“Help me with this,” Becky said as she started to take a mattress off a twin bed. We dragged it to the landing and heaved it down the stairs. The door at the bottom was only open a crack. I could see arms poking through.
I ran back into the guest room with Becky. We tossed the box-spring down the stairs next. Some zombies were already pushing the ottoman out of the way. We tossed the bed frame down the stairs; it knocked them over, pinned one creature against the rear wall, and slammed the door shut on the arms of the others. Altogether, the junk did a reasonable job of blocking the stairs. It would buy us a few minutes.
I poked my head out the window of the guest room, on the left side of the house. The next house was ten feet away. Half a dozen zombies wandered the alley below. There was no escaping through that window.
My next stop was the bathroom window while Becky continued to throw furniture from another bedroom down the staircase. This window overlooked the rear of the house. From the bathroom, I had a clear view of the clock-tower and downtown. Payne’s Creek was in chaos.
Zombies were wandering at random as they sought out the newest source of noise or scent of blood. A handful of survivors who I didn’t know were desperately trying to pick off zombies from the second floor window of a library. There was a swarm of the creatures pounding on the main door below them. This was one of the worst zombie hordes I had encountered since I left Quarantine Camp #24B. It was just my luck that this horde happened to meander by on the night when The Preacher and I decided to save the day. Fuck my timing.
Even worse, was that this window led to a sheer drop. It would prove useless. However, as I looked to my right, I noticed the roof to a farmer’s porch. Another window was right above it. It looked feasible.
“Over here,” I called to Becky as I ran into the far bedroom.
She tossed a nightstand down the now-cluttered stairs and chased after me.
The window above the porch took some elbow-grease but I got it open. As I looked outside, I planned a route.
“If we can get down, we can run up that side street,” I pointed to where I was mentioning so Becky could see. “It looks pretty clear of zombies.”
“Okay,” Becky agreed.
“The second building on the right there has a low, open window,” I continued. “You see it?”
“The little, gray building?”
“No, the brown one.”
“Okay, got you,” she confirmed.
“Let’s get inside that building and take it from there. If the coast is clear, we may be able to run directly to the town-hall.”
“Okay.”
“After you,” I motioned, and took Becky’s hand as I helped her climb through the window and onto the porch roof. A serious of groans and scraping from downstairs indicted that the zombies were now trying to get around the furniture that Becky had tossed in their way.
I swallowed a lump in my throat and followed her to the porch roof. Once outside, I shut the window behind me. Becky was already peering off the edge of the porch for a way to get down.
“There’s a dumpster right here,” she let me know.
“Perfect, now go!” I instructed. We climbed down one by one. Fortunately, no zombies were close by.
As we ran across the street, I watched the mob of undead that were attacking the library smash through several windows.
“They’re in! They’re in!” I heard a survivor’s panicked voice yell.
I kept going. Soon, Becky and I were through the low window I had pointed to from the red house. This building looked like some sort of office. It was empty and dark. A row of cubicles lined each wall. Each one had a desk with an unused, dusty or broken computer atop it.
We made our way through the building with great care and met with no unpleasant surprises. Outside the main entrance, the street was basically clear with the exception of a few straggling zombies. The old town hall was now just a few hundred yards away. I could see it clearly from my position as I looked through the office door.
A crash and snarl at the rear of the building made me perk up.
“Shamblers,” Becky whispered. It was time to move.
I pushed through the main door and ran down the street to the town hall. Becky chased after me. The sniper rifle fired again, though luckily at a zombie which was about seventy yards up the road. I watched as its head disintegrated into fragments.
“Thanks for taking my bullet,” I panted as I ran quicker to get out of the sniper’s line of sight in case he spotted me.
After I passed a few old cars, I ducked behind a tow truck with four flat tires and waited for Becky to catch up. She was only a few paces behind me, so it didn’t take her long. The entrance to the town hall was now just across a patch of grass and a small parking lot. I was out of sight from the sniper, and I didn’t see any zombies around.
“Now what?” Becky asked.
I reached into my backpack. “Now I get to play with fire,” I told her with a devious grin on my face as I retrieved the quart of acetone, my only spare shirt, and the packet of matches. I propped my twelve gauge pump-action against the side of the tow truck and added, “please cover me and yell if we need to bug out. I’ll be back in just a minute.”
Becky nodded and peered out over the hood of the tow truck to see if there was danger.
I ran into the town hall with my items wrapped in my spare shirt and my .45 in my shooting hand.
The bottom floor was empty. To my benefit, it was also old and dried out. I hadn’t seen Marcus yet, but if he was hiding out in here, he’d soon be extra crispy.
I emptied the quart of acetone all over the old shirt and the floor. After stepping back a safe distance, I picked the pack of matches off the floor and set down my .45.
As I prepared to light the place off, a sledgehammer hit me. I don’t mean that in the metaphorical sense, either. I mean a real sledgehammer slammed into my back.
I sprawled to the floor and cried out. I was lucky my backpack was full of gear because it absorbed most of the shock. I still suspected I’d have one hell of a bruise. In a pained daze, I looked up at Sha’Quizz. I don’t know where his LMG was, but assumed that he’d either used up the ammo or lost it fighting zombies. I also didn’t see his companion from earlier, the man who’d been wielding the sword. Maybe he too had fallen to the zombies. Sha’Quizz was obviously by himself. It didn’t seem to bother him any: he started to laugh at me.
“Oh boy, oh boy,” he said in between chuckles, “I barely tapped you and you on your ass already.”
“I’m not here for you,” I told him, “tell me where Marcus is.”
“I afraid I ain’t gonna do nothin’ of the sort,” Sha’Quizz shook his head. “But,” he added a second later, “I do intend to see how many pieces I can turn your head into.”
He swung the sledgehammer down at me and I rolled fast. It almost punched a hole through the hardwood floor.
As he lifted it again, I kicked him hard in the balls (I wasn’t above cheating to keep my head in once piece).
Sha’Quizz lurched over and I stumbled to my feet. He was coming at me a second later like an angry rhino. A quick backswing of the sledgehammer barely missed me. I leapt in close so he couldn’t get leverage with it again. As I tried to take the sledgehammer with one hand, I struck him hard in the side of the head with my other.
He barely moved. I punched him twice more. He grunted then just used brute force to shove me backwards, off of him. I almost did an entire back-flip as I rolled. I was hardly on my feet when he tried to plow the head of the sledgehammer into my stomach. I twisted to the side to avoid the rib-breaking attack. The head of the hammer buried itself into the wall behind me.
I hit Sha’Quizz twice more, this time with left hooks. He took the shots like a man, let go of the entrenched hammer, and slugged me in the right side with a left of his own. I gasped from the powerful punch to my recently healed rib. I was then left wide-open for a straight right to the cheek. It knocked me backwards,
onto a desk.
Papers went flying everywhere as I kicked wildly at Sha’Quizz with my right foot. I caught him once in the chin. When I tried to get him with a second good shot, he grabbed my ankle and started to twist it.
As he tried to break my foot, I reached up and dug my fingers into his shoulder. We fell to the floor together in a heap. I kicked him a few times with my free foot and he let go.
I got to my feet, but he was faster. He caught me with a powerful, left uppercut. It sent me backwards and I skidded across the hardwood floor. Blood started to run down my face as the cut I’d received on my chin earlier opened back up.
Sha’Quizz reached down into his pant-leg. He drew out a narrow, boot-knife that I really had wished I’d known about. I thought I was a goner when I caught the glint of my .45 on the floor nearby.
Like the tongue of a frog darting out for a fly, my arm moved like lightning. I clasped the handle to the heavy pistol and fired without aiming as Sha’Quizz rushed forward to finish me off with his boot-knife.
The heavy, slow moving bullet struck his unarmed hand and took half his fingers off. Sha’Quizz cried out and stopped in his tracks. His eyes bugged out of his head as he realized the extent of his injury. “Awww, shit man,” he said angrily. He looked more irritated than concerned.
I quickly got up and grinned at him as I trained my .45 on him. “Maybe I should see how many pieces I can turn your head into, fucker,” I told him.
The next thing I knew, I was screaming with pain and my .45 went clattering to the floor. That’s when I looked down and noticed that I had the handle of a knife sticking out my forearm. I blinked and thought what the fuck just happened? as I stared at the blade. Then, I realized that Sha’Quizz had thrown it. He had just lost half a hand and still had the remarkable sense of self-preservation to throw a knife into my arm!
He body checked me to the ground in that moment of confusion. I rolled onto the arm that had the knife sticking out of it. The floor forced the knife out at an angle and caused my cut to open up even more. I screamed again.
Sha’Quizz reached for my .45. I knew I was fucked.
Then, I saw the book of matches.
Everything moved in slow motion. As I picked up the matchbook, he bent over to grab my gun. I opened the matchbook and used one match to light the whole pack aflame as he stood upright. As he started to aim the gun at me, I tossed the flaming matches into the acetone-soaked shirt.
The loud WHOOMPF that followed was the sound of a fireball. It was so hot that it singed off my eyebrows. It was so bright that I had to shield my eyes. Before they even opened, I could hear Sha’Quizz howling in primal torment.
When my eyes opened, I saw his entire body engulfed in flames. He was desperately spinning in circles and flailing around as he tried to swat the fire out. I stumbled out of the town hall as the fire spread. I was barely able to stay upright.
As soon as I got to the street, I found the person I’d been looking for.
“Good to see you again, you scrotum tickler,” Marcus said with a smile. He had one arm around Becky’s throat. His other was pointing the pistol with the laser sight at her head.
Chapter Seventeen
Becky looked at me with a sort of sad guilt and said, “I’m sorry Nick, he snuck up on me.”
“Please let her go,” I begged. “You can have me instead.”
Marcus smiled in a sinister fashion. He bounced the top of the pistol off Becky’s head, which caused her to cry out, then answered, “I can do whatever I fucking want. I have the pistol and your girl. You don’t even have a weapon.”
I stalled for time. I knew he didn’t like to talk much so he’d shoot me very soon. I had to make him talk while I thought of something. “I know, -you’re right,” I told him. I hoped that feeding his huge ego would help. “You have all the cards here. I came to kill you and I failed.”
“Damn straight you failed like a sucker,” Marcus laughed, “although you did kill all my boys: Sha’Quizz, Wendy, Clod, and who knows who else -props for that.”
“How’d you get them to take your side?” I asked as I looked around for a weapon and saw none. Smoke was now billowing out of the town hall’s front doorway.
“It was easy, Nick. All you have to do in this new world is promise people what they want.”
“Which is?”
“I offered them something that Mr. Yates didn’t have the balls to make. You remember what he told us when we arrived?”
I thought for a moment. “Yes,” I said, “h told us we could either go on our way and never come back, he could kills us all, or we could join them and build the town.”
“Exactly!” Marcus nodded.
Becky squirmed in his grasp and he squeezed tighter around her throat. She turned blue before he relinquished the pressure. “Stop moving,” he rasped in her ear. He looked back and me and continued, “so what do you think was wrong with that deal?”
“You tell me,” I countered.
“It’s a deal for pussies,” he stated. “It turns out that some of Yates’ crew, particularly Wendy and Sha’Quizz, wanted things done different. You see, Wendy lost her eye from some guy betraying them when Yates took the guy in. One of the nigger’s close friends was killed when another guy got bit and hid it. Prior to bite-inspections, they used an honor system. He fucking died that night and turned to a shambler. He bit some other poor fucker before he was put down.”
“So you offered them the agreement they wanted to hear,” I pieced the puzzle together.
“Yes. I promised them that we would be safe of threats for good. I told them that we would cull out the weak….like you….and we would have the strongest, most well-armed community we could make. We would never let anyone leave once they found us. Their options would be simple: either they prove their worth immediately or they die and we take their stuff. We’d build a sick-ass reputation for our toughness, Nick. No one would ever come looking for trouble. Once we had enough fucking tough badasses here, and guns and ammo to go with them, we would be able to protect ourselves from any shambler threat. No one would dare to betray us, and no one would die.”
“You’re a wonderful liar, Marcus,” I said snidely.
“Well, I didn’t want to live under Yates’ regime any more than they did,” he confided. “After all, if I have to live in a community with all kinds of rules and shit, doesn’t it make sense that I lead it?”
“Your logic is fucked, Marcus.”
“No,” he said, “you’re fucked.” He pointed upward to the clock-tower and added, “and he’s fucked too, watch.”
I turned around and saw that flames were now bursting through the second floor windows of the town hall. A column of thick, black smoke was rising up and into the clock-tower where the sniper was stationed. The sniper was now using the butt of his rifle to smash out the wooden slats from the window that he’d been shooting through. He was trying to flee from the smoke and fire. I could imagine it was stifling up there.
Once he opened a hole large enough to climb through, he dropped the sniper rifle out. It fell two stories, bounced off a narrow, steep roof, and landed on a sidewalk below. The sniper climbed out the window next and perched himself onto the sill as he looked down.
“This is gonna be good,” Marcus said.
Before he leapt, he crossed himself with the traditional Catholic cross-thing (if it has an official name, I don’t know it). He then dropped down from the high window.
He landed on his back with an audible crack as he hit the narrow roof that his rifle had just bounced off. If his back wasn’t broken, I would have been astounded. While he screamed, he rolled off the roof and landed in the street below. His crumpled body was half on the curb and half off it. He was still conscious, though it was clear that he had a number of broken bones and was in a lot of pain. The zombies nearby immediately took note of him and started to stagger toward the hapless, crippled sniper.
From behind me, I could hear Marcus laughing. “You fucking s
ee that!” He was in near hysterics. “What a dumbass!”
The sniper screamed as he was mobbed and devoured. While I watched the horrific scene, Marcus addressed me, “that was your doing, Nick. I hope you’re happy.”
“I did what had to be done,” I let Marcus know as I watched a zombie peel the face off the screaming, dying sniper.
“Well, good for you,” Marcus replied, “but now it’s time for me to kill you, Nick. I’m going to keep your woman, too. Now turn around so I don’t have to shoot you in the back. You know how I hate doing that to people.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat as I realized I was about to die.
Oh well, there are worse ways to go, I concluded.
I spun around and faced my foe. Four zombies were lurching up behind him. He must have seen that my look of terror wasn’t directed at him, or else he heard the groans of their hunger because he blurted out, “oh shit!”
He immediately glanced over his shoulder to assess the threat. Becky elbowed him in the face and ran for it. He fired a quick shot at her and missed, then turned to the zombies.
He killed the first one as he stepped away from them. Meanwhile, Becky snatched the pump-action shotgun from its place propped against the tow truck as she ran towards me.
That’s when I heard more undead sounds. The smell of decay overpowered me. From around the side of the town hall, I noticed shifting shapes. There was a virtual army of zombies marching our way; they must have been attracted to the roaring fire.
Marcus continued to shoot at the zombies near him. I quickly looked around. Zombies were starting to appear from everywhere. The only direction we could run without encountering a mob of them was back toward Marcus and the office that Becky and I had passed through a little while ago.
Marcus fired his last shot. The slide to his pistol snapped open and his final bullet-casing shot out and rolled away. The fourth zombie by him dropped.
Becky tossed me the shotgun. I pointed it at Marcus.
Shamblers: the zombie apocalypse Page 12