Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling

by Meredith, Peter

  Bryce licked his lips. It was a question he didn’t want to think about. He had seen a lot of death over the last few days; none of it good, none of it right. “I don’t want to die. It’s why we have to keep going. If we stop…” His mind flashed to the demon. The last they’d seen of it, it was pulling a woman into an apartment. What were the chances it had gorged itself into a stupor? When it came to the demon, it was best not to count on anything. He had to assume it was on their trail. “If we stop, we die.”

  “We’s gonna die any how,” Sid said, swigging from the bottle. “Them zombie freaks are everywhere. Chi-town. L. A. Boston. They even got ‘em at Washington. At least they’ll be safe from the nukes.” He glanced up as if expecting to see in-bound rockets streaking across the sky. There was only smoke. Maddy glanced up as well, remembering her dream and feeling the fear of it creep over her.

  Sid went on, not noticing how Maddy’s pink cheeks had gone the color of milk, “I was gonna go live it up in one them fancy Park Ave hotels, but up town seems out of the question. It seemed like there’s a shit-ton of them up there. So, I don’t know. I think I might go to one them down by the river. The Hudson, not the East River. There’s some big ones. Big and fancy is how I want to go out.”

  He sighed and took another sip.

  “We’re going to the Federal Plaza,” Maddy told him. “The FBI has a field office. We think they might get us away to somewhere safe. Who knows, they might take you too.”

  “I wouldn’t get his hopes up,” Bryce said. “Without Griff, they may not even take us.” She had forgotten about that. Her mouth closed with a little click of her teeth. “Our best hope is if Plinkett made it through.”

  Neither of them held out much hope of that. More than likely he was dead, but if he had made it through the city on foot in the middle of all the chaos, why hadn’t he returned with help? Had he been denied? Maybe the FBI didn’t think they were worth it. Or they were already gone. Maybe they felt New York was lost.

  Bryce hadn’t had a dream about nukes but didn’t need one for him to fear that eventuality. It soured him. Jutting his chin at Sid, he said, “They’re not going to take him. Why would they?”

  Sid sneered, his hackles rising. Maddy put a hand on his arm, answering, “Because he’s been in close proximity to us. We don’t know how the pathogen is transferred. I’m beginning to wonder if it even can be transferred from person to person. Don’t give me that look. It could be something in the water supply for all we know.”

  This brought a laugh from Sid. He was feeling the warmth of a good buzz again. “I’ll drink to that.” Nervously, they watched him take a mouthful and wipe his lips with the back of his coat.

  Bryce feared they had found an anchor in the form of Sid, and that sooner or later, he was going to drag them down. Maddy kept giving him the side eye which Bryce took to mean she was thinking the same thing. That was good, at least. She wasn’t deluding herself as she did all through college, taking on one lost cause after another.

  He led them south through what felt like a ghost town. The buildings were mute and dark, like great windowed tombstones, and other than the endless cars and the mutilated corpses, the streets were empty.

  The darkness echoed with forlorn screams and the occasional gunshot. Each of these reminded Bryce just how defenseless they were. He came across a brick and carried that. Maddy found a stout little cane next to the body of an old man. Sid had his bottle, which he held by the neck and brandished at a collie-mix that growled at them. These were all terrible weapons and Bryce knew they should stop and search one of the buildings for something better, and yet they were on a streak—they hadn’t run across one of the demons since they leapt across that chasm.

  They had to duck and hide from gangs of zombies. These forced them on detour after detour. And there were plenty of lone zombies as well; these fell into two categories: those that had a destination in their wormy minds and tromped towards it without looking left or right, and those that had gotten to their destination and stood there, staring blankly at a wall or a door, or maybe a crack in the sidewalk. As long as the three of them were quiet and kept cars between them and the zombies, they were easily avoided.

  Despite all the back and forth, Sid, sauced as he was, managed to keep them heading slowly south.

  After an hour, they came on a higher-end fashion store. It stretched for half the block and took up two floors. Bryce knew he had a dreadful split in his pants and his boots felt like they were shrinking around his feet. He needed new clothes, but he needed to get to safety more. He planned on marching right past it.

  Maddy had the same idea. She barely gave the Thanksgiving Day specials a glance. Orange and brown weren’t really her colors anyway. Then she caught sight of a display positioned just in front of a second-floor window. The manikins were dressed in winter flair: blue, silver, and white. Two stood with ski-poles in their plastic hands. Another leaned jauntily on a kid’s sled.

  The last one had an arm raised and despite its perfectly drawn smile, it looked strangely aggressive, almost like it was about to attack the other manikins with the tool it had poised over its head.

  It was an ice axe.

  She stopped in her tracks and Sid knocked blearily into her. Half his bottle was gone and he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes fully opened or his mouth completely closed.

  Maddy barely noticed. Her mind went to her dream—They moved slowly in a crouch, their eyes always out. It was mid-morning and yet the sky was dark. The air was filled with dust and ash. Bombs had been raining from one end of New Jersey to the other for the better part of the night. Even miles away, they could feel the explosions coursing up through the ground.

  Maddy carried her climbing axe in her right hand and the garbage can lid in the other. The lid was dented and stained. It was an ugly shield, but it was still a shield.

  “We have to hurry,” she hissed. Time was squeezing in on them. She could feel it in her bones. Death was coming. Death from above. She cast a fearful look up and just then the sky was lit in an unholy radiance. The air screamed in agony and the earth melted under the…

  She was shaken by a sudden and violent tremor. It started in her shoulders before it coursed down her entire body. The ice axe looked like the very same one from her dream.

  “Climbing axe,” she whispered. That’s how she had thought of it in her dream. She had never seen one in real life, only in documentaries. And she had never seen one with a blue handle and a shining aluminum head, like the one in her dream and like the one the manikin held.

  “We need to go in there.” She pointed.

  Bryce saw the climbing axe right away; two feet long, slightly curved with a narrow pick-like head. It was better than carrying a brick, though he didn’t think it would be the best weapon against something as horrible as the demon.

  “No. We keep going. The FBI will have weapons for us.” Maybe. If anyone was even still there.

  “I dreamt of that axe,” Maddy said. “That axe. Not an axe like it, but that axe right there.”

  Bryce did not believe in ESP or precognition or any of what his father called “happy horse-shit.” His first impulse was to discard the idea completely out of hand until he realized that up until the day before he hadn’t believed in zombies either. Still, a dream prophecy about an ordinary axe seemed both farfetched and sort of useless. If she had dreamed about a machine gun, that would’ve been handy.

  “Let’s say that’s true; you dreamed about an ice axe…”

  “That axe.”

  “Sure. That axe. In the dream, was it magical? Did it play some important role in our lives? Or did you just have it?” When her eyes darted away, he knew. “So you just had it, or one like it. It doesn’t do anything for us right here, right now.” He pointed down the street. It was empty for blocks. “Look at that. We got a free shot downtown. After everything we’ve been through. After all the obstacles we’ve had to…”

  “I’m going to get the axe,” she sa
id, speaking over him. “It’s important. I know it. You guys can stay here if you want.”

  Bryce grabbed her as she turned. “If you get the axe, it becomes a self-fulling prophecy, making it meaningless. If I dream of purple socks and I go out and buy purple socks does that make me a prophet? Does it make the socks important? No. This is a coincidence.”

  She paused. A part of her knew he was right. Another part of her knew there was more to the axe than it being just an axe.

  “I’m getting it.”

  Bryce groaned and rolled his eyes. When Sid handed him the bottle, he took a healthy swig. They followed her to the front doors, which were protected by the usual roll down metal gate. She gave the window a glance.

  “It’s pretty lucky you have that brick,” she noted, putting her hand out for it.

  Bryce pulled it back. “Are you kidding me? You know how much noise you’ll make? If there’s no way in, then that’s that.”

  “There’s gotta be one them side entrances,” Sid said in that odd way of his. “Or an alley entrance.”

  Maddy beamed at him. She marched down the block and found an odd little door that didn’t seem to belong to either the clothing store or the copy place next to it. She tried it and found it unlocked. It opened on a dark alley. Sid, who couldn’t see more than five feet into the shadows balked. Maddy and Bryce gave him a queer look.

  For them the shadows were not so deep. They noted the half-filled dumpsters, the accumulated years of gunk along the edges of the bricks, the partially frozen puddles that smelled of fermenting piss. The only thing that moved in the darkness was a frightened house cat. After years of demanding to get out of its apartment, it had been released into the wilds of the city by a frightened couple who knew they’d never get out of the city hauling a cat-carrier around.

  The cat slunk beneath one of the dumpsters and shook in abject fear.

  Maddy felt a moment of sympathy for the creature, but knew that with all the death surrounding them, that it was misplaced. Just a few steps down from the cat was a side door just as Sid said there’d be, and it was held canted open by a broom.

  “What are the chances?” Maddy asked, an eyebrow cocked.

  After his experiences over the last few days, Bryce guessed the chances of finding an open door like this in an otherwise locked building were probably one in two-hundred. They were steep, but not astronomical. “What are the chances the streets will be empty when we get going again?”

  She said nothing to this, knowing that even if it was fifty-fifty, the side trip for the axe wouldn’t be worth it.

  “We’ll be out in no time.” She pushed aside the door and found herself in a dim corridor. She smelled cardboard, leather, and a partially eaten tuna sandwich that was going from bad to worse in a garbage can four doors down. They were in the “Employees Only” section.

  Behind them was a stunted and fantastically crowded warehouse. Ahead were bathrooms, human resources and the office with the tuna sandwich. She hurried past all this to swinging double doors which led out onto the floor. Her eyes swept past the clothes until she saw the escalators.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “You have one minute,” Bryce said. He was already kicking off the toe-crushing boots he’d been wearing. Just to their left was a shoe section and he figured he’d be able to find replacements for the boots in seconds, especially since style meant little to him at the moment. “Sid, can you find me a pair of pants?”

  Not far away was a table with neatly arranged hundred-dollar joggers. He pointed distractedly in its direction as he put his foot down onto the metal device used to measure shoe sizes. For most of his life, he had been a size seven and took great pains to keep that fact to himself. Just then, the device measured him at a ten.

  “Whoa,” he whispered.

  Sid was not so quiet. First, he dropped his bottle and cursed flamboyantly about the inequities of life. Then he asked in a slurry voice, “What you wear? A medium or sometin?”

  “Better make it a large and in something dark.”

  Maddy heard all of this as she mounted the escalator stairs with her mismatched boots. She would need to change them out sooner rather than later. The singular Ugg had gone from warm and comfy to tight and damp. Her feet were sweating as much as the rest of her.

  “Let’s hope that stops soon.” She reached to her side where she could normally grab handfuls of flesh. Now she had an inch or so, and it was mostly skin. “Don’t complain. It could be worse.” Her mind blinked to the woman who hadn’t been able to kill herself with the musket. That was a hundred times worse. She was just thinking that things could always be worse when she reached the front window and the winter display.

  It was the climbing axe from the dream. Her axe.

  She slid it out of the manikin’s formed fingers and as she did, she saw movement down below her on the street. Like grey water, zombies were flooding the street, pouring around the stranded cars.

  “No,” she hissed and ducked away out of sight. They had to get out the back before it was too late.

  It’s already too late, a voice whispered in her mind.

  And it was.

  Chapter 33

  The voice whispering its insanity was certain, but Maddy wouldn’t believe that it was too late until she saw it with her own two eyes. Precognition was junk science; she knew that. Even after the axe and her dream she knew it.

  It was a fact.

  And yet she ran full out as fast as she could for the far end of the store to a window that faced the next east-west street. She pushed through manikins that were dressed for a high-powered corporate meeting. At first, the street seemed deserted. Then she saw slinking shadows and there was Bryce’s dark demon. Even from fifty yards, it struck a chill into her heart.

  It was moving among the cars, shoving smaller zombies down, hiding them. Maddy’s mouth fell open as she realized they had been about to walk into a trap. She found herself staring at the axe. It had been important…or it still was. She didn’t know.

  The voice again: It’s too late.

  Maybe it wasn’t. The axe and the dream had saved them from the ambush. They just had to get out of there before the trap closed all the way. “The alley,” she whispered to herself. It was the only way in and maybe their only way out as well. She spun on the spot and sped for the escalators. “Bryce! It’s them.” She took the odd metal stairs three at a time, the axe in her hand all but forgotten.

  Bryce didn’t have to ask who they were. He was tying a pair of red and gold sneakers that looked like clown shoes in his mind, but fit him nonetheless. His hands worked in a blur.

  “Hurry!” Maddy was about out of her mind with fear. She inched towards the double door and the moment he stood, she and Sid ran for them. Bryce quickly caught up.

  “Did you close the door behind us?” he asked Sid.

  Sid hesitated, making anything he answered suspect. What came out of him was a cinnamon smelling string of syllables that were essentially meaningless. They found out soon enough that he had been sober enough to do the right thing; the door to the alley was shut. He grinned. “What’d I tell ya?”

  He went for the door. Bryce was a second too slow, recognizing the coming danger. Maddy felt it, but was behind him and too far from Sid.

  “No,” was all she had time to say before Sid bashed open the door with his shoulder in his eagerness to flee. Unlike Maddy and, to a lesser extent, Bryce he could not smell the zombies on the other side of the metal door.

  Luckily for Sid, the zombies were just as surprised as he was. A small crowd of the grey-skinned creatures turned dull eyes towards him. They and Sid stared at each other for a full second, which was enough time for Bryce to haul Sid back inside. Bryce went to yank the door shut, but by then grey hands had a hold of the edge. There was a short tussle, pull against pull. It was a tug of war that Bryce had no chance of winning…unless he changed the dynamics.

  Without warning, he reversed himself and threw his
weight against the door, which went flying open. The dead fell back in a convoluted pile as if they were pins in a bowling alley and for a moment they stared up at the clouds of smoke with dull confused eyes. Too late, one tried to grab the door again. It lost three fingers when Bryce slammed it shut.

  He turned to glare at Maddy.

  “Don’t start,” she snapped. “Your demon is out there and the only reason the road was clear before was because it was setting a trap.”

  This killed his anger. If what she said was true—and he knew that it was— the implications were…too much for him at the moment. He couldn’t deal with precognition on top of everything else. He could deal with cold facts. “Does it know we’re in here?”

  “It shouldn’t, but yeah, I think so.” There was no “think” about it. She knew that it knew—both were impossibilities in the face of science.

  Bryce felt that his hold on what was real and what wasn’t, was slipping. Except, that is, for the certainty of a terrible death that seemed to hang in the air around them. That was a reality that he didn’t want to face anytime soon if he could help it. “There’s got to be another backdoor. The warehouse!”

  He sped past Maddy, heading to the left to where the smell of cardboard wafted down the hall. The double doors here were similar to the ones that entered onto the floor, except they were painted and they had two small windows set at head height. Bryce glanced inside and saw a narrow, two story warehouse. It was so cramped that the shelves seemed to lean outward under their burdens.

  There were no zombies in sight and nor did he smell any. Still, he was careful when he stepped through the doors. A dozen metal push-brooms and three wooden mops hung on a board next to the door. Bryce chose one of the mops and snapped off its head with his foot. Now it had something of a point. It was not exactly fearsome, and yet it was better than the brick he had left back in among the shoes.