by Urban, Tony
The first zombies he saw out here, in the light of day, were lone monsters staggering hither and yon like children lost in a foreign world. They wandered down the streets and sidewalks, bouncing off lampposts or street signs, then turned around to return in the direction from which they’d came. The ghouls would give a weak swipe as he rode by them but gave no chase.
They changed when he got further into the city where the population was denser. Here, the zombies also increased in number, and rather than the lone wolves he saw on the outskirts, these zombies hunted in packs.
Emory was closing in on a discount electronics outlet when he saw three men with bandannas covering the lower halves of their faces rush toward the store. One of them carried a cinder block, which he hoisted over his head and pitched through the huge plate-glass window. It exploded in a thunderclap and the trio jumped through the void.
Two of them reemerged moments later. The first carried an armload of laptops and tablets. The second had claimed a variety of cell phones. Their block tossing companion remained inside.
“Hurry up, Rog!” one of the thieves yelled.
A few seconds later, the other man hopped through the broken window carrying a flat screen TV with each arm and the men took off with their haul. They didn’t make it to the end of the block before a group of eight zombies emerged from an alleyway and blocked their path.
Emory slowed the bike and considered another route, but his curiosity got the best of him and he watched as the thief with the cell phones tossed them aside and pulled a pistol from the front of his jeans.
Without warning the man fired four shots and every round connected with the torso of a middle-aged zombie in a tank top. The four bullet holes stood out dramatically against the pale fabric and bits of blood seeped out. The zombie looked down at the holes in its chest and stomach, curious. Then, its gaze turned to the shooter.
“What the fuck?” the thief who held the flat screens said.
And then the zombies attacked like a pack of hyenas. They got the shooter first, and as he fell, he squeezed off another round that went whizzing down the street a few feet away from Emory.
The man screamed as the zombies ate him, taking ragged bites out of his arms, face, and neck. There were too many zombies to all get in on the meal, so the others moved on to the two remaining thieves.
The man who had the computers dropped them and abandoned his friends, sprinting in the opposite direction. He was fast, and within seconds, he was closing in on Emory. Up close, Emory could see this was no teenage thug. This man was in his forties and old acne scars gave a lunar feel to his complexion.
“Can you believe this shit?” he asked Emory. “This is end of the world shit.”
Emory watched the action ahead where the other thief now held up a TV like a shield, which he used to block and batter the zombies that were attacking him. One zombie got behind him and sunk its teeth into the man’s shoulder.
He spun free and slammed the flat screen over the zombie’s head. The plastic frame hung around the monster’s throat like a necklace, but it didn’t go down. Two more zombies grabbed the thief from behind, and soon enough, he was on the ground and being eaten alive.
“Hey! Gramps!” the last thief said to Emory and the man's words drew his attention away from the carnage. He turned just in time to see a blurry fist flying at his face. He heard his nose break and the momentum of the blow carried his slender frame backwards. He tumbled off the bicycle and smacked into the pavement. Then the bike fell on top of him.
Through the stars that had sprung up before his eyes, he saw the man who just assaulted him grab the bike and climb aboard. Emory reached out and grabbed the rear tire, but as the thief jumped down on the pedal, the spokes whirled around and spun free of his weak grip.
Gramps, Emory thought as he laid on the hard macadam and stared up at the featureless gray sky above him. Did that bastard have the audacity to call me Gramps?
As the stars faded and his senses returned, Emory realized the screaming had stopped. He rolled onto his side, then his knees, and as he knelt there on all fours like a dog in the street, he saw the zombies had finished dining on the electronics thieves and were coming for him.
His body still ached from the wreck and his legs were weak from riding the bike. Getting to his feet seemed as impossible as climbing Mount Everest, an adventure he’d often daydreamed about tackling when he was a young man and read Sir Edmund Hillary’s biography. But, like so many things, it had remained nothing more than a dream, one more unchecked box on his wish list of life.
Now, the only wish he had left was escaping the creatures which he could hear getting nearer, their lifeless feet scraping along the rough pavement.
He got one foot under him and used all his strength to stand. When he did, the stars returned, but now they were black pocks against the streetscape. A shrill bell went off inside his head and it squealed so loud that he couldn’t hear the zombies anymore.
A vise embraced his chest and he struggled to suck in breath. He knew he was on the verge of losing consciousness and tried to blink away the coming darkness as his knees gave way.
That was when they grabbed him.
Chapter 31
The woman crouched on all fours and knelt over something, her head thrashing wildly back and forth. Solomon recognized her as one of the bints he’d heard gossiping about his wife. God rest her whoring soul. As he stepped closer, he saw exactly what was going on: she was chowing down on her own son. She had her head buried in the child’s stomach, her face obscured in the tot's guts.
It reminded Solomon of a rabbit he’d had growing up — Daphne. She got pregnant, and he’d waited impatiently as her furry belly grew fatter, eager to see the coming kits. She went into early labor one morning and his mum allowed him to miss school so he could stay home for the event.
Daphne gave birth to five of the ugliest things he’d ever seen, but the experience amazed him nonetheless. He was even more amazed late that night when he poked his head into the hutch and saw mum rabbit eating her young.
Daphne’s tan fur was stained red with blood. Two of the kits were back in her belly, albeit in a wholly different way than they’d been the day prior. She'd devoured a third from the hindquarters up and its lifeless torso shimmied back and forth as its own mother dined on its organs.
An eight-year-old Solomon puked his supper onto his shoes and ran back into the house, crying as he told his mother of the horror. She looked at him blankly and replied only, “It happens, love. Part of nature.”
After that, he’d had frequent nightmares in which his mum was eating him. He’d wake up in a cold sweat, crying and squalling, and she’d rush in to the room to console him, but with those visions so fresh in his mind he couldn't stand to look at her.
He pushed the thoughts of the rabbit and his mother from his mind and returned his focus to the zombie on the lawn before him. She was oblivious to his presence as he strolled up to her, held the pistol a few inches from the back of her skull and squeezed the trigger. Her head snapped forward and she fell on top of the tot.
Solomon used his foot to push her off the lad, and when she toppled away, he saw the boy’s stomach was a gaping cavern filled with half eaten organs and ropes of chewed on intestines. The aroma was nauseating and Solomon used his free hand to cover his mouth and try to block out the stench.
The tot squirmed to and fro on its back, a whiny squeal coming from its mouth. Solomon wasn’t sure if it was alive or undead, but what he needed to do was the same either way. He aimed the gun at the tiny body below him and —
“Put down the gun!”
He glanced to his side and saw two police officers standing in front of a police cruiser.
That’s about right. Always get here after the fact. Solomon turned toward them. “Don’t you coppers know what’s going on here?”
The half-eaten tot rolled onto his stomach and Solomon heard the guts slithering out of the gash in his belly as it moved tow
ard him. Solomon moved his hand, the hand that held the gun, an inch, if that.
“Drop it, now!”
Solomon looked toward the cops, fury clouding his face. How stupid could these arses be?
He felt the tot’s little hand press against his foot and looked down on it. He raised the pistol.
“No!”
When the cop screamed Solomon turned his head toward the voice and the next thing he felt was a firecracker of pain explode in his head. Then everything went black.
I’m moving. My body isn’t, but I am.
He couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t feel anything except an inferno in his head. He tried to move but couldn’t. But he was moving.
“Get him in the ambulance!”
“Fuck him. He can rot.”
“Jesus, Shawn, the guy got shot in the head.”
“He’s a fucking murderer. You see what he did to that woman and her kid?”
Between their voices came a metallic clang and a heavy bump that shook his body. Solomon realized he was on a stretcher. He tried to move again. Couldn’t. Tied down to a stretcher. Balls, did his head ache.
“We don’t know what happened. Guy had a gun and that kid… That didn’t happen with a gun.”
“I ain’t no detective, but you got a bloody guy standing over a dead woman and a half dead kid and I know a duck when I see one.”
Christ, these morons are my saviors?
The movement stopped. He heard a metal door opening. Felt the gurney bump against what he assumed was the ambulance, but he still couldn’t see anything but black.
“What the?”
Someone screamed. A gunshot. Another.
“Hurry!”
He and the stretcher were thrown into the ambulance. He heard no one follow him into the back. Another door closed and the tires squealed as the vehicle sped away. The stretcher bounced back and forth as the ambulance rounded corners at wildly unsafe speeds.
Muffled voices — Angry? Scared? — came from the front, but between the pain in his head and the shrieking of the siren, he couldn’t make out any words. Soon enough, he lost consciousness anyway.
Light seeped in through the darkness. Not much, but enough to turn his world from a black hole into a dark room. A chorus of voices, some male, some female, shared this space with him.
“Where’s Micklson?”
“He was supposed to be in the OR when we got here.”
“Page him, now!”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Jesus, look at that hole. Is that his brain leaking out?”
“Where the fuck is Micklson? I’m not a god damned neurosurgeon.”
A muffled scream rang out. Then another. Then several more.
“What now?”
“See what’s going on out there. And tell someone to fucking get Micklson!”
A door opened, closed.
Solomon tried to open his eyes and a flat plane of white appeared. Dark blobs moved through it. He made an attempt at speaking but nothing came out.
More screams. His thoughts were cloudy and scattered, but he had an idea what was happening even if these fools were clueless. He forgot about trying to speak and focused on opening his eyes the rest of the way.
Something crashed. Glass broke.
His eyes came open and he saw he was in an operating suite. Five other people stood around. He may as well have been invisible for all the attention they paid him. They stared at the double doors at the edge of the room. Doors which were at the very edge of his peripheral vision.
Yet another scream, this one high pitched and filled with pain.
“Christ…”
All of them watched the doors, transfixed. Solomon saw a middle-aged man in dark blue scrubs grab a scalpel.
I’d go for something larger, Doc.
The doors burst open and a woman in Winnie the Pooh scrubs fell through them. Doused in blood, she had a ragged hole where her right cheek had once resided. She ran into a wheeled table, knocking a tray of instruments to the floor where they clattered and scattered.
A woman and a man rushed to her side, kneeling out of Solomon’s view. He saw a jowly cop stagger through the doors, the bottom half of his face covered in blood. Not his own blood.
Solomon tried to move and still couldn’t. All he could do was lay there and watch as the cop grabbed an anesthesiologist by the front of her uniform and pulled her into him. He was much taller than her, and when he bit down, his teeth caught beneath her eye and above her eyebrow. There was a grating, scraping sound as his jaws closed.
The woman squealed and flailed at the cop with her arms. One of the nurses slammed a metal clipboard over the cop’s head, and when he pulled back to look at his assailant, the anesthetist's eye came with.
The room became chaos. Running and fighting and crying and screaming and bleeding. So much bleeding. Solomon saw a slender, dark haired man with jet black hair come through the doors. He was missing his nose and upper lip. That didn’t stop him from tearing out the throat of one of the surgical techs. In the struggle, Solomon saw a blood speckled name tag and was positive it read, “Micklson.”
Well, that’s just fantastic.
He suspected there was no need to see what came next and let his eyes go shut.
Chapter 32
Mina sat on the bed for a good, long while and waited. She was certain that, any minute now, the police would show up. Killing her father had caused a heck of a racket and some nurse or orderly must have called the cops to report the crazy black woman who had just committed homicide.
And when they showed up, what was she going to say? The truth? That her dead father came back to life and tried to kill her, only she bashed in his skull with the bedpan before he could eat her hardly seemed plausible. She was free of her father, only to end up in prison or, at best, a lunatic asylum. Either way, it would be bye, bye Birdie.
Only, no one showed up. No police. No security guards. Not even a nosy candy striper or janitor. She realized that all she had to do was walk away, and after cinching together her ripped blouse and trying her best to look like someone who hadn’t just committed murder; she did just that.
Mina peeked out of the doorway and checked up and down the long corridor. All was clear, but not in the way she’d hoped. It wasn’t that everyone was preoccupied. Everyone was gone.
Earlier, when she’d waited outside the room for the doctor and nurses to attempt their best heroic measures, the hall was bustling with hospital employees fluttering about like worker bees. Now, there was no one, as if everyone in the hospital had gone on a cigarette break at the exact same time.
Who cares where they all went, Mina thought. Just go. So, she did. She was halfway to the elevator when she heard someone moaning a few rooms down. As she got closer, she heard the steady tone of a hospital machine. Mina didn’t know what the machine was or its purpose, but she knew from the movies the sound was bad news.
She again checked the hallway, but no one was rushing to the rescue. And when the person in the room moaned again, Mina decided it was up to her to see if they needed help.
As she stepped into the room, a baby blue privacy curtain blocked her view. Mina reached up, started to pull it back, then paused.
“Hello?” She waited. Another moan. “I don’t work here. I was here with—” She stopped herself. What did it matter to the person behind the curtain why she was here and why volunteer unnecessary information? Instead, she went with, “Do you need help?”
What a stupid question, she thought even before the words stopped spilling from her mouth. The machine doesn’t make that sound if things are okay. And people don’t moan like that unless they’re in trouble.
Mina pulled back the curtain and the first thing she saw was the nurse who’d instructed her to wait with her dead father. The beautiful woman was sprawled on the floor beside the empty hospital bed.
Her once pristine pink scrubs now shredded and stained with blood. Most of her flesh was missing. Even the
bones showed through in places. To Mina, the nurse looked like she’d taken a dip in a pool filled with piranhas.
A wet, gasping noise from the bathroom at the other end of the room drew Mina’s attention away from the dead nurse. Mina approached the half-closed door.
What are you doing, you ding dong? It was her father’s voice she heard echoing through her head. You ain’t got many brains, but it’s time you used ‘em. Get your ass out of here before it’s too late.
“Shut up!” she hissed, and didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until a gagging, gurgle answered from the bathroom.
“Hey,” she said to the half-closed door. “Do you want me to get someone?”
When she didn’t get an answer, Mina gritted her teeth and pushed open the door. What she saw was even more of a shock than her dead father attacking her.
The small, Indian doctor who had pronounced her father dead sat upright, his back against the blue tiled bathroom wall. His head hung limp and his chin rested on his chest. At the doctor’s midsection, Mina saw an old woman in a hospital gown on her hands and knees. The gown had ridden up and the split flapped open to reveal her saggy, wrinkled ass. The old woman’s face was buried in the doctor’s stomach, her head twisting back and forth as she burrowed into his bowels.
The sour aroma of shit hit Mina as violently as her father’s fist and she couldn’t hold back a dry retch. That drew the attention of the old woman who pulled back and her face came free of the doctor’s innards with a sloppy sucking sound. Schwock!
Blood and bits of intestines covered the woman, and when she saw Mina, the woman scrambled to her feet and loped toward her.
Mina slammed the door into the woman. It bounced off her and the old zombie stumbled backwards and tripped over the doctor’s body. Mina dashed away from the bathroom, but footsteps resumed behind her and they were coming faster than Mina could run.
