Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse

by Young, William

  He made his way down from the third floor to the second, pausing to look in the various rooms of their home, at the stuff they had owned. He wondered if he would ever move back into this house or if the new world order meant he’d be forced to continue living in an Army surplus canvas tent with Frank and Olandis. They joked that they were living the lifestyle of Trapper and Hawkeye in M*A*S*H, only without the still. Will’s eyebrows shot up and he smiled and snapped his fingers at that thought.

  He bounded down the stairs and through the living room to the hutch against the wall of the dining area, kneeling quickly and pulling a cabinet door open.

  “Holy fuckin’ hallelujah,” Will said, reaching into the space and pulling out a bottle of MacAllen 12-year and a bottle of Balvenie Double Wood.

  He heard Frank stepping quickly up the stairs and burst into the dining area.

  “What’s up? Everything okay?” Frank said quietly, but with utmost urgency.

  Will turned and smiled broadly, holding up the two bottles.

  Frank’s face lit up. “No fuckin’ way. Tell me that’s why you really wanted to come here today. We’re gonna get good and drunk on the good stuff tonight.”

  Will slipped his tactical backpack off and put the MacAllen into it and handed the other bottle to Frank, who put it into his pack. Frank looked around the room and then at his friend.

  “Weird being back here, isn’t it?”

  Will nodded.

  “You okay?”

  Will shrugged. “Just one more thing I need to do.”

  Will walked past Frank and through the small kitchen, twisted the knob on the back door and pulled it open. The grass was a foot high in his small backyard, and branches from the tree next to the house littered the yard. He walked down the steps and stopped a couple of feet into the grass and looked down at the skeleton of his wife, her skull shattered above the right eye. He winced. He felt Frank’s hand on his shoulder.

  “You had no choice, bud,” Frank said.

  “I know ... but still.”

  For an instant, he remembered that last moment with her, the undead version of her in the back yard. He had known before going that he was going to have to put her down, but raising the pistol had been difficult, even as she lurched toward him, blood and mucus covering her chest, her skin a dull gray, her eyes filled with somnolent rage.

  He pushed that thought out and remembered Cora on the day of their wedding, holding hands in front of the preacher as they stood on the gazebo, the entire world suddenly erased from his vision. He had stared at her eyes and watched them well with tears as she squeezed his hands, and he had been the kind of happy nobody knows they will be in such a situation, when all your dreams are coming true and you suddenly know it.

  Then a deep bass rumble had broken his reverie and both he and Frank looked into the sky. Fast moving clouds were flooding the sky above them and the temperature was dropping quickly. The wind kicked up leaves from the grass in the back yard. The two men turned toward each other.

  “So much for the weather,” Frank said.

  Will shined the red light on the back door of the bar. “Alarm will sound if door is opened” a small sticker said on the push-bar. Will hoped to god that was not the case. The electricity had been out in the city since shortly after martial law had collapsed. He turned the flashlight off, shouldering the door open by inches and searching through the dark for the undead. He pushed the door open slowly, the wind instantly driving drizzle through the door and into his face.

  He stepped into the alley and eased the door shut behind him. He turned left and stood stock still. The door made a small click as it settled into the frame. Will unsheathed his machete just as the two zombies in the alley turned around, stepping quickly to the side as they lurched toward him, trying to create some space between the two. He cut a hand off of one and circled as he listened to the incomprehensible babble from the monsters. The one less-a-hand growled and stutter-lunged at him and he chopped downward through its skull, lopping the top half off. The undead man dropped to the ground as Will pivoted for the other.

  Too late.

  The other zombie grabbed him from behind. It was strong. Stronger than he had imagined, and it dragged him quickly toward it. He tried to move, but now understood how so many could be taken so easily: they were far stronger undead than alive. He reversed his grip on the machete and swung it backward into the zombie’s mid-section when a blast rang out and he felt shards of bone and a burst of fluid on the back of his neck. The zombie let go and slipped off him to the wet asphalt.

  He scrambled for a moment and got into a crouch, pulling his blade from the dead zombie.

  A figure stepped out from behind a nearby parked van.

  “You okay?”

  “Frank?”

  “Shit, Will, you made it,” Frank said.

  “We gotta start running now, there’s a half-dozen super zulus a half-block away on the other side of these buildings.”

  “Shit, let’s go,” Frank said.

  And they ran. They picked their way around the silhouettes of trees, the occasional spider web slapping across Will’s face as he led the way. There was no time to worry if the spider that had spun it had been on it when he ripped through it. His fear of spiders had been replaced by something much more deadly. They stopped after a while and each took a knee amid a copse of trees. Will was exhausted.

  Click.

  Will toggled his radio. “Olandis, man we’re on the way. I just found Frank and we’re in the woods maybe a mile from you. We might be there in fifteen minutes or it might take the rest of the night. Just stay cool.”

  Click. Click.

  Will looked at Frank. “There are some of the super zulus around the aircraft. Olandis is already there, hiding in a building, but I think he’s starting to panic.”

  Frank nodded. “Panic? I was hiding in that alley for hours waiting for a chance to move after those two Zs came down it and just stood there. When you came out that back door, I couldn’t believe I had a chance. I’m glad it was you.”

  Will nodded. “Likewise. But you could have blown my head off at that range.”

  “I didn’t know it was you until after I shot it,” Frank said. “Anyway, you were seconds away from getting your head bitten off.”

  Will let out a tiny laugh. “I had the bastard right where I wanted it.”

  The rain changed from a downpour to a steady drizzle and both of them looked up through the canopy at the low clouds moving by. The wind slackened.

  “I know this is going to sound crazy, but you don’t have any water, do you?” Frank asked.

  Will nodded and pulled the hose to his hydration pack from underneath his combat harness and offered it to Frank. Frank leaned in and took several long pulls before sitting back against the trunk of a tree.

  “That fucking zulu that grabbed me tore my pack and everything off my back. Nearly dislocated my left shoulder before I slipped down a hill into a drainage ditch and was swept a hundred yards down it and into a metal screen covering a storm water drain,” Frank said. “Went from terrified of being eaten alive to terrified I was going to drown.”

  Branches snapped, a sharp ripple of noise off to their left. Both of them rose onto a knee and pointed their weapons at the noise. If the paths through the park still existed, they were long-since overgrown, and in their mad dash through the park, Will had made sure to avoid them, but someone or something was on one. Now, silence.

  Will turned to Frank and shook his head in disbelief before making a couple of hand gestures indicating they begin slowly moving away from the sound.They crept through the underbrush, eyes out, ears attuned for any sound not created by wind or rain. They paused every ten yards or so for a listening break, each taking a knee for a minute and searching through the darkness for some evidence of the undead walking near them.

  The progress was slow. Will was navigating off of a changed landscape, no longer the one he had taken weekly mountain bike rides through
. Those paths were long gone, and new trees and bushes had sprung up everywhere in the absence of the county parks maintenance teams’ pruning. Nature had taken back the park and exposed all that human activity as nothing more than a temporary setback to Mother Nature’s dream of ruling the planet.

  And then the drizzle stopped and moonlight poured down through the forest. Both men dropped instinctively to the ground and disappeared into the flora. Will looked up and saw the near-full moon and more stars than he’d ever seen before from inside the city limits of Pittsburgh. Without the light scattered from the streetlights, the night sky was a brilliant affair. He looked at his Luminox Navy SEALS watch: the sun would be up soon.

  Frank tapped him on the shoulder and pointed forward. Will looked. Fifty yards in front of them, standing at the edge of the woods were a dozen of the new zombies standing in a line inside the trees, watching the overgrown field Will and his friends had landed their aircraft in that morning. Beyond them, Will counted four more zombies wandering not-quite-aimlessly among the aircraft.

  “Motherfucker,” Will said under his breath.

  Frank nodded.

  Will keyed his walkie’s microphone, “O, you still there?”

  Click. Click.

  “We’re here at the edge of the field, maybe two hundred yards to the east in the woods, so hold on a little longer.”

  Click. Click.

  “Give us a couple of minutes to figure something out,” Will said and turned to Frank.

  Click. Click.

  Frank slung his shotgun over his back and pulled his Smith & Wesson .40 pistol from its holster. “I say we creep in as close as we get, and I shoot ‘em in from the right side and you take ‘em from the left.”

  Will nodded. “Yeah, but then we’ve got the other four on the field. And if there’s a dozen of them waiting here, how do we know there’s not a dozen on the other side of the field?”

  “They ain’t that smart,” Frank said.

  “They know we’re coming, so they’re smart enough.”

  “We can’t kill that many with blades, Will, there’s too many.”

  Will looked at the problem. Twelve headshots from this range - or any range - was impossible in the woods. Maybe if he had a silencer, but he didn’t, and his many attempts to try to build one had all failed. And even if that could’ve worked, they’d be walking into an open field in broad daylight with some super Zs right in front of them.

  Will began feeling the pockets on his combat vest and smiled when he touched the pocket with the two M67 fragmentation grenades. He clicked his walkie.

  “O, are you still armed?”

  Click. Click.

  “What are you thinking?” Frank asked.

  Will pulled the grenades out and then produced a small spool of kite string. “We’re gonna build a little sound diversion back here to divert their attention and make them come this way when we run for the gyros.”

  “O, when the sun comes up, we’re going to create a diversion on our side of the field. You wait until you see us come into the field running for the aircraft, when you see that, come out and look in every other direction but where we’re coming from and shoot anything coming,” Will said into his walkie. “You copy?”

  Click. Click.

  After Will explained the plan, Frank looked at him in disbelief.

  “I ... you wanna ... I mean, that’s,” Frank said, turning and looking at the super-zombies a half-football field away. “I don’t think we’re as bad shots as you think we are.”

  “Maybe not, but we start the kind of shooting you want to do, we’re going to be the center of the zombie universe. If there’s any on the other side of the field, or if some of them from Regent Square followed us into the woods last night looking for us, then we’re in a world of hurt real quick if anything goes wrong.

  “And something always goes wrong. We just need them all looking somewhere else for the couple of minutes it’s going to take to get to the aircraft and start them up,” Will said.

  Twenty minutes later, Will and Frank were picking their way through the waist-high grass on the southern side of what had been a field used for soccer and dog walking. The sun was poking up from the east, the sky easing from black to blue, and despite the beauty of the park, Will was filled with tension. He looked at his watch. Two more minutes.

  “I only wish we could be there to watch and see if it actually fuckin’ works,” Frank said, looking toward the tree line to the east.

  Will nodded. “Either way, we’re going to know if it worked pretty soon.”

  Will turned his P90 over in his hands and checked the magazine, confirming it was fully loaded. He glanced at his watch and raised the weapon, sighting across the field at one of the zombies moving among the aircraft. Frank pulled out his Smith & Wesson and sighted on the closest undead walker, forty yards away.

  There was an explosion in the woods a hundred yards to their left, and Will squeezed the trigger a half-instant later, putting a round into the zombie’s ear and finishing its undead existence. He turned to his left and quickly acquired the next zombie when its head popped open and Olandis suddenly appeared from the underbrush in the field. A couple of seconds went by and a second explosion erupted in the woods. Will swung the rifle through the field and saw no more targets.

  “You got ‘em both?” Will asked.

  Frank shook his head. “Fuck no, the other one is behind Greg’s airplane not moving. No shot on it from here.”

  “Fuck. Time to run,” Will said. “Watch the tree lines.”

  They got up and sprinted into the field, Will pointing to Olandis to watch in the direction of Greg’s parked aircraft. Olandis turned just as the waiting undead monster started skip-hopping right at him. Olandis dropped to a knee, raised his Winchesterr and put a round through the creature’s neck, causing it to pause for a moment to regain its balance. Olandis pulled the bolt back and slammed it forward, but Will had the creature in the the sights of his P90 and put two rounds through the back of its skull. It collapsed in a heap.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Will yelled as he ran for his aircraft and began spinning the rotor blade madly.

  He hopped in and sparked the engine to life, throttled the engine up, and began rolling forward, gaining momentum, the blades beginning to spin and generate lift. He looked behind him and saw Frank rolling along with Olandis in the back seat of his two-seater. Behind them, he saw more than a dozen super-zombies streaming out of the woods, some of them in full-spittle sprints.

  And then Will was in the air, adjusting the controls and gaining altitude above Beechwood Boulevard, turning quickly to watch as Frank pulled into the air with ease, the nearest undead twenty yards behind him. Will stuck his hand into the air and gave Frank the “thumbs up” before motioning for him to take trail and follow him. Will climbed to a thousand feet and turned the aircraft to the north, cutting across the city and turning to the right to follow the Allegheny River upstream, adjusting his altitude down to just a hundred feet above the river: he didn’t want the undead to see him at altitude and, maybe, figure out what direction he was heading in. And, for whatever reason, the undead avoided water. He figured they couldn’t swim.

  Twenty minutes later, Will rolled to a stop on the little make-shift grass strip a mile outside of Leechburg. He drove the aircraft to the parking area and shut it down. He leaned forward in the cockpit and rested his head against the instrument panel, working on controlling his breath. Greg was gone. Al was gone. George was gone. Jeff was gone.

  All so he could get some snapshots of a wife he’d shot dead years earlier.

  He leaned back in the cockpit and began weeping, tears streaming down his face, his nose filling with mucus. Everyone died. Everyone. The world was lost. He pulled the photos of his wife out of the pocket on his vest and stared at them, looking at the blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman he’d know for a total of four years. He’d known Greg and Al for ten, George and Jeff for fourteen. And he’d risked all their lives for a h
andful of pictures of her and the off-chance that the Giant Eagle supermarket hadn’t been raided by whoever was surviving in the neighborhoods near the shopping center.

  He had now failed nearly everyone he had ever loved.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Frank park his aircraft and both he and Olandis walk away toward their encampment. Will calmed and sat still, looking through the photographs, staring at one he had taken of Cora in the spare bedroom one day, her hair falling across her shoulders, an errant strand caught in the hinge of her glasses and laying on her cheek. She was smiling. The most genuine smile of any of the hundreds of photographs he’d taken of her. She had hated being photographed and most of her smiles looked faked, at best. In this one, she looked happy.

  He put the pictures back in his pocket and looked up into the morning sky. He never tired of the blue of the sky, never was less-than-awed by the way the landscape looked from altitude. The zombies may have come to rule the planet, but they hadn’t taken away its beauty. A gust of breeze coursed over him and he enjoyed the sensation. He climbed out of the aircraft and looked around at the world, listened to the trills of birds as they awoke, felt the softness of the grass under his feet.

  He walked across the field to the tents in the tree line and pushed through the flap. Frank and Olandis were sitting on the edge of their cots, whatever conversation they had been having suspended by his entrance. Both were quiet as Will stripped out of his gear and dropped it on the ground by his cot. He was exhausted. Sleep pushed in on him, overwhelming all of the emotions he knew he would have to deal with later.

  Later.

  The world still hadn’t ended.

  What Hristo Gruev Saw

  Devin, Bulgaria - Day (-) 8

  The shed behind the house collapsed in a loud clash of splintering wood and clanging garden tools. The four walls fell away from each other and the roof spit up chunks of shattered wood and tar shingles. Everyone in town had heard the noise, and lights flipped on throughout the town. Hristo got out of bed and looked through the window into the backyard and saw nothing. He looked over his shoulder at his wife, who was sitting up in bed, and shrugged.