In the confusion, Kurt managed to find Randall, and pulled him by the arm as several attacked from behind, nearly knocking him down. He lifted Randall to his feet and they dove into the thick mass of ravenous zombies.
As they made their way through, Kurt caught a glimpse of Dr. Smegma at the front of the church, where the altar used to be. The operation had stopped with Dr. Smegma’s head partly severed. His naked body lay limp. His expression was neutral, the smirk finally gone, and blood had erupted from his eyes as though he had seen something for the first time and wept bitterly at it with tears of blood. The inert machinery was a mere jumble of metal to no purpose. Kurt doubted that he had seen what he had earlier, and discarded it from his memory and his mind, although he was newly filled with horror. The illusion of order had vanished, and the sense of relief that he had felt when he was in the cell was gone.
Pulling Randall behind him, Kurt pushed his way through the horde. Some were locked in bloodthirsty frenzy, blind to all but that on which they were already feasting. Others stalked the sanctuary in zeal, running and bounding after any moving person that caught their attention. A quick hand snatched at Kurt; he turned, throwing a punch, making contact with something—he couldn’t see what. He drew back his fist, now covered in blood and filth. Another swiped at him from behind; he lurched backward onto it, driving it down to the ground. He thrust his elbow behind him, connecting painfully with its ribs and snapping them. Two leapt over him while he was down; he thrust both his hands in the air in an instinctive motion of defense. His left hand struck the zombie on the chin, and the fingers of his right hand thrust deep into the other zombie’s mouth. The zombie bit down, cleaving through his bones with a crunch and severing his fingers. In a shock of pain, he lurched forward, throwing the offending zombie off. He looked to his right and saw that Randall had been brought to the ground and that two were pulling at his leg mercilessly and with such a force that they had bent the foot out of joint. Kurt dove forward and took hold of him by the torso. He pulled hard, as hard as he felt that he could. The others pulled also, and with a crack, the ankle joint broke and the skin tore and the foot separated from Randall’s body. Randall screamed in pain. Kurt, with his arms wrapped around Randall’s torso, fell with him to the floor. Then he hooked his elbow under Randall’s other arm, and pulled him free.
There was an exit to the side of the sanctuary that, Kurt assumed, led out of the church entirely. When they reached it, he kicked the door open and discovered that he was right—the door opened to the blinding, formless, white sky, filling the entire doorway. They fell out of the door into the blank emptiness.
Past the door was a small courtyard, and then a rolling hill populated by the bloated zombies that had been feeding on all who had been herded into the church until now. They all sat together on the ridge, their bodies beside and on top of one another, as though they had stopped moving long ago but continued growing long after they had run out of space to grow. Some had grown over while others had grown under. Kurt and Randall rolled down the hill of fat zombies whose heads rolled around in their necks, searching the air with their tongues like barnacles. Some of the bodies were so plump that their skin burst at impact, their bodies exploding wetly like overripe fruit. Kurt and Randall tumbled down to the bottom where the zombies ceased to have any sort of definition from one to the other—they were no longer individuals, but the hill became merely a sea of fleshy mouths and tongues. The zombies had nearly liquefied, bearing only featureless mouths that opened up passively in an amorphous, gelatinous mass.
Kurt’s vision began to fail, and it was with great difficulty that he managed to drag Randall away from the globby slime onto an empty patch of pavement, as though he had just emerged from a womb. They were covered with blood, filth, and pulpy jelly from head to foot. On his hands and knees, Kurt sputtered and wiped it away, while Randall lay on the ground gasping for breath as his blood stained the asphalt. For how serious the injury was, it did not seem to be causing a great loss of blood. Kurt lifted his head and sat on the ground beside Randall and looked back up the hill.
They were looking at the back of the church now, up the hill of fat zombies. Seen from this side, it looked entirely different. It seemed small and insignificant from the ground. Their experience inside seemed to Kurt to be a mere dream, something of little or no consequence. They were back on the ground, and things were as they had always been, and would always continue to be. They had escaped, and escaped alive, although for how much longer neither of them could say.
Kurt tore his shirt from his body and tied it around Randall’s lower leg as a tourniquet. Randall winced in pain. The bleeding seemed to slow, but did not stop. Kurt pulled the knot of his shirt tighter and Randall cried out, but the bleeding seemed to continue at the same rate.
“I don’t know,” said Kurt. “I don’t know what I can do.”
Randall rolled on his back and sputtered a laugh. “I always had two left feet,” he said.
“I would never have left you,” said Kurt.
Kurt put his arm around Randall again and lifted him up, placing him unsteadily on his one good foot.
He led him like this away from the church toward the road that led out of the town in the opposite direction from which they had entered it. He wasn’t sure where it would take them, but the open road seemed like a safer bet than going back to either the woods or into the town. It led away straight; they could see down the road a considerable distance.
As they went down the road, they did not talk. Randall grunted as he strained to remain upright and maintain his balance. Kurt strained too under Randall’s unsteady weight. Randall’s head hung low and Kurt leaned in close to him. From a distance, they would have looked like an intimate couple speaking to each other softly. The white sky hung over them like a screen.
Kurt looked back over his shoulder. They had progressed a good distance, but had not gone as far as he would have liked. He could still see the church on the hill, its dinginess the only thing that separated it from the chalky sky. It was a good landmark, Kurt thought. Once they were out of sight of it, then he would feel safe to rest.
The road was flanked on both sides with old-style houses that stood on large pieces of property. The grass lawns were overgrown. A tree had fallen on one, and the roof had caved in. They passed a road sign that said, WATER OVER ROADWAY. But it had not rained for several days, and the road was dry.
The road had been straight and easy, but before long, they passed a sign that read LIMITED SIGHT DISTANCE, and it took a sharp and sudden curve down a hill along the edge of a steep drop, the severity of which was masked by the dense foliage that grew on it. The guardrail had been bent and twisted from the edge, likely from an accident long ago where someone had barreled through it and driven over the edge. As they were walking, it was easy to maneuver the curve that, for a car, would have been treacherous.
The trees became thicker down the curve, blocking out the sky. The air grew colder. A clammy chill descended on Kurt, and he became aware that he was gradually growing nauseous. He felt a burning sting on his shoulder. Thinking it to be muscle pain, he reached up his free hand to massage it. His fingers found an open wound, sticky with warm blood. Then he remembered that he had been bitten at the church. He coughed and shook his head. He put the thought out of his mind. They were out of sight of the church. The next priority was finding some sort of shelter. When they came to something that would suffice, he thought, then he would stop and rest and deal with the wound.
At the bottom of the incline, Randall stumbled on his foot and rolled his ankle. His weight shifted suddenly, and Kurt did not have time to adjust his footing before he lost hold of him. Randall fell to the side of the road where the guardrail had been uprooted and fell through the gap into the foliage, and then he rolled away down the hill. Kurt had lost his balance as well and fell into the guardrail at the point where it had been bent. The metal had been folded into a sharp angle like the point of a wedge; it dug into Kur
t’s side like a knife as he fell on it. His body continued to fall, and he tumbled into the bracken lining the edge of the road after Randall. He rolled down the hill through the brush, past an abandoned car—likely the one that had crashed through the guardrail long ago. He threw his hands out in front of him in an effort to slow his descent, but his hands found nothing to hold on to. He had tucked his legs in underneath him and his exposed knees struck a heavy limb that had fallen. His kneecaps cracked against it and pain shot through the length of his legs.
Not far down, the ground leveled and there was a clear patch of stumps overgrown with brush. Kurt landed on his ribs against the corner of a stump crowned with a snarl of blackberry vine. His ribs cracked against the stump and the thorns cut his skin. His legs ached with pain. He knew his legs were useless.
Randall was not far from him, his face cut and smeared with blood, twigs and shoots sprouting from his hair like the remnants of a crown of weeds. He saw Kurt’s fall and observed his unnaturally straight legs, his side gaping and bloody, and he began to weep.
Kurt was dazed from the fall, but after a moment, his senses returned to him somewhat. He noted the blackberries, how they were ripening already. Nature was a machine, he thought, and it was a perfect machine. It never broke; it always continued to operate. Why had humanity never been able to build a machine like that?
He looked up at Randall, blurred in his hazy vision. He had sustained a blow to the head on his way down, and he attempted to lift his arm to touch it, but his arm did not respond. He looked down at it. It was grey, colorless—it was broken, and it had already begun to decay.
He looked back up at Randall’s blood- and tear-stained face and a mutual glance confirmed between them what they both knew: this was it. And Randall began to weep more deeply, taking in shallow gasps of breath and blurting out short sobs.
“I’m turning…” said Kurt, weakly. As he spoke, sharp pain stung deep in his side; the metal must have pierced him deeper than he had thought.
Randall blinked his eyes and brought his weeping under control and looked around for a something that might serve as a weapon, but gave up quickly.
“I’m too far away,” he said. “I don’t have anything…”
“Fuck,” said Kurt, rolling his head back and closing his bloody eyes.
They fell into silence, sitting in the clearing, neither able to move. All around them the forest was quiet, and the white sky hovered above them with silent warmth.
“Kurt,” said Randall.
Kurt rolled his head down again and opened his eyes. “Yeah.”
“There’s something I—that I have to tell you. That I always wanted to tell you before you—before we—” His throat caught and he emitted another heavy sob.
“What is it?” said Kurt.
“I—I—” Randall struggled, and then shivered violently with a sudden chill. He was losing blood. He took in a deep, stuttering breath and, with his voice quavering so much that it nearly impeded his intelligibility:
“I love you.”
Kurt looked at him slowly out of one eye. He took in a breath and said, “I… I love you too, man.”
Randall slurped in a breath wet with blood and phlegm and said, “No, Kurt, I—I love you.”
Kurt looked at him again out of one eye, this time saying nothing.
“I’ve loved you since we met…” he said. “Since your first day digging graves…”
Kurt winced. “So was that… was our friendship…? You mean, the whole time…?”
“Yes, but… our friendship was real too…”
Kurt was in so much pain that he could not determine if the overwhelming sense of disgust that struck him was the result of Randall’s confession or the cumulative effect of his injuries. He felt as though an inconceivable distance had grown between them, some interminable gulf opened up that dwarfed their physical distance from each other lying immobile in the glade.
“I don’t…” said Kurt, cut off by another stab of pain.
“I love to be with you,” said Randall, babbling more freely. “All I ever wanted was to spend forever by your side. We trust each other… I always knew that we were perfect companions. I was afraid that you wouldn’t understand. I just wanted to be with you in every way. I wanted us to be close. I wanted to be a shoulder for you to lean your head on, to nestle into…”
A wave of nausea washed over Kurt. He found it difficult to follow Randall’s words. They meant nothing to him. And then he thought again of the church, of the pile of corpulent zombies, the morbidity and the stench, the living rot.
The sky grew brighter, and for a moment, the clouds threatened to dissipate, hinting at the presence of the sun, a definite position of the source of the light by which they saw. On the ground, the world glowed brighter, shadows threatened to form—the pale world suggested more color, more definition, starker contrast of brightness and darkness. And the forest ceased to be merely mechanical; it took on a character of otherness, of ghostliness. The forest was haunted—the forest itself haunted him. Everything was alive in the fullest sense of the word. The trees, the bracken—all was imbued with an otherworldly transcendence. But this it did for only a moment, and then the clouds thickened again and the world was cloaked in white and gray. There were no shadows, and there was no sun.
For a moment, Kurt thought that he saw something on the edge of his vision, like a shadow, or another, similar darkness. Then he was struck with an overwhelming sense of fatigue, of sleepiness.
Nausea overwhelmed him. He lost all sense. And then he was dead.
Randall heaved a sigh as though he would begin weeping uncontrollably again, but he was spent and the sigh died in him.
Then Kurt woke up. His eyes clicked open revealing irises clouded over with grey, insensate nothingness governing a lack of vision.
The knees cracked and the body lifted itself up with a locomotion that seemed external to its being and it stood up on its contorted legs. It moved toward Randall, devoid of emotion, looking toward him but not at him, alive but not living, and terribly ravenous. Randall’s eyes had fallen to the forest floor, and they did not rise. The creature that was Kurt bowed its head over him, gently rested its head on the nape of his neck, caressing his shoulder with the hair of its head. It brushed its lips against his skin. Randall shivered. It exhaled lightly, and then it sank its teeth into his skin.
The End
Read on for a free sample of 900 Miles: A Zombie Novel
Chapter 1
Life used to be so hard. Thinking things were tough when we didn’t get the job we wanted, or pissed at the politicians for making rules that didn’t matter. We were upset when the Barista fucked up our Venti Coffee or our favorite TV show was canceled. Going through the motions. Mundane tasks for a mundane world. What the hell did we know? We were just begging for it to end.
I was sitting in another meeting, surrounded by ten of the most overpaid, worthless people on the planet. Glancing down, after staring at a very slow second hand tick around the clock above the door, I watched in disgust as my boss scarfed down another glazed pastry. That’s when the first text hit.
None of them would make it. That much was clear. With their overpriced Hummers and their thousand dollar suits, they never had a chance. I wasn’t always so cynical. I had the job, the money. I didn’t drive the Hummer, but I had a damn nice suit and was busy working my way right up the corporate ladder.
“You have great times ahead of you,” they would tell me. A rising star... None of it would matter.
When the text hit, I thought it was a joke. We all just eyed each other for a moment before breaking into laughter as Josh, across from me, read it out loud. Unbelievable, wasn’t it? The text had come in as a news alert from CNN on Josh’s two hundred dollar Smartphone.
It read: DEAD RISING: STAY INDOORS. TURN ON TV.
My boss stood up, crumbs from his pastry falling from his tie. He started to stumble across the room with his arms held up high, moaning about
wanting to eat Josh’s brains.
“They’re coming to get you, Barbara,” Josh quipped in a crude reference to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The group was giggling, but it wasn’t that funny.
Following the herd would be the death of us.
Josh looked at me. “John, are you able to stream video from behind the corporate firewall?” I could, so I pulled up CNN.com, ignoring the fact that my boss was right there. Why were we even taking this seriously? I thought. The site took a while to come up. In fact, it took too long. Moving on, I entered yahoo.com into the web browser, which revealed the typical bloated mainstream media stories of celebrities, sports and finance. No mention of the dead rising.
CNN must have been hacked, we concluded. The group got a good laugh out of the whole thing.
I couldn’t enjoy it though. In the back of my mind, I was thinking about the fight I had that morning. “Just 900 miles away from your troubles,” she said. Truth be told, I hated these meetings, and I hated flying even more. I guess I wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. I hoped I’d have a chance to apologize.
We finally finished the meeting, the text long forgotten. As we walked out of the conference room, I felt an anxious energy in the air. I couldn’t place my finger on it. The normal white noise-induced coma, which was the norm for the office seemed, well …broken. There was movement all around, as people were packing up their laptops, jackets, and purses on their way to the elevators.
I leaned in to listen to a few of the mail clerks huddled around someone’s cubicle. They were watching a video stream that was uploaded to YouTube. Some jerkoff food critic was filming a streaming review at a diner in East Manhattan. It was one of those real ritzy places where the tables were made of mahogany and the waiters all wore tuxes with dazzling white shirts. The critic had uploaded a video where some lawyer-looking bastard, with a perfectly parted hundred dollar haircut, had swallowed too much of the cow he was eating and keeled over dead at his table.
The Imminent Scourge Page 17
