Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  There was a stir in the house and he tensed. The sounds of footsteps softly indenting carpet nearly roared through the house, and he turned his head and gripped his pistol.

  “You’re still awake, nice,” Gannon said as he turned the corner into the room. “I was trying to be quiet so as to give you a start when I touched your shoulder.”

  Duncan smiled. “I heard you a mile away.”

  “Heard anything outside?”

  “Not a sound.”

  “I wonder if that’s a good thing,” Gannon said, walking to the windows and pulling a curtain aside an inch. Duncan’s eyes widened and his gut tensed. “Nothing out there.”

  “So, whaddya think we should do? Continue the plan to ride until we find a safe haven, or maybe hunker down here and see if we can ride things out?”

  Gannon shrugged. “The people who lived here didn’t see a future in staying here, and there’s a couple-hundred of undead just a mile or two outside of here on the other side of a double wall of parked cars blocking the main road.

  “Somebody tried something to keep the town safe, but nobody stayed. I’m guessing there’s a good reason for that.”

  “So we keep riding for Esperance?”

  “That was our plan.”

  “Then we have to spend tomorrow finding a four-wheeler and then find all the gas we can and mod out a vehicle,” Duncan said. “This biking shit is going to get us killed.”

  It took most of the next day going house-to-house before they found the keys to a car that was acceptable to them: a 1979 Toyota LandCruiser

  “You really want to risk our lives in this?” Duncan said. “It’s almost a half-century old.”

  “Believe me, Dunc, this is what you want in the end times, not some fancy shmancy Beemer four-wheeler made last year for the tennis set,” Gannon said, starting it up and listening to the rumble of the engine. “This was made for the wilderness, not for tooling around town with a bunch of kids in the back so you’re not embarrassed to be driving a mini-van.”

  “Yeah, but if it breaks down, we’re screwed.”

  Gannon shook his head. “No way, mate. If a modern car breaks down, now that we’re in the apocalypse of zombies, then you’re screwed. You can’t fix a modern car on your own because of the way they’re made: the engine’s a square bit of plastic with wires coming out of it. You need a computer and a rocket scientist to fix ‘em. But this you can fix with a wire hanger and electrical tape, and you can make spare parts out of metal cans, plastic tubing and spare coins.”

  Duncan raised his eyebrows querulously.

  Gannon grinned. “But why the worry? Whoever owned this has kept it up. Ignore the mileage and it might as well be brand new.”

  Katrina came out the front door of the house next-door with a canvas bag and smiled.

  “More food,” she said.

  “This town is a gold mine,” Gannon said, getting out of the car and closing the door.

  Katrina walked up to them and dropped the bag on the ground. “I figure we got a week or two’s worth of food and water now, so we should be good.”

  “For a week or two, sure,” Duncan said. “And then what?”

  Gannon shrugged. “Well, hopefully everything will be peachy in Esperance. If not, we do like we just done here, stock up and move on. There’s gotta be a safe haven somewhere.”

  Highway 40 southeast out of Brookton was mostly open roadway, with a few broken-down cars pulled off to the side. They had all expected zombie infestations, but each of the small towns they had passed through had been empty, as if the inhabitants had left in an orderly manner. Gannon slowed the LandCruiser down as they passed through them, hoping a living person would emerge with news, but nobody had, and they had goosed the speed back up exiting each place. They were all dead. Or undead. Or hiding.

  Gannon lifted his foot off the gas pedal as they neared the intersection with the South Coast Highway, letting the vehicle coast the last kilometer with the engine idling. The three of them scanned the countryside. Duncan picked up the binoculars from the seat and looked through them at the intersection.

  “Holy shit.”

  “What?” Katrina asked.

  Duncan pulled the binoculars away from his eyes and handed them to her. She looked through them for several long seconds before gasping. “My god.”

  “Alright, enough with this, what is it?” Gannon asked.

  Erected across the intersection, barring easy driving access to the highway toward Ravensthorpe was a make-shift barricade straight out of the Middle Ages. It was fifteen feet high, constructed of hewn trees lashed and nailed together in five large Xs and braced with concrete barriers at the base to withstand attempts to ram through it. Tied to the Xs were undead, splayed out, alive in their undead state, moaning.

  “I don’t know what’s scarier, this barrier or the thought of the mates who went to the trouble to construct it,” Gannon said, hefting his weapon and walking around to the back of the gate, examining it. “It’s not meant to be rolled aside, neither.”

  Duncan laughed.

  “What”

  “What the hell’s the point of it?” Duncan asked. “It’s not going to scare anybody off but somebody has now put up a couple of these fucking things. First the wall of cars, and now this.”

  Gannon shrugged. “Yeah, you really have to wonder why the fuck the drama? It’s one thing to build a wall; another thing to tie the undead to it.” He motioned with his pistol down the road: “Shall we, then?”

  They motored slowly down the coast highway into Ravensthorpe, the road changing name to Morgans Street, giving anybody who might be watching a long time to scan them and realize they meant no harm. Inside the town limits, everything was quiet. Abandoned. There was some sign of pandemonium, but for the most part the town resembled the last: left behind in an ordered fashion, ready for repopulating.

  The police station was ringed with sand bags four feet high, a measure of concertina wire topping the portion where the defensive perimeter turned around the corners of the walls, the windows boarded over with small slits cut into them. No sign of a struggle to the end, however, just evidence of preparation for a fight.

  “Hey, look, a pharmacy,” Duncan said. “Maybe we should see if there’s anything left inside?”

  Gannon chuckled. “They bricked the front doors over with cinder blocks.”

  They stopped the LandCruiser and got out, each looking around at the structures lining the main street through town. All of them were securely boarded up, many with make-shift defensive positions built into the main entryway to the building or on a corner of the lot.

  “I think these people were expecting a fight and then chickened out,” Gannon said, scratching the stubble under his chin.

  “Maybe they found a better option,” Katrina said.

  “Maybe,” Gannon said. “But they didn’t want anyone snooping in their stuff after they left, so we should probably just move on to Esperance. A couple of hours and we should be there.”

  Duncan pointed to the Eagle Fuel petrol station as they were nearing the fork in the road that exited town. “First, maybe we should fuel up. And maybe see if there aren’t a few jerry cans around for extra, just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” Katrina asked.

  “Just in case we have to go somewhere else all the sudden.”

  The drive had taken twice as long as it should have. Abandoned cars were parked behind car crashes that were sometimes a half-kilometer long, necessitating the pushing of cars to the side. Decayed bodies of the dead were everywhere, a mixture of killed undead and the dead living. Whatever had happened, the people in Ravensthorpe appeared to have fought a rear guard action down most of the highway toward Esperance, making little last-ditch stands here and there to gain minutes or meters for the rest.

  They managed to scoop up a Weatherby Mk V Sporter bolt-action rifle and a pair of Sig Sauer 9mm pistols at one such defensive position, the owners of the weapons having been eaten to de
ath. Gannon handed one of the pistols to Katrina along with an extra clip, giving her a twenty-second demonstration on how to use the weapon.

  They drove the final twenty kilometers in silence, watching as the plumes of smoke in the distance grew thicker as they approached the coastal city. They were forced to stop as they approached Pink Lake on their right and Lake Warden on their left: a make shift fence of every conceivable vehicle and large object had been strewn between the two bodies of water, five-hundred meters of Toyotas, Audis, Hondas, cement barriers, tree trunks and construction site detritus. Bodies were everywhere.

  Gannon brought the truck to a halt. He got out and started lacing on the sporting goods protective equipment they had picked up the day before.

  “What are you doing?” Duncan asked.

  “Getting my kit on,” Gannon said. “You two should do the same.”

  “You want to find a way in there?”

  “We gotta take a look. We’re here.”

  Duncan and Katrina glanced at each other incredulously. From a distance, it appeared the entire town was afire, tens of columns of smoke boiling thousands of feet into the air before the winds aloft bent them inland.

  “The entire town’s on fire, Gannon,” Katrina said.

  He shrugged. “My brother and his family are in there. They’ve got a nice little house in the West Beach area, not far from the ocean. Nice neighborhood. We get there, we’ll be okay.”

  “And if we can’t get there?” Duncan asked.

  “We go in as far as we can. If we can’t get there ...” Gannon trailed off and cocked his head to the side. He gazed across the surface of the lake, the algae giving the heavy salt concentration of the water a pink complexion the color of a lipstick an ex-girlfriend of his had worn as her signature color. He had told her that pink wasn’t a real color but an illusion, something the human brain concocted to make sense of red and violet wavelengths entering the eye at the same time. She had asked him why that didn’t make pink things invisible instead? He smiled for a moment thinking about her and now, staring at the lake, he saw the beauty in the color’s defiance of nature’s water colors palette. He wondered if the undead appreciated nature, if they noticed it for its beauty, if they were somehow a part of nature, like insects, sharks and viruses, serving some vital element of the ecosystem, or if they were some cosmic joke.

  He wondered if the dead could see pink?

  Gannon turned and glanced at the smoke in the sky, could hear the faint whines of sirens in the distance. “If we can’t get there, then we turn around. Go somewhere else. This isn’t a bloody suicide mission.”

  They managed their way into town weaving between the shore of Pink Lake and Collier Road, Gannon steering the LandCruiser while Duncan kept watch for the undead. It didn’t take long to run into them: near the intersection with Longbottom Lane, a thousand undead stood amassed, churning in place as if awaiting orders to deploy. Gannon stopped the truck.

  Just then, a pair of zombies stepped out of the crowd, one on either edge of the mass of undead, and regarded the arrival of their vehicle. Each took staggering steps toward them, and the mob behind began to turn as well. Gannon rested his head on the steering wheel.

  “Runner!” Katrina shouted from the back seat. “On the left by the building over there!”

  Duncan looked out his window and saw a teenage boy skip-hopping furiously toward their truck, maybe fifty meters away, spittle flying from his mouth, a small, hand-held garden rake in one hand. Duncan glanced quickly over at Gannon.

  “Mate, we gotta go, we got a tsunami of undead headed our way.”

  Gannon nodded and put the truck back in gear. He grimaced and shook his head. He turned to Duncan, “Where d’ya think, mate? Maybe the north coast? What’s up there? South Hedland? Broome? Darwin? Can’t be many zombies up there as there never were many people. Maybe make a go of it there? If not, there’s gotta be someplace else, right?”

  Duncan nodded. “Never been to the north coast. Always meant to see the country on a driving tour. Now seems about the right time.”

  “We gotta go, this runner’s almost here,” Katrina said from the back seat. “I vote for whereverthefuck.”

  Gannon laughed. “Right, then, whereverthefuck here we come.”

  The Coroner’s Report

  Monclova, Mexico - Day 499

  The thunderstorm crackled and popped, the wind howled and hurled sheets of rain against the building. From the ceiling in the room, a few leaks had started letting in a steady stream of water droplets which pooled on the dirt floor and made splotches of mud. Noelys Sanchez stumbled drunkenly across the floor, oblivious to the storm and the raindrops, her head lolling atop her shoulders, blood-infused drool seeping out of the corners of her mouth. She banged into a wall and paused, her eyes searching the room, unable to focus on anything. She took a few steps away from the wall, vomited a small measure of blood, and collapsed to her hands and knees.

  She took a few more shallow breaths, paused, and sucked deeply on the air in the room before lowering herself to the dirt and curling into the fetal position. Noelys closed her eyes for the last time and Carlos Trejo looked at his watch: thirteen hours and nine minutes from the moment of infection to death.

  Now, he had to wait to see if she returned to life. Well, unlife, undeath, nobody knew what state the infected resurrected into. Although there was a significant chance that she might remain dead: about thirty percent of those infected never arose again. Curiously, nobody had ever recovered from the infection; it was either death or undeath. He noted the time of death on the medical form and slipped the sheet into the manila folder with her name on it.

  Carlos made his way through the mansion to his study, poured himself three-fingers of Herradura Reposado Antiguo tequila, and sat at his desk. The storm raged louder as the cell at its center made its way over the city, and the candles on his desk flickered. He looked at the hand-drawn spreadsheets he’d made on the nature of the disease, flipped through the various home-made charts detailing his scientific findings, and wondered if there was any way to make sense of the data. What he wouldn’t give for access to a computerized data base that could crunch the numbers and maybe let him see some larger pattern at work. He wondered if somewhere in America or Europe there was a laboratory still capable of modern science, or if the entire world had fallen into a new Dark Ages.

  Lightning rippled across the sky followed by a crack of thunder. So much for humanity destroying the planet. Now, Mother Nature was allied with the undead to undo everything man had achieved. Already, the earth was taking back the city as plants took root in places where men had once maintained civilization. Wild animals roamed the streets. He wondered what a world run by zombies would look like. Did they have some sort of purpose greater than killing? Would the zombies eventually die out when there were no living to feed upon.

  Carlos awoke at dawn, the night’s storm having given way to a normal day of blue skies. He looked through his bedroom window at the city and saw smoke in the distance, evidence of a building somewhere in the city having caught fire. There was no one to put it out, and he half-wondered when such a fire would consume the entire city rather than just a block. Time was not on the side of the living.

  He made his way to the observation chamber and looked in on Noelys Sanchez. She was still curled up on the dirt floor, dead. He checked his watch - it had only been nine hours since death, so she was still within the resurrection timeframe. He made a note on her file and scratched the four-day stubble on his chin. Behind him, the door to the observation deck creaked open and he smelled coffee.

  “She turn, yet?

  Carlos shrugged and turned toward Federico, his assistant. Federico stepped to him and handed him a mug of coffee and looked down at Noelys.

  “No, she’s still dead,” Carlos said.

  “So, we’re going to wait?”

  Carlos nodded and sipped his mug. “We now know the disease is contagious through the air, but we need to figure
out if this is a major pathway to infection or if there is some other mechanism at work. Not everyone infected can have been bitten, first, because the undead seem to prefer eating the living as to converting them. There has to be a reason why so many have been infected.”

  Carlos savored another sip from his coffee and looked down on the girl, wondering if she might recover instead of revive as undead. There had to be someone who was resistant to infection. If she came back to as living, her blood samples would be worth more than gold. He smiled at that thought. What was gold worth in a world where it could not be spent? Indeed, why had gold ever been considered a source of wealth? It was just a metal, and a soft one a that. And, yet, for the entire history of mankind, gold was a highly desirable commodity that people killed for. Gold? Carlos sipped his coffee. An ounce of gold was useless anymore. A can of tuna was priceless.

  “You keep an eye on her and record any changes. Her file is over there on the table. I’m going to go out and see what I can find.”

  He hated going into the towns because that’s where the undead were. It was also where the living went in search of the dwindling supplies of dry and canned goods that could be found in abandoned homes. Every trip could be his last as there was no way of knowing if that was the day a herd of zombies had moved through in search of living flesh. And every building he entered harbored the possibility of a loner zombie laying dormant waiting for an opportunity. Carlos often wondered if there was a structure to the zombie menace, if there were a hierarchy that caused some to form into raiding groups that roamed the landscape while others waited patiently in spots that only they could have determined to be strategic to their cause.

  But they were everywhere.