Keyshawn and Kevin walked up the stairwell and pushed through the door onto the roof of the four-story walk-up. The smell of deer meat cooking on a charcoal grill spun around them in the churning wind as they entered the fresh frozen evening air. Keyshawn’s mouth watered and Kevin looked up at him.
“Smells good,” Kevin said. “Ain’t never had no deer before.”
“Me neither.”
Keyshawn walked to the edge of the roof and looked down into the shadow-darkened street below him, searching for any undead that might have caught the scent of the meat. Nothing but the lump of couple from the morning. He looked over the skyline of the city, the buildings becoming silhouettes against the blackening sky, and wondered if the lights would ever come back on in them. A year ago, he hadn’t realized how many stars were in the night sky, hadn’t known they were drowned out by the lights of the city, and had never made the connection why he had never seen many stars before. But the night sky was beautiful.
Life had been hard before the zombies, but he had always been able to get an order of fast food or a slice of pizza. Somebody always had a joint to smoke. Fortys were cheap at the corner store. Nobody expected him to put his life on the line every day finding something to eat, even though he had put his life on the line all-too-often. But now he had a girl to keep happy and a make-shift family to feed.
It was different, now. He put his life on the line for a reason, and it was always a good feeling to come back home with something for them, proof that he could do the job of providing for them: it made him feel like a man in a way he had never felt before, and Shacelia showed him a gratitude he’d never experienced from a woman before. What he did mattered, now.
Shacelia turned from the charcoal grill and grinned at him. “Smells good, don’t it?”
Keyshawn smiled and nodded. “It sure do.”
“You done good today, baby,” Shacelia said.
Words of affirmation. They filled his soul and made everything worth doing. Until he had started taking care of these people, he had never known what it was to be praised, to be appreciated for his ability. It felt good, and he wondered - almost wondered - why his father had never visited and why his mother had always gotten high. There had been a life for them that they had refused to take hold of and he had turned to the streets and the life it offered because it had a set of built-in friends and rules. Home life had never had anything to recommend it.
But now he had a family.
He stared up into the night sky and smelled the venison on the grill, his mouth watering. Family. The word turned through his mind in a way he had never thought of it. These people weren’t his kin, he wasn’t related to any of them, but they had come to mean more to him than any other grouping of people he had been apart of. They were family.
His family.
And he loved them.
Fight Club
Thatcher, Arizona - Day 483
Garth Davies held his katana before him and stared at the five undead shuffling toward him from the R&R Pizza Express parking area. A little more quickly than normal, he thought, as he watched them approach. He had lured them down West Thatcher Boulevard from the spot nearby the Infamous Bar and Grill, where they had been hanging out for several days. Former patrons called home to their watering hole of choice by some leftover memories buried deep in their zombie brains and activated as a potential hunting spot? He looked around for a sprinter zombie. You had to be careful about the sprinters. They came out of nowhere fast and took you down quick.
Not that he was worried. Just concerned. Bobby was in a homemade ghillie suit off to his left with an AR-15 rifle and Jose was behind the dumpster to his right with a Remington shotgun, although he was using a camcorder at the moment. Garth shrugged and adjusted the football shoulder pads, shaking them against his body and making sure they fit right. He was covered in sports padding: baseball catcher’s shin guards, rollerblading knee and elbow pads, and a skateboarding helmet on his head. You didn't want to take unnecessary chances with the undead.
The zombies closed on Garth and he whirled the blade before him, reassuring himself of the weapon’s balance point. The undead took no notice of the danger he posed, ignorant or uncaring of the blade Garth held. Bullets worked, but gunshots attracted more of them. Arrows worked, but none of them were any good with a bow. So, the katana. He had a 9mm Ruger just in case, too, but he kept that in its holster in the small of his back.
For the last few weeks they’d been scouting the town for loner zombies or small clusters of walking dead that could be busted up and the individuals taken down one-at-a-time. Each of them needed practice and there was nobody to teach them how to kill the undead, so it made sense to find singletons and gang up on them.
It had taken them a while to realize they were on their own, that after the police had disappeared and the National Guard had never shown up their safety was in their own hands. None of them was older than twenty-two and suddenly the future of the world was in their hands.
They also realized that the supply of ammunition was mostly locked up in gun stores, and getting in any of them would be tough. So far, it had been impossible as none of them had any explosives to blast off the reinforced doors on the gun shops they’d tried to enter.
So, they turned to swords of various kinds they had collected at Renaissance fairs over the years and realized they had no idea how to properly use them, not to mention that putting edges on them had been a steep learning curve. They had learned quickly that you couldn’t just swing them like baseball bats as the momentum would leave you off balance and exposed if you missed.
That’s how Ray Durham had gotten bitten their first time out at the end of last summer. There had just been three of the undead, and the group had them cornered out by Bark Avenue on the outskirts of town. Ray had moved in quickly, but with poor footing, his balance off. A fortyish woman wearing a grimy bra, jeans and athletic shoes had stepped forward toward him from out of the group, and Ray had swung. Missed. The sword tip had buried into the ground, and he had pulled it out in a panic, throwing himself off balance some more, and stumbling backward.
None of them had thought to be holding a firearm at that moment, and in the next instant, the woman had grabbed Ray and bitten him on the shoulder, blood oozing from around her mouth as she moved her head back and forth, sawing at the flesh. Garth had quickly pulled his Ruger out and put several rounds into the two undead men accompanying her. Jose had moved in on the undead woman and cut her right leg off. Both Ray and the zombie had fallen to the ground as a result, and Jose had buried his sword into the zombie’s head.
“Jesus, that was close,” Ray had said, massaging his shoulder wound. “I thought I was a goner.”
They had buried Ray the next morning in the woods behind Garth’s parent’s hunting lodge after Ray had died from the infection twelve hours later. They had been having a dinner of canned pork-and-beans when something had begun scratching at the back door.
“Probably a raccoon,” Bobby said.
Garth had walked over to the sink in the kitchen area and peered through the window and had been totally surprised at what he had seen pawing at the back door.
“Holy fuckin’ shit,” Garth had said, “Ray’s out back trying to get in.”
“No, no, no. We all saw him die,” Bobby had said, walking over to the sink and looking through the window at his undead friend.
“We’ve seen lots of people die.”
“But none of them came back to life.”
Jose gave him a queer look. “None? The whole state is full of dead people.
“Infected people,” Bobby had said. “News reports from the government all said it was a virus of some sort, not that it brought people back from the dead. I thought it just made them look like they were zombies.”
Jose and Garth regarded each other and turned to Bobby as one.
“Dude, really?” Garth had said. “It doesn’t put people to sleep for a while and then wake them up as zombie
s; it kills them dead and turns them into the undead.”
“He died. We buried him.”
Garth shrugged. “Who knows how it spreads? Could be lots of ways. But we now know being bitten is a way. So let’s not any of us get bitten going forward: Note to self.”
“Keep his attention on the back door,” Jose said, picking up his snub nose Smith & Wesson Model 42 and checking it to make sure it was full of five rounds.
“What are you going to do?” Bobby asked.
“Put Ray down for good before he attracts any more like him.”
Jose had gone out the front door and around the cabin, with Bobby and Garth watching through the kitchen window.
Jose came to a stop ten feet away from Ray.
“Hey, Ray,” Jose said.
Ray turned, groaned something beneath his breath, his thick tongue pushing out against his teeth, thick mucus oozing out of the corners of his mouth.
“Sorry, man,” Jose had said. He put a round in Ray’s head, and then they buried Ray again, only this time deeper and with a layer of rocks mid-way down.
Garth began stepping to his left, the sword held out before him, his eyes focused on the first zombie as it shuffled inexorably toward him, its eyes locked on his, full of rage. For a moment, Garth thought he saw a sense of something alive in the visage of the undead monster, as if it were calculating some course of action of its own. Garth changed his focus and watched the four behind the leader as they trudged toward him, each one separated by about three or four feet and in a ragged line that drifted to Garth’s right. Garth took another couple of steps left and watched the lead zombie separate further from the pack.
And then when the space between them had closed to ten feet, he took several purposeful, measured steps forward, lifting the sword higher, juking quickly left once more and striking the zombie’s neck quickly with a powerful slash, separating the undead man’s head in a spray of foul blood, the body collapsing to the ground while the head rolled off to the side.
Garth moved quickly to his left and took several small steps backward, watching the other zombies as they readjusted, oblivious to the loss of the first of them. The second in line was a girl in her late teens, her blonde hair grime-streaked and matted to her head. Her jaw had been dislocated at some point in the past and she had trouble opening it as she moved toward him. But still she moved toward him. Garth could sense his heart rate increase slightly. He had never killed someone so young before, and he felt bad for the girl until she made a feral snarl and small dribble of blood-flecked drool oozed out of the corner of her mouth. This was no girl; this was monster.
He moved toward her as he had the previous undead walker and sliced for the neck, but at the last instant the zombie’s stutter-walk had changed her position, altering the angle of attack from the blade. It cut only half-way into her, lodging deep into the girl’s neck bone, blood weakly trickling out onto her chest.
Don’t panic, he thought, and pulled the sword quickly out of the creature, changed his footing and counter-sliced from the other side of the girl with a level blow that finished the job. The girl’s head popped off and rolled on the ground while her body fell sideways, dark red-yellowish blood gurgling from her exposed neck arteries. Garth took several meaningful steps backward and surveyed the other three zombies as they came at him.
Garth glanced over at Jose, who was pointing the video camera at the girl’s body before turning it back on Garth. Garth smiled when Jose gave him a thumbs-up and mouthed “don’t get cocky, kid.”
“We got two runners coming at us up the side alley,” Bobby said flatly. “You got about twenty seconds to finish these three off before I have to shoot.”
“I got it. You wait,” Garth said.
The talking had made the zombies start looking around, now aware of more potential food. Garth rushed toward the closest one and easily cut its head off, yelling “the vorpal blade just went snicker-snack” as he paused to center himself on the next undead walker. He moved quickly toward it in measured steps, aware of his footing, keeping his feet near him to maintain a center of balance at all times
But the fourth zombie stuck its arms out toward him as he closed on it, as if it had maybe learned something from the deaths of the previous three and was attempting a defensive posture. Garth had already imagined such a scenario many times and changed his stance and swung the blade through the zombie’s right hand, stepped with the momentum of the sword and then chopped off the zombie’s left arm just short of its elbow. Blood oozed from the stumps but the zombie took almost no notice of the damage done to it and stepped toward Garth.
“It’s a black knight,” Garth said, moving to his right and slashing the katana through its neck.
But in the commotion of the last few seconds Garth had lost sight of the fifth zombie and he turned too quickly to his right to acquire it. Then it was on him, both arms squeezing the shoulder pads with enormous pressure, keeping his sword at stomach height and forcing him down and backward. He looked up into the face of an enraged thirtyish man, his jaw deformed into an intense biting apparatus, the teeth thicker and sharper, the mouth wider.
Adrenalin flooded his body and fear rushed through him. Garth slashed the sword sideways into the fleshy middle of the zombie. He wrestled the sword out for another chop when he heard a shotgun blast and the zombie’s head popped open and blood splattered everywhere. Zombie blood stank to high heaven, and Garth fell to the ground under the dead weight of the undead creature. He pushed it off and rolled over onto his feet just as the two sprinters came into the fight zone and Bobby took each out with a head shot.
“Yo, Garth, you okay?” Jose asked.
Garth nodded and breathed deeply. “Yeah. ... Yeah, I’m okay. We should probably get out of here before any more show up. I’m sure a hundred probably just heard us and are shuffling this way right now.”
The other two nodded in agreement and they quickly piled into Jose’s Jeep and headed away from the town toward Garth’s cabin. Garth sat in the back removing the helmet and shoulder pads, making a disgusted look at the fetid zombie blood that clung to the plastic and coated his fingers. He rustled around for the bag of wet wipes and pulled a few out and wiped his face and hands clean. He prayed to god that none of it had made it into his eyes or mouth, although nobody knew if that was a way you could get the living death, though it made sense that you could.
After all, if being bitten and getting some zombie saliva in you could turn you, blood in a wound was probably a guarantee of being turned. He shook his head at the thought: who the hell had come up with these creatures? He paused, breathed deeply, and told himself he was okay. He’d gotten zombie blood on him before and had never turned. All of them had.
He picked up the katana and wiped it clean, taking care near the edge so as not to cut himself. That scared him more than fighting the zombies, just the fact that he could nick himself cleaning it and the zombie blood could commingle with his and he’d turn. All because of dumb luck. He’d thought about that a lot, and he was more than certain that there was no shortage of people turned into zombies by sheer, random bad luck. Hell, anybody not just killed and eaten by a zombie was evidence of bad luck: they’d escaped certain death for imminent undeath. He wasn’t sure which outcome was the better one.
“Probably death, dude,” Bobby said later that night, as they sipped on warm beer in the glow of a propane lamp. “Who knows what it’s like to be one of them? Dead, I can imagine, because I don’t exist anymore. Undead? What if it’s like being totally paralyzed and unable to move or talk, but having full consciousness? Just staring out of your body while some other force caused it to move and eat people? Kill me, that happens to me.”
“I don’t know, man, what if they can cure this?” Jose said. “I know we have to kill them because that’s the only option - kill or be killed - but what if they can come up with a cure and turn them back into the living? You know the government has got to be working on this right now in one of its
labs. It’s only been like a year or so since Phoenix fell.”
Garth snorted. “Yeah, right. The government. Let’s see, first they tried to keep us locked up in our homes under quarantine, and then the first responders and police all disappeared and the National Guard never showed up. Those are all government people, so I’m going to guess the government told its people to go somewhere the government people could be kept safe until this whole thing blows over and we’re all dead or zombies.
“And whenever that moment finally happens, the government people are going to come out and kill everyone of us out here because they aren’t going to take the risk those of us still alive aren’t infected.”
“They’re probably all at Fort Knox. I hear that’s the most heavily defended fort on the planet since it holds all the gold,” Bobby said.
They were all quiet for a while, sipping on their beers, each in his own thoughts.
“Is it even worth staying here? Maybe we should get the hell out,” Jose said. “My dad’s cousin has a small cattle farm outside Imuris in Mexico that would be able to take us. It’s not that far from here, maybe two-hundred miles. We could make it in a day.”
Bobby laughed. “Right, because Mexico isn’t filled with a hundred-million zombies between here and there, and if we made it, your cousins wouldn’t just kill me and Garth just because we’re white guys.”
“No, not if I was with you. You’d be fine,” Jose said.
“Jose, it’s hard enough siphoning gas to get around here,” Garth said. “How much harder would it be to do in a third world country? We can’t go anywhere south of the border, we wouldn’t last a day. Hell, we’re lucky we last each day here, and this is the middle-of-nowhere.”
Jose sagged as if the weight of the world had finally been placed on his shoulders.
“This can’t be the future, it just can’t,” Jose said. “I was goin’ to school to learn how to be a machinist. I was supposed to be able to get a job earning real money. I wasn’t supposed to be scrounging food from abandoned houses and killing the undead.”
Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse Page 16