Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  “Come to think on it, you ain’t ate nothin’, so why would you?” He walked away, listening to her shuffle to the front of the cage and bump into the bars.

  The last few months had been strange months for Trace. Strange not in the sense that he’d had to learn to live with zombies, that had taken some time to get used to, but strange in the sense that he had realized he had an overwhelming fascination to see what made them tick. Or, more accurately, die. Initially, he had taken to figuring out how to shoot them to death, quickly concluding that only headshots actually finished them off. Anything else left something that could still move.

  But he and Dag had also realized that ammunition might get difficult to come by, so shooting was limited to actual necessity, and they had taken to capturing the undead and finding other ways to kill them. Zombies could be burned, drowned, and decapitated. Poison didn’t kill them, although it did fundamentally alter the undead’s ability to function, usually by blinding them. Injecting them with various chemicals produced similar results, but only acids seemed to incapacitate them.

  He stopped briefly at the burn pit, a twenty-by-twenty square hole that was ten feet deep. Inside it were the burnt remains of a dozen of the walking dead, maybe a few more, that had been put through some experiment or another by Trace. Several of the undead hadn’t actually been dead-dead when put in the pit, and Trace had found their screams... of pain? ... to be curious and disturbing. Clearly, the undead didn’t want to die, and they felt some sense of pain, at least when lit afire. When you shot them or chopped something off, they seemed to barely notice the wound and just kept coming at you: it was the damnedest thing.

  Trace heard whine of Dag’s 2005 Honda CRF250X dirt bike and turned to watch him ride in over the hill on the other side of the lake. There should have been two whines, as Mike rode a 2004 XR400R, but Trace just watched as Dag rode up to him and killed the engine, slipped off the side and steadied the bike on its stand.

  “Some fucking Army sergeant zombie got Mike while we were poking around Rucker,” Dag said, fishing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lighting one quickly. “Fuckin’ thing came outta nowhere and fucking bit a hole in his head. I heard him scream, turned around, and shot the fucker.”

  Dag brushed the hair out of his eyes and tucked some loose strands behind each ear. “Then I put a round through Mike’s skull and just got the fuck outta there.”

  Dag took furious puffs on his cigarette. “On the way out, I noticed the whole fucking army was hanging out at Cairns field, just moaning and shuffling and whatever. When the hell did they come back?”

  “How many?” Trace asked.

  Dag shrugged. “I dunno, a couple thousand, at least. They were just standing there, where they haven’t been in weeks.”

  Trace scratched his forehead. “We’re gonna have to see if we can make these things talk.”

  “Talk? You’re lucky if you can listen hard enough to figure out if they’re saying ‘brains,’” Dag said.

  “Yeah. But one of the things I’ve learned is that they know what they’re doing even if I haven’t figured out exactly what it is they’re trying to do. They know to come at us, not dogs nor cattle nor horses nor nothin’ else,” Trace said. “They know we’re what they’re looking for, and we know it ‘cause they’s lookin’ fer us.”

  Dag shrugged, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and spoke a cloud of words. “Trace, I don’t think we’re ever going to find out why there are fucking zombies or what they want. The world’s gone and I don’t think it’s ever coming back.”

  Trace looked down into the burn pit and thought for a moment about the 40ish housewife zombie that he had burned alive just to see what zombies did when on fire. He had doused her in charcoal lighter fluid and then lit her clothes on fire before pushing her into the pit, which he had already lined with dead branches and scraps of wood. The ropes around her hands and ankles had burned off and she had gotten to her feet and thrashed about in the pit as the branches caught fire, but she eventually fell onto her side and burned to ashes as he tossed in more firewood. She had been the first in the pit, and he had wondered what her life had been before she had been turned, what her kids had been like and if she had been happy.

  “Dag, it jes can’t be possible that the entire world is now zombies, that the entire fuckin’ planet is now filled with walking dead people who want to turn the rest of us who are living into zombies. I mean, what the fuck happens when everyone on the planet is a zombie? What do they eat? How do they live? What’s their purpose? Shit, we’re alive and we’re killing them, so you know we’re not the only ones.”

  “Yeah, but there’s now four of us and a couple thousand of them out there at Rucker. It’s probably like that everywhere. There’s not really much we can do.”

  Trace shrugged. They had only known Mark about six months, but still it hurt to lose a friend, and plain old living people were hard to come by anymore.

  “Sooner or later, Dag, we’re gonna have to figger out what the pattern with these things is, because there has to be one,” Trace said. “Until then, we keep capturing them and putting them through whatever tests we can think of. Eventually, we’ll find a way to kill them all in one big swoop, jes like how they all got made in one big fashion. We know we can kill them, it’s only a matter of time until we figure out the easiest way to kill them on a large scale.”

  “Trace, we’re just a few guys living in the middle of Alabama. We’re not the government or some huge corporation: we don’t have any assets. Even if we figure out that diesel fuel mixed with arsenic kills zombies when they breathe the smoke from it when it’s burning, well, hell, we don’t have diesel fuel or arsenic or any way to get anything we might come up with to spread it on a large scale. We’re fucked, Trace.

  “We’re fucked, and we’re going to have to live in hiding the rest of our lives.”

  “That might be true right now, Dag, but you can’t know what tomorrow holds, because it wasn’t too long ago that the world didn’t have zombies,” Trace said. “If that can change that quickly, you better sure as hell believe it can change again. And I don’ see no reason not to keep killing them before they kill us. I’ll kill a hundred, a thousand, a million, all of them. Or they’ll kill me. But I’m never gonna stop killing them or trying to figure how to kill ‘em.

  “Dag, man, we used to change oil every day and rotate tires. We used to want something meaningful to do with our lives other than go to work, pay bills, and fucking hate on chicks who wouldn’t give us the time of day. Now we don’t have any of that shit. No work. No bills. No fucking chicks thinking they’re too good for us. We’ve got a calling. We’ve got something to live to do. For the first time in our lives, there’s meaning. “

  Dag sucked the last smoke out of his cigarette and dropped it to the ground.

  “Our lives have ‘meaning?’ Shit, Trace, I can’t even fuck Marcia Brewer on the weekends anymore after we been drinking for a couple of hours at the bar. I can’t eat hamburgers and French fries for lunch. I can’t go to the movies. I can’t do anything, anymore. I never really hated my life, Trace, I just wanted a little more than I had.

  “Now, I got nothin’.”

  Trace smiled slightly. “And when we kill the zombies, Dag, and you get back all that; you’ll feel like a king. Trust me: zombies ain’t the future, we are. And we’ll be some of the people who fought back, who won the war. Shit, we might even end up heroes.”

  Dag cocked his head and rolled his eyes. “Trace, I ain’t never cared to be a hero. I just wanted to live a normal life.”

  And then Trace laughed boomingly, suddenly realizing his friend had been holding out on him about something important to him. “And, shit, Dag, Marcia Brewer’s living in Daleville with her brother on the second floor of some apartment the flight students used to rent. And she’s skinny, now. I thought you always thought she was just a good fat fuck, I didn’t realize you liked her.”

  Trace laughed again and slapped Dag
on the back. “Hell, we can drive down there tomorra mornin’ and see if she remembers you.

  “Now, let’s go see if this fat-fucker I’m drainin’ has bled out yet. I’m kinda curious how much blood they need to stay alive.”

  Comedy of Horrors

  Plano, Texas - Day 90

  Jessica Heatherington stared down the barrel of her H&K P30 pistol and watched the final zombie collapse to the ground, its head blown open by the weapon's .40 caliber round. Behind her, her teenage daughter Belle was breathing out tears in Morse code, fear of imminent death having paralyzed her after the three zombies had broken down the front door of their home and sauntered in. For a few moments, there was no sound but Belle's sobbing and the scrabbling sounds of Bob Crighton on the tile of the foyer as the last moments of his zombie death-life eked out of him.

  Jessica looked over her shoulder at Belle and saw her daughter standing still, her arms slack. Jessica wasn't sure what she should do: smile? Shrug? Nod? The imminent danger was over. But Belle needed some assurance that only a parent could give, and Jessica couldn’t rely on the age-old stock admonition: monsters were now real, so she couldn't very well say they weren't.

  "Everything’s going to be okay. Throw some clothes in a backpack and get ready to go, we have to get out of here, now," Jessica said, her voice chirpy with adrenalin.

  She turned and looked at her daughter. "Come on, we need to get moving. It's not safe here anymore."

  "Dad was right."

  Jessica winced inside. Just days ago, her ex-husband had tried to convince them to come with him out of the city, that it wouldn't be safe once the plague got into town. But she wouldn't listen to him, telling him the police and government would keep them safe. He, on the other hand, had never made her feel safe. He had always been too cautious, too uncertain. He was a poor handyman, unskilled with automotive repairs, and as far from an outdoorsman as a Texan man could be. On the other hand, he knew how to cook, could pair wine with a meal, and could talk about the most obscure details of pop music and current literature with anyone. He was a whiz at cocktail parties.

  Which is why she had divorced him after starting an affair with Bob Crighton. Crighton was raised a country boy, hunted and fished, followed college and pro sports, and could fix anything. He was the consummate man’s man. He was now lying on the floor of the foyer with a bullet in his neck. Bob had said everything would be fine if they stayed put, that the government would handle it, and then had gone out to fish the day before and come home with a bandage on his left arm.

  Now her ex-husband Ken was safe in their cabin near Lake Bridgeport with her dog Beau (she had begged Ken to adopt the dog for her years ago, and it had repaid her by preferring Ken’s companionship), a safe full of weapons and six months of canned goods. He always said you had to be prepared for the worst, but she had always taken that to be the insurance salesman inside of him talking. The boring, nine-to-five working, bicycle-riding, online-poker loving "I prefer single malts" man with whom she had grown bored during sixteen years of marriage. She had wanted something more than his routine ordinariness, and Bob Crighton had been sitting next to her on a barstool one night while she was out with her girlfriends and had provided the spark she thought she needed to get through the second half of her life with the happiness she felt she deserved.

  But that spark had faded after a couple of months, and she had found herself trapped in a new relationship with a balding, slightly-less-than-bright "nice guy" with his own ex-wife issues. When Jessica had found out that Bob's marriage had ended because he had cheated on his wife, Jessica had realized the mistake she had made in filing for divorce, but pride wouldn’t let her admit she had been wrong and apologize to Ken and ask for another chance. Ken had settled into his own new single life in the cabin, having sold his insurance business back to the company and written a novel, the dream he had always talked about over weekend cocktails but had never begun. Now, Ken had an agent in Manhattan who told Ken he was certain he could sell his manuscript.

  When the plague had started spreading across the nation several weeks earlier, Ken had urged her to let Belle come stay with him, but Jessica had refused because school was still in session and Bob had convinced her "the plague" was just a media scare story. When people had started wearing surgical masks around town, she had wondered what the hell was going on, remembering stories she had seen on television from years earlier when people in Asia had gone nuts over some bird flu scare.

  When the plague hit Dallas last week, Ken had driven in from the cabin and begged both of them to come with him. He had traded in his Acura for a used tan GMC Hummer, which he had left idling in the driveway of their home in the cul de sac of Melanie Lane.

  "Just grab a bag and stuff it with some t-shirts, underwear and jeans," Ken had said, "and get in the truck. I need to get you guys out of here before the government shuts down the roads and quarantines everybody. You’re not going to be safe here."

  Jessica had stood in the foyer looking at her ex-husband and thought for a moment that he knew what he was doing, so assured, self-possessed and calm. Had he always been this way?

  "Mom, come on, let's do it," Belle had said from behind her. "We can always come back if it turns out to be nothing."

  Jessica had almost said yes.

  "No, honey, we need to just stay here and let the authorities take care of it," Jessica had said.

  But the authorities hadn't taken care of it. Just like Ken had said, they'd closed the city and quarantined everyone to their houses. At first, there were constant police patrols, the city government even using fire engines and ambulances to drive through neighborhoods and use bullhorns to keep the people inside their homes. She hadn't seen any authorities in two days now. She'd woken up before dawn that morning and found Bob not sleeping next to her and made her way downstairs to find the back door open and the patio furniture overturned.

  By mid-morning, some of her neighbors had loaded up their cars and driven off, but she and Belle had stayed indoors and watched cable news, trying to make sense of the coverage of the plague. None of the anchors or reporters actually used the word "zombie," but the images of the infected people certainly made them out to be such creatures. And then the power went out and she and Belle had no way of finding out what was going on in the world other than looking through the windows of their home.

  Bob showed up before sunset the next day, his pajamas covered in blood and mucus, two other infected people with him, a twentyish man in a Quick Lube oil change uniform, a barbed-wire tattoo curling up from his left arm and around the bottom of his neck, and a middle-aged blonde woman wearing a lab coat and a torn skirt. Jessica watched them come onto the lawn and try to open the front door of the house before they started circling the house, trying to find a way in through the other doors.

  Jessica got her pistol from the safe in the bedroom - it had been a gift from Ken on the last wedding anniversary they had celebrated (she had gotten him a silver money clip with his initials engraved on it) - and told Belle to stay in her bedroom. She had fallen asleep on the couch after watching Bob and his new pals shuffle off down the road, but the splintering of the front door this morning had awoken her and Belle at the same time, and each had run to the foyer to investigate.

  And there was Bob with a crowbar, blood-infused drool trickling down his chin, staggering into the foyer in his pajamas and bare feet. He was pale, too, as if the blood had been drained from him. The look in his eyes was a mixture of sleep and hate. Curiously, she thought she heard him moan "brains" as he lurched into the house, the other two groaning behind him as they filed in.

  "MOM!" Belle shrieked from the stairs as the zombies approached.

  Jessica raised the pistol and put a round into the wall of the house, the recoil of the pistol surprising her. She pointed it at Bob again and squeezed the trigger, the bullet piercing his chest and staggering him momentarily.

  “Shit,” she said under her breath, trying to remember all of the thing
s Ken had tried to teach her about shooting. Ken had told her he wanted them to go a range on a regular basis as something for them to do together as a bonding element for their relationship. It was to be a new version of “date night,” and she had almost rolled her eyes at the idea that Ken had thought shooting a gun before cocktails would turn her on.

  The zombies moved through the foyer and she took several small steps backward, now looking through the sights of the pistol at Bob’s head. She pulled the trigger and sank a bullet straight through his mouth, splintering his neck bone and collapsing him to the floor.

  Jessica stepped back a few more feet, paused, and fired four more rounds at the other two, watching with fascinated horror at the eruptions of blood from the backs of their skulls. Her ears rang from the gunshots. Bob wasn’t dead, but all he seemed able to do at the moment was move his head slightly as blood pooled out of his neck on the floor.

  "Move it, Belle, we've got to see if we can get to your father," Jessica said.

  She felt weird having said those words. She now realized she needed Ken, needed him in a way she never knew she had needed a man before: he would know what to do. But, then, he had always known what to do, she had just never wanted to do it his way.

  "Five minutes and we're out of here," Jessica said. "Get moving."

  Twenty minutes later, she and Belle were backing the Toyota Land Cruiser out of the driveway. The sun was up and the sky was littered with a scud layer of clouds below a high overcast sky. A few tendrils of black smoke reached into the air from the direction of downtown, but she wouldn't be heading that way so she shrugged off the significance. Minutes later, she braked the truck to a stop at the corner of Sailmaker Lane and Mission Ridge Road. A five-car pile-up filled the intersection and automobile fluids pooled around the vehicles.