico asked.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Neil said.
“What do we do?” Sadie asked from the back seat. “We can’t fight our way through if it’s an ambush and we can’t go back at the first hint of danger. We could take that other highway to the west, but that’s pretty far out of our way and we’d lose a third of our gas just getting there.”
This was a succinct description of how screwed they were. None of the choices appealed to Neil. “I have an idea,” he said. “We’ll go back a bit. Over that hill where we’ll be out of sight and then I’ll get out and circle around to see if there’s anyone hiding in those cars ready to ambush us.” He felt ill over his own plan.
“You want I come?” Nico asked.
Desperately, Neil did, however he shook his head. “No. Two people will only draw more attention. I’ll go by myself.”
“You should go as a monster,” Jillybean suggested. “I know we don’t have the make-up anymore, but we could cover you in mud. That should do the trick.”
Despite Sadie’s endorsement of dressing like a zombie, Neil didn’t trust the concept, especially the part where he couldn’t run or scream or any of things he usually did when confronted by a zombie.
“I have my axe,” he told her. “And I don’t see any monsters hanging around. I’ll be ok.”
They went back and parked on the lee side of the hill, out of sight of the cars. Neil scampered up the embankment easily enough, but th
e fence was a bit of a trial, not made any easier when Sadie began snorting with laughter as Neil’s pants got caught at the top.
“I’m not a commando, you know,” he said, grimacing. The fence was biting into his unmentionables.
“And that’s not the face of a cliff,” she called back. “That’s a fence.” Her laugh turned into a cough which she had trouble suppressing.
“Serves you right,” he said of her cough. “Making fun of an old man.” At thirty-five he wasn’t exactly old but to him, the challenge of fence climbing was practically an Olympic event.
Once on the other side, he left them with a wave and went to brave the forest, and for him it was very much an act of bravery. He gripped the axe with sweating hands, jumped at every sound, and frequently found himself freezing in place if a zombie got within a hundred yards of him. It took him half-an-hour to circle the few hundred yards to where the cars were arranged on the road.
Neil let out a sigh of relief when he saw there wasn’t anyone near the cars. They were abandoned completely. On a whim he decided to get a closer look at them and climbed the fence right there; this time like a pro.
“No one around to see my triumphs,” he said, moseying up to the highway. He saw the spike strip hidden in the tall grass right away. “What the hell is this?” he asked, pulling it up. It was a moment before he understood what he was seeing and another before its ramifications sunk in. When he realized that he was indeed standing in a trap, Neil crouched down next to the closest vehicle, gripping the axe even harder than before.
He stared all around, fully expecting an attack to occur with ear-shattering rapidity, but nothing out of the ordinary happened and the only thing of note that he saw was a column of smoke rising far away to the south west.
“Maybe it’s an old trap,” he said to himself. “Or maybe they come by and check it every once in a while.” Strangely, Neil didn’t equate the bounty hunter with the trap. The “they” in his mind, was a faceless group of dirty, bandit looking men who hid behind bandanas and large, military style weapons.
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