Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  He paused. “I just don’t get it.”

  Bobby shrugged. “Yeah, but at least I ain’t stockin’ shelves at the store no more. That was boring, man, and it was the only job I could get.”

  “Nah, man, you could have totally worked in fast food,” Garth said, adding a small laugh for effect.

  Bobby gave him a limp-wristed middle-finger and rolled his eyes. “Ooh, a zinger from the comic-book-store guy.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to figure out something more to do with our lives than what we’re doing now,” Garth said. “There aren’t any actual rules anymore other than survive, and we aren’t going to live a helluva long time in this cabin just doing what we’re doing. And while killing real zombies is almost as much fun as it was killing them online, we aren’t going to respawn if one of them gets us. Well, we might respawn, but we’d come back like Ray did.”

  Bobby brightened and sat forward on his chair. “We could just work on clearing the town out of them. A couple a day, just go in, chop their heads off, shoot ‘em, whatever, and come back here. Maybe in a couple of months we’d have killed them all off and we could live in town.”

  Jose furrowed his eyebrows. “And then what?”

  Bobby shrugged. “I dunno, man. Hunt deer? Plant a garden? Try and find some girls to move to town?”

  “There’s a thousand zombies in town, Jose. We’re three guys with replica swords, a couple of guns and about 300 rounds of ammunition. Those are some long, long odds,” Jose said.

  “What are our odds now, Jose?” Garth said softly, dropping his head and staring at the floor. “We can’t survive like this forever, and we’re not the only ones around scavenging for dry goods and canned food. But if we can take maybe - what’d we take down today? Seven? - If we take down seven a day, on average, we can clear out the town in about a half-a-year or so.”

  “And then what?” Jose asked.

  “I dunno. Maybe we can find a way to start letting the other people know what we’re doing and maybe they’ll come join us. Gotta be people out there with working walkie-talkies; it’s still the twenty-first century and there’re plenty of batteries nobody is using. If the people come, we can start over,” Garth said. “If we can get enough of us who are still alive together, maybe we can fight off the zombies the next time, now that we know what we’re up against.”

  The three were silent for a moment as each thought over the idea. Fight or flight. Neither seemed like a good option, but those were the only two options, ingrained in their DNA as the essential survival choices. Choose one.

  “Alright, Garth, let’s do it. Let’s take the town back,” Jose said. “We know we aren’t the only still alive people out here, so we can’t be the first ones to come up with the idea. Which means we might not be the only ones doing this after a while, but until then, we’re going to have to get real good at using these swords.”

  Garth nodded. “Yeah, our vorpal blades are going to go snicker-snack quite a lot over the next few months.”

  The Road Warriors

  Perth, Australia - Day 169

  The sun was just up, casting long shadows across the road. Duncan Wiltshire stayed in them, taking careful steps, his eyes constantly searching for the infected. Behind him in other shadows were Gannon Hardcastle and Katrina Blandon. They were waiting on the military helicopter a kilometer away to move off so that they could continue on their way out of the city.

  Which was illegal, as the government had issued an official "bug-in" policy, requiring everybody to remain in their homes until the military and government agencies had contained the outbreak. That had worked until the power had gone out almost two weeks earlier, causing a massive panic when nobody could watch the news on television or tune in a radio station. With the sudden disappearance of any information about the plague, everyone had assumed the worst and had been fleeing the city.

  "Okay, it's gone," Duncan said, his voice a loud whisper. He fished a small pair of binoculars out of his messenger bag and scanned the road. "There's a couple hundred of 'em down to the left, but the right is clear."

  The road was knotted with fender benders in both directions, the doors to many of the cars open, evidence of sudden flight. Duncan figured almost nobody had driven out of town, and guessed a large percentage of those that had been in the cars were now in the mob to his left.

  The three of them had been five just two days earlier, but Gina and Roger Cavalleri had been eaten by a group of twenty-plus undead yesterday afternoon, Roger swinging a cricket bat at a fast-runner zombie that had latched onto his wife. Fatal mistake, as two other runners had set upon him seconds later while a gang of shuffling walkers moved inexorably down the road toward the whole group.

  Duncan had put two rounds center-mass in one of the zombies just before it bit into Roger and been stunned the creature hadn't collapsed until Gannon had said, "Head shots, Dunc," and used his own .38 to blow its skull open. Which was too late to save Roger and had caused the zombie horde to realize there was more fresh meat on the menu: they had barely managed to get inside a building and barricade the door before the dead had tried to pry it open.

  They crept down the street in a loose formation, the two men with their pistols and Katrina wielding a gardening hoe. They worked their way slowly through a couple of blocks, carefully checking each car as they passed it, constantly scanning for police or military personnel. The authorities had orders to shoot-to-kill anything moving, but they were obviously overwhelmed with dealing with the zombies. The undead were everywhere. So were the remains of their victims.

  Duncan heard a grunt off to his left and startled. He turned quickly and raised his pistol and saw a man trapped between the bumpers of two cars. Not a man-man, but a was-a-man, a human figure turned a deep gray, its mouth deformed and with larger, razor-sharp teeth. It stared right at Duncan and struggled in its predicament.

  "Sorry, mate," Duncan said as he lowered his pistol. "Hey, Kat, you wanna come over here and clobber this fella?"

  Katrina stopped alongside him and looked at the undead man struggling to free himself from the grip of the bumpers. His mid-section was pinched closed: he should be dead-dead. But, he wasn't.

  "That's just...," she paused, reconsidered. "Nobody could live through that."

  "I don't think he's 'living' through it," Duncan said, "but I can't say as I know what state of life a zombie is. But we can de-animate the reanimated."

  Katrina took a few steps closer to the half-zombie, positioned her hoe above its head for aim before raising it and cleaving deeply into the zombie's head. The zombie torso went silent and motionless between the bumpers.

  Gannon walked up and said, "Great, one down, twenty million more to go."

  "You don't think it's that bad, do you?" Katrina asked.

  Gannon shrugged and looked at Duncan. Gannon pointed. "Over there, look."

  Duncan and Katrina both looked.

  "What?"

  Minutes later they were inside a sporting goods store, trying on protective gear. Gannon slipped an Obo Robo throat protector around his neck and adjusted it while Duncan snuggled himself into an Atlas Pro Body Armor hockey torso suit. The two men looked at each other while Katrina grabbed a trio of Cambelback hydration backpacks and headed to the back of the store in search of a sink to fill them.

  “Isn’t that a bit of overkill?” Gannon asked, eyeing the foam armor Duncan was adjusting.

  “You saw how those fuckers bit through Gina and Roger the other day,” Duncan said. “Every little bit has to help.”

  Duncan caught sight of himself in a mirror and chuckled. "When do we mod some cars for driving in the Outback?"

  Gannon smiled. "Not cars, Dunc, bikes."

  Minutes later they were pedaling down Graham Farmer Freeway, weaving around grouplets of walkers caught unaware of the silently moving trio of living. A pair of runners had given them chase but had been easily left behind when they switched up gears and pedaled harder.

  They came upon a
n Army blockade at the edge of the city that had been abandoned, and stopped. There were no dead or undead around, just clusters of sand-bagged emplacements and some automatic weapons positions minus the machine guns. They dismounted and poked around the position, looking for anything useful the Army might have left behind when Duncan noticed that the roadblock seemed designed to keep people inside the city. Whatever its purpose, it had been abandoned without apparent use, the Army choosing to fight elsewhere.

  "You know, it seems to me that a modern Western democracy with a first world military force ought to be able to defeat hordes of zombies in short order, seeing as they're out in the open and don't move very fast," Gannon said, "but instead, they fly combat patrols over the city and warn the uninfected to stay inside or we'll be shot."

  Duncan shrugged. "I don't think the government knew what it was up against. Zombie plague? Really, mate? I don’t think anybody really knew what to do and they tried to deal with it like fighting an influenza outbreak. But the zombies didn’t act like normal sick people, instead of staying in bed, they went out and started making more of them.”

  Katrina nodded. "And, they might be working on a cure and not want to kill so many of them, only the ones they have to. Maybe they figure if they kept us in quarantine, we'd be safe while they worked on a cure."

  Gannon laughed. "Only idiots would choose that course of action. Have we cured the common cold or AIDS or cancer? And look at how much money the world has spent trying for as long as it's been trying. Nah, Kat, the government isn’t going to go all-in on funding a cure that will save everybody from turning into a zombie. I'm honestly surprised that they haven't started nuking cities by now."

  As if on cue, a flight of eight RAAF F-18s streaked by at low altitude, and the three turned their heads quickly to follow them toward the city. Moments later, explosions rippled back toward them, columns of dark smoke rising in the air.

  Gannon smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Thank god we don’t have any nukes.”

  Duncan walked over to his bicycle and turned to the others, "Let's just ride. We need to find somewhere to stay before nightfall."

  The road out of the city was littered with car crashes, evidence of mad dashes from civilization to a hoped-for zombie-free wilderness. Where there were few people, it stood to reason, there should be few zombies. By mid-afternoon they were walking alongside their bicycles, none of them conditioned for long terms sitting on narrow, gel-padded seats. Gannon had been the first to complain about the discomfort he felt, but when he had made mention of it, Duncan had braked to a stop and gotten off his bicycle and made a series of weird, goose-steps trying to restore the sensation to the area of his body that had been pressed against the most narrow part of the bicycle saddle.

  “Shit, I think my nuts are numb,” he said, reaching into his pants and re-adjusting his private parts. “How the fuck does anybody do the Tour de France? No wonder that Armstrong guy got dick cancer. This ain’t how you’re supposed to sit for any length of time.”

  Duncan looked at Katrina for a moment and bobbed his head. “Sorry, Kat, but it’s the truth, and I had to say it.”

  She laughed. “What? I’m supposed to be offended because you were talking about how your penis is sore from sitting on a bike seat for a couple of hours? Please. My ass hurts something fierce.”

  So they alternately walked and biked until late afternoon, when they came upon a make-shift barrier of cars pushed together in a line to form a wall blocking the road. It was obvious the placement of the vehicles was intentional, to keep anyone moving down the road from going any further. The cars extended off to either side of the road to points where no automobile could drive around.

  The insides of the cars were stuffed with a variety of things, but mostly pillows and blankets. Atop the cars were anything and everything that could be set upon them to make a barrier: lawn chairs, charcoal grills, garden gnomes, sand bags, assorted pieces of masonry and uprooted shrubbery. Whoever had built it didn’t want anyone looking through or over the barrier, or going over it. Around, on foot, was the only option.

  Gannon looked at the other two, slipped his pistol out of his belt, and said, “Well, there’s either living people or undead on the other side of this, and methinks neither kind are likely to welcome us.”

  Duncan pulled his pistol out.

  Katrina looked at the two of them. “What? Are you going to just shoot them?”

  Gannon smiled. “Only if they’re already dead.”

  “Stay here with the bicycles,” Duncan said, shrugging out of his backpack. “There’s probably nothing on the other side, but you don’t even have your hoe anymore, so, you’re better off being here and riding in the opposite direction if anything goes wrong.”

  Duncan and Gannon walked around the right edge of the barrier, weapons at the ready. A dozen bloated bodies lay on the ground, melting into goo or mostly bones in clothing. On the opposite side of the road from them, a zombie with the flesh burned from its legs scrabbled against the ground with its hands, its eyes fixed on the two of them. Duncan and Gannon glanced at each other, unsure of what to make of the scenario: there was a second row of cars twenty feet beyond and identical to the first row, built up with the flotsam of suburbia to reinforce it.

  “What the fuck, Dunc?” Gannon asked.

  “Dunno, mate, but it’s most definitely weird,” Duncan said, stepping forward and examining the corpses near him. “Clearly, we aren’t the first ones to try to get through here. Somebody doesn’t want us to get past, at least not on the road. But going around seems easy enough.” Duncan walked up to the next row of vehicles and started walking the down the length to the end.

  “Who builds a double-fence out of cars and spare backyard objects? It’s almost a mockery of being spooky,” Gannon said, stopping by one car and looking through the windows. “This one is three-quarters filled with water and has a layer of footballs and tennis balls floating on top. Uh, why?”

  Duncan turned and raised his pistol, stepping quickly to his left and aiming. “Duck!”

  Gannon spun and dropped to one knee, bringing his pistol up just as Duncan’s shot echoed inside the canyon of cars. The zombie’s neck tore open at the Adam’s apple and the middle-aged man in pajamas staggered backward a half-step.

  Gannon pulled the trigger of his pistol and the top of the undead man’s head popped into the air with spurt of blood. The zombie collapsed to the ground atop another body.

  “Head shots, Dunc,” Gannon said, “head shots.”

  “Shit, we’ve gotta see what’s on the other side of this wall of cars right now,” Duncan said, hustling to the end and turning the corner. Shuffling toward him down the road were hundreds of zombies, all now attracted to the sound of two gunshots. Gannon came up quickly behind him and paused.

  “Well, we ain’t going that way,” Gannon said. “Let’s go.”

  They ran around the first row of cars toward the bikes and a bug-eyed Katrina, who stared at them in anticipation of terror.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Zombies. Lots of them about a half-click down the road, and coming this way,” Duncan said as he got on his bike.

  “Out here on the edge of the desert?”

  Gannon was on his bike and made a quick circle around the other two. “Come on, let’s get back to that town we just passed through and hunker down for the night.

  They biked back into the little Shire of Brookton an hour before sunset. They rode through the small town for a short while, scouting it out, looking for the undead, before deciding that the entire place had been abandoned. The shops they had passed were boarded up, and the three figured there hadn’t been any of the looting that had gone on in Perth in the mad frenzy after the authorities had lost control of the city. These people had vanished, perhaps with a plan to come back once the contagion had been contained.

  “Crikey, I can’t believe the entire town is deserted,” Gannon said as they pedaled around the streets,
looking for a house to break into.

  “It’s not a big town, Gannon,” Duncan said. “Probably only a coupla hundred people lived here. I can see ‘em bugging out of town if they thought it wasn’t going to be safe.”

  Katrina made a dismissive laugh. “Really? A little town without an airport or any reason for someone to visit evacuates everyone, but a major city like Perth tries to quarantine us all in under shoot-to-kill orders? If there was anywhere this plague would hit, it’d be Perth, not here. These people should’ve been the ones to sit tight and wait it out. The Army could’ve probably saved them, here.”

  “Bingo, Kat, which is why they tried to keep us all penned in: they couldn’t possibly get us anywhere safe ‘cause there were just too many of us, and they couldn’t just let us all leave willy nilly because here’s where we’d come, and here we are,” Gannon said. “Only, where are they?”

  Duncan shrugged. “Maybe they knew something we don’t?”

  Gannon paused for a moment. “Yeah, but what? There aren’t any bodies, no signs of looting, it’s just as if they all packed up and left before anything happened.”

  “But where?” Katrina asked.

  “Maybe they’ve all got family in Esperance like Gannon?” Duncan said with a laugh.

  “Once you’ve tasted the clams from Pink Lake, you’ll understand why I want to go there,” Gannon said with a wink.

  Duncan smiled and thumbed at a house. “Let’s break in to this one. It’s far enough from the main road that we shouldn’t have to worry too much about any of the undead making their way this far into town, if they’re still coming.”

  That night, Duncan took first watch, sitting up in the living room of the house and wondering if the light from the two votive candles was enough to alert the undead that he was alive, inside the house. The world outside was quiet. Too quiet. He heard noises in the breeze that brushed against the outside of the house, imagining them to be the palms of hands testing for weaknesses in the exterior wall. He swore he could hear trash cans being bumbled into, a shuffle of feet en masse moving down the sidewalk outside. And, for a moment, he thought he could hear a chorus of voices on the wind in a minor key, murmuring “brains.”