by AJ Powers
Still in bed, Malcom decided to pick up where he left off on Zombie Rush, finishing the disc while he ate cereal with sweetened condensed milk he found in the cabinet. He verbally mocked the things the television show got wrong—not just from his real-life experience, but also the creative liberties they used to deviate from the book. Malcom had read all of them in high school, and though he couldn’t remember all the details, there were several major plot points that he knew had nothing to do with the books. Not that it surprised Malcom any; Hollywood had a way of ruining works of art.
It was about 12:30, and Malcom still had some time to kill before he needed to leave. He thought about going back to sleep for another hour or two, but what was the point in that? He would have all of eternity to nap after sunset, so he didn’t need to bother with one now. As his eyes landed on his FAL leaning up against the wall next to the bed, he got an idea.
Malcom huffed his way up the few flights of steps leading to the rooftop and emptied his backpack of all his rifle magazines and ammo. Including the one in his rifle, he had seven full magazines and eight and a half boxes of 7.62 left. It wasn’t a ton, but it was plenty for the party he was about to throw.
Scooting up to the ledge, Malcom dropped the muzzle toward the street and looked for a target through his iron sights. He zeroed in on a lone infected and squeezed the trigger. Predictably, his shot had gone wide to the right, shattering the back window of a black Escalade parked on the curb. Between the downward angle and considerable distance, Malcom hadn’t expected to hit the infected man. But because of the booming echo the rifle sent throughout downtown, and the Escalade’s wailing car alarm, it only took a few minutes for a small group of infected to investigate.
Malcom took another shot at a sports car parked a few spaces back and its alarm also blared wildly from the impact of the heavy round.
“Come and get some, motherfuckers!” Malcom shouted from the rooftop.
As a good-sized crowd circled around the Escalade, Malcom took aim again, this time leveling his sights on the middle of the crowd. His shot rang out furiously, and the crowd temporarily dispersed as two bodies dropped to the street. After a moment of confusion over their fallen comrades, the group returned to bashing on the high-end SUV, scratching and clawing to get to the people they thought were inside.
A sinister grin spread across Malcom’s face as he repeatedly mashed on the trigger with menacing delight. He quickly lost track of his kill count. The more he killed, the more they flooded in. Which was fine by him; he had plenty of hate to go around.
If only he had access to an A-10… and knew how to fly one.
Brrrrrrrrrt, Malcom heard in his head.
After burning through four magazines, he could no longer see his kills on the ground. There were so many of the bastards packed into the streets that the moment one dropped it was engulfed by more ghouls. Malcom didn’t even have to aim anymore. He just swung the barrel in the general direction of the crowd and pulled the trigger. After another twenty rounds, Malcom decided to give himself, and the rifle, a short break to reload the depleted magazines.
Admittedly, Malcom hadn’t fully thought out this brilliant plan of his. Blinded with an unbridled desire to slay as many infected as he could, Malcom hadn’t considered his exit strategy. The street directly below his sniper nest was impassable; he certainly wouldn’t be leaving that way.
After topping off his magazines, Malcom walked to the eastern side of the roof to assess the situation. The roads were buzzing with activity as well, but nothing like the other side. And it looked as if most of the infected were just trying to reach the party on the western side, where Malcom had been delivering copper-jacketed devastation for the past thirty minutes.
He scouted out a few possible paths, but the most obvious one would be the skywalk that connected the adjacent office building with the massive office complex across the street from it. If he could manage to get to the skywalk, he was confident he’d be good to go after that. But it remained to be seen just how big that if was going to be.
Returning to his perch, Malcom hopped up onto the ledge and relieved himself onto the infected below. He didn’t suspect the grotesque beasts cared about being splashed with his piss, but Malcom found it humorous and oddly satisfying.
The herd had already started thinning after five minutes of silence since Malcom’s last shot, giving him reasonable hope that a few hours of quiet would make his departure mildly lackluster. He didn’t need to go far—another mile or so—and he was determined to make it, even with the heightened activity on the streets.
Slapping a fresh magazine into the weapon, Malcom yanked back on the bolt and let it slam shut. The clacking sound of the Belgium rifle chambering its first round never got old. Of all the guns Malcom owned, nothing quite did it for him like the FN FAL going hot. And it had a similar effect on him every time his shoulder absorbed the recoil. Doubly so when an infected was on the receiving end of that trigger pull.
With less than a hundred rounds of 7.62 left, Malcom decided to quit. He sat down and leaned his back up against the ledge of the building, listening at the utter bedlam below. There was a small mountain of brass and empty boxes of ammunition a few feet away from him. He never imagined in his wildest dreams that he would be perched on a rooftop in downtown Cincinnati shooting into a crowd of bodies. That was the kind of horrific headline that made him cringe in the old world. But times had changed, and these weren’t people. Not anymore.
To hell with them all.
Despite the cathartic rooftop shooting spree, as Malcom’s adrenaline levels began to balance out, he remembered why he was downtown in the first place. Reality returned, pulling him out of the strange, twisted fantasy world he was living in. As Malcom sat on the rooftop alone, reliving his losses, he reached for his cell phone and powered it on.
He hadn’t had a signal in weeks, but that wasn’t why he kept his phone charged. After unlocking it with his thumbprint, Malcom tapped on the photo gallery and began swiping through the thousands of pictures and videos on the compact, high-definition screen. The bittersweet pixels in front of him helped bring him down from the rampage he’d just gone on. Whether she would have approved or not, Malcom slaughtered the infected for Cameron. For Mackenzie, Melissa, Colleen and Donovan. No, the infected he killed weren’t directly responsible for his family’s deaths, and killing them wasn’t going to bring them back, but a part of him believed that aside from satisfying his rage, his actions today might prevent another man from losing his family tomorrow. And it was that mindset that had kept him going all this time.
But as he learned today, if he takes one out, a hundred more fill in the gap.
A rush of mixed emotions flooded Malcom as he scrolled through the pictures, slowing down as he reached October of last year. He stopped when he found the pictures of Cameron in her sassy cat costume handing out candy on the front porch. The costume was a spandex suit with a tight corset, a lacy skirt, and a pair of furry ears and a tail. Malcom smiled warmly as he thought back to later that night when Cameron had dropped the spandex suit from the ensemble.
That was a wild night, he thought.
As painful as it was to have his family at the forefront of his mind every day, Malcom found comfort in the torment. His family was everything to him. He lived for them. He'd die for them. And he wanted his last living thoughts to be of them.
Malcom made it back to the previous summer in his photo stream, pausing for several long moments on a picture of Cameron in a pink camo bikini, when a distant hum in the air caused him to lower the phone. He climbed to his feet and began looking up and down all the streets he could see from his vantage point nearly three hundred feet in the air.
“What the hell?” he muttered as he continued his search for the sound.
Soon, he felt the sound as much as he heard it. Looking skyward, he spotted a low-flying cargo plane a few miles east of his position. It couldn’t have been more than a few hundred feet above the buildings it was flying ove
r. The back cargo door opened. Suddenly, the sky behind the plane flooded with tens of thousands of sheets of paper, each one swirling in the wake of heavy props as they slowly drifted to the ground on the eastern half of Cincinnati.
Malcom was conflicted as he contemplated a detour to go find out what the bright, green leaflets said. Had the powers that be discovered a cure? Or was it the federal government simply telling the people, “You’re fucked. Good luck,”? His curiosity was piqued, but would it change his outcome in any way? Of course not. Which meant that Malcom would stay the course until his mission was complete. No more detours. No more delays.
The plane gained altitude as it reached the Ohio River and banked hard, eventually completing a U-turn and heading back to the north, likely returning to Wright Patterson Air Force Base where it had probably come from.
Malcom gave the plane a weak salute as it left the area, thousands of feet higher than when it had jettisoned its cargo. “Godspeed, gentleman. Whatever your plan is, I hope it works,” Malcom said with a melancholy tone.
Deciding to grab a bite to eat and, with a little luck, a hot shower in his commandeered apartment below, Malcom headed back to the roof’s edge to collect his gear. As he picked up his rifle—the barrel still warm to the touch—he peeked over the edge at the mobs below. He was stunned to find that more than half of them had left the area, and the rest were also stumbling away. The dispersing masses revealed close to a hundred bodies on the ground, with their collective blood streaming into the storm drains on either side of the road. Malcom continued to watch as the street slowly cleared, all of the infected heading to the east. He smiled at the random stroke of luck. The cargo plane and the falling papers dancing to the ground were enough to lure the horde away from his location, giving him a relatively simple escape.
Malcom took it as a sign from the Man upstairs.
It was time for his story to come to an end.
Chapter Ten
10 – Cincinnati, Ohio – May 25th
Interstate 71 wasn’t in much better shape than I-75, and the decision to backtrack to the alternate highway hadn’t saved Tessa any time—in fact, it was going to make their day even longer. But it did allow them to get closer to downtown before having to abandon their vehicle, which meant less distance they had to cover while exposed and vulnerable in the streets. It felt like the right move, but only time would tell if the decision was a prudent one or not.
“No, no, no,” TJ shook his head. “I don’t want to get out.”
After the traumatic past twenty-four hours, it was no surprise the toddler was terrified with the thought of leaving the relative safety of the car for the hell outside. But Tessa didn’t have a lot of options to work with. The wreckage up ahead was too dense for even a motorcycle to pass through, much less a car. Not to mention the racket she’d make while unsuccessfully trying to push cars out of the way with the old sedan. Short of stumbling across a monster truck with the keys dangling from the door, hoofing it was their only option.
It took a few minutes of calm, soothing words and a piece of candy from Tessa’s pack, but TJ finally settled down enough for the three of them to get on the move. With tear streaks still glistening on his cheeks, TJ wrapped his arms around his mother’s neck as she picked him up out of the car. They had a long walk ahead of them, and Tessa knew the boy wouldn’t be able to keep up with her and Naomi—both in speed and in stamina—so, while she still had energy to spare, Tessa would carry him. They were a few hundred yards from the Martin Luther King exit, putting them between three and four miles from the marina, barring any significant detours along the way.
Tessa fully expected detours.
Since there were several large hospitals in that chunk of the city, including the one Tessa called home, she knew the area better than most cab drivers. Navigating their way to the marina wouldn’t be a problem, no matter how abstract the path might become. But whether any of those paths would be clear of infected was a different story.
Unfortunately, on the fastest and most direct route to the marina, they quickly encountered a snag. As the breeze in their face intensified, Tessa noticed the awful stench permeating the air. Not long after, she spotted the silhouettes up ahead. There must have been over a hundred of them milling about on the road. Swallowing the lump in her throat, Tessa managed to maintain her composure and acted as if everything was fine as she kept her eyes glued to the infected a half mile in front of them. One frightened scream from the boy in her arms and the mob would be on top of them in a matter of minutes.
Back before the TV networks were overtaken by the emergency broadcast system, Tessa watched several terrifying videos on GNN of what a reporter called “a runner.” It was widely agreed upon that the infected were faster than the typical human, and some experts guesstimated their average running speed was sustained at between ten and twelve miles per hour. The key word of that analysis was average. There were many reports that claimed some infected reached speeds up to thirty miles per hour. It sounded like science fiction until the news anchors mentioned that the fastest speed achieved by an Olympic athlete was twenty-eight miles per hour. And some recent scientific studies concluded that human beings could be capable of even reaching forty miles per hour.
Suddenly, that thirty didn’t sound too far-fetched.
There was no way Tessa could outrun them, especially while carrying a toddler in her arms. Outrunning an infected while on foot was as effective as trying to run away from a tornado, only with a less merciful ending.
Needing to figure out their next move, Tessa stopped next to an ambulance. “Why don’t we take five,” she said quietly, setting TJ down on the asphalt.
“It’s only been like fifteen minutes,” Naomi said, her dainty voice sounding as loud as thunder to Tessa.
While TJ busied himself tracking a few insects on the ground, Tessa slowly moved her finger up to her mouth. She then used her eyes to draw Naomi’s attention to the herd ahead. Naomi’s body stiffened, and her eyes widened when she noticed what caused the abrupt halt in progress. With a soft whimper, her muscles paralyzed with fear.
Tessa gestured toward TJ and shook her head before returning her attention to the group of infected while she weighed her options. Perhaps if they were all heading south—away from them—she might have been inclined to just slow their pace a little, giving the group a chance to gain a lead. But, as far as she could tell, they were all going in different directions. Their movements were jerky and erratic; there was no rhyme or reason to their behavior other than whatever it was that drove them to sink their teeth into a healthy human being.
Her heart stopped for a moment when she swore that one of them looked right at her, yet the pack didn’t run toward them. Tessa was starting to think that the beasts had terrible eyesight, forcing them to rely on their senses of smell and hearing to track their prey. Tessa thanked God that her family was downwind of the horde, or they would likely already be running for their lives.
Leaning closer to Naomi, Tessa said under her breath, “I think we should head back to the last exit and get off there. We’ll have more places to hide.”
Naomi’s gaze lingered at the aimless herd ahead for a moment before her eyes finally drifted back to her mother’s. “Yeah… Yeah, okay,” she muttered.
Tessa bent down and got to TJ’s level. “Hey buddy, my arms are so tired from carrying such a big man like you. Do you think you could walk for a bit?”
The boy nodded. “Yup!” he said emphatically, momentarily oblivious to the world he lived in, which was a godsend for their travels.
“Okay, why don’t you go walk with sissy? I think she’s feeling kind of lonely.”
The boy sprang to his feet and ran over to his sister, reaching out for her hand. As Tessa trailed a few feet behind, her pistol tightly gripped in her hand, she couldn’t help but appreciate the sweet moment between the siblings. Even given the circumstances, she treasured the sight, memorizing the image that she hoped would stay with her
well into the afterlife.
Because the highway was flanked with concrete barriers on either side, and dense trees just beyond that, they were forced to backtrack to the previous exit, undoing more than half of the walking they’d just done. But slow and steady was the only way to win this race. And it was a race; the bright-green leaflets they found all over the ground near Reading Road was an ominous reminder of that.
CITIZENS OF CINCINNATI: EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY! AERIAL BOMBARDMENT TO COMMENCE ON May 26th AT PRECISELY 9:00 A.M.
“What does it say, Mama?” TJ asked innocently.
Tessa suppressed the shudder rolling down her spine as the reality of her hometown being flattened by the US Air Force fully sank in. “It says there’s going to be an air show tomorrow.”
“Can we go?” he asked excitedly.
“Maybe next time.”
“Awww,” he pouted, but quickly dropped the matter.
Being careful to turn down a side street whenever they spotted infected, Tessa managed to get her family to within a mile of the marina undetected. They had just crossed into Over-The-Rhine, which had been one of Cincinnati’s most violent neighborhoods for years. After millions of dollars and a lot of effort, the city managed to clean it up, making it a more desirable location for locals to frequent. However, it seemed that old habits die hard, and the notorious neighborhood had reverted back to one of the no-go places again.
The infected were everywhere. And despite her best efforts, Tessa couldn’t prevent TJ from seeing the demons lurking in the late afternoon sun. The boy began to panic.
“Mama! Mama! It’s the bad pe—”
Tessa wrapped her hand around the front of his face, muffling TJ’s cries. This only added to the boy’s anxiety, but it was better than drawing unwanted attention. With her hand still covering his mouth, Tessa scooped TJ up in her other arm. The family darted over to a small bistro, running straight for the kitchen in the back. Tessa jumped when she saw the body on the floor, but even with their shuffling shoes and the boy’s muffled cries, the body remained motionless. Tessa quickly ushered her children into the manager’s office and locked the door behind them.