by Brown, TW
Joel wanted to say something, but he didn’t have the words. He knew what she was saying. He also knew what she was expecting from him. In all their years together, Joel had prided himself in being able to give Wanda her every desire, no matter how big or small. He had the means, and saw no reason to ever deny her anything. Yet, this was different.
“Joel, did you hear me?” Wanda asked, her stern tone fighting its way through.
“Wanda, if you’re asking me to—”
“I’m not asking…I’m telling you.” Wanda pushed herself up a little bit on her pillow and fixed Joel with a look he knew all too well.
“You’re asking me to put a bullet in your head.”
“Again…” Wanda exploded into a coughing fit, but still had the strength to slap Joel’s hands away when he reached for her. “I wasn’t asking. And from what I’ve seen on television, as well as what happened down in the lobby, there won’t be anything of me in whatever it is that would come back.”
“You can’t know that,” Joel insisted.
“I watched a pair of sweet little old ladies rip a young man apart. They pulled out his insides, Joel!”
Joel had seen the news. He’d seen his share of what was going on down in the streets below. And he’d heard the screams.
“You need to put things in order, Joel Landon. Nobody is going to be ready for what is coming. The zombies are only going to be part of the problem.”
Wanda sunk into her pillow and closed her eyes, a long sigh escaping her. She was silent for so long that he thought she might’ve passed. Her breathing was so slow and shallow, that he feared she would not make it through the hour.
“You need to take charge. Get someplace safe, and then set up a defense that will keep the undead out and make the living think twice before messing with you,” Wanda finally said, her voice now little more than a labored whisper.
“What are you talking about,” Joel challenged.
“You know those books I read…those movies that I watch that you hate so much?” Joel nodded. “Well if any of it is even partially accurate, things are going to get very bad. You know my favorite saying.”
“People suck,” Joel recited, just a hint of mirth filtering into his voice as his lips curled up just a bit.
“So, while everybody is running for their lives, you need to pick a spot and turn it into your fortress.”
“But what about you?” Joel groaned.
“Sweetheart, I can feel this infection or whatever it is burning me up from the inside. So I need you to swear that, when my eyes close, you will do what I asked and take care of me.” Wanda gazed up at Joel, her eyes pinched at the corners from the pain, a sheen of sweat adding to her sickly appearance.
“I promise,” Joel finally conceded.
The couple sat together holding hands for a while. For Joel, his only comfort came in that he was there for Wanda like she’d been there for him all these past years. Part of him wished they’d had children, but another part of him was thankful they hadn’t. He doubted that he could endure seeing a child of his own experiencing something like this. These were the thoughts that occupied his mind when his beloved Wanda shut her eyes and let loose with a long, ragged exhale that would prove to be her last.
Almost as if on cue, the phone beside the bed rang. Joel considered just ignoring it, but another voice in his head told him that answering the phone would allow him to delay the deed that he dreaded. Pulling his hand free from his wife’s, he scooted around the bed and managed to answer it by the third ring.
“Joel?” a familiar voice said hastily. The owner of that voice sounded as if they’d just sprinted a few miles.
“Conrad?” Joel replied, making sure he was speaking to the person he believed to be on the other end of the line.
“Yes, sir.” Sounds of screaming came from the background on Conrad’s end, almost drowning him out.
Conrad Parks was the son of the late Bill Parks. He was also one of the finest attorneys in Las Vegas—an education thanks to the fund Joel had set up on the young man’s first birthday. As soon as he passed the bar, he’d signed on to a very prestigious firm. Within two years, he’d been made junior partner. Within five, his name was part of the firm’s logo.
“Have you heard from my mom?” Conrad gasped.
“Not in a few days,” Joel admitted.
“She isn’t answering at home.” A barrage of gunfire sounded to punctuate that statement. “I know this is asking a lot, but can you send a driver over to check on her…maybe pick her up and have her brought to The Grand?”
“I would if any of my drivers could be reached,” Joel said.
There was a moment of silence and Joel wasn’t sure that the call was still connected. At last, a deep sigh sounded in his ear.
“Look, Conrad, I’d go myself, but Wanda…” He couldn’t bring himself to finish the excuse.
“Wanda?” Conrad blurted, a tremor in his voice caused it to crack a bit. “No…she hasn’t been bitten…” Now it was Conrad’s turn to not be able to complete a sentence.
A low moan sounded, and it took Joel a second to realize that it wasn’t more background noise from the other end of the call. This sound was close. All he had to do was turn his body a little to the right and he would be able to see the source. The problem was that Joel didn’t want to see it. He wanted to ignore it and hope to God that it had been a figment of his imagination.
He felt the bed shift slightly against his leg and he could not ignore it any longer. Joel turned his head and saw his deceased wife sitting up in their bed. Her head was turned away from him at the moment, sparing him the pain of having to look into her dead eyes.
“I have to go, Conrad,” Joel said absently, placing the phone back in the receiver He heard the tinny sound of a voice obviously protesting his seemingly arbitrary decision to end the call.
Wanda shifted at the sound of his voice. Her head began to swing back in his direction. Only, it was with oddly halting and jerky movements. At last, her face was revealed. Wanda’s normally smooth and soft skin now hung loosely on her face. It was as if all the muscles had simply quit working to hold up the flesh of her face. The eyes were now covered in a disgusting film that made the black tracers stand out even more.
Her normally olive skin tone was now a sickly grayish-blue, and her lips were almost black. When she opened her mouth, her normally kind voice was gone. All that came out was a low moan that seemed impossible to be coming from Wanda’s mouth.
Joel stood rooted to the spot as his dead wife began to try and fight her way out from the sheets, blankets, and comforter of their bed. Her moans grew in intensity, but her eyes never left Joel as she fought to free herself. He was still standing there when one of her hands came free and brushed his arm. Joel winced at the uncommon coolness of her skin.
“I’m sorry, my love.” Joel pushed Wanda back onto the bed and she ended up flat on her back.
If she’d struggled with the bedding, she was really having a difficult time getting herself rolled over in order for her to stand. At last she made it onto her side. One leg became ensnared by the wadded-up sheets. It was enough to pull her off balance, and the thing that had once been Wanda toppled over backwards and landed out of sight on the far side of the bed with a heavy thud.
Joel only briefly considered exiting the room and perhaps securing the door, but his final promise to Wanda gave his conscience a stinging rebuke.
Joel turned the latch on his nightstand drawer and reached down without looking. His hand found the familiar shape of his Smith & Wesson .44 magnum revolver. He checked it out of reflexive habit and then turned to confront the thing that had once been his wife.
On the other side of the bed, the wad of bedding twitched and roiled as the undead creature struggled with the task of freeing itself from the tangled mess. Joel stalked around the bed and staggered back a step. The smell hit him full force and brought him to the verge of puking.
Joel Landon knew death. H
e knew the stink of a dead body…even a rotting corpse. It was a smell that burrowed into his being during his time in Vietnam. This was not just the stench of death. The smell assaulting Joel was something more. It was infinitely more rotten, rank, and rancid than just the stink of the dead.
Gathering his resolve, Joel tried to hold his breath as he continued his approach. He brought a foot down firmly on the thing trying to extricate itself from the bed linens. It mewled and moaned in what sounded almost like frustration.
All of this combined—the smell, the sounds, and the way it looked so different in death—made Joel’s task a fraction easier. Pressing the barrel of the pistol against the shape that he was pretty certain had to be the head, Joel squeezed the trigger.
The report from the pistol was still thunderous despite any dampening of sound that might’ve resulted from the barrel being pressed firmly against the target and Joel’s ears rang slightly. Stepping back, he could observe the dark and ominous stain centered on the hole his weapon had put in the bedding as well as the zombie’s head.
He had no idea how long he simply stood there staring down at his handiwork. Part of him kept waiting for some sort of movement, but the main part of him had a bit of a check out. This had been too much to process in one big piece. He needed to break things down into much smaller bites.
As he stood there thinking, Joel did not notice how his mind began to change. He was oblivious to the icy detachment that wrapped his heart in a cocoon of icy ambivalence. He was even less aware of the awakening of the old soldier that still existed in the deepest caverns of his mind.
At some point, Joel withdrew to a chair in the corner of the bedroom. From there, he was able to see out over the city of Las Vegas. He could see the strip and the lie its lights tried to tell. Those lights were part of the illusion that Las Vegas was a wonderful playground. It was the mask that the thief hid behind as it emptied the pockets—and sometimes entire life savings—of the people who flocked to it like moths. Only, this thief did not need to assault somebody to take their money; no, the fools came to give it willingly. The city played on the human weakness that you could get something for nothing. It hid the truth well.
Late afternoon gave way to evening, and all those lights fought to hide a new illusion. Death. Death had come to Las Vegas, and it would not be denied.
At some point, Peanut, Joel’s orange and white tabby leapt into his lap and curled up. Joel stroked it absently as he continued to stare out the window.
A flurry of movement caught his eye and Joel let his gaze narrow to the source of such sudden movement. It was one of the other amazing hotels that lined the new strip in Vegas. To be precise, it was the penthouse balcony.
Joel stood, ignoring Peanut’s meow of annoyance as it was unceremoniously dumped from his lap. He reached in the same drawer of his bedside nightstand where he’d drew his pistol and came up with a set of very powerful binoculars.
Opening the slider to his own balcony, Joel was assaulted by a cacophony of screams, gunshots, and sirens. He ignored it all and brought the binoculars to his eyes. It only took a slight adjustment to find his target.
What he saw was horrible. It was like walking in the living room in the middle of one of Wanda’s awful movies. A pair of women were fighting off at least a dozen attackers. All the attackers were covered in dark stains he knew to be blood. One of the living women sported a similar stain on her right shoulder. She was also visibly slower in her reactions as she struggled to fight off the pack of ravenous attackers.
As he watched, the uninjured woman backed herself into a corner. It was a double-edged sword. The benefit was that she had less area to defend, and it was impossible to get behind her. The negative came in that she had nowhere else to retreat.
The injured woman swung what looked like a large butcher knife at one of her would-be assailants and the weapon struck home, burying itself in what appeared to be the eye socket of the zombie. It dropped like it’d been shot, yanking the weapon from the woman’s hands.
Joel had no idea if she had a weapon in reserve. If she did, she never got the chance to draw it as three more zombies crowded in and dragged the woman down and out of sight. Even from this distance, and despite all the other noise carrying on the night air, Joel heard a scream that was unlike any he’d ever been so unfortunate to hear.
He re-trained his binoculars on the woman who had been backed into a corner and was surprised to see that she’d climbed up onto the balcony’s railing. Oddly enough, he was less shocked when she threw herself from that ledge and plummeted down the face of the tall hotel. His eyes tracked her fall all the way to the pavement below. It was then that he noticed several more dark shapes scattered about the wide walking thoroughfare that normally boasted thousands of pedestrians eager to reach the next location where they were certain luck would change and they would hit it big.
The time for sitting around was over, Joel decided. It was time to act. A piece of Joel that had been dormant for decades woke and asserted itself as if it had never been shelved. The warrior was awake and in charge.
***
Joel stood at the foot of the bed he’d shared with his wife in their company-owned suite at the MGM Grand. There had been a lot of good times between them and he didn’t have any regrets about the life they’d lived together.
And now that life was over. To many people that Joel had known over the years, he knew very well that he came across as cold, hard, and unfeeling. Nothing was farther from the truth.
He did feel. He felt deeply. His biggest strength, if you asked him, was that he was able to separate emotion from reality. When he was doing business, it was always with the idea that his choices were what would make his company stronger and therefore allow him to take care of him and Wanda, as well as his employees, to the utmost degree. He did not dwell on things like how others perceived him. That was their flaw. They let their feelings and emotions get all twisted up in their everyday lives, and when it came to the business world, too many people often lacked the ability to divorce themselves of such things like human emotion.
That was how Joel had done so well during his time over in Vietnam. He saw everyday as one where he needed to do his job. He needed to perform without hesitation. The option to give less than all he was capable of had never been available. At least not as far as he saw things.
Joel had not so much changed in the past hour as he had redefined what his new job would be going forward. Wanda had made that one of her final requests. He would honor it as he had so many others in their life together. He glanced down at the hiking pack that he’d loaded with the most fundamental supplies. She would laugh at him if she saw the half a dozen books sitting on top.
Joel had never given a thought to a zombie apocalypse. It was nothing more than ridiculous fantasy as far as he was concerned. Still, now that he was staring it in the face, it was impossible to deny. The book at the top was the most worn out and also had a title that seemed the most appealing: The ZOMBIE Survival Guide by some fellow named Max Brooks.
He doubted it would read much like a field survival manual, but it was likely to have a few pointers in it that would be relatable. After bowing his head for a moment to offer up a prayer to whatever might be listening, Joel twisted open the bottle of alcohol and doused the makeshift torch he’d created.
“Rest in peace, Wanda,” he whispered as he lit the corners of the bed on fire and then set the torch down in the center of the bed.
Joel picked up his cat and held it in front of his face. “I’m gonna put you in my pack. Just chill out for a bit and everything will be okay.”
The cat stared back at him with its usual catlike ambivalence. The only thing it did in acknowledgement was start a deep purr, its eyes drifting half closed. It seemed to consider its new location in Joel’s pack for a moment before yawing, curling up, and shutting its eyes. On the way out, he paused to hit the start button on the microwave.
Joel was just opening the door to the
emergency stairs when the explosion rocked the floor and blew off the door that had belonged to his room, sending it slamming into the wall across the hallway. He didn’t even look back or acknowledge the blast as he turned on the portable LED lantern and started down to the ground floor.
His first order of business would be to get out of the heart of Las Vegas. The place was sheer and utter chaos, and if he was going to have a chance at survival, this was not the place to be.
At last, he reached the ground floor. His ability to hear the screams had kicked in with about three floors to go. He’d been hearing gunshots as soon as ten floors remaining in the descent.
He was not concerned in the least that he had an old school military issue M-16 slung over his shoulder as well as his beloved .44 Magnum holstered to one hip. But in his hands he held a Beretta 92 9mm with a full magazine and in a pouch on the hip opposite his Smith & Wesson were five more fully loaded magazines. His pack held four boxes of ammo for the Beretta, each box holding fifty rounds. He knew that obtaining more ammo would be vital, but he was hoping almost three hundred rounds would at least get him out of the city center.
At last he reached the bottom. Very carefully, Joel opened the door just a crack. The wave of noise as well as a wall of stench hit him full force and caused his nose to wrinkle in disgust. On the plus side, the door opened to a service corridor and was off the beaten path. All the madness was happening to his left. That meant he would go right.
Joel eased out, but set the door stop so that he could retreat back to the stairwell if necessary. He kept in a low crouch and hugged the wall as he moved along towards the end of the long, dark hallway.
He was almost to the exit door marked with a big “EMERGENCY ONLY—OPENING WILL RESULT IN AN ALARM” sign that he could read despite the relative gloom and without his reading glasses when a scream from behind him caused him to pause long enough to glance back and seek out the source.
