A.K.A. No Time for a Love Story (Book 1): Just Another Day

by Sims, Jacob Louis

  After doing a quick visual sweep of the yard, we crept up behind the zombies - who I imagined were husband and wife when they were alive ‘cause they were standing very close to one another, with their hands touching in an almost loving manner - and brought our blades to their necks, chopping their heads clean off. The heads hit the ground at our feet, and the bodies collapsed right behind them. We cleaned our blades off on their clothes, re-sheathed them, and walked to the fences gate, side-arms still in hand.

  “You know what?” I whispered to Frank as we passed through the gate in to the yard, closing it behind us. I figured it was safe enough, for the moment, for some hushed verbal communication. Plus, I was speaking for a very serious and important reason. “I really want a beer. Right now, man. Bad. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, I do - trust me, I was thinking the same fuckin’ thing - but I gave Ethel my last one,” he whispered back. “We’re out. We’re gonna have to wait till we get to Gus’s before we get some.”

  “Nah, fuck that shit, I say we check this house out here,” I replied as I gestured to the one we were at that moment coming up to, “and see what’s in the ole’ fridgeroo.”

  “Hmm…. Why the fuck not, right? Let’s do it!”

  Before we entered the house, we went from window to window (back windows only) to see if there were any zombies visible within. The house looked clear as far as we were able to see, so we went to the back door, which Frank found to be unlocked.

  The room we walked into was a little windowless coat room, that opened up into the kitchen, and it was obvious there were no zombies in it as we entered, closing and locking the door behind us. We hugged the walls - I was on the left, and Frank was on the right - and brushed past the coats and jackets as we made our way to the door to the kitchen. There was no actual door separating the two rooms, so once we were at it, Frank got into a crouch (so if I had to shoot, I woulda been able to shoot over him without fear of hitting him) and cleared the left side of the kitchen, and I stayed in a standing crouched position and cleared the right. Once we were both sure the room was safe to enter, we did just that.

  We checked the rest of the house in the same fashion - top to bottom - and found no threats. We didn’t find any survivors, either - the house was empty, and surprisingly clean. We went back down into the kitchen and right to the fridge, with high hopes that our thirsts would be quenched. The Gods of Beer and Happiness must’ve been smiling down upon us - there was an unopened twenty-four pack of Coors Original in there, just waiting to get drank. Sure, it wasn’t my flavor, but I wasn’t gonna complain. And neither was Frank. I ripped that fucker open with a quickness, and got us out a few beers, each, so we could get back into the groove we had when we first started our little adventure.

  Once the beers were pounded, and one more each was drank at a relatively normal speed, we filled our packs with the remainders and went to the living room windows so we could see what the street looked like. Seeing that it was pretty clear both ways, we left the house and hit the streets.

  40

  The street we came out on to, 27th Street, was a long motherfucker, let me tell ya. By the time we got to the end of it, we were dog-fuckin’-tired (but not really, that’s nasty), dripping with sweat, and ready for a beer break. Or a two or three beer break, even.

  Even though the street looked clear from the living room of the house we were in, once we got ourselves on it, it became readily apparent that it was anything but - there was almost as many zombies on 27th as there was on Midtown. They were all just a little bit further down than we were able to see. It fuckin’ sucked. The only difference was that the zombies on this street weren’t coming to the street, they were leaving it - it seemed that they were all headed towards Ethel’s place, following the sounds of a battle that had already been over for a couple of hours. Zombies and their one-track minds, you just wanna put a bullet in ‘em.

  “Okay,” I said as we stood in the middle of the street, holstered our side-arms, and got our rifles ready - while at the same time a good number of zombies had spotted us and changed their courses, moaning as they came. “This fuckin’ sucks rotten bum ass, dude. You wanna beat feet and get the fuck outta here… or do you wanna have a little fun?”

  “You know, Dave, I kinda want to have a little fun…”

  “Okay then… are you ready for this shit?”

  “Nope,” answered Frank, as he made sure he had plenty of extra mags within easy reach. “Not a bit.”

  “Me neither. Well, we may as well get to it then, I suppose…” I said with a smile on my face.

  “Yup… may as well.” He was smiling just as big.

  So we didn’t have a huge, thick packed-together glob of zombies coming at us - which would’ve been a serious pain in the ass to get through - Frank and I took to the opposite sides of the street, making the pack thinner, more spread out as they were going for two meals instead of one, and easier to kill and navigate through as we made our way down the street.

  We battled hard for about 150 yards, and killed dozens upon dozens of the meat-bags - we sprayed their brains through the air, decapitated them and amputated their arms and legs with barrages of white-hot lead, and left piles of them in our wake - before I decided that enough was enough. It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying myself, ‘cause I really was, it was just that there was way too many of the motherfucker’s for just the two of us to handle.

  “FRANK!!!!” I yelled as loud as I could, so he’d hear me over our shooting and the zombies moans. “FRAAAANK!!!!”

  He finally heard me after I yelled a few more times, and looked over at me, still shooting.

  “Fuck this shit, dude!!!! Head to that house there!!!” I yelled, pointing to a house on his right that had a fairly clear path to its front door. “We’re getting overwhelmed here!!! These fuckers are gonna kill us!!!”

  “Right!!! Moving!!!” Frank yelled as he broke contact and bolted for the house, as he was closer to it than I. Once there, he turned and laid down cover fire for me, and cleared a path for me to the house. I ran right past him and put a shoulder to the door, shattered the door frame, and nearly took the door off its hinges as I burst through it into the living room (there was a pack of the fuckers right on my tail, so being gentle and trying the handle first was outta the question). He ran in right behind me, and we both scrambled and tossed as much shit in front of the door as we could to barricade it, as there was already a ton of the dead fucks pounding at the door, trying to get in at us.

  Once it was secure enough for our liking, we sat on the couch (that was pushed up against the shit we had thrown against the door) and I got a couple beers outta my pack. Killing zombies builds up a mighty thirst. Plus, we were fairly safe in there, so I figured why the fuck not?

  “Man, that was getting scary,” Frank said as I handed him a reeb. “I thought we were gonna be fucked there, for sure.”

  “No shit,” said I, as I popped the top, “me too. We shouldn’t have even tried, we shoulda just ran… Oh well, at least it was kinda fun.”

  “Fuck yeah it was! Did you see it when I shot that fat doctor zombie in his face? I swear his blood and brains sprayed three feet high! It was fuckin’ awesome!”

  “Nah, man, I missed it… sorry. Wish I coulda seen it though, sounds cool! Tell ya what, dude, we got a long way to go before we get back to Gus’s house. I really don’t feel like running if it’s gonna be like that the rest of the way there. We gotta find us some wheels.”

  “Fuckin’ A we do. …Maybe we can find the keys to one of those cars out front in here. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt to check, right?”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” I agreed, “that’s a good fucking idea. But first… I wanna finish me beer…”

  “But of course, kind sir…”

  We sat there for another forty minutes or so, chilling, and knocked back a couple more beers each. While we were sitting there, the zombies outside the house got so thick and piled up on top of one another, that a
few of the “smarter” ones - it actually seemed that some of them retained a wee little bit of their prior intelligence - figured out that they could gain entry to the house by breaking the windows and crawling through, over the pile. We didn’t move, of course - we just went to our side-arms and shot them from the couch so we’d still have a free hand to drink with.

  After the beers were done, Frank went on a search through the house for the keys, while I stayed in the living room and shot at any zombie that tried to get inside. For shits and gigs, I went to the window and burned through a whole magazine while I waited - thinning the herd out and making it harder for the zombies to climb in - so I had enough time for another beer. My buzz was going strong, and I was feeling pretty good.

  Frank came back into the living room ten minutes later holding three sets of keys, two of them the kind with the remote controls on ‘em. The first set he tried only had a remote for the car alarm - he hit the button, to no avail. Out the window they went.

  “Okay,” Frank said cautiously as he prepared to try out the second set of keys, that also had a remote start feature on them, “here goes nothing.”

  He hit the button for the alarm - and the most annoying fuckin’ alarm I had ever heard started blaring from a new-looking Hyundai Sonata that was parked right in front of the house. Whoever owned that car must’ve been a real fuckin’ idiot, or thought they were funny or something, ‘cause instead of a shrill beep or tone, the car “talked”, saying “help me, I am being stolen” over and over, in a terribly loud Asian-sounding voice. I almost put it out of its misery - and mine.

  “Fuck yeah!!!” we both yelled at the same time.

  Frank then turned off the alarm, and tried the remote start. The cars battery was thankfully still good, ‘cause the car fired right the fuck up. Boom. We were set. Frank tossed the third set of keys out the window, where they bounced off the head of a little-girl zombie, and got caught in her hair. I shot them out for her, I’m just that nice a guy.

  “Now to get out there,” I said. “Hmm… why don’t we just try the back door?”

  I really didn’t think it would’ve been that easy, but it was. There wasn’t a single fucking zombie in the back yard - every one of the fucks was piled up out front. I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it. That last beer I had had tipped the scales, and I was rearin’ and ready for some zombie-slayin’ ac-shee-own! Mutha-fucka!

  We walked around the house to the front, and stopped at the edge of it to look past and see if we would’ve been able to make a run for it. The coast looked clear enough, so we took off at a sprint to the Sonata, where I found myself in the drivers’ seat for some reason. Before I could get out to remedy the situation, Frank had jumped in the passenger seat and locked the doors.

  “Wait! What the fuck are you doing, man?” I yelled at Frank. “I can’t drive, I’m fuckin’ wasted here! Fuck!”

  “Who gives a shit! Just get us the fuck outta here, man!” Frank yelled. The car was completely enveloped by the undead at that point, and they were pounding on the windows, hood, and roof, and were violently rocking the car from side-to-side. “Drive, man! It’s not like there’re any fuckin’ cops anywhere! C’mon!”

  So I took my pack off, threw it in the backseat, and did just that. I put my seatbelt on, threw it in drive, and put the gas pedal to the floor - the car shot outta the swarm like it was shot from a cannon, scattering zombies to the heavens. Well, not really, but hey, if that’s what I saw, then that’s what I saw. I was drunk as shit. But anyways, the car barreled out from the swarm and we shot down the street, to safety. Until…

  “You know what, Frank?” I said as I spun the car around in the middle of the street and aimed it back at the swarm we had just escaped from. “I feel like bowling.”

  41

  I came to as Frank was laughing and dragging me down the street. The sky was getting dark. The last thing I remembered was slamming into a massive wall of at least a hundred zombies at seventy-three miles an hour. I looked to my right and saw the Sonata standing on its rear bumper, leaning against a telephone pole, the corpses of several zombies scattered around and beneath it.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Hold on!” I yelled up at Frank. “I can get up, I’m fine, I’m fine…”

  I got to my feet and was surprised to find that I was in fact… just fine. I picked up my pack that Frank had dragged with me, put it on, and checked to see if my AR was in good working order. I woulda been bummed if it wasn’t, but thankfully it was A-OK.

  “Fuck, sorry about that, man,” I said to Frank as he squared away his gear and made sure his MP5 was still serviceable (we both did that by shooting a few of the approaching zombies in their faces - the best kind of weapons check ever). “I didn’t expect that to happen. Fucking imports.”

  “Eh, that’s okay, it was actually pretty fucking cool. Hurt a little bit, though. At least we’re outta the house now and a little further down the street.”

  “Yeah, but we’re back on foot now… Eh, fuck it, you cool to move?”

  “Well, I don’t plan on staying here,” he answered, gesturing at the horde that was less than fifty feet away, and closing. “So we gotta move, even if I wasn’t. But yeah, I’m cool. You?”

  “Yeah… um, wait a minute,” I said, then stopped, bent over, and puked my guts out. “Fuck! …Now I am. Let’s beat feet.”

  So down the street we ran, yet again. Even drunk and beaten we were still faster than the pursuing horde, and in no time flat we had put a good bit of distance between the zombies and ourselves. We only encountered twelve zombies on the way down the street, and we took care of those quickly and cleanly. By the time we got to the end of 27th, the zombie horde was way off down the street - at least a half hour away, in zombie-traveling time.

  “God! I could use a beer right now,” Frank said as we were stepping off 27th into someone’s big-ass front yard. “I’m fucking parched.”

  “Well… why not?” I replied. “Here, stop. Turn around and I’ll get a couple outta your pack.”

  “What… out here in the open? Those zombies are behind us, remember?”

  “Fuck, I don’t care where the fuck I’m at dude. If there’s beer involved, I’m game. Fuck them zombies. They won’t get here for a while anyways, we got time.”

  “Okay, go ahead,” he said as he turned around and took a couple shots at a few zombies that had stumbled outta their yards or houses as we walked by. “Get a couple each out.”

  “Ri-tee-o.”

  So we sat down in the grass by the curb, back to back so we had a good 360 view, and got ourselves good and hydrated. Three beers apiece later, we got up and made our way into the Richie-rich neighborhood that stood in between us and Midtown Road. We figured we’d get back to that, since Ethel’s house and all that mess we left behind was a decent clip away from us, and it was a way back to Gus’s that we were already familiar with.

  The neighborhood we were walking through was pretty fuckin’ swanky - filled with those massive two-story houses that had two or three bathrooms, four bedrooms, and garages so big that there was room for three cars and an “office” for the man of the house. Made me kinda mad that people were living like that, while I lived in my little apartment above a fuckin’ bar. Not that it mattered anymore.

  We were walking beside this huge plantation-looking house, when gunfire erupted from within. We both put our backs to the wall and looked at each other, indecisive as to what to do. You see, we were fairly close to our destination, and we didn’t really feel like getting shot at - neither of us said that, but it was an obvious unspoken agreement, ‘cause neither of us made a move to go and see what the shooting was about. Someone may have needed our help, but since we didn’t see or hear anyone, we didn’t want to rush into a situation where we had no clue as to what was going down.

  Plus, in the days up to that point, there was a noticeable decrease in the shots fired that we heard - at first, it sounded like people were storming the beaches at Normandy out here, but as the da
ys wore on, the gunfire became more and more sporadic, more random, as it seemed that most people were either hiding out inside their homes or wherever they were at, or dead. And to hear gunfire so late in the game meant, at least to me, that we were either gonna run into people like us - survivors who weren’t afraid to step out into this new and violent world - or bandits like we had killed earlier. I was figuring on the latter.

  I gave Frank the nod to move on, and we got to the edge of the house when - from a second-story window directly over our heads - a chair crashed through, sailed out, and landed in the grass. Right behind the chair, a guy tried to follow, but was dragged back inside by a pair of bloody hands. We now had a clue.

  We immediately turned and ran back to the front of the house, put the boots to the front door, and ran for the stairwell. The room the guy was in wasn’t hard to find - we just had to follow the screams and the sounds of struggle. We both instinctively knew that we weren’t gonna get there in time, ‘cause it sounded pretty bad, but we had to try - it just wasn’t in either of us to turn our backs on our fellow man when they needed help, especially in times like these.

  We got to the room, kicked the door in - and walked into an abattoir. The walls, floor, and ceiling were stained red with fresh arterial blood. Chunks of flesh and gore were strewn all about the room, stuck and sliding down whatever surface it had happened to land upon. Whoever it was that had thrown the chair out the window and tried to escape was now completely unrecognizable - they were just another entrée that was being feasted upon by the four zombies that were in the room. The zombies didn’t even see us or notice us as we stood there and watched in disgusted awe as they ate - it looked like there was at least three people in the room that the zombies were devouring, but we couldn’t tell as they all had been torn to pieces and were scattered about - they didn’t even move as we began to empty our magazines into them.