Clearly frustrated, he tried shooting me yet again as I closed the distance between us.
“Should’ve used your own gun,” I said as I raised the derringer level with his head.
“Fuck,” he replied, likely knowing what was coming next.
With only a second of hesitation, I pulled the trigger. It wasn’t a head shot, but I’d nabbed him in the neck. With a shriek, he dropped the shotgun and covered the wound, blood spurting between his fingers. I doubted he’d be any more trouble.
The other one, unfortunately, was another story. He’d dashed around the front of my vehicle before I had a chance to react. “You killed Jamal,” he spluttered.
I glanced toward the ground, where Jamal writhed in pain. “He’s not dead yet.”
Despite my confident facade, I had mixed feelings about what had just happened. I’d always considered myself a strong man, willing to sacrifice myself for those I loved: namely, my wife, my cat, my brothers, and my parents. But while I’d always believed myself capable of killing someone who threatened me or any of my loved ones, I’d never actually shot a living person before.
Zombies, yes. People, no.
I pointed my gun at Jamal’s friend – the one I hadn’t shot yet – just as he aimed his gun at me. Neither of us pulled the trigger.
“What kinda gun is dat?” He crinkled his nose. “Looks old. Can’t have many shots.”
“It’s a derringer. And two is all it needs.” I sighed, knowing I had no desire to shoot the kid. “Look, my name’s Joe. What’s yours?”
“Samson,” he replied. “Like in da Bible.”
I squinted, my eyes tracing his short stature, then arched an eyebrow.
Before I could say anything, he explained, “My mama had a strange sense uh humor.”
Movement behind him caught my eye, and I realized we had visitors. Apparently, some of the zombies had heard either our voices or the gunshot and, eager to investigate the potential meal, shoved their way between the giant doors. Samson and I had run out of time.
“Seems we have company,” I said.
“Zombies?” he asked without shifting his eyes – or his gun – from me.
“Listen, Samson, I don’t want to shoot you, and I don’t think you want to shoot me.” At least I hoped he didn’t.
“Naw, man,” he said, glancing from me to his dying friend to the zombies heading our way. “I never wanted to do dis bullshit. Just tryin’ to survive.”
“Why don’t you go find your mama?” I asked. “And get her outta the city?”
Sighing wearily, he nodded and lowered his gun.
I lowered my pistol as well.
“Good luck, mister.”
“You too, Samson,” I said, bending down to retrieve the shotgun.
I looked up in time to see him bolt past me and leap for the upper ledge of the brick wall. Some of the zombies were only a few yards away and rapidly closing on my position, so I sprinted toward the passenger door of the van and slammed it shut. As I dashed to the open rear doors, I caught a glimpse of Samson disappearing over the wall. A part of me hoped he’d make it.
Hastily, I grabbed my keys, climbed into the back of the van, shut and locked the doors, and scrambled toward the driver’s seat. I’d just buckled my seatbelt and started the rumbling engine when the first zombies reached us. Ignoring me and Azazel, they made a beeline for Jamal. Probably lured by the smell of fresh blood. And his groans.
Several zombies disappeared from view as Jamal screamed. I could only assume they were tearing him apart, devouring everything in sight. His bloodcurdling shrieks were almost too much to bear.
Eh, fuck him.
He’d tried to rob me – and kill me – and ultimately gotten what he deserved.
Chuckling, I realized Robert would’ve been proud of my eye-for-an-eye attitude. Even if Clare would disapprove.
Carefully, I pulled out of the parking space and headed for the giant doors. The gap was much wider now, but still not wide enough for my vehicle to pass. The high volume of zombies presently flooding into the lot would make it impossible for me to stop the van, climb from the driver’s seat, and manually open the doors as I’d planned.
Only one way to go.
“Sorry, baby,” I whispered, before gunning the van and ramming through the doors.
The wood splintered with a deafening roar, but we made it onto Rampart Street, dismembering zombies, scraping the sides of my vehicle, and whacking the passenger-side mirror in the process. The makeshift battering ram had done its job, and the van now had real damage – and real blood – to match its fake patina.
“Oh, well,” I said, glancing at the dangling side-view mirror. “Every car has to have its first scratch.”
Driving northeast on Rampart, headed for the nearest I-10 entrance ramp, I could finally breathe a little easier.
True, I still had to swerve around busted cars, hapless survivors, and zombie herds on the roadways. Hunger, thirst, and fatigue had almost derailed me a few times. My headache had returned with a vengeance. And I couldn’t shake the terrible memories of being chased by zombies, seeing countless bodies in the streets, and watching dumbass stoners be ripped to shreds.
Yes, I hated leaving neighbors behind and knowing I might never again see the people and places that had made New Orleans home. And indeed, I realized more than eighty miles still lay between me and Baton Rouge.
But despite quite a few obstacles – and several close calls – Azazel and I had miraculously survived. Finally, we were headed to the highway. On our way to Clare. As we should’ve been hours earlier.
I patted the coin pocket of my jeans. Fortunately, I could still feel the outline of Clare’s diamond ring through the denim. How futile that nearly fatal trek would’ve been if I’d lost the damn thing between Troy’s place and the parking lot.
Glancing through the slits of the carrier, I noticed my poor cat was stretched out like a tiny manatee and snoring gently. I’d assumed that, once we reached the van, she’d start clamoring for food, treats, water, or her litter box, but she seemed beyond pooped. She’d been through a lot, too – and deserved as much peace and luck as I did.
But, since everything good in life seemed to come at a price, I couldn’t help but wonder what additional horrors we’d face before making it to Clare.
Chapter
20
“The world we know is gone, but the will to live never dies. Not for us… and not for them.” – Mattie Webber, Pulse (2006)
Naturally, getting the hell out of Dodge – or, rather, New Orleans – wouldn’t be as easy as I’d hoped. Hard enough to navigate a heavy, oversized, extensively modified delivery truck – a real beast of a vehicle – around numerous dead bodies and abandoned cars (some of which were charred, smoldering, or outright burning). But the real trick to maneuvering on the narrow, pothole-filled surface streets of a post-apocalyptic Crescent City was to avoid the small – and not-so-small – herds of zombies that were seemingly everywhere.
While driving northeast on Rampart Street, I encountered a slew of undead obstacles – more than I’d observed when first squeezing my fat ass into the parking lot near Ursulines. The unavoidable gunshot that had incapacitated my would-be murderer had also lured quite a few of the walking pus-sacks from nearby buildings and adjacent side streets. Now, a bunch of mangled motherfuckers had crept across Rampart and unfortunately blocked the closest turnaround.
“What am I thinking?” I muttered to myself – and perhaps to Azazel, if she’d still been awake.
No need to wait for a proper turnaround – not today.
Abruptly, I turned the steering wheel hard to the left, and the front, all-terrain tires responded by hopping the curb and rumbling across the neutral ground – or, as the rest of the country had always called it, the median.
In pre-zombie days, an illegal maneuver like that would’ve garnered me, at best, a pricey ticket or, at worst, a painful beating by an overzealous NOPD officer. But these were di
fferent times. Since waking up in the courtyard with the axed pirate zombie, I had yet to see a living cop – just a few dead or undead ones – and traffic laws no longer existed.
In fact, all municipal laws seemed to have been suspended. Indefinitely.
Frankly, I wasn’t worried about getting in trouble for driving across the neutral ground. As a creature of habit, I’d simply needed a minute to realize official turnarounds and one-way streets no longer meant anything.
No, what troubled me most about taking the unorthodox route was that, beyond typical hurdles like palm trees and streetcar tracks, the neutral ground now boasted piles of dead people. Dead, as in ravaged bodies… and dead, as in the zombies still munching on them.
The heinous scene resembled a twisted version of a traditional crawfish boil, but instead of hovering over a steaming heap of cooked crustaceans, peeling out the tails, sucking the heads, and discarding the shells onto a refuse pile, the zombies on the so-called neutral ground were pigging out on various twitching parts or fresh kills, slurping up human brains, and tossing the unwanted bones and rotting flesh aside. One seriously fucked-up feast I currently plowed my way through.
Fortunately, the zombie-mobile did its duty, shoving the ravenous diners out of our path while maintaining traction on the carnage-covered ground. I had no time – or desire – to examine the grill, tires, or undercarriage of my baby, but I assumed there was now plenty of real gore to match the comic-con paint job.
Once I’d mowed across the zombies and their unfortunate victims, and my front tires finally hit the asphalt of the westbound lanes, jolting the van and its occupants, I again turned the steering wheel to the left and headed in the right direction: what native New Orleanians would’ve called the “lakeside” of Rampart Street. As I passed the headquarters of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, I heard a plaintive meow beside me.
Glancing to my right, toward Azazel’s carrier, I spotted her wide, green eyes staring at me through the slits. “Sorry, sugarplum. That was pretty bumpy, I know.”
She meowed again, sadder that time.
I shifted my eyes back to the street ahead, but continued trying to soothe my little girl. “You’re probably hungry. Thirsty, too. And sick of that stupid carrier. But I can’t let you out just yet. For your own safety.” I peeked at her again. “As soon as we’re able to take a break, I promise, I’ll let you roam around a bit.”
She meowed once more – whether to underscore her displeasure or agree to my terms, I couldn’t be sure – then she lowered her furry head and presumably went back to sleep.
Just as I returned my gaze to the road, I noticed several people darting across Rampart, probably headed to Louis Armstrong Park – a well-tended, thirty-two-acre oasis in the infamous Tremé neighborhood that bordered the French Quarter. They likely hoped the tall, iron fence surrounding the park – once a popular place for outdoor concerts and festivals – would keep them safe from the undead. I almost tagged them as I crossed St. Ann.
Gazing in my side-view mirror, I watched as the fleeing people made it mere steps from the stately front gates of the park, when a mass of zombies suddenly surged from the Quarter – surely their reason for running in the first place. Before any of the potential victims could even start to climb the gates, the undead had tackled the lot of them and, as usual, commenced ripping them into horrifying pieces.
After taking a shortcut down St. Peter and Basin Streets, I edged closer to the I-10 entrance ramp Clare and I normally used when headed to her mom’s house. It felt strange driving on traffic-free roads with nonoperational stoplights, so close to the NOPD station, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, and other neighborhood landmarks usually bustling with people – now either overrun by zombies or hauntingly vacant.
Someone must’ve still been alive inside the police station because I heard several gunshots from within. Along the outside of the building, enormous piles of destroyed bodies were stacked against the entrance and near a few of the windows. The cops – or whoever was inside – certainly put up a valiant fight, but the hordes of zombies kept coming. Sooner or later, the survivors would run out of ammunition – and then they’d either starve to death, barricaded inside, or be eaten as they tried to escape.
I shrugged and kept driving.
By the time I reached the interstate entrance, I’d figured out my greatest obstacle to leaving the city. As much as I hated to admit it, Troy had been right about the highway: It was jam-packed with stalled vehicles.
Despite the suddenness of the zombie invasion, plenty of people had apparently had enough time to evacuate. Or at least attempt to evacuate. Hard to believe so many New Orleanians had managed to reach their automobiles and hit the highway – given all the mayhem of the night before – but a strong sense of self-preservation had apparently provided the necessary dose of adrenaline and resourcefulness.
Presently, most of the cars and trucks appeared to be abandoned, with zombies weaving between both the vehicles and the bodies of those who’d unfortunately made a run for it – and ultimately lost the race. I immediately tried to bulldoze a path between the crowded lines of automobiles. With my responsive driving skills, I managed to miss most of the meandering zombies, but when a bleached-blonde woman with half of her face missing moved in front of my van too quickly, I inadvertently caught her with the front left edge of my bumper.
Although numerous obstacles made it impossible to drive fast, it was such a tight squeeze between vehicles that I simply couldn’t avoid her. The van knocked her to her knees, and my bumper crushed the remainder of her face against a brand-new Lexus. Her head squished like a grape, but luckily, most of the blood and zombie goo seemed to splash onto the once-pristine hood of the luxury car. Not that I was truly concerned about how the exterior of my zombie-mobile looked.
Hampered by numerous obstacles as well as the smoky atmosphere of a city on fire, it took me almost twenty minutes just to drive a couple hundred yards. Beyond dead bodies and abandoned cars, I spotted several survivors trapped inside their vehicles, surrounded by ravenous, unrelenting zombies.
In a perverted way, the scene reminded me of those camera-wielding paparazzi encircling hapless celebrities – only the zombies wanted a bit more than a salacious photo. The undead creatures craved organs, flesh, and blood – and they wouldn’t leave until they’d devoured their fill. It was a waiting game: The zombies would eventually claw their way inside or the humans would inevitably starve to death. Either way, the zombies couldn’t lose.
It didn’t take much longer for me to accept the interstate wouldn’t work as a viable passage to Baton Rouge. Assuming I could plow my way through most obstructions, I was bound to reach a point where even the van’s makeshift battering ram wouldn’t suffice.
Fortunately, the I-10 wasn’t my only option. Before the interstate was constructed in the 1950s, the main route between New Orleans and Baton Rouge was Airline Highway, a rather schizophrenic thoroughfare known for golf courses, schools, various businesses, and prostitutes. Lots and lots of prostitutes.
It also happened to bypass the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport – hence, the name. Even if Airline were relatively empty, it would take longer than an obstacle-free interstate, but it would certainly offer more turnarounds and side streets, enabling me to avoid blockades and keep moving toward Baton Rouge.
I only hoped fifty thousand other people hadn’t made the same assessment.
Chapter
21
“You want me to salute that pile of walking pus? Salute my ass!” – Captain Rhodes, Day of the Dead (1985)
The quickest way to exit the interstate was to put the van in reverse and retrace my route through the bodies, zombies, cars, and survivors. Out of habit, I glanced in my side-view mirror and noted a new wrinkle: At some point during my stop-and-go journey, a small BMW convertible had apparently trailed my path of destruction and now encroached upon my back end.
Seriously, who the fuck drives a soft-top conver
tible during a zombie apocalypse?
From what I could tell, a well-dressed, sixtysomething white man sat behind the wheel, while an attractive redhead, likely in her twenties, occupied the front passenger seat. As I rolled to a halt, shifted into reverse, and assessed my options, the jackass in the BMW honked his horn at me – possibly because he’d spotted my red taillights.
Had he learned nothing since the zombie virus had begun to spread throughout the city? Horns, gunshots, and other often avoidable sounds would only attract unwanted company.
I rolled down my window, just a crack, and yelled at him, “Hey, dumbass! Back up your stupid Beemer!”
As I’d feared, his relentless honking lured hordes of zombies from both directions. Luckily, I managed to crank up my window just as an undead clown reached his blood-smeared fingers toward the gap. Azazel and I might’ve been safe for now, but another look in my only functional side-view mirror told me a few of the zombies were already tearing through the cloth top of the convertible. The redhead – who was undoubtedly not the man’s daughter – shrieked and slapped her companion’s arm, probably trying to compel him to move the fucking car.
Still, despite the urgency of the situation, the entitled idiot staunchly refused to shift into reverse. Hastily, I unbuckled my seatbelt and stepped to the rear of the van, where I plucked the shotgun from beneath the tarp and loaded it with shells from a nearby drawer. When loaded, the 12-gauge shotgun could be a deadly weapon – not just a pseudo Wild West prop, like back in the parking lot.
Through the smudged windows of the rear doors, I noted three zombies clawing at the roof of the BMW. The redhead, whom I could barely see through the car’s windshield, had apparently tilted her seat all the way back, so the first zombie who managed to slip his arm into the vehicle (a particularly eager postal worker) couldn’t quite grab her.
Zombie Chaos (Book 1): Escape from the Big Easy Page 11
