Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  “What a waste,” Fyodor said, looking down the roads connected at the intersection, scanning for the inevitable arrival of a shuffling horde of undead. He had no idea why gunshots attracted them with such intensity, but it was a fact of modern life that they did.

  Vasily took a few steps down the road to where Nikita had been pointing and stopped. His shotgun sagged in his hands at what he saw.

  “You’re not going to believe this, Fyodor,” Vasily said, “but somebody blew a hole in the side of the bank since we were last through here.”

  Fyodor walked up alongside Vasily and stared at the crumble of rubble, the interior of the bank’s vault exposed. Fyodor walked up to the edge of it and looked into the shadowy darkness. Coins and cash were scattered everywhere amid the broken masonry, a small fortune for a person in a modern 21st Century nation. Fyodor turned and looked over his shoulder at Nikita’s body and then glanced at Vasily.

  “Probably the most cash she’d ever seen in her life,” Vasily said.

  “It’s not even good for toilet paper,” Fyodor said.

  “Or eating.”

  Fyodor laughed flatly. “We better get out of here before more dead show up.”

  Just then they heard the booming of another round of artillery fire, the sky above them rent apart by the projectiles as they burrowed through the air. Several seconds of silence passed before the explosions reverberated back to them. Vasily and Fyodor turned and faced each other.

  “The army’s retreating,” Fyodor said, letting the words hang in the air. They both knew what that meant.

  “We’re going to need more vodka and another girl,” Vasily said, nodding down the road, his voice flat, the words emitting only facts.

  “This world can kiss my ass good-bye, but it’s going to do it on my terms,” Fyodor said, the two of them listening as another round of artillery shells sluiced through the air, “when I’m drunk and laid.”

  The Undeath of Rob Zombie

  Norman, Oklahoma - Day 199

  Robert Sebastian Colfax had been thirty-four-years old the day Marguerite Rosario Del Rio bit him on the calf. She had been undead for almost sixteen weeks at that point, a janitorial team member who cleaned the Catlett Music Hall on the University of Oklahoma campus five days a week. She had been bitten by John Kennedy Creighton, an undergraduate student with an undecided major but a more than a passing interest in the oboe. Marguerite had bled to death after stumbling away from Creighton and hiding in a janitorial supply closet.

  Creighton had been killed minutes later by a state trooper. John Creighton’s body had been burned with hundreds of others in a pit dug in the football field. In the confusion of the battle for the campus, nobody had thought to look for the third-generation Mexican woman, and she had undied in the closet and awoken to living death. She had no concept of time in the closet, sitting there against the wall in complete darkness, never making a single move to stand up and explore the oven-hot room she was in.

  And then the door opened and Rob Colfax and Claire Benoit shined a flashlight into the room, neither of them concerned there might be an undead third-generation Mexican janitor waiting patiently for the opportunity to taste living flesh. So unconcerned about the prospect of a zombie janitor in the closet were Rob and Claire that Rob stepped into the closet and shined the light up, above the undead body of Marguerite, playing the beam across the shelves of cleaning supplies.

  “Shit, nothing,” Rob said.

  And then he felt the pair of hands grab his right calf followed quickly by the bite of teeth. He yelled.

  “What the fuck!”

  He shined the beam down on Marguerite as she shook her head back-and-forth like a thresher shark tearing at a fish, biting flesh, blood trickling down his leg and foaming around Marguerite’s lips. Marguerite’s undead life ended two seconds later, as Rob quickly pulled his Smith & Wesson .357 revolver from its holster and squeezed a round into her skull, splitting it open and spattering brain matter everywhere. The sound of the shot deafened both Rob and Claire.

  Rob stumbled backward out of the closet and into Claire, who had her hands up over her ears too late to muffle the sound of the pistol and just in time for her to lose her balance and fall down when Rob bumbled into her. She hit the ground hard, grimacing as she landed on her tailbone. She stared at the bloody bite on Rob’s right calf muscle and then looked past him into the dark closet. Rob looked down at Claire and then turned the beam of the flashlight back into the closet, where the deathless, lifeless corpse of Marguerite Rosario Del Rio lay on its back, a pool of long-since dried blood blackening the floor around her body. Rob worked the beam up to the un-living woman’s body and trained it on her split-open head, one of her eyeballs having been blown out of her skull and hanging by fibers to the socket, the contents of her skull moist.

  Rob looked down at Claire, holstered his pistol and extended his arm. “Come on, let me help you up.”

  Instead of taking his hand, Claire pointed to the bite indentation on Rob’s calf: it was deep, the flesh torn and seeping blood, but the zombie hadn’t actually bitten anything out of him. Rob eyed the bite for a few seconds before shrugging off his backpack and rustling through it for a bottle of tincture of iodine, which he unscrewed and began dribbling over the wound. There was a rumor making its way through the town that not everyone bitten became infected and that iodine could help. Nobody knew anyone who had tried, but nearly everyone still alive carried some sort of iodine solution or pills.

  “What the fuck was she doing in there?” Rob said as he pasted a large square Band-Aid brand bandage to his wound. “I mean, what the fucking fuck was a fucking zombie doing just waiting in a supply closet? That fucking doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

  Rob shook his head in total disbelief. He wanted to cry at the unfairness of it all: he was careful when out scavenging and didn’t make “rookie” mistakes. There was no reason for a zombie to be sitting in a closet waiting for someone to open it. None. That’s not what zombies did.

  “You okay to walk?” Claire asked.

  Rob nodded. “Yeah, it’s not that bad. It looks worse than it feels.”

  “I think we should call this a day and head back.”

  Rob muttered a small, plaintive laugh.

  “What?” Claire asked.

  “I can’t go back. Not now, not with this.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “No. I can’t. They’ll put me in the quarantine yard and wait me out, and if I turn into a zombie, they’ll kill me.”

  Claire tucked some strands of hair behind each ear. “Yeah. If you become a zombie. Do you want to become a zombie and have us not kill you?”

  Rob laughed a chuckle of genuine mirth at that. He smiled. “I don’t want to become a zombie and I don’t want anyone to kill me either way, to be honest with you.”

  “Maybe the iodine will kill the infecting agent?” Claire said unconvincingly.

  Rob shrugged. “Maybe. But I’m going to stay here for the next day or two and wait it out. I’ve got a couple of Power Bars and some water, so I’ll be okay. If I turn, well, I won’t turn in the yard, so I’ll be out here and you can hunt me down like free-range zombie. If I don’t turn, I’ll just show up in a couple of days and knock on the door.”

  “They’ll still put you in the yard,” Claire said matter-of-factly.

  “Yeah, sure, but if I don’t turn dead in the next day or so, I won’t turn dead, then, either, so I won’t be out in the yard wondering about my fate.”

  Claire stared at him for a long moment and Rob looked down at the bite wound. Nobody had ever recovered. They’d both heard stories, rumors really, of people who’d been bitten and not transformed, but neither they nor anyone they knew had ever known such a person. In the world of the undead, being bitten meant becoming one of the living dead.

  “Go, I’ll be okay,” Rob said. “I’m sure the iodine will help.”

  Claire nodded sadly, looked him in the eyes, a look Rob interpreted as f
arewell, and she backed a few steps away from him, trying to smile confidently. Rob nodded his head and shouldered his backpack, all the while watching as Claire made her way down the hall to the stairwell. He had to watch her, she was armed with a 9 mm Colt Defender and he knew from shooting with her that she’d be able to plug him in the skull from inside 15 yards with ease.

  After the door had creaked shut, Rob slid down against the wall and put his head in his hands, tears of disbelief finally welling in his eyes. Fucking zombies. Why the fuck was a zombie chick hiding in a closet in the music hall? What the fuck did her zombie brain think it was doing? It made no sense, and the unfairness of it all bewildered Rob into a teary rage of whimpers, shouts and weeping. He didn’t want to become a zombie. He wanted to go back to the house, open a basement-cold beer and make love to Barbara Zane, his girlfriend of two months since he and Claire had rescued her from the overnight lock-up in the Norman Police Department. She’d been arrested for DUI the night before police had been ordered to the outskirts of town with various fire departments and the nearby National Guard unit to form a skirmish line against a horde of undead coming down North Flood Avenue from Oklahoma City. That was three months ago.

  After a while, he got hold of himself, wiped his eyes dry and blew his nose out on the floor, wiping it with the back of his hand and then onto the seat of his shorts. Why hadn’t he worn jeans today? It was only 104 Fahrenheit outside, and a dry heat at that. He shook his head and made his way out of the building and along the sidewalk running parallel to College Avenue, strolling beneath the shade trees and turning absent-mindedly onto West Boyd Street, past a series of cars frozen in a multiple rear-end car crash. He crossed the empty street and almost forgot that he needed to be aware of zombies - this area was frequently overrun with them (former students turned undead, Rob and others figured they came back to campus out of habit) - and walked up to the carcass of The Library, a once-popular bar and restaurant that had been ransacked and looted months ago. It was full of broken glass and overturned tables now, the front doors long-ago pried off, the windows broken. Rob missed the quiet comfort of the place on a weeknight in the summer, when there were fewer students to deal with and it was easier to get a seat at the bar and watch television over a beer.

  Zombies. Why were there even zombies in the first place? How was that even possible? Why didn’t the re-animated dead bodies continue to deteriorate and become dust in the wind? What made them walk and seek out living humans? And why? Zombies were like mosquitoes in that they seemed to serve no observable purpose in the ecosystem except to feed and spread disease: the world would miss neither if either suddenly blinked out of existence.

  “Why?” Rob shouted up into the sky at the cumulus clouds rolling by.

  “Why what?” said a voice from behind him, and Rob spun quickly, his hand falling to his holster.

  A man in his fifties was standing behind him with a boy of about ten, both of them wearing cowboy hats. The man idly held a Winchester rifle in his hands, more-or-less not-exactly pointed at Rob’s gut, while the boy had a small .22 caliber Ruger pistol in a hip holster. Rob smiled and moved his hand away from his gun.

  “Was just asking God why this happened,” Rob said, shrugging, scanning the area for the sudden appearance of the walking dead.

  “Get an answer?” the man asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Need any help?”

  Rob shook his head. “Nah, just picking through the bones one more time looking for stuff that might’ve been overlooked. You?”

  The man tapped the brim of his hat with his pointer finger and made a brief nod. “Just passing through. You be careful, there’s a horde of about ten-thousand dead-ones out by Westheimer Airport. No idea why, but they’re strung out like they’re waiting for something to come and land.”

  “Thanks,” Rob said, watching as the man and boy walked down the street, each of them turning their heads to constantly scan the properties lining the street, looking for the undead. They turned a corner and Rob was alone.

  He walked up onto the disheveled patio of The Library and sat down on a chair. He ate a Power Bar, drank some water, and stared around at the world. He wished there were some way to charge his iPod so he could listen to his Life Sux mix, a playlist he had started when his last long-term pre-zombie-apocalypse girlfriend had broken up with him. He’d edited it many times since then, adding two other short term girlfriend specific songs to the mix, but the playlist had long since morphed into a general purpose “bad day” mix: until Barbara Zane had come into his life, he hadn’t had a girlfriend in more than a year. The women who had originally inspired its creation never crossed his mind when he listened to it, and today would have been a perfect day to listen to it while drinking a six-pack of beer, seeing as it would likely be his last chance to drink beer as an alive human.

  His calf throbbed with a dull warm pulse, and he looked down at the bandage. Not everybody got zombie-itis that got bit, did they? Someone had to be immune. Someone had to be resistant. Somehow, there had to be at least a natural chance that the disease didn’t get passed on to the bitten, right? Some people could survive an infection, he thought, because not even the plagues in Europe in the Dark Ages killed everyone. Right? Some people survived. Somewhere, someone had to be working on a cure. Right?

  “Not in this town,” he said under his breath, looking around for anyone who might be in earshot.

  The town was quiet, though. Only bird noises and the sound of the wind. If there was anyone in the country - the world - working on a cure, nobody he knew had any knowledge of it. There was nobody on the roads, nobody roaming the land, nobody with knowledge of anything outside a day’s walk of Norman, Oklahoma.

  Nobody but maybe that man and kid in the cowboy hats.

  He sat up in his chair and realized he had been crying, and wiped the tear streams from his face. Shit, he thought, two people passing through town and he hadn’t bothered to ask them anything about the outside world, or even if they were from somewhere farther away than a day’s round-trip. He left the bar’s remains and walked in the direction of the cowboy hat duo, feeling a dull ache forming in his calf, as if he were succumbing to a cramp, tightening up, becoming less limber. He shook it for a second and increased his gait.

  He turned onto South Flood Street and began walking north, the last point he had seen the cowboy-hat-wearing man and boy. There was nothing on the road aside from abandoned cars and skeletal remains. He walked cautiously on the side of the street until he reached the intersection with Main Street, which was clogged with vehicles, abandoned by owners long-since dead or undead. Nobody who fled lived, so far as he knew. Anybody who had ventured out in search of a safer haven had either been killed by zombies, become zombies, or been killed by the military or law enforcement in the last ditch attempts to enforce curfews and quarantines.

  Nothing had worked. Somehow, the zombies always got through, and only those who had hunkered down had survived. And not all of them, either. Rob looked up and down Main Street: the storefronts were all cracked open, long since looted and pillaged for anything and everything. He had been among those doing the pillaging and looting back after it was obvious neither the police nor National Guard were coming back.

  He suddenly felt faint, a hot flash coursing through his body, the taste of vomit at the back of his throat. He pulled a water bottle out of his backpack and drank deeply, the luke-warm water doing nothing to cool him down. How long had it been since he’d been bitten? It had been late morning then, and now the sun was setting. Where had the afternoon gone? He looked around Main Street again: this had been a bustling city of more than 100,000 before the zombie plague, and now it was empty. Where were the people?

  His fevered mind told him they had gone somewhere, that a hundred-thousand people don’t just vanish or turn into zombies that vanish. And, there weren’t that many corpses in the town, though they were everywhere. Maybe there was an escape?

  He stumbled through town f
or several blocks, increasingly feeling like he was drunk. He was losing his balance and his ability to see clearly. The world was taking on a fog-like shroud. He felt almost good in the same way as a late-afternoon beer buzz at a barbecue cook-out. After a while, he stumbled onto the grassy lawn of Wells Andrews Park. He stared around at the high grass and didn’t realize it hadn’t been mowed in months. But he knew where he was, and for no reason he could know he made his way to the amphitheater. He was burning hot, and he had run out of water on the way. But he wasn’t thirsty. Or hungry. Just ... sleepy.

  He made his way into the amphitheater and walked up into the seating area, not looking for anything, no longer aware of anything, just trying to find a spot to sit and sleep it off. He found a spot in the lower left-third of the seating area and plopped down unceremoniously. He wriggled out of his backpack and stared up into the sky, the sun nearly set, the sky filled with a riot of violets and indigos, still waiting for the arrival of the stars. After a moment, he saw the first star and shivered. He could feel the sweat on his body pooling. Nothing was right. He was drunk. Mightily so, and everything in him said “sleep.”

  And so he closed his eyes for the last time as a member of the living.

  The Third Time is the Harm

  Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin - Day 654

  Milton Kempf worked his way along the hillside, keeping his eyes on the band of shuffling undead trudging down the road. For months, little groups of zombies had been making their way into Chippewa Falls, slowly forming in the Northern Wisconsin State Fairgrounds into a gaggle that resembled the swaying of tall grass on a windy day. Milton had no way of knowing why that location drew them. At first, he surmised it had to do with the proximity to the Calvary, Hope and Forest Hill cemeteries and all of the potential new recruits in their graves. And then he had made his way around those cemeteries and realized not a single grave had been disturbed. Anyone buried in them was still below ground. Whatever had killed and resurrected the undead had had no effect on the previously dead.