Noah breathed a sigh of relief. He shifted the clutch and put the truck into gear. It jerked forward, startling him. He pulled out of the station and onto the furthest lane of the main highway, heading back in the direction of his family. As he passed the super store, he noticed that the front doors were open.
“Alvin.” He spoke the name as if it were an obscenity.
The road leading to the Barnes’ house was dotted with undead, but the tanker was powerful enough to mow them down with minimal resistance. The truck’s transmission was similar to the standard transmission on his old car, but for some reason Noah couldn’t get the rig moving over thirty miles per hour.
During the seemingly endless drive home, it began to drizzle. Noah repeated a prayer. “Please be ok. Please be ok.”
There was a break in the density of bodies on the half-mile stretch of highway leading to Noah’s house. His heart fluttered. Had he passed the front of the horde? He wondered.
The truck was too big to navigate up his winding driveway. Noah stopped the rig in front of his mailbox, which had been snapped-off at the base and pushed into the drainage ditch. He left the engine idling in the road, jumped out of the cab, and ran up the driveway.
Noah stopped short at the sight of his family’s home. The front door was kicked-in, and a few corpses milled about outside. Hunched silhouettes passed across sections of windows where the boards had been torn off. The baritone moans of what sounded like a couple dozen corpses droned from inside the house like a beehive. But there was no gunfire. No screams. No signs of life.
His stomach turned, and his body began to teeter from side to side. She could be locked in the attic—or the basement, he thought, still unwilling to give in to the obvious. Dad would have stuck her somewhere for me to find, if he had any sense left in him.
There were far too many to kill. Noah’s eyes narrowed as if searching for an idea somewhere in the distance, and, after a moment, he spotted it.
He ran back to the truck. A few frontrunners to what remained of the second half of the horde were already within throwing distance. Noah hopped into the cab and grabbed his backpack. After unbuckling one of the straps, he tied it around the pull cord that hung from the ceiling and let it drop. As the pack dangled, the air-horn let out a loud, steady belch. Every corpse within a mile radius perked up at the sound of the horn. Noah jumped down from the cab and slammed the door.
He skidded down the ravine in the direction of the canal, stopping beside the mouth of the drainage pipe that ran beneath the road. Noah slowly plodded through the pipe, careful to keep his splashing to a minimum. He stopped at the far end and waited in the shadows. Eventually a steady line of dead streamed down the driveway, eager to investigate the noise emanating from the road. When the flow of corpses tapered off, Noah climbed the streambank and ran up the driveway.
With machete drawn he flew through the front door. The kitchen looked like it had experienced an earthquake. The breakfast table lay on its side with two of its legs knocked off, and the matching chairs were trampled to pieces. Broken cans of food were strewn about the floor, liberated from their shelves by blasts of buckshot that blew the cupboard doors right off their hinges. The acrid scent of burnt gunpowder mixed with the aroma of preserves and the all too familiar stench of rotted flesh.
Noah stepped over a faceless body before entering the living room. There he found a few more bodies with pulp for faces, but no Charlie or Abby.
He moved upstairs. There was a hole in the wall outside the first bedroom, which was the guest room where Alvin had stayed.
Dad switched to slugs, thought Noah. He was running out of ammo.
Peering through the hole he saw a man and a woman hunkered over his father. They tore chunks of flesh from his body like hyenas feeding on a zebra carcass in a nature documentary. The shotgun lay beside Charlie. Several spent shell casings were strewn about the rug, along with three motionless corpses, their heads reduced to unrecognizable stumps by close-range gunfire.
Noah dashed into the room. “Hey!” He blurted.
The corpses turned their heads but didn’t attack. Their current meal still warm, they went back to eating. It was the first time Noah had gotten the attention of the undying, only to be promptly ignored again.
He charged, swinging the machete with such force that it decapitated the first corpse’s head clean off. The headless body knocked into the woman and pushed her onto her back. Before she could recover, Noah plunged the blade through her torso so hard that it pinned her to the floor like an insect tacked to a setting board. She pulled at the blade, managing only to mutilate her hands and nothing else.
Noah stood hunched over his father’s mangled body, shoulders slowly rising and falling as he regained his breath. There’s nothing left, he thought. Nothing. Tears rolled down his cheeks and fell onto his father’s neck.
Suddenly his father coughed spraying blood over his chest. Noah’s mouth gaped. He knelt beside Charlie and took his hand.
“Dad?” His voice creaked.
Charlie’s eyes fluttered open. He squinted at his son, as if trying to place a face he hadn’t seen in years. “Y—you shouldn't have left,” he said between shallow gasps of breath.
Noah winced. “I know. You were right about Al. I didn't see it.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I protected him.”
His father nodded slightly, and then his eyes rolled into the back of his head. The blood that pooled in his bite wounds lessened as his heart grew weaker. Charlie’s grip tightened and then relaxed.
Noah cupped Charlie’s hand and closed his eyes, trying to reflect on his father’s passing, but the incessant snarling from the pinned woman was too distracting. Noah stood. He placed his foot on the woman’s ribs and yanked the machete out of the floor, only to plunge it right back into her forehead.
He looked back at his father again. Charlie’s body twitched. Suddenly, a high-pitched scream sounded from down the hall.
She’s alive! He thought.
Noah pulled out the blade and dashed into the hallway. He burst into his sister's room where he was surprised to find Adam Fitzpatrick pounding on the closet door.
“Adam?”
Fitzpatrick turned. His bug-eyed gaze and bobbing jaw resembled the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Get away from her!”
Darting forward, Noah swung the machete at Fitzpatrick’s head, but at that moment Adam lunged beneath the blade, tackling Noah.
As Noah slammed against the hardwood, his machete fell and clattered against the floorboards. Adam grabbed Noah’s shoulders and leaned in for a bite. Noah palmed Adam’s face with one hand and groped blindly for his weapon with the other. He could feel the edge of Adam’s teeth as they repeatedly grazed the meat of his hand.
Noah grunted, “You want it?” And in one quick, fluid motion he stuck his fingers into Adam’s mouth, cupping them over his lower teeth, and pulled. Before Adam could bite down, Noah dislocated his jaw from the base of his skull. Adam fell onto his side giving Noah the opportunity to scramble for his machete.
Noah got to his feet. He raised the blade over his shoulder.
Adam sat up. He touched his lower mandible, which sagged awkwardly. When he tried to close his mouth and could not, Noah thought he registered a faint look of confusion. Noah cared little to examine it, however, and lodged the blade into the side of his neighbor’s head. Adam’s animation ceased immediately, as if he were a mechanical toy that Noah had just switched off. Fitzpatrick fell to the floor, never to move again.
Noah hobbled over to the closet.
“Abby. Are you in there?” He called through the door.
“Noah?” Abby replied in a muffled voice.
“It's me, sweetie. You can come out. I got him.”
The closet door opened slowly, and Abigail stepped out. Her bloodshot eyes contrasted sharply against her pale skin as they nervously scanned the room.
“Oh, thank god,” Noah whispered. He squatted and pr
essed her to his chest. “I thought I’d lost you.”
Holding her out by the arms, Noah inspected Abby. She pressed a stuffed tiger against her forearm. It was soaked with blood.
“Oh no,” Noah’s voice quavered. “No. Abby?” he said choking back tears.
She collapsed into his arms.
“No, no, no. Not you too.” Tears welled in his eyes.
“I wasn't quiet enough,” she whimpered.
He pulled her to him. Her small body felt so weak and fragile in his arms. “No. It wasn't your fault, sweetheart. It was him.”
Noah picked her up and sat her on the bed. “Let me see,” he said, gently peeling the tiger off her arm.
Abby winced. The bite was deep. Blood pooled in the cavity with every beat of her little heart. Noah yanked off a pillowcase and wrapped it around her arm.
Abigail slumped back on a pile of stuffed animals and began to shiver. Noah took the sides of her quilt and wrapped them around her like a crepe.
“Did Alvin do something bad to you?” said Noah.
Abigail nodded her head gravely.
Noah pressed his eyes shut and turned his head away, as if he were about to be given an inoculation with a particularly large needle.
He turned back to her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“He said he’d let the bad men in if I did.”
His anger flared, but, as he looked at the light fading inside her eyes, the emotion was quickly overpowered by heartache. “I let you down,” his voice cracked. “I let you down so bad.”
She laced her fingers between Noah’s. “He's good at lying.”
“I’m so sorry, Abby. I should have been—”
“Daddy?” said Abigail, looking past her brother.
Noah's eyes widened as the color drained from his face. He turned to find his father, hazy-eyed and riddled with bright-red bite craters, teetering in the doorway.
Charlie reached for them, but strangely he didn’t advance. He seemed to be stuck at the threshold of the door. Perhaps, in a far corner of his mind, a smoldering ember of memory kept him from attacking his own children.
Noah’s eyes glanced at Adam. The machete was still lodged in his head. He stood up and took a deep breath. “I'm sorry,” he said, inching toward Adam’s body. “I’m sorry I let him in. I’m sorry I left.”
His father tilted his head.
“And I’m—I'm sorry for—” He glanced back at Abigail as she bled to death. Noah wiped his tears with the back of his bloodied hand. “Just—everything.”
Charlie moaned and stepped toward him. In a flash, Noah leapt onto Adam’s back, freed the machete, and swung the blade into his father’s temple. Charlie dropped to his knees and then slowly fell onto his side.
Noah turned back to Abigail. Her hands were butterflied over her nose and mouth.
“Don’t look at him.” Noah sat in front of her, blocking the view of the mangled bodies. “That wasn’t daddy. You know that.”
Abigail’s breath was fast and shallow. Her eyes opened and closed slowly. “Will I be like daddy?”
Noah caressed her cheek. “No, darlin’. I'll stop it from happening—after you go to sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
“But you’ll get to see mommy—and daddy. And everything will be like it was before —just somewhere else. Somewhere nicer.”
“But not you.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
Abby’s eyes slowly closed for the last time, like slipping into a deep slumber she had been fighting hard to ward off.
He began to cry. “I love you, sweetie.”
“I lo—,” she mumbled, and then she was gone.
As he walked across the yard Noah dabbed his eyes with a red bandana before wiping the blood off his machete. From the hill that overlooked the highway he had a clear view of the fuel tanker. Although the horn had run out of compressed air, almost two-dozen corpses were still poking around the truck, looking for the belly in the clam.
Noah flicked the machete into the overgrown grass. It stuck in the ground like a dart in a cork board. He pulled out a box of tracer rounds from his shirt pocket and loaded three cartridges into Charlie’s Sedona rifle. Taking aim at the massive, cylindrical fuel tank, he fired.
A reddish streak of burning strontium trailed in the wake of the tracer round. The bullet winged a corpse in the shoulder, spinning her in Noah’s direction.
The high-caliber gun kicked like a horse. “Argh!” He cried, doubling over as the pain ripped through his arm. The near-continuous surge of adrenaline pumping through his body over the past couple days had allowed him to forget about the bite on his shoulder.
More dead turned in time to see Noah stand and reload. They shuffled in his direction, but they were too slow. Switching shoulders, Noah awkwardly fired again. The incendiary round pierced the tank and ignited the gasoline. The rig exploded in a huge fireball, incinerating the surrounding corpses. The dead that eluded the fire were killed as well, their brains turned to mush by the blast’s pressure-wave.
“Now die!” shouted Noah.
A cadaver on the edge of the blast radius stumbled around, engulfed in flames. Noah smiled as it flailed its arms and then fell onto the ground to writhe and cook.
He dropped the rifle and headed for the toolshed. Charlie and Abby’s graves would need to be dug quickly as the commotion was sure to attract more attention.
VII
Noah barreled down a back road in an Olympic blue Ford truck. A pack of Marlboro’s sitting on a bed of coins in the center console caught his eye. He picked up the pack and thumbed the lid open. It was nearly full.
“What the hell,” he said.
Using his lips, Noah pulled a cigarette from the iconic red and white box. He pushed the knob on the truck’s electric lighter and then slipped the pack into his shirt pocket. When the knob popped out, he pulled it from the dash and pressed the glowing red coils against the tobacco. Noah took a long, satisfying drag and then let out a series of coughs from deep in his lungs. It was his first cigarette in over a year. He used to smoke a pack a day until Abby learned about the harmfulness of cigarettes in school. After that, she embarked upon a crusade to end her big brother’s smoking habit, which she successfully accomplished after only a few months of relentless nagging. She had even made him sign an agreement promising that he would never smoke again.
The road was clear until he reached the cemetery. A man in his seventies wearing a soiled gray suit stumbled into the street from behind a small mausoleum, attracted to the truck’s rumbling engine. Noah punched the gas and aimed straight for the gray-suited man. His body bounced off the truck and flew into a drainage ditch.
As the truck cruised along the hillside that led past Noah’s old high school, a tall corpse wearing a green and white Lyon’s basketball uniform stepped into the road. They collided, but instead of plowing him aside as he had the man by the cemetery, the former athlete slid up the hood and crashed through the passenger-side windshield.
Startled, Noah jerked the steering wheel. The truck swerved onto the road’s shoulder. He corrected the wheel and had almost regained control of the truck when the corpse suddenly came-to and began thrashing around. With his attention divided between driving and fending off the gangly basketball player’s flailing arms, Noah lost control of the vehicle. The Ford tore through the guardrails and rolled onto its side. It tumbled down the hill and crashed into the side of the school’s cafeteria, punching a hole through the brick wall.
Slowly, the world came into focus. Noah hung upside down, suspended by his seatbelt. The corpse that had been lodged in the windshield was gone, but now another one was trying to slip through the broken passenger window. Stuck between the cafeteria floor and the door panel, she swiped at the air, just inches from Noah’s head.
“Jesus!” said Noah when he saw the girl. Her lips had been chewed off revealing the bloodied bottoms of her gums, and there was a gash on her forehead that went all the wa
y down to the bone.
He unclipped his seatbelt and fell onto the roof. The girl hissed. Noah lightly tossed the machete and rifle through the driver-side window before dragging himself out of the truck. He labored to his feet and performed a brief skeletal inventory. Despite feeling like he just got off the Scrambler at the Barrel County Fair, nothing seemed broken.
Halfway up the hill, the basketball player lay on his back, his pelvis crushed, feebly waving at the languid sky. Noah considered finishing him off but then reconsidered when he noticed several twisted faces appearing in the windows of the cafeteria. More would come from outside the school.
As Noah headed down Smoke Street, he came across his former high school chorus teacher, Professor Hendrick. His dried intestines hung from his gut, dangling over the crotch of his black slacks like the purse worn over a Scotsman’s kilt. Noah waved without thinking, but then caught himself and lowered his hand. Hendrick had the slow, rigid gait of someone who had been long-dead—probably since the very beginning. Noah sidestepped his old teacher with ease, but he hadn’t gotten more than a few paces before stopping. Hendrick had taught Noah to sing, had believed in him enough to even give him a solo in the high school chorus recital. His teacher deserved better than to be left a slave to his insatiable hunger. Noah turned back, and with one precise swipe, he put the professor down.
Couldn’t I have run into any of the assholes I went to school with? Noah thought as he wiped the blade on Hendrick’s pant leg.
His encounters with the dead became more and more frequent the closer he got to the center of town. Noah thought about what he had told Charlie before he left with Alvin, “They’re dying out. You can handle it.” How stupid he had been. This was nowhere near over.
Desperate to get off the street, Noah headed up a dirt road leading to Oakwood Park. The park was deserted, as it had always been even before the outbreak. He and his friends used to spend Saturday nights drinking on top of the “tall hill” that overlooked the JV football team’s practice field. The height afforded them a clear view of the road for times when bored police officers would come looking to bust balls. Whenever that happened, which was rarely, Noah and his friends melted into the surrounding trees until the cruiser hung a U-turn and drove out of sight. Even when the police did spot an underage drinker, the steepness of the tall hill was usually enough to dissuade most cops from giving chase. The ones with too much enthusiasm—usually rookies trying to prove something—would typically sprint about halfway up the hill before turning back to the squad car, wheezing in defeat. The living dead, however, would not be thwarted by fatigue. Noah had seen enough writhing bodies floating face-down in the river to know that the dead didn’t need oxygen—didn’t need to breathe at all.
Worse Than Dying Page 6