Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  Scratch that. She was the most beautiful blonde he had ever had sex with. Fyodor Volkov had never known love, not romantic love, anyway, and had learned over the years to stuff the desire for such a connection into a small recess in his mind near the spot where his skull met his spine. Sex was easy for him, made almost simple by the fact he had become rich in his twenties, was good-looking and had figured out how to talk women into bed before he had money or status. He had game, and he knew it.

  He squeezed Natalie’s ass between his fingers and thumb, a quick pulse that might have made it through to her deep-sleep sub-consciousness as a sign of affection, slipped out of bed and walked into the living room. He pulled up a bottle of Stoli from an end table and tilted it into his mouth, letting the vodka slip in over his tongue and fill his cheeks.

  And now here he was: thirty-eight years old, two bastard children – probably dead, along with their mothers, but whom he loved (the children, not the mothers) – apartments in Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Dallas, a custom-built Ferrari, a Sports Illustrated swim-suit model from Texas sleeping in his bed and everything he wanted whenever he wanted, and it might as well have been nothing.

  He tapped a cigarette out of a pack and flamed it to life with a gold-plated lighter Natalie had given him last Christmas. He inhaled deeply and held the smoke in his lungs, noting the sensation of fullness that was only slightly different from a lungful of air, and then blew the smoke out in a stream. He stared at the cloud of smoke as it twirled in the currents of the room, thinning out and fracturing as it dissipated.

  “Hey, Vasily, wake up,” Fyodor said, kicking his drunk friend lightly on the bottom of a foot protruding from a blanket where Vasily lay on the couch.

  “What?” Vasily asked. He hadn’t been asleep, either.

  “Do you think zombies can die of lung cancer?”

  Vasily opened his eyes at this. “What?”

  “Lung cancer,” Fyodor made a demonstration move with his cigarette, lifting it in the air for Vasily to observe, then took a drag from it. “If you had lung cancer before you turned into a zombie, would the cancer keep eating away at you after you were a zombie?”

  Vasily laughed. “I would bet it would make them stronger and more able to kill us. Wouldn’t that be poetic justice, my friend? The undead gaining strength for the vices that would have killed them in their living lives. Only God would be so ironic.”

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  “I also don’t believe in zombies. And, yet, … zombies.”

  Outside, there was a staccato of fire from an AK-47 machine gun, a sound familiar to both of them not so much because one heard it all the time anymore, but because they had used them themselves on many occasions before the world had gone to the dead. The sound made almost no dent on the reality of either man, and Fyodor took another swig of vodka before handing the bottle to Vasily.

  “What idiot goes out in the dark of night anymore?” Fyodor asked of nobody.

  Vasily suppressed a burp. “And with an AK? Only a fool goes out there anymore with anything less than a Saiga shotgun of some sort.”

  Fyodor motioned with his head and Vasily followed him out of the living room with the bottle of vodka. They went up the steps to the second floor and entered a common room appointed with leather furniture. A large LED TV and a surround-sound speaker system were mounted to the walls. A leggy brunette wearing nothing but her underwear was sprawled against the arm of a couch in a stupor, her eyes glazed over and fixed on nothing. She turned her dark eyes up at the two men as they paused in the room.

  “We’re out of coke,” Mariya said, her voice hollow, the words matter-of-fact, plaintive almost, but not desperate.

  Fyodor and Vasily exchanged a look.

  “Have some champagne, honey, there’s plenty in the wine cellar,” Fyodor said, taking the bottle from Vasily and tipping a sip of vodka into his mouth. He turned to Vasily and said, “I’ve never seen a person go through so much coke in so short a time. Does she eat?”

  Vasily shrugged. They walked out onto a balcony and took a helical staircase up to an observation deck atop the house. Broken clouds moved across the night sky, obscuring the stars, but both men ignored the beauty of the heavens and fixed their eyes on the horizon, which was aglow.

  “I can’t believe they burned the fucking city down,” Vasily said, watching the distant smoke columns merge with the clouds.

  “Of course they did. We’re Russians. Nobody but Russians get to live in Moscow,” Fyodor said. “Napoleon and Hitler both learned the hard way. Now, my friend, the undead learn.”

  A series of thunderous booms undulated through the night followed by the sound of distant whistling. The two men turned their heads in a direction and waited a few seconds for the same number of explosions to echo from the horizon. Fyodor took another swig of vodka and set the bottle down on a hand railing.

  “Still fighting the last war, our glorious army at work killing zombies with howitzers,” Fyodor said, patting through his pockets for his pack of cigarettes and bringing one alight. “I don’t know when it became the custom of every Russian army to destroy everything in sight as a means of waging war. If we’re losing, we burn it all down so the enemy can’t have it, and if we’re winning, we blow it all up so the enemy can’t have it.”

  Vasily laughed.

  “Vasily, we’re all or nothing as a people, and soon we will be nothing. For our entire history, nobody has been able to conquer us, not really, not fully, but now, at the apex of human achievement, when life is easy, when you can watch porn on your pocket phone, get any drug you desire, eat anything you want, have any girl you choose, we finally found a way to kill us all off.”

  “Only, we didn’t kill us all off, we just found a way to make all of the stuff we made to make life easy completely useless to us,” Vasily said. “Now, all we want is to wander the earth undead, trying to eat the brains of our fellow man.”

  There was some rustling on a chaise longue and the two men quickly turned their heads to the noise. Fyodor was instantly relieved to see Nikita push her chestnut hair off her face and tuck some locks behind each ear. Her eyeliner streaked down her cheeks from having cried, but Fyodor had no idea what she might have been crying about.

  “This used to be such a nice dacha to come to for a weekend trip, Fyodorovitch, but now it’s just a fucking prison,” Nikita said, her voice soft. “A gilded cage. I want to go home.”

  “You can’t go home, Nikita, the army is burning it down as we speak,” Vasily said.

  Nikita let out the barest trace of a whimper, but she had already cried all of the sadness out of her, leaving nothing but a hollow spot inside her where she should have felt sorrow or despair. She felt nothing but the heaviness of helplessness.

  “Are you going looting tomorrow?” Nikita asked.

  “Foraging, Nikita, not looting,” Fyodor said, taking the bottle from the railing and handing it to her.

  “Whatever. I want to go this time; I want to see some of the world out there on the other side of the fence,” Nikita said.

  The two men looked at each other and Fyodor gave a slight nod. “Sure, Nikita, we’ll get you up after dawn.”

  Fyodor motioned with his head and he and Vasily went back down into the house. Fyodor picked up a Desert Eagle .50 caliber pistol off the kitchen counter and snugged it into his waist band while Vasily grabbed a shotgun from its resting place in a corner of the room. They stepped outside onto the patio and paused, listening for the sound of an undead walker that might have made it through the fence. None ever had, but there was no reason to be lax. All it took was one bite.

  “We’re going to need to pick up a new woman as well,” Vasily said. “These ones are all burnt out.”

  “That’s going to be tougher than getting coke or vodka. Nobody trusts anyone anymore, and promising girls drugs and food and security hasn’t worked well the last few times. The girls that are left already know how to survive or have men,” Fyodor said. �
�And we need to find something better than canned dog food, too.”

  Vasily laughed. “Yeah, Mariya was good for fucking after we gave her coke, but when she found out she had to eat dog chow, our luster wore off pretty damn quick. Here we are, millionaires with sports cars, apartments and access to everything the city had to offer, and now we’re lucky if we can get some farm girl like Mariya. There was a time when Mariya would have been sidewalk trash to us, just some chick to ignore on the way to somewhere, and now she’s the crazy fuck.”

  Fyodor paused for a moment and thought about the time they had rescued Mariya from the farmhouse she had been holed up in. A small group of undead had found a weakness in some plywood covering the front windows of her house and had begun pulling it down when her father, an over-weight middle-aged man wielding a .22 caliber rifle had stepped from a window on the second floor onto the roof over the front porch and begun plunking zombies. He lost his balance and slid off the roof and had been quickly torn to pieces.

  Fyodor and Vasily had been watching from a copse of trees across the street, initially amused that the farmer had thought his little varmint killer would do much to the undead, and then saddened at his fate – who can predict a loss of balance on a pitched roof? It’s like slipping in the bathtub: it happens, but not so much. Mariya had climbed out onto the roof moments later and begun wailing at the sight of her father being destroyed by zombies and Vasily had broken from the cover of the trees with his shotgun in hand, blasting holes in the pack of undead. In less than a minute the zombies were all dead, and Fyodor had walked across the street, scanning the distance for itinerant zombies drawn by the noise.

  “Vasily, that was stupid,” Fyodor had said. “You might have just drawn a hundred more to our location with all the shooting.”

  Vasily had ignored him and looked up at the girl on the roof of the porch. “Come with us if you want to live.”

  Mariya had been Vasily’s sex slave for the first few weeks, but the gratitude of having been saved and the grief of the loss of her father finally having morphed into the realization she was still trapped, and then she had succumbed to the alcohol and drugs as a way out of her new predicament. Or, perhaps, a way to avoid the fact that they often had to eat food meant for dogs and cats.

  The next morning, Fyodor gave Nikita a 20-gauge shotgun with shells filled with birdshot. He wanted her to be armed, to feel safe, but he didn’t want her with a weapon that could be used to kill either him or Vasily should she have come to the conclusion that her only way out was to kill her velvet jailers.

  Fyodor had always told the girls they brought back that they could leave at anytime, and he meant it. It was Vasily who would take them aside and reaffirm that commitment, and then point out the decaying skeleton of Irina just the other side of the fence, her bones picked clean by zombies and scavengers, killed by runner-zombies just ninety seconds after saying her tearful good-byes to them, Fyodor locking the gate behind her and wishing her good-luck.

  There were no remains of Tanya to show anyone, and the digital cameras on which images of her were stored had long ceased to power up. That was back when they thought taking pictures would give them something to look back on in the future, when the zombies were gone. Back when they all thought the plague was a reason for a party.

  The trio made their way down the street cautiously, Fyodor in the lead with Nikita in the middle. They were almost three kilometers out from the dacha, walking alongside a string of curbside shopping centers and taking pains to check through the storefront windows of each as they moved. For whatever reason, the undead could remain immobile for long periods of time, just standing in place, or lying against a wall. Human sounds, the steps of the living, would rouse them in a heartbeat, so one had to take precautions in areas where the zombies assumed people might be.

  “This has all been picked clean, Vasily,” Fyodor said as they came to an intersection and scanned the open space for the undead, the store fronts all broken open. “We’re going to have to walk farther if we’re going to find anything.”

  Fyodor stroked his beard and looked around. He hated having a beard, but procuring razor blades was one of the things that rarely occurred to him while he was out foraging for supplies. He kept the growth clipped close with scissors, but for some reason he was still drawn to stroke it as if it were some obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  “What are you thinking, Fyodor?” Vasily asked.

  Fyodor shrugged and watched as Nikita slowly walked to the edge of the sidewalk curb, moving her shotgun in small arcs as if she were searching for something at which to shoot. She might have some talent at this, he thought.

  “I’m thinking we need bicycles, Vasily, but I haven’t a clue where any might be.”

  “What for?”

  “So we can cover more ground more quickly without making any noise,” Fyodor said matter-of-factly. “It’s not like there’s any gasoline anymore. Not that you can drive anywhere with all the fucking car wrecks on the roads, but if we’re going to have to keep going farther out each time, we’re going to need to expose ourselves for less time.”

  “Bicycles,” Vasily said, letting the word just hang in the air and sag under its weight, as if such a contraption were an indicator of poverty or powerlessness. He looked around the intersection, paused a moment on Nikita, who had made her way off the roadway and was poking through some rubble near a crumbled wall, and turned to Fyodor.

  “How long until they nuke us?”

  Fyodor shrugged. “We’re near Moscow. I think that probably still means something to them, even if it’s mostly burnt to the ground. But if somebody doesn’t figure out what’s going on with these things, and how to kill them or cure them or whatever the fuck you have to do to them, well, it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Unless the dead walkers get to them first,” Vasily said with a sniff of a laugh He glanced at Nikita. “Look at that girl. Nineteen years old, perfect body, tight ass, and I’m tired of fucking her already.”

  Fyodor rolled his eyes. “You fucked her this morning before we came out here.”

  “Only I wasn’t fucking her, not in my mind, anyway. I was with that redheaded coat check girl at the club who would never give me the time of day, only a stub for my coat,” Vasily said. “I wonder where she is these days.”

  “You’re not missing anything with Karena,” Fyodor said, focusing on Nikita as she walked across the street, her shotgun held at her waist, ready for use.

  “You didn’t.”

  Fyodor barely shrugged. “I did. A couple of times. She’s a sloppy fuck.”

  “You never told me you banged her.”

  “Yeah, well, it was before you told me you wanted to, so I didn’t want to prejudice you.”

  “Looking out for me?”

  “Not really,” Fyodor said. “You didn’t miss anything.”

  Vasily stood there in silence for a moment and watched as Nikita looked through the broken store front windows on the other side of the street. “How did you get in Karena’s pants? I tried every time I was there.”

  “It was easy, Vasily, I was a little drunk and she was chatting me up about my coat and I asked her if she wore panties with words on them, and she said all panties had words on them and then I said -- before she could explain, because I knew she meant the label -- that I had seen a catalog with a pair of panties in it that said ‘Wild in Bed’ and I asked her if girls who wore such underwear were subject to truth in advertising laws.”

  “And that worked?” Vasily asked.

  “I nailed her in the back of the coatroom twenty minutes later,” Fyodor said. “I keep telling you that the way into a girl’s pants is through misdirection. If you talk about a girl’s underwear with a girl who will talk about her underwear, both of you are talking about fucking, not underwear. You’ve just got to recognize the indicator of interest in you. All women who are interested in you do this, send you a signal that they’re into you, and if you know what you’re doing, you can
figure out what they’re about pretty quickly and then it’s just about negotiating the time frame.”

  Fyodor paused and stared at Nikita as she walked to the other side of the intersection. “Vasily, all women want to fuck, it’s in their DNA just like it’s in ours, they just want to fuck the right guy at the right time, and you have to know how to make them think you’re that guy and that time is now. It’s not foolproof, but you get to a point where you can tell which girls are fuckable and which aren’t.”

  Suddenly Fyodor noticed Nikita jumping up and down, pointing to a hole in a building on the other corner of the street. She turned and waved at him, urging him and Vasily to come to her.

  “She’s excited about something,” Vasily said, his voice a monotone.

  “Not the size of your dick if her silence this morning means anything.”

  Vasily smiled. “I’m going to guess it’s not a bag of dry dog food we can moisten with rain water.”

  Fyodor laughed out loud, a belly laugh he hadn’t experienced in many weeks, and he realized that mirth and happiness were not lost in the new world of the zombie apocalypse, that a friend could still make you laugh with a comeback quip. Nikita was jumping off her toe-tips, pointing to her side, the smile on her face wide, a jubilant look. Whatever she had just discovered changed everything in her life, made it somehow better, made it worth telling Fyodor and Vasily about.

  And then three runner zombies erupted from around the corner and tackled Nikita to the ground, one of them immediately biting into her shoulder. At the same moment Nikita’s last dying impulse was to squeeze the trigger on her shotgun, the recoil from the blast causing it to jump from her hand and skitter across the sidewalk, the shot pellets briefly pinging off the wall of a nearby building. If she screamed, it was drowned out by the blast of the gun, and, anyway, an instant later she was inert flesh on the sidewalk being torn apart by the undead.

  The two men glanced at each other briefly before raising their weapons and firing on the walking dead, a round from the Desert Eagle splintering the head of a middle-aged male zombie while Vasily’s shotgun bursts swept the other two off Nikita’s body and into the gutter along the sidewalk, where the body of a young man twitched for a few moments as the death seeped out of his living corpse. Fyodor walked quickly to Nikita’s body and knelt down, slipping his pistol into his waistband and grabbing the idle shotgun from the ground. He stood up, aimed at the girl’s head, and disintegrated it with a blast from the weapon.