It was going to be night soon. He wanted to get into that garage. Hearing the return of the zombies, he retreated to the center of the pool. The wave held the only zombies he could see now, and it had gone quiet within the house.
The wave was getting smaller. Some of the zombies had stopped moving with the group. Collecting at the garage door with a series of clangs, it trickled away. The sun was setting, its blaze a fiery aura around the mansion, and cool colors encroached from the east.
Wash in. Wash out. Wash in. Wash out.
It was evening. Small, sporadic sounds were coming from the second floor of the house, but otherwise, it was still. Xan slithered out of the pool and moved on his belly to the driveway. He didn’t get his belongings yet. First he had to see.
The wave had moved to the curve of the driveway that led down to Wicker Place. He dripped onto the walkway as they washed in and out over there. With each wave, they penetrated more shallowly into the property. Then he could only hear their scratching feet and tumbling pebbles. He inched forward to see the garage door. The reason it hadn’t gone down fully was due to a box hanging over the lip of the concrete. The door was resting against it.
Xan lifted the door tentatively. It gave, too heavy to push up with the fingers of one hand, but very willing to move.
Then he went fast, collecting his things, lifting the door partway, dipping inside, and pulling it down with his foot shoving the box aside. He ripped open the zipper on the backpack and flailed around for a flashlight. Sweeping a wide yellow beam over the garage, he had the handgun pointed out into the dimness.
The two-car garage was packed with boxes and file cabinets, bicycles and tools. Slim pathways led between the uneven rows. There was no room for a car. There was barely room for Xan. A raised shelf coming down from the ceiling was packed with more boxes. Just as he began to walk the rows and search for life, a zombie scratched by to the pool and he froze in place. Then the scratching doubled back and faded.
Xan eased around the towering stacks. In the far back was an emergency bucket of first aid supplies, food and water, a towel and a folded blanket. Once he was sure that he was alone in the garage, he returned to the bucket. If zombies heaved open the garage door, they wouldn’t have a view of him. Nor could they get to him with any speed. This would do for now.
He stripped off his wet clothing and hung it on the box towers, dried off with the towel and hung it up, too. Pools of water grew beneath everything. Dressed only in his underwear, he shook out the blanket on the concrete and sat down for a meal. The candy that he had gotten with Selena from the prize counter made a lump come to his throat.
Religion had never spoken to him. But he still prayed that she was alone in the master bedroom, coming apart by natural processes. Somewhere in the world, her mother was roaming obliviously. Only Xan would mourn Selena, and that doctor who had been kind to her.
The temperature dropped. The cold of the concrete came straight through the thin blanket. When it grew too uncomfortable, he walked the aisles to read the labels on the boxes. Holidays, office, miscellaneous, the first box labeled clothing only had things for a woman. He pulled them out and added them to the bed for warmth to get through the night. His clothes would be dry in the morning, or drier.
Someone was scratching around the pavement again, a one-zombie wave that washed back and forth until some internal tide pulled it away for good.
The bicycles. Xan had walked by them earlier without thinking about it. Rockwin went downhill, and a bicycle would give him great speed. He could fly down that hill faster than the zombies could give chase, and a bicycle was much easier to steer around a fallen tree or vehicular accident than a car.
He weaved down the rows to the bicycles. There were two of them: lightweight, a black frame and a dark blue frame, very professional. The black one had tires in better condition. These bicycles had belonged to someone who didn’t pedal around town as a hobby.
He could ride to Newgreen. The zombies in his way didn’t have supernatural speed; Xan on the bike would be the fastest living being out there. He’d zoom past them to the moat and throw himself in, and they’d never be able to touch him.
We’re going home tomorrow, he promised Selena, but only her spirit would be traveling with him.
****
In the morning, he listened at the garage door and then opened it up. A chilly breeze blew in and flattened his damp shirt to his skin. The zombies were gone from the pool and driveway, everywhere he looked, and the house was quiet.
He wheeled out the black bicycle. He could smell the zombies he had killed yesterday. The odor hadn’t penetrated into the garage overnight, but there was an unpleasant scent in the air now, one of meat that had gone off.
He mounted the bicycle and took it down the slope of the driveway with great caution. Stopping at the road, he peeked around the foliage to see what lay in wait. Yesterday’s infestation had fully dispersed. He kicked off and began to pedal.
Finding Rockwin was easy. It was only two curves of the road down from the house with black curtains. He turned onto it, the bike making a quiet whoosh beneath him, and picked up speed. The rifle was jutting out of his backpack.
A car had been abandoned here. He swept by it, whipped around a turn, and saw his first zombie of the day. It was standing on the curb. Xan shot it, one hand in a lock around the handle, one on his handgun, and he returned the gun to the holster in one smooth move. Let the sound attract them here. He would be long gone in seconds, and no one could even see him in this stretch of the road. Shrubbery and trees rose over his head on each side, packed so thickly as to be impassable in most places.
Coming up too fast on the next turn, he squeezed the brakes just enough to take it without wiping out. Foliage rustled and he didn’t have time to shoot. He just flashed by as a zombie fought to release herself from the brambles that had gotten hold of her clothing. She snapped at him and fabric ripped. It was too late. He was going around the next curve by the time she staggered into the road.
Halfway down the hill, he came up on a naked crawler. It wasn’t worth the ammunition, and the zombie was all the way over at the side of the road. Oblivious to his approach, the guy was wizened and white with age. He didn’t turn until the bicycle was almost upon him, and his eyes were filmy with cataracts. Almost blind, almost deaf, this was the oldest one Xan had seen in Delanto.
He rolled by as the foliage fell away, giving him a view of the freeway, and of a tiny wave farther down the road from where he was. Four zombies were weaving over the lanes.
He positioned himself close to the miniscule shoulder and rode there, taking out his gun again. They spied him and forgot their formation to rush up the hill, knocking into each other in their eagerness to get into his lane. He pulled the trigger at the giant block of flesh they formed. The bullet went through two of them, who abruptly staggered as it passed through their bodies. The other two kept running as Xan put away the gun. The grade was increasing, as was his speed, and he couldn’t aim and shoot when he had to hold on and steer. He went straight for them, and then he swerved into the other lane.
They didn’t have time to react. He zoomed off, hearing footsteps pick up, and then they faded away.
He met no one else in the twists and turns of the road. The bottom of the hill was coming up, the map in his mind’s eye showing him one more turn that would dump him out to flat land. It presented itself, a twist in the road, and a stop sign that he blew through at high speed. He had planned to skim across the intersection and take the onramp to the freeway, but the pavement there was so damaged that he had to stick to Rockwin.
The burp shirt was plastered to his chest, and air was roaring in his ears. The space between Delanto and Newgreen was so empty, letting him see everything, and letting everything see him.
In the former pumpkin patch to his left, figures were stepping over the weeds to the parking lot that let out into the road. He pedaled furiously, the muscles in his legs burning. Figures were
rising from the pasture on his right, but they were so far away that he wasn’t too worried about them.
The zombies from the pumpkin patch were much closer, and the first of them had gotten to the road. Another three were in the parking lot, two more crawling over the counter of the weathered stand with hours and prices printed on the wood. The remainder was still back in the field.
A car had crashed in the southbound lane and there was no sidewalk or shoulder, so Xan would have to go by on the northbound where the zombies were emerging. Now there were four in the narrow space where he had to pass and he couldn’t take a hand off the handle to shoot at this speed and he definitely wasn’t going to slow down . . .
More zombies stepped out from behind trees past the accident. He jerked the bike into the driveway of the pumpkin patch and raced into the parking lot. Past the zombies exiting the weeds, past the cheerful signs announcing that the patch sold strawberry jam and homemade treats when it wasn’t pumpkin season. Past the stand and portable toilets that had been knocked over . . . past a heap of bones picked clean . . .
He braked at the wooden fence separating the lot from the former corn maze. The front tire hit it hard. He scrambled off the seat and let the bike fall to the ground. Then he was over the fence and in the weeds, shooting a zombie who lunged for him and sprinting across the field for the freeway. Only once did he look over his shoulder, which confirmed what was no mystery. They were following.
A fence was at the end of the field. He got to it and shoved his shoes into the diamonds. Up and over and down into a muddy gully he went as the zombies ran directly into the fence. Fingers stretched through the diamonds and closed for him. He scrabbled up the mucky side of the gully and fired at the zombie already scaling the fence. The bullet went through its throat and the creature fell off. Xan shot the second and third lifting their feet off the ground.
When he pulled the trigger for the fourth, the gun clicked. He dropped it, his fear making him shocked to have run out of rounds when logically he understood that he had been using that handgun for some time and it had had to run dry eventually. The second handgun was tucked in his waistband. He lifted it, reconsidered, and slid it into his holster. He could waste all of his rounds at this fence and have nothing with which to fight zombies between here and the moat.
It was time to run.
Newgreen. The haze was burning off or he had gotten much closer, or it was both of those things put together. He hit the slow lane at a sprint, the backpack jouncing on his shoulders. If it weren’t for his weapons, he would ditch it. He had left most of his things back in the garage. He didn’t want a can of Diet Nazzie slowing him down even by a microsecond.
What he did want was his rifle. Neither the handgun in the holster nor the revolver in the pocket of the backpack would hit as many targets when he was shooting from a distance. He put his hands over his head to reach the top of the backpack, running as he did. The zippers released as he tugged, making a metallic rip, and he got out the short barrel rifle.
A red hybrid had gone off the road. It would have keys, it had to have keys there in the ignition if it was on the freeway, but he didn’t stop running to see if it functioned. He had a premonition that the car would be a death trap for him, working or not. Or the adrenaline flooding his system was so high that he just couldn’t bear to slow down. The settlement was right in front of him, its angles gaining more definition with every racing footstep he took.
The bushes discharged several of them far ahead, and they roamed into the lanes between him and the moat. He ran over the fast lane, onto the flimsy excuse of a shoulder, and climbed over the barrier. Sunlight reflected off broken glass scattered in the lane and he remembered . . . he remembered looking at broken glass on the ground at the time he had been shot. The shocking sting in his back, the wild hunger abating, the men and women from the truck screaming for him to get in . . . get in, dude, hurry . . . quick, quick, quick . . .
What happened? What did I do?
You don’t want to know, man.
He knew.
He hadn’t slowed down when the flash-memory overwhelmed him. His body also knew what had to be done, and what would happen if it didn’t get done.
A zombie came out from behind a car off the side of the road. A second zombie was jutting out from beneath it, dead and decaying. Xan halted, pulled the rifle’s trigger at the live one, and he stood by the car for one wild moment to see where his greatest problem lay.
He glanced back at the fence to the pumpkin patch. They were dropping down into the gully.
He glanced at the southbound lanes. They were climbing over the barrier.
He glanced out to the fields, where they were coming to the freeway with single-minded purpose.
His greatest problem was everywhere, and then his leg burst with pain.
The zombie whose legs were under the car wasn’t dead, and it had just bitten him. Xan wrenched free. The rotting thing didn’t come after him for a second bite. It turned away and placed its cheek down on the pavement again.
It had tried to infect him. Its parasites were driving it to find a new host instead of sating itself on flesh, and those parasites couldn’t tell that the antidote had rendered Xan immune. Xan didn’t expend the bullet on it. He felt a trickle going down his skin. He was bleeding. Out here, with zombies on three sides, limited ammunition, and a mile or so away from Newgreen without a place to take shelter.
The fewest of them were coming from the pasture. He launched over the barrier and ran in the grass. His steps were high; his eyes keen on the wooden fence to the next field. The upper board had fallen in one section, so he could leap it and keep pace. But first he had to deal with the zombie racing for him, the man so intent on Xan that the constant staggering caused by the weeds never caused him to look down and watch where he was going. The guy was young and fit, clad in shorts and his legs scraped up. A woman was also running for Xan, but from farther away.
The packs from the pumpkin patch and the freeway were scuttling over the barrier. Xan let the distance shrink between him and the man. He couldn’t waste the shot. The guy was too close for comfort when Xan pulled the trigger.
Blood sprayed out behind the man, who took no note of it and staggered onwards. Raging for meat as strongly as Xan was raging for Newgreen, and finally the man went down. Xan had had to reduce his speed to a trot, and now he slammed back into a run for the broken fence. Leaped it and searched ahead for the next one. There was a shack of a home in this field. It had no glass in the windows, no door, and had been scorched by fire. It wasn’t a place to hole up.
Heads poked up from the tall grass, crawlers lifting to their knees and sleepers waking up. His blood was calling to them. The grass was shorter by the fence, tramped down by a wave that had washed through this field, and he took advantage of it. A tiny figure shot by, startling him at its incredible speed. It was a cat, a lean calico fleeing for fun or its life or after a mouse that Xan hadn’t seen.
A zombie wriggled out of the grass. It wasn’t even a crawler at this point, so riddled with infection that it could only squirm. The calico cat leaped over it gracefully with Xan doing the same seconds behind.
Then the world tumbled before his eyes, something colliding with his side and sending him sprawling into the grass. A hidden zombie had bowled him over and was now atop him, Xan catching it by the neck to keep its teeth from latching down on his face. The rifle had been knocked away. He wrestled his handgun out of the holster and shoved it into the zombie’s stomach.
Then he was dumping the body off him and scrabbling through the grass for his rifle. He found it just past where he had landed and returned to the flattened path. The cat was gone. The zombies weren’t.
The path led all the way to the fence. A woman in a ragged skirt was running alongside him on the freeway, a crude strategy in her head to cut him off as he went over it. He took aim, judged the chances too high that he would miss at their distance when both of them were moving and she
was so very thin. His opportunity arrived as soon as he got to the fence. She came at him and he shot her in the face.
His hand went out to the top board and he heaved himself over. He was back in the lanes. The freeway curved here to pass around Newgreen, sending an off-ramp to the moat.
The water in the moat was flowing, placidly and peacefully and beautifully, around the settlement. He could see the wall on the other side, the clusters of buildings, the small shapes of people walking on the path. He dashed over the lanes, jumped the barrier, and dashed over the lanes again. Dropped down a short ravine to a field of grass as frantic scratching pursued him from the freeway. A handful of zombies were roaming in the field, their heads all turning at the exact same moment as the scent of his blood tickled their noses.
He wrenched away from a red X painted on the ground. He’d almost stepped on a land mine! The earth was littered with fresh and fading X’s, shallow craters, and bodies. Some were newly dead, some were withered, and some were nothing but bones atop shreds of singed clothing. Insects were heavy in the field, lifting as he passed by blasted corpses. He batted them away from his eyes and scanned for X’s. Volunteers burying the land mines had lost legs out here from careless steps. The legs were still in the grass. Their lives had ended gruesomely for extra tokens.
His life was going to end gruesomely for nothing if he missed an X. Grass had grown over some of them, and at the worst, they were a faint pink tinge through the strands. He aimed for craters when he could, skirting close to their edges since the land mines there had already gone off. Going too close to one, the earth collapsed under his left foot. He staggered into the hole and stopped there to shoot a zombie who was approaching fast. The man fell and growled, fingers clawing the air.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 42
