The image was enough to get Neil moving, although he almost immediately tripped over something and spilled onto the grass. Tripping wasn’t a new occurrence for him and so he was up in a flash and didn’t even hear the walkie-talkie begin to chirp as he started to jog up the road.
By the time he reached the top of the hill, Neil was blowing hard and waving his free hand at the Expedition parked down the road. They didn’t see him, however a pair of zombies did.
“Oh balls!” Neil cried. “Hey! Nico, Sadie. Hey!” He began waving his arms frantically now, but still the Expedition just sat there.
The zombies were between him and the SUV and what was worse they were equal in speed, meaning they would get to Neil at just about the same time. He stopped in his tracks and stood leaning on his axe, puffing out air. If he was going to fight he would at least do it without being exhausted. In spite of the two-to-one odds, Neil wasn’t exactly scared.
With his axe he held a huge advantage on the offense against zombies and on defense his immunity to their bites and scratches meant they would have to wrestle him to the ground and actually tear out his neck to do real harm. The very notion always made his throat tighten.
Still, he was a thinking creature and they were not. He cast about and found a hunk of asphalt from the edge of a growing pothole. It was good-sized so that Neil had to lay aside his axe in order to pick it up; he stepped forward ten feet and waited. After a minute the zombies were close enough for Neil to act. Grunting with the effort, Neil smashed the larger of the two in the face with the asphalt.
He didn’t pause to see how the blow fared. Instead he ran back to his axe and scooped it up. The rock did not kill the zombie. It crushed the side of its face and slowed it down enough for Neil to use his axe properly. Two wide-arced swings later, Neil stood gloating over his enemies as they lay at his feet.
“Ta-duh!” he said, taking a bow toward the Expedition. There was no reaction from the vehicle. It just sat there, sixty yards off, idling. “Idling! What the hell?”
He ran up to it and saw that only Jillybean was awake. She was playing with Ipes in the back seat. “Hi, Mister Neil. Was it a trap? You have a little black blood on your face. Right by your nose. Did you battle a monster? Sadie was coughing a lot, but she said not to talk about it so I guess I shouldn’t have said nothing. I mean anything.”
Sadie cracked a bleary eye. “I’m fine,” she said in a voice that rumbled with phlegm. “Just a little tired.”
“We’ll let you rest in a little bit,” Neil said, climbing in and staring at the gas gauge. The indicator rested on the tip of the E. “You might get more rest than you want. We’re going to run out of gas soon, because you guys left the engine running.”
“Oh my God!” Sadie cried when she saw how low they were. “I’m so sorry. I fell asleep, I didn’t know.” Nico, who had been in the driver’s seat, grunted an apology as well.
“We were going to run out anyway,” Neil said with a sigh. “I was hoping for later rather than sooner, but what can you do? Oh, by the way, that bunch of cars ahead was a trap. There isn’t anyone there now so we better get past it before they come back.”
They cleared the trap and saw nothing of the bounty hunter all that day. With the gas they had left they were able to go fourteen more miles before the Expedition began to hitch and chug as its tank ran dry. Thankfully, they were on a nice downward slope near an exit ramp when it happened. Neil was able to coast the beast of a machine for more than a mile, all the way to the edge of a little group of homes and businesses that could barely be called a hamlet.
Sadie got all the rest she wanted as Neil and Nico spent hours hunting in vain for fuel. “Everything close to highway is searched time and again,” Nico said, wiping sweat out of his eyes. “We must go away further from road.”
Neil agreed but with only an hour of daylight left he was stuck with a tough decision: did he try to go searching by himself? He wouldn’t make it back before dark and that was a truly scary prospect. But taking Nico with him would mean leaving the girls to fend for themselves.
“Do you think you can walk for a mile or two?” he asked Sadie. “There was a sign for some place called Pinedale. It’s just down the road. Maybe we can find gas there.”
Pretending she was feeling better than she was, Sadie agreed she could indeed walk such a short distance. They hitched their packs and gathered their weapons: Neil had his axe; Nico had an aluminum bat, and Sadie toted the shotgun. Jillybean had Ipes.
The walk was pleasant for Neil, but a strain for Sadie. She hung on Nico’s arm and her face grew more pale with every step. After only a few minutes Nico took her pack and the shotgun so that she wouldn’t be burdened. She could barely hold her head steady; the only time she looked up for more than a minute was when they got to the edge of the little town of Pinedale and walked past a McDonald’s.
“Can we go look to see if they have any ham-buggers?” Jillybean asked in a pleading voice. There was no way that it would, but she and Sadie had stared at the dark building and its yellow arches with such longing that Neil agreed. All she found were fourteen packets of ketchup—thirteen since Jillybean had one open and had sucked down the contents in a second.
“Shouldn’t you save those for French fries?” he asked her.
“We don’t have French fries,” she replied. For her it wasn’t enough to suck out the ketchup, she peeled back the package and licked it clean.
Neil shrugged. “We have a little bit of oil left. If any of these houses has a garden like the one you found before, we could have fries in a snap.”
Jillybean’s eyes went huge and she clasped her hands together and begged: “Can I look? Please, please, please? I’ll take Nico with me if you want.”
The town wasn’t more than a wide spot in the road. There was a mile long “commercial district” down the center, with the McDonald’s, a Sears, and a Walgreens as the anchor stores. Everything else was strictly mom and pop. Fanning out from the main strip was the residential section. There were all manner of homes in it: little rickety ranches, a smattering of sixties era bi-levels, duplexes, some nice three story homes and in the back of the town bordering on field and forest was a flock of mobile homes on cinder blocks.
There were few zombies in evidence, which was why Neil agreed to Jillybean’s request. Nico gave him a dark look as Jillybean took his big hand in hers and dragged him off chattering about the need for French fries in their diet.
“Is that in retaliation for him leaving the Expedition running?” Sadie asked.
“What?” Neil asked in fake outrage. “Never!”
Sadie gave him a lukewarm smile that faded to lukecold. “I need to lie down. I don’t feel so good.”
“Of course,” Neil replied, taking her arm.
One of the closest homes was two stories of rambling wood and shingle. It had two separate garages, something Neil had never seen before, and four dog houses chained to slowly strangling poplars. Its yard was packed dirt overlaid by long-dried dog crap. Beyond the crap there was nothing else to be seen of the dogs.
Neil went into the dim home first and, after seeing what shape the yard was in, was not at all shocked at the mess that greeted him. He was sure a family of packrats had lived here and he was certain it retained much of the same look it had from before the apocalypse. The cleanest room was an upstairs guest room. It was here he laid Sadie down and gave her a canteen of water to sip on.
She fell asleep quickly.
While she snored, he busied himself with a fire and then explored the house. The next nicest room was a little girl’s room; its theme was pink. Nothing went with anything else, but by God it was all pink. In this girlie maelstrom he uncovered a Barbie doll in good condition and a Velveteen Rabbit. Also a little stack of clean panties that he figured would fit Jillybean, who had been making do with three pairs which were thinning after so much use.
“This is just what the doctor ordered,” Neil said as he came down the stairs. He st
opped at the last step and stared, his mouth hanging open.
There was a man in the living room. He had a gun and he was dressed in green camouflage, after that Neil couldn’t describe him. He was far too focused on the gun and how it pointed straight at his face. Too late Neil tried to hide the Barbie and the panties.
“You’re one of them perverts, aren’t you?” the man asked in a cold tone.
What could Neil say, but, “Yes. I guess I am.”
Chapter 16
Sarah Rivers
Northern Maryland
Sarah very nearly set the Kinkos alight without first checking it for a hidden cache of food or weapons. It was a bust, however upon reflection that was alright with her. She wasn’t there to scrounge, she had to remind herself. She was setting her own trap.
The paper turned out harder to get going than she thought it would. Individual pieces lit without an issue, it was the thick reams that didn’t want to burn in the way she had imagined they would. After several tries, she decided to break them open and spread the paper out everywhere. When the floor was carpeted to the depth of a foot, she went about lighting everything within reach, working her way from back to front. By the time she stepped out onto the sidewalk the interior of the store was a solid wall of gray.
“Maybe too much gray,” she said. What would happen if the flames were smothered by the smoke? Easy, the fire would go out. “I can’t have that.” Her hand axe was a simple solution. Enjoying the rebellious nature of her actions, she broke every window.
This sudden influx of oxygen turned the smoking storefront into a five alarm beast that would eventually consume every building on the block. Sarah smiled at her handiwork. Soon the fire attracted a throng of undead, who came to stand in an arc around the building just like normal people might. They stared at the dancing flames just as Sarah did, something she hadn’t expected. Adopting a zombie shuffle, she left them to their entertainment and headed for the clock tower.
The city hall, a sturdy brick affair was horrible in a way few places were. The people of Easton, Maryland, with a one-time population of over five thousand souls had used it as a morgue during the apocalypse. In nearly every meeting room, hallway and office on the main floor, bodies were stacked like cordwood. The ones at the bottom of the piles were properly sheeted and tied against the misadventures of rigor mortis. The ones on top were not. They were open for all to see.
The full ugliness of death was on display—the rotting, fly-covered flesh, the draining ribbons of fat, the pudding-like black blood which pooled in the low spots of every room—was of such magnitude that it left even a veteran survivor like Sarah stunned. Making a retching sound in her throat she staggered for the stairs as behind her in the hall, one of the piles teetered and fell over. There was a zombie among the dead. Unlike the cadavers all around her that seemed extra-skinny and deflated, the zombie was morbidly obese. It had been feeding on the dead like a pig at an endless trough.
Even then as it stared at her with deep set, piggy eyes, it was chewing on greasy flesh.
Like a bull, it bellowed, sending out flecks of diseased meat, and then it charged. Sarah fled up the stairs, taking them two at a time, easily outdistancing her attacker. Eventually the stairs ended at an open landing in the middle of a long hallway on the third floor. It had been her hope that the stairs would have a door that she could block.
“This won’t do. Fuck! This won’t do at all,” she hissed. The zombie would have trouble on the stairs, but it wasn’t going to have any trouble wandering the halls until it found her. Even the narrow stairs leading to the clock tower weren’t barricaded by anything more challenging than a red velvet rope.
“I’m being silly,” she said to herself. The zombie was going to forget about her any second and go back to eating. It wasn’t going to climb all these stairs to get at her, or so she hoped. Doing her best to put the foul creature out of her mind, she went up the narrow, spiraling stairs and found a door at the very top. It was flimsy to begin with, but when she shouldered it in, it became useless.
“It won’t come up here,” she said to reassure herself about the fearsome zombie. “Never going to…happen. Whoa.” The Kinkos and the city hall building were only separated by the main street and a pretty green lawn of some sixty yards in width. She was close enough to feel the staggering heat being thrown off by the fire. It was a massive thing now. It had fully engulfed the Kinkos so that only edges of brick could be seen in all the smoke. She craned her head back and saw that the smoke had risen beyond her ability to judge. It could be a mile high, or ten, for all she knew.
Perfect.
“Now to get comfortable,” she said, figuring it would be a while before the bounty hunter showed up. That meant going back into the municipal building to get a chair. With the height of the railing, a barstool would serve her needs best. “But who’s going to have a barstool here?”
The mayor—not the bum who had claimed to be mayor, but the real mayor that is—had one. He also had a bar and good Belvedere vodka. Sarah pocketed the alcohol and then dragged the chair up the stairs. Propping her feet on the rail, she took a slug of the vodka. “That’s for the bounty hunter.” She took another. “And that’s for the stink.”
The odor of rotting flesh from below, seemed to channel up the stairs to hover around the clock tower like an invisible cloud. She tried not to think about it. Instead she set her eye to the rifle’s scope and slowly worked the gun among the zombies in the street. She then scoped the other ways into the town and saw only more zombies.
Almost beneath her feet came a crash. Sarah sank another drink. “And this is for you, fat-boy.”
She sat on her perch above the town for an hour and only had one more drink. It occurred when the crazy “new mayor” arrived at the scene of the fire. He went among the zombies in a rage, blaming each for the fire and vowing retribution. Those that attacked him he struck down with his heavy pipe. Those that were mesmerized by the fire only got an earful of his constant diatribe.
After that fourth drink, Sarah was close to telling the crazy man to shut the hell up. She even went so far as to put the cross-hairs of her scope dead on his chest. “Shut the hell up,” she whispered, touching the trigger. The Belvedere had put her in a mood, but not in a mood to commit murder.
It put her in the mood to right at least one wrong.
Sarah slid off the bar stool and then grabbed the railing as her head went light. The alcohol had gone down smoothly and four shots made the earth seem to tilt. “I’ll be ok,” she said. After a couple of seconds of deep breathing she felt good enough to go on. She went down the stairs, listening to the fat zombie wheeze and moan. It was trying to get through a door on the third floor, bashing at it with its ham-sized fists.
Sarah took aim. At thirty yards, its head looked to be the size of a pumpkin. She almost didn’t need the scope. Almost. Thinking she couldn’t possibly miss, she thumbed off the safety and fired. The gun kicked like a mule and sounded like a cannon. The bullet passed through the zombie from cheek to cheek taking with it a number of teeth and spraying the hall with black blood.
It was close as to which of them recovered from the gun’s blast first. Sarah had fully expected the zombie to be dead and was working her shoulder in circles, while wearing a look of pain. The zombie stood looking at the door as if it had attacked him. It then spat out its own tongue before turning and locking eyes with Sarah.
Sarah ran. She took off down the stairs, trying to reload and manage the steps at the same time.
The zombie chugged to the stairs and immediately fell. The fat beast was faster this way and it came tumbling to the second level to land practically at Sarah’s feet. She backed up as the zombie struggled to stand. It was sort of comical in a sickening way. Its belly was so distended from its constant feast that it outshot its arms. It had to use the stairs to stand and by the time it did, Sarah had reloaded and was again drawing a bead.
Her one problem was that she was so close tha
t the zombie filled the entire scope and she couldn’t tell what part of it she was aiming at. She could have backed further away, but she chose instead to sight down the side of the barrel. When she pulled the trigger, and the gun deafened her a second time, she was pleased to see the top of the thing’s head shoot upwards. The rest of it fell forward with a slap and a squish, his fat body seeming to ooze outward in death.
“Wow, that’s so gross,” Sarah said, feeling her stomach turn over in a slow roll. Wearing a light sheen of sweat, she went back to the clock tower and considered another drink of the vodka, but held off as the new mayor of Easton came marching across the street. “Go away,” she yelled at him.
“Who’s doing all that shooting? You? What are you…hey! That’s my tower you’re in,” he cried, shaking his pipe at her. Her response was to chamber another round. Either he didn’t notice or he didn’t understand the significance of the move. “Get down from there,” he went on. “That’s mine not yours. I’m the mayor, remember? You’re nothing but a pretender to the throne.”
“Go the fuck away,” she yelled back. “I’m warning you.” When he began to jaw at her again she chucked the bottle at him, missing wide.
“You can’t do that,” he said in disbelief. “I am the mayor! Don’t you get it? The mayor!”
“Well, good for you,” Sarah yelled back. “But I’m the bloomin’ Queen of England which means I outrank you.” The “logic” of this statement so upset the threads holding together the man’s fantasy that he could not quite recover. Sarah went on in a truly wretched British accent: “Thas right. Be gone with ye or it’ll be the tower for you. Go back to your alley until it be the ‘morrow.”
Perplexed, he stumbled away out of her sight, presumably back to his alley. Sarah didn’t really care where he went as long as he stopped his ranting.
Time clicked slowly by. The fire began to consume the building next to the Kinkos and now there were easily a hundred zombies taking in the spectacle. It was interesting in its way, but more and more she grew bored. She looked down her scope periodically and wondered if she had lit a fire for nothing.
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