Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  The kid came back with the bag of food and stopped suddenly, his eyes flicking between the open bag on the floor near his horse and Carter. He dropped the food and his hand drifted to the pistol on his hip.

  “That’s my bag. You had no right looking through it.”

  “Son, you’ve done brought a hailstorm of a dilemma on us,” Carter said. “I’m not interested in this bag of yours, but I reckon the men on the bikes are. I could tell you fine, go on and do that. It’s yours and it’s a free country, and if you weren’t twelve or thirteen-years old and your parents were still around, things would be different. But they aren’t different, because here is where we are.

  “I don’t know why you’re carrying this bag of gold with you, and, frankly, I don’t care. But the men out there that been following us do care. They think it’s worth something and they want it, and for reasons we’ll never know, they’re going to some extraordinary lengths to get it.

  “But I’m going to tell you that this bag of yours is never going to be anything but a source of trouble. You need to leave it here.”

  The kid stared at him for a moment and then dropped his eyes. “My Dad said gold is the money of all time. That if you had it, you would be okay in the future because you could always trade it for something.”

  Carter nodded. “That was the old world, the one the zombies are destroying. Zombies don’t care about gold. You can’t eat it. It’s not useful for anything that isn’t jewelry. And there’s nobody who wants it.”

  “They killed my parents to get it.”

  “They’re still living in the past. Right now, a lot of people are still thinking the lifestyle we had will return, but it won’t,” Carter said. “This world is done. The rules have changed.”

  The kid just stared at the ground.

  “My Dad said to ...,” the kid said, suddenly sobbing, tears dripping from his eyes onto the dirt floor of the barn. “He said if I had this, it would save me in the future.”

  The whirr of a dirt bike rolled close to the barn and then turned and circled the house before lowering to a putter as it made its way back to the main road. Carter had seen his own sons cry like this when they couldn’t understand why what they had done was wrong, confused by the differences in what their consciousnesses told them was what okay and the reality that the world didn’t work that way. As always, there was a compromise.

  “Grab a handful and stuff it in your pocket, but leave the rest here,” Carter said. “But we’ve got to leave, now. If it’s ever worth anything again, what you can stuff in your pockets will be more than enough.”

  The kid stuffed his pockets quickly while avoiding Carter’s gaze and then climbed onto his horse. Carter grabbed the bag and rode out the front door directly at the nearest man on a motorcycle, held the bag high and tossed it to the ground. The zombies were only yards behind him, and the rider looked over his shoulder, nodded back at Carter, and zoomed away.

  The zombies paused for a moment and one of them stepped out from the crowd, then another, and began looking around. They settled on Carter and the boy on their horses and the group began moving toward them. Carter surveyed the hundreds of undead shuffling toward him, the sun now fully up and heating the Oklahoma morning. It was going to be hot.

  Carter looked over at the kid. “It’s going to work out just fine. One of the things you’ll learn about life is that everything always works out in the end. Maybe not to your favor, but everything ends. And then something else begins.”

  He nodded toward the approaching horde. “Even this won’t stay like this forever. It’ll change, too, and maybe not to our advantage. Come on, let’s get movin’.”

  The Only Way Out is Through

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - Day 1349

  Rain is cold.

  The rain poured from the evening sky, drenching Will. He tried not to shudder, not to move, not to make a sound. For a moment, he remembered the first girl who had ever taken him for an intentional walk in the rain. Susan. Sue. Brown hair, brown eyes, the rain smoothing her clothing against her body into an hourglass of perfect desire. She had liked walking in the rain. He remembered it was supposed to be romantic.

  Rain is cold.

  He huddled against the crumbling cinder block wall, his P-90 machine gun clutched to his body, listening. The rain drowned out the ambient noise. Will cocked an ear and listened harder, trying to make out the sounds of a rhythm, of a zombie on the prowl. But the rain did just as much for the undead as it did for him: masked movement. He turned his head and looked through the darkness, wondering about his next move. He saw nothing. But, still, the dead could be anywhere.

  He shivered.

  He couldn’t stay here forever. He couldn’t stay here for long. The undead knew he was somewhere near. The undead were somewhere near. He summoned up what courage he had left in him and began to step forward along the wall, his weapon raised. There was a rally point, a place for them to meet if everything went to hell. Again. Or: as usual. The world was hell. Once upon a time, the world had been awesome, but that was a long time ago. There had been beer and steaks and women you could take home for a night. Where had that memory come from?

  He shivered.

  “Yo, is anybody still listenin’ to this freq?”

  The words sounded out in his earpiece. Olandis was still alive. Will smiled but said nothing. He looked around, again, saw nothing, and pressed the button on his walkie: click, click.

  Will moved stealthily along the wall, testing the ground with each step to avoid kicking debris. The last thing he wanted to do was knock an old soda can over and cause it to ring out. For whatever reason, the zombies had learned to differentiate between the world’s natural sounds and those made by man. He had watched zombies investigate the shattering of glass plates as they fell from downtown skyscrapers and ignore the scuff of a plastic trash can as the wind blew it down the street. They knew that motorized vehicles could only be operated by living people and moved toward the sound of the engines. Gunfire was like a dinner bell.

  Lightning flickered across the sky and he crouched instinctively. Ahead of him in the parking lot was a zombie, silhouetted in the brief flash, facing away from him. He watched it as it swayed in place, its head lolling above its shoulders, ears listening for him, eyes looking for him. Will looked over the top of the wall at the rest of the parking lot, looking for any other undead. He knew there were dozens nearby, maybe hundreds.

  He slung the P90 over his back and slipped the Ka-Bar Black Kukri Machete out of its scabbard. He stepped lightly on the the balls of his feet, his eyes fixed on the undead monster before him, and swung the blade through the neck of the zombie. Its head popped off and its body collapsed to the ground with a plop.

  Bad idea.

  He could hear the skip-hop before the undead head stopped rolling on the ground, the slapping of feet coming from the direction of the building off to his right. He turned quickly and saw a skeletal man in tattered clothing coming at him in what amounted to a run for a zombie. A trap. He cursed himself in his head: of course it was a trap.

  He took a couple of steps to the side and began a slow retreat, making the undead monster change its course. They were easier to kill when they had to suddenly change direction, as it seemed to put them off-balance and you could move in quickly and kill them before they could adjust themselves for a new approach. Will watched in surprise as it veered off to his left and lurched to a halt a dozen feet from him, by the corner of the building.

  Not good.

  He looked around quickly, the uncertainty of the situation maturing in his brain’s analysis: this wasn’t normal. He turned and saw a slow mover only steps away from him, its arms out, mouth open, a woman who had been in her thirties and was now clothed in only dirt-stained threadbare bra and panties.

  He turned the machete through the air and brought it down through the top of her skull, splitting her head open in two halves. She fell away from the blade to the ground and he turned his attentio
n quickly back to the sprinter who had already closed half the distance between them. He stepped quickly to the side and slashed the zombie’s right arm off at the forearm. It turned and growled at him but Will stepped in and slashed the blade through the creature’s neck, its head falling backward and leading the rest of the undead’s body to the pavement.

  Will turned a slow circle, looking for the next unexpected zombie. The night sky crackled with thunder, and a moment later a flash of lightning lit up the the world. Will speed-walked out of the parking lot and into an overgrown area of vegetation. He knelt down and keyed the mic.

  “Olandis, this is Will, where are you?”

  There was a long pause. Thunder rumbled above. The rain soaked through his clothes. He was cold.

  “I’m in the field house near the soccer fields.”

  A mile away. An eternity away. Will looked through the night. Nothing.

  The radio crackled in his ear.

  “I’ve got zombies all around me,” Olandis whispered, his voice clear in Will’s ear. “There’s four or five of ‘em out on the field near the gyros.”

  “Just stay put. Don’t move. I’m on the way.”

  “What about the other guys?”

  Will scanned through the darkness. George and Jeff were dead for sure, he’d watched them get torn to pieces in the shopping center parking lot. Hugh had run into the grocery store while the zombies were eating George and Jeff. Al and Greg were dead. When the runners had found them, they’d run the opposite direction from him and directly into a phalanx of slow walkers: the last image he had of them was Greg putting a round through a zombie skull while it bit Al’s shoulder.

  Frank was the only one he couldn’t be mostly sure was dead. Frank had unloaded on a half-dozen undead with his Mossberg 500 before disappearing into the rain-darkened night, his shotgun booming every few seconds, the sounds getting weaker in the distance until silence. Will and Olandis had backed away from the mass of undead, Will working through the fifty-round clip, felling zombies with head shots while Olandis had cleared the way in the opposite direction with a Sig Sauer pistol. And then Will had had to change magazines, and in the seconds that took, Olandis was gone.

  Will didn’t blame Olandis for leaving him behind. It had been the smart thing to do when the horde had appeared. The stupid thing to do was what he and the rest of them had done, which was think they could fight so many off and salvage the operation. They were all supposed to run to the rally point if that had happened. It had happened, and only Olandis had done what they had decided in advance to do.

  They were done as a group. They had all known they would never last, could never last. And, now, they hadn’t lasted. It was weird to be on that end of the timeline of the story. The end. Only, for Will, it wasn’t the end, not yet. It was the movie post-credit sequence or the beginning of the sequel or, maybe, some fan fiction where he was the spin-off character from Olandis’ story. Or Frank’s, if he had been the main character and Will had been some character the author had forgotten to kill off in the original story, leaving readers to wonder just what had happened to him and inspiring a thousand on-line discussion threads wondering what it could possibly mean to have had a minor character who simply “vanished” half-way through the story. Whatever happened to Will?

  “They’re all dead,” Will whispered.

  Will moved out from the trees and onto the street. It was overgrown with grass and saplings, the asphalt cracked into tiny pieces, the dirt migrating from below to reclaim its place in the natural world. This had been his neighborhood just a few years earlier, and it had been a vibrant community of shops and restaurants. He and his wife, Cora, often walked in from their nearby home for dinner and drinks. Now, the buildings were crumbling, the windows broken, the interiors littered with blown leaves and crumbling modernity.

  “Shit,” Will mouthed and dropped to the ground. Directly ahead of him, at the intersection of what had been Swissvale and West Hutchinson avenues, was a cluster of a half-dozen undead.

  Lightning flickered and thunder boomed. Will was glad he’d seen the silhouettes first, or they’d certainly have seen him standing in the middle of the road. In the burst of light, he could tell the group was the “new” zombies. Wider mouths with sharper teeth, hands with longer fingers, and skin that was tough like a leather belt. They were still slow, but outrunning them was no mere matter of sprinting to safety like at the beginning of the pandemic. Now, outrunning them required endurance. He’d seen a handful of people who were run down by these versions because they had tired out.

  All of this meant there was most likely a new runner or a toolie nearby. New runners made sense: if the slow walkers were evolving to move faster, then it only made sense that the ragers would evolve to run even faster, but the appearance of zombies that used tools had perplexed him. What they used the hammers, crowbars and other tools for was a mystery: he’d never seen the undead build anything.

  The heavens opened up with a sudden burst of heavy rain, the drops beating down on his back. Rain is cold. He shivered for a moment before forcing his mind out of his body, concentrating on watching the undead in front of him. He began crawling backwards, moving toward the cracked-open storefronts that had once been bars and shops. He had to get out of the rain and regroup.

  He crawled through the puddles and up onto what had been the sidewalk, which was now covered with splotches of wild grass, and up to the door of what had been Murphy’s Tap Room. The door was ajar, and he pushed it open with the muzzle of his P-90 and dragged himself over the threshold. He pushed the door closed behind him and sat against the wall.

  It had been his idea to come to this part of town. He’d convinced the others to come because he thought it might be safe to go back into the city and forage for supplies. As far as any of them knew, nobody had really been able to go through the city because, in the early days, it was choked with the undead. Everybody living had fled when it became apparent the city was overrun and the authorities were unable to do anything about it. He wasn’t sure exactly why he had suddenly cared, but he had wanted to see if any pictures of his wife still existed in their home, and the shopping center was close by.

  Will had fled to a small grass airstrip north of the city near the Kiskiminetas River where he and his fellow pilot buddies kept their gyrocopter aircraft. When Al, Greg and Frank all showed up within the week, they had taken it as a sign that they were meant to survive. They sat around the first few days retelling their harrowing journeys out of the city and mourning the loss of those that hadn’t made it with them.

  Al’s wife Linda had gone out to get her parents the day before the zombies and never come back. Greg had been trapped in the PPG building for days before managing to sneak out of the city one night using a cardboard box for concealment. Frank had made his way to the Allegheny River and used a canoe to row upriver. Will had put a bullet in his zombie-wife’s skull in the backyard of their home in Edgewood and barely managed to get on his Nashbar road bike and pedal his way to Route 28 ahead of the zombies.

  The walkie clicked twice in his ear and Will realized he was shivering badly. He stood up and took a few steps into the main bar area. He stopped and let his eyes search through the gloom before clicking on the flashlight on the side rail of the P90, the red lens dulling the brightness of the beam. They’d all found it interesting that the undead couldn’t see the red beams, but they still used them with caution: the zombies kept changing, so you never knew what the next adaptation might be.

  He played the beam through the room, looking for a lurking “waiter” zombie. He hated them. They could sit for days or weeks or maybe years, just waiting for the opportunity to bite somebody. Rich had been taken by a waiter zombie on a trip into Apollo a couple of months after they’d been living on the airstrip. That was also the day they met Olandis, then a twenty-two-year old with a thick Afro held fast by a dew rag. He kept his hair close-cropped, now.

  “O, it’s Will, I got your clicks, I’m still al
ive,” Will said quietly, moving through the bar toward the back,

  Click. Click.

  Will sagged. Olandis was in trouble. “I’m gonna guess there are some zulus pretty close to where you are.”

  Click. Click.

  “Just hang tight and stay quiet. I’m on the way, but there are new zulus everywhere here, so it’s gonna take a little time to pick my way outta here and into the park. But I’m on the way.”

  Click. Click.

  He’d found his wedding album in his home that morning and sat down and cried while looking through it in the master bedroom of his house. It had been weird walking into the house with Frank, guns at the ready. Inside, it was surprisingly well kept, albeit dusty. None of the windows had been broken, so Mother Nature hadn’t wrought havoc inside. Memories of his life with Cora popped into his head with everything he saw, and he remembered the life they had talked about building, the kids they had anticipated having.

  “The canned stuff is downstairs in the pantry, Frank,” Will said. “I’m gonna head upstairs and look around a little.”

  Frank understood and just nodded. Frank’s wife had been in Dallas on business and he had no idea what happened to her after the city shut down. He’d gotten a text after martial law had been declared saying she was okay. He’d texted back that he was going to come for her, but she never responded and his calls had all gone straight to voicemail. He still would say that she might still be alive and that one day he’d try to find her. But, then, everybody said that.

  Will pulled a dozen photos of her and them out of the album and slipped them behind a spare magazine for his H&K .45 Tactical USP in a pocket of his Condor Deluxe Tactical Vest. He walked over to her dresser and pulled out the top drawer and stared at her clothes, the underwear and socks still in place. They were still where he put them when he last did laundry: Cora rarely did laundry and never put her clothes away. Indeed, there was a small stack of jeans and T-shirts covered with dust in the corner of the room. Will smiled.