Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  “Uhh, yeah, just the three of us,” Remy said, motioning with his hands and then shrugging, hoping the movements would convince the gun wielders of their non-offensive status.

  The other man and the woman split, each of them moving off to either side of Remy and his two companions. The man scanned the intersecting road while the woman kept her eyes on the threesome. The bearded man approached them directly, his rifle held at waist-height in both hands.

  “Walking down the middle of the road without any weapons of any kind?” the man said, pausing and scanning the woods lining the north side of the road before turning his attention to the fields on the other, in-between Rue Maurice Burrus and the N59 highway. He raised his left hand in the air and waved it back and forth. “Are you three trying to get eaten or do you want to find out what life as a zombie is like?”

  Remy was filled with a sudden twinge of anger at the half-joke. There were no rules about the current zombie apocalypse, no government regulations about how to act or what to do. Hell, he had wanted to stay in the dormitory and wait for help, how was he supposed to know what the proper course of action was outside?

  “We’re trying to get to Strasbourg,” Remy said after a moment, turning his head to the fields off the side of the road and noticing several other armed people moving off to the west.

  The man tilted his head slightly and furrowed his eyes. “Strasbourg? What the hell for? There’s only zombies there, and tens of thousands of them at that. You wouldn't make it within ten kilometers of the place though, seeing as you're not armed and on foot.”

  Remy glanced at Syrah and Yvette. Yvette sagged slightly at the news, enough to let on that she had only ever thought there was an outside chance of hope. The world really was dead. Undead.

  “Well, you three can stay with us until you decide what you’re going to do,” the man said. “I’m Thierry. It’ll be dark soon, come with us. You’ll be safe.”

  An hour later they passed through a make-shift barricade of felled trees and sandbags. On the side of the road, in what used to be a football pitch, a series of what Remy took to be burial trenches were dug into the field, the first two already topped with dirt, filled to capacity. A makeshift gate was pulled open just as a half-dozen other armed people materialized from the sides of the road and from behind houses and joined them. Inside, Remy stared in awe at the amount of people near the barricade who were armed with rifles and pistols.

  “Wow, you guys sure have a lot of guns,” Remy said as he watched a pair of women push the woven-branches gate back into place. “Are they all legal?”

  Thierry sniffed out a laugh. “Legal? Are zombies legal? Come on, follow me.”

  They walked into the center of town down Rue Clemenceau, passing by houses and closed-up shops, and turned onto Rue de la Gare, walking up it a short way until they heard the sound of children at play. And smelled meat cooking on a fire.

  “You’ve got fresh meat?” Remy asked, his mouth watering as his nose filled with the savory smell of grilled game. “What is it?”

  Thierry sniffed, shrugged. “What I wouldn’t give for beef.”

  “You have children here?” Syrah said.

  “Oh, yeah, lots of them,” Thierry said, motioning them off the street and through a parking lot that led into a paved playground area behind a school.

  “I haven’t seen children in months,” Syrah said as she turned around the corner of the boys school and saw almost two dozen kids at play on an asphalt court buffered from the roads by several buildings.

  She started to cry at the sight of the them, their ages from three to eleven, as they kicked footballs, played escargot or drew on the pavement with chalk. Several parents, each of them armed with a weapon of some sort, stood close watch nearby, their attention focused not on the children and whether any would get bruised from a tumble to the earth, but outward, looking for sudden infiltration by the walking dead.

  “I never thought I’d see children again,” Syrah said as she paused to watch them a moment longer.

  This was a concern that had never even occurred to Remy. Children? The only reaction he had to the word was a cautionary one, a reminder to constantly ensure that the women he slept with were on the pill or, if they weren’t, that he wear a condom. But, mostly, to make sure the woman was on the pill. Aside from guarding against the accidental creation of a child, children were something that Remy never thought about or noticed. That Syrah was moved to tears by the sight of a group of children at play rankled Remy on some level, redefined her in some way, turned her from a sexual being into a breeder to be wary of. Anyway, who wanted to have children in the pre-zombie world, when the living was fun and children would only ruin things? Now that there were zombies, who in their right mind would want to bring a child into the world?

  Suddenly Thierry stirred to life and tilted his head in the air, sniffing on the breeze. Remy stared at him, wondering if these small-town mountain hunting types had figured a way to smell zombies on the wind. Remy hated hunting, though he had never done it, nor even fished. He considered it déclassé, something nobody should have to do and fewer should want to do. Humans hadn’t climbed from the muck of millennia and created skyscrapers and smart phones just so some small percentage of the population could indulge their natural urge to kill wild animals. Wild animals were a part of nature, they served a purpose, and that purpose did not involve hunting and killing them for pleasure.

  “Boar!” Thierry said ecstatically, slapping Remy on the back. “Tonight, my new friends, we shall have boar!”

  After a dinner of boar, roasted carrots and parsnips with dill, and a salad of wild flowers and lettuces in a balsamic dressing – a meal so good Remy realized he had forgotten what cooked fresh food tasted like – Thierry and the rest of the townsfolk took their empty plates and left the threesome alone with a bottle of Riesling. Remy had done everything he could not to roll his eyes when presented the bottle of German wine, but he was glad for it: it had been weeks since he’d even seen a bottle of alcohol, let alone wine. It was sweet and cool going down, and after a while of passing the bottle between them, Remy could feel the relief ease into his body as the wine diffused throughout it.

  Remy leaned back against the trunk of a tree in a buffer scrim between parking areas, the asphalt unyielding beneath his legs but his mind drifting peacefully through the twilight sky. It was good to be alive, again, and he felt the rush of desire for Syrah as he watched her sip from the bottle. His eyes flitted briefly to Yvette and he wondered about her, too, and if the girls would mind if he took turns sleeping with them so long as the three of them were a unit.

  And then he felt tired, energy seeping from him as the wine worked its magic on his body and soul. His mind relaxed and his body let down its guard. Every cell inside of him wanted nothing more than to turn off all the alarms and physical requirements of a life in constant fear and submit to sleep. The last time he had gotten any real sleep was when he had fallen asleep in the train station a week earlier, convinced they were safe because they were inside a building.

  “I wonder where we can sleep,” Remy said.

  “Thierry said there’s a hotel just up the road a hundred or so meters,” Yvette said. “The Two Keys Inn.”

  “He also said there are sticks with white strips of fabric tied to them in front of empty houses and apartment buildings with unoccupied units. He said the owners are either dead or undead and won’t mind if we move in,” Syrah said.

  Remy and the girls got up and began walking down Rue de Saint Antoine, looking for an open house. None were available. Inside many, the flicker of candlelight could be seen, reminding Remy that once not too long ago, that flicker would have been the blue of a television screen, numbing the occupants with mindless programming and blinding them to the realities of life. Now, finally, people were forced to live life in a genuine manner and in some harmony with nature.

  They turned left onto Rue du Chalmont when Remy realized that if they didn’t find a pla
ce soon, they’d be walking around in complete darkness. This unnerved him, but not so much because of the possibility of a stray zombie coming across them but rather because of the large amount of people wandering around with firearms. He wondered who had trained any of them to use them?

  “Hey, here’s one with a flag in front of it,” Yvette said.

  They had been walking in silence since leaving the courtyard behind the boys school, and the sudden sound of Yvette’s voice had startled Remy. He had been lost in thoughts about the new order of things to come, how the property of the world would be re-distributed among the living after the undead had been dealt with. Now that there were fewer people, there was more than enough for everyone. Finally, there was a way to make the world fair. They were suddenly doused in a powerful white light, the beam playing across each of their faces as each reflexively lifted an arm to block the ray.

  “You’re the living?” a voice asked, gruff and tinged with anger.

  “Are we alive?” Remy asked, “is that what you’re asking? Yes, yes, we are very much the living.”

  The beam dipped down to their kneecaps, but the damage to Remy’s night vision had been done, and he could make nothing out in the crepuscular gray of twilight.

  “Walking around in the dark without any weapons isn’t exactly the smartest thing to do these days,” the voice said, the tone pained obviousness, a bored elementary teacher lecturing a child.

  “We’re looking for a house with a white flag in front of it,” Syrah said. “This one has such a tag.”

  The beam swerved across the ground and bobbed around the front yard of the house before settling on a small stake with a length of torn white sheet attached to it. The beam lingered a moment, played across the façade of the house, then meandered down and across the ground to a spot in the street between Remy’s group and the speaker.

  “Well, you should get inside,” the man’s voice said. “Lock up and take shifts through the night on guard. It’s pretty safe around here, but we still get the occasional zombie that makes it through the perimeter.”

  The beam switched off and the sounds of several pairs of boots crunching on gravel receded into the darkness. Remy turned and looked at the girls, who were waiting for him to decide something.

  “Works for me. Let’s get inside,” Remy said.

  The pounding on the front door at dawn was so sudden and furious that Remy startled awake on the couch in the front room of the house, sliding off it and onto the floor as he sat up and twisted to orient himself on the origin of the banging. Yvette was sitting on a rocking chair on the opposite side of the room, reading a book she must have chosen from the bookshelf in the room, and laughed briefly at the sight of Remy on the floor. The noise had caused her to drop her book in shock, too, but Remy hated being laughed at and scowled for a half-moment before gathering his wits.

  Remy pulled the door open and beheld Thierry, smiling broadly and armed with a shotgun held idly at his side. Three other men and a woman – all of them armed in some manner – stood in the background by the edge of the road, chatting amongst themselves.

  “Good morning, my new friends, I trust you slept well and safely last night,” Thierry said, “but the day is young and there is much to be done.”

  “Done?” Remy said.

  “Oh, yes,” Thierry said. “Meals to be made, children to be cared for, fences to be made stronger. Come over to the courtyard behind the boys school in twenty minutes for breakfast and assignment to a work detail. Lots to be done before sunset.”

  Thierry turned and walked off with his group down the road, not looking back. Remy stood in the door and watched them until they turned a corner, then slowly turned on his heels and regarded Yvette and Syrah, who were both standing in the middle of the room, watching him.

  “Jesus. They want us to start working for a living already,” Remy said, trying to figure out what alternatives there might be. Continue on the road to Strasbourg and risk the zombies? They had no weapons and had probably been incredibly lucky not to have been killed or infected since leaving the dormitory.

  Yvette motioned to the kitchen behind her, through an arch from the living room. “Well, there’s no food in there or the basement pantry. My guess is everything was collected from all the houses and stored somewhere else. There’s nothing for mice to nibble.”

  After a breakfast of pancakes and home-made berry-syrup, Remy had been assigned to a group heading to the farms around Saint-Hippolyte, a small town about eleven kilometers to the southeast. It would take a little more than two hours to get there on foot, pulling wagons. Remy had protested, not wanting to walk through the wooded hills.

  “Why can’t we just drive there?” Remy had asked.

  “You brought gasoline with you, did you?” Thierry asked and laughed. “We haven’t had any gasoline for weeks, now. Maybe we can siphon some from an automobile while we’re down there, should we get lucky that way.”

  Syrah and Yvette had both been assigned to the kitchen in the boys school, and Remy waved slightly to them as he trooped out of the town with Thierry and seven others – three men, four women. Everyone except Remy was armed, although two of the women carried large knives instead of firearms. The day was spent scavenging through fields and abandoned houses for anything that could be eaten. They saw nobody, neither alive nor dead, which Remy thought both odd and comforting.

  At twilight, back in the house, Yvette opened a bottle from a local winery while Syrah lit a candle and set it on the coffee table in the living room. Remy had nothing to show for his day, having turned over his collection of turnips and onions to the boys school before dinner. He did, however, possess a small pike he found in a work shed on one of the farms, which gave him some sense of comfort that he could now, at least, try to defend himself should he need to.

  “Another Riesling,” Remy said. “Not bad.”

  “It’s from somewhere outside Selestat,” Yvette said. “They’ve got hundreds of bottles of wines stored in the basement of the school.”

  “And who-knows-how-much canned food and bulk flour and whatnot larded away in the classrooms,” Syrah added. “After the town closed itself off when the quarantines began, everyone pooled everything together so it wouldn’t be left to spoil in individual homes. Then they divided into teams to spread the workload around. We spent all day washing the morning dishes and then making the beans for dinner.”

  Remy gave the girls a look of compassion, indicating that he felt their pain, and took another small swallow of the wine.

  “It beats sitting around in the dorm all day playing cards,” Yvette said.

  Remy thought about that for a moment, already knowing he’d be doing more scavenging the next morning as his group continued to work through the farmland for food, fuel and other useful items from before the zombies. Fucking zombies. Nobody had any idea where they had come from, how they were made, or why they existed. One day, life had been complex and filled with a million struggles, a constant sense of trying to find dignity and justice in the modern world of nameless, faceless men and the vast machinery of Western life and its total indifference to the individual. Now, most of those people were walking dead, and those that were alive were struggling to figure out what the new rules were.

  On the walk back from Saint-Hippolyte, Remy had figured the new rules should be obvious to those that remained alive: kill the undead, redistribute the property equally, limit the amount of new children brought into the world, and ensure everyone understood their part in a harmonious and cooperative society. Only nobody wanted to talk about how to restructure society on the walk back home from the farms, although everyone had agreed that killing the undead should be a top priority.

  Remy took another sip of the wine and stared at Yvette for a moment: she had said she was glad for the labor, the security of the town, the opportunity to live rather than survive. So was he, he realized. And, yet, he missed his cell phone, reading blogs on the Internet, picking up girls at the discos f
or one night stands, sitting at a table on a sidewalk and sipping coffee, listening to his iPod, and all of the other things that had been his life just a few months ago.

  Modern life suddenly didn’t seem as oppressive as the new version of life did. There had been so many things to do that deciding among them had been the defining aspect of difficulty, he realized, as he took another sip of wine – the only wine available – and regarded the girls in the candlelight. Now, there were only two girls to choose from – one, really, if that were still a going concern. Maybe there had been too much choice for the average person in the world before the zombies. Maybe that’s what had made it so confounding to the average person: how could anyone know what to choose?

  But now, with almost nothing to choose from, it was easy to figure out what made you content: a woman, a bottle of wine, the flicker of a candle. Dinner wasn’t what you had to choose amongst, it was what was offered. Remy smiled to himself as if he had made some sudden great insight into the nature of life: choices were a trap, you only need a few options to make you happy, not infinite ones. He smiled. He had a blonde and a brunette in his room; he only had to choose.

  All Hell Breaks Loose

  Los Angeles, California – Day 21

  Brooke Tammerlin felt Joshua Sparks’ fingers lace through hers as they stepped onto the sidewalk outside the bar and for a second she could feel her wedding ring get pressed into her finger. For a millisecond she remembered that she was married, that her husband had just texted her from work on the other side of town wishing her a good time out with her girlfriends, and then she forgot about the ring and her marriage and felt the warmth of Josh’s palm, the light pressure of his fingertips on the back of her hand.