When Everett was a boy, a teenager who had foolishly thought himself a man, his ill-tempered father had finally had enough. A petty argument between his parents had been the last straw, the final spark that ignited his father’s short, thin fuse. Dad had never hit Mom, but the emotional and psychological abuse he’d left in his wake was violent enough. Sometimes words could do far more damage than a fist. Everett had learned that early in life, and sometimes his own tongue was a lash, and he wanted to tell Lucille he was sorry for that. His father had stormed out of his and his mother’s life, packed up the car and left.
“Maybe one day you’ll see I’m not so bad,” Dad had said. His parting shot across the bow as the back door slammed shut behind him.
Everett had never seen his father again after that, and he had never had the chance to see if his father could be a better man. Everett himself knew he could be better, too, if he hadn’t been so lazy, and he hoped that William did not think as poorly of him as he did his own father.
He’d never left William or Lucille, not like that. But too many times, he had checked out emotionally and mentally. Too many times, he had thought about leaving, oh yes. Had come so very close. But his son needed a father, and Lucille needed a husband. He loved them, and in the end that was a strong enough bond to keep him tied to them, despite the occasional urge and depressive insistence that he run and run far.
He’d stayed.
Now they had all left him. All the things that kept him connected, that made him and defined him, slowly detached, one by one.
Lucille. William. His job.
The pounding against the glass behind him reminded him that now, too, the world around him had become unmoored. Impossible things slammed against the glass and rattled the locked door in its frame, reality itself ungluing from all that Everett had thought he’d known. One last illusion undone and stripped away.
His hand fell onto his lumpy coat pocket. The gun in there.
The gun was always for just in case. In case he couldn’t take it anymore. In case the loneliness became too unbearable, the weight of it too crushing. In case he decided he needed, finally, to see Lucille again. In case he lost one more goddamn thing.
Always just in case.
He didn’t think he would use it until after Friday, his last day on the job. Not until after he was retired and cut loose from yet one more thing that defined his days. He couldn’t bear the thought of having nothing left. And so he kept the gun in his pocket, just in case.
“We can’t stay here.”
The man’s voice was gravelly, probably from too many years of liquor and cigarettes. When Everett turned to see who had spoken, he saw it was the Ossie Davis-looking man in the blue windbreaker. The gentleman was older than Everett, with thinned hair and a scalp lightly stained by the coloring used to make his hair an impossible shade of black for a man so advanced in years. His face and hands littered with liver spots. Everett recognized his voice as the same one Teeg had shut down earlier.
“We can’t stay here,” he said again.
There were a few nods of agreement, a few whispers of dissent, and a loud silence from those who simply had no idea what to do and were too afraid to commit one way or the other.
The kid, Mitch, was looking at his phone, his thumb sliding up the screen over and over. Kara sat beside him, their chairs butted up together, their knees touching and her head resting on his shoulder. Whatever he was reading caused him to look incredulous.
“They’re calling this a riot,” he said, practically laughing at the absurdity.
“Who is?” Everett asked.
“The news, their official sources,” he said, mockingly. “That’s the party line, I guess. ‘Authorities are urging people to remain in their home until the situation is resolved.’”
Mitch snorted then tossed his phone onto the table. “Riot. Yeah, right. A riot. That’s what this is.”
“How long until that glass breaks?” Ossie asked, tugging at the front of his windbreaker. “All of them pressing up against it like that?”
Everett turned to get a look around the corner of the booth. More faces were pressed against the window now. A lot more.
Brown’s didn’t have much in the way of safety features. There were no bars on the windows, no security gates for the doors. Only a dead bolt, maybe an alarm system. The restaurant was situated in a sleepy suburb where crime was low enough to barely register as a concern. This so-called riot, though, may have been enough to single-handedly destroy the small town’s police force. Everett realized it had been a while since they’d heard a siren or even a gunshot.
He worried over how widespread things were. William hadn’t seemed to know about it, and that gave him some comfort. Hopefully his son and family were safe and blissfully ignorant of what was happening here.
It would spread, though. He knew that much. Lucille’s books didn’t seem so entertaining anymore. They felt more foreboding, more cautionary, like a warning they hadn’t heeded. Joke’s on you now, guys.
How long until the troops rallied? State police or National Guard would have to respond, wouldn’t they? Or were things so bad already that even those resources were being applied elsewhere or diminished entirely?
“What about unofficial sources?” Everett asked, pointing Mitch back toward his phone. “Isn’t there like a Tweetbook or something?”
His own phone had apps for those, but he’d never used them. He had a lot of things on his phone, all manufactured, installed stuff, but he hadn’t opened a single one of them. As far as he was concerned, a phone was supposed to be a phone. Maybe an e-reader, if the Kindle died. Games, this so-called social media stuff—that was all useless. Or so he’d thought.
“Hashtag zombie apocalypse?” Mitch said. “Let’s see.”
Mitch’s face slowly sank, a spark leaving his eyes. “It’s not just us,” he said, finally.
He kept talking, reading tweets and describing pictures and videos people were uploading, but Everett didn’t listen. He heard sobs as the older women broke down, a few of them digging their own cell phones out of purses so they could call loved ones.
Teeg rolled in a banquet cart piled with salads, fish baked and fried, onion rings, french fries, carafes of coffee, and hot water for tea. He looked around at the collective misery and said, “Eat up.”
“It’s spreading,” Mitch said.
“We can’t stay here.”
Eyes turned toward Teeg, and he held their gazes for a long moment. Finally, he let out a deep breath, and an admission. “No, we can’t. We don’t know what it’s like out there. I think everything’s been turned upside down. Doesn’t it feel like that? Feels like it to me. Which is why we all need to eat up, get our fuel, then we’ll head out.”
“I’m starving,” Mitch said, as if realizing it for the first time.
“C’mon, y’all. Grab a plate.”
Teeg and Maddie stacked each plate high with food and filled cups with coffee and tea. Nobody wanted to call this the last supper, but it sure did feel like it. Everett wondered how many of them were honest enough with themselves about what was happening that they even dared think of this as their last meal.
Conversations started and stalled and started again all around him, although Everett sat by himself, in the same booth he’d been seated at hours before. Night had fallen, but the coffee kept him alert. The young couple sat at a nearby table, but he didn’t engage them, and their focus was entirely on the food before them. Kara was an eater, even if she didn’t look it, and she worked through her meal with a contagious gusto.
The tartar sauce was freshly made, and Everett loved the tingle in his cheeks left by the finely chopped pickles and capers. Halfway through the dish, he heard a rising growl and pneumatic hiss from outside, barely louder than the noises of those creatures everyone was desperately trying to ignore. He knew with dreadful certainty that gunfire would commence.
When the shots rang out, they came with vicious, sudden loudness, s
tartling the other patrons. The gunfire kept on, sustained in a way that made him think it must have been a machine gun, certainly a high-end bit of artillery.
The undead were packed deep, and the bodies in back protected those in front. The bullets managed to chew their way through the corpses, striking the glass. Between the assault from the shooter and the crush of bodies pressing against the pane, the glass exploded, and a tidal wave of corpses, animated and otherwise, flooded into the restaurant.
Bullets slammed into the walls and ceiling as the shooter tried to retarget on the shifting mass, maybe realizing living beings were still in the restaurant, and jerking up on the weapon to avoid hitting those inside.
Teeg’s head snapped back, his body dropping. The food lining the table in front of him chipped and burst apart.
“Get down!” Everett said. His body protested the sliding movement he made to slink beneath the table. Kara was closest, and once he was safe beneath his table, he grabbed her arm and hauled her to the floor. Mitch was moving, too.
The other diners weren’t so lucky. The Ossie Davis lookalike jerked and flailed in his chair, his wife, sitting across from him, covered in blood, both his and hers. Her pillbox hat was nowhere to be seen. The side of her skull had been blasted into a crescent, her eye dislodged from its cavity and dangling before her open mouth.
Maddie spun, a bullet catching her in the shoulder, and in her hip another that set her spinning back in the opposite direction. Her neck exploded, the large-caliber machine gun decapitating her.
Bodies began shifting by the window as the gunfire turned toward the door. More of the creatures outside were trying to get into Brown’s through the front window. Some were lucky enough to climb over and land in the twisting heap of undead, while others were cut down by the machine gunner.
Zombies rose, their noses flaring as they sniffed out the fresh blood and became incensed.
From his position on the floor, Everett could not make out what was happening outside. The shuffling corpses blocked his view, but the sounds were a good indicator. A man’s shrill scream pierced the air, and then came a screech as tires fought for purchase on the macadam, an engine roaring. Metal crunched, and loud thuds filled the air as he imagined hordes of the undead being plowed into by a Humvee. There was a wicked crash and bursting mortar, then more gunfire followed by a scream that ended in a shocked yelp and a cry for help. One last gunshot, and then the sound of running.
Everett watched as crooked feet lumbered closer, the walker nearly tripping over his own steps.
Everett, Kara, and Mitch were still far enough back in the dining room that they were not yet in immediate danger. They still had time to escape.
He reached up for his jacket and found the gun, the grip both strange and familiar in his gnarled, arthritic hand. It was a six-shooter, an old piece, fully loaded. He’d only ever planned on needing one bullet.
“Come on. We need to go,” he said. He hoped the panic he felt wasn’t apparent in his voice. Holding his Saturday Night Special, he definitely didn’t feel like Dirty Harry or John Wayne, or any of those action-movie guys who always had a clever quip and true aim.
The kids looked at him as if he were holding a rattlesnake but quickly adjusted to the new reality. Kara nodded, then she took her boyfriend’s hand and helped him out from under the table.
“Start moving,” Everett ordered. “I’m right behind you.”
That wasn’t exactly true. His knees were flaring up, protesting the weight of his kneeling body, his hip tight and his back aching from the odd contortions. He had to crawl forward, then get a free hand up onto the seat of the booth, steady himself and raise one leg to get a foot beneath him, using his arm and fucked-up knee to push off, up into a standing position. The process was slow and sluggish and painful.
A scream erupted behind him, and although he knew he shouldn’t have looked back, he couldn’t help himself. A Q-tip of a woman was being jerked back by her poofy, cottony cloud hair, her feet wheeling back. Teeth bit through the wobbly folds of her turkey neck, boring down through the skin and veins to get into the deeper recesses of her throat.
Kara and Mitch were waiting for him, the boy practically waving him home. He had no idea why. They owed him nothing, yet Mitch’s arm was looping around his waist.
“You need to get out of here,” he said.
“We’re all getting out of here, man,” Mitch said, guiding him through the swinging door and into the kitchen. They all avoided looking at Teeg, their feet turning the destroyed food into messy slop against the blood-splattered tile floor. If not for Mitch’s aid, Everett thought he might have slipped in the mess.
“We’re the only ones left,” Kara said.
“I’m slowing you down.”
“None of that now,” Mitch said. They were almost to the rear door, the employee entrance.
Only a few feet away.
A few feet too far, Everett knew, even before a surprisingly strong hand clamped down on his shoulder and pulled him off balance, his body tugging between Mitch and his assailant. He twisted funny, a hot, writhing lance of pain exploding in the center of his lower back. He gritted his teeth against the pain, but moving forward was impossible. The hand gripped the meat of his shoulder tight, hauling him off his feet.
“No!” Mitch screamed, fighting against the undead creature for supremacy over the old man’s body, trying to pull Everett away.
“Let go,” Everett shouted, but Mitch hung on, maybe thinking Everett was talking to his attacker. This close, he could easily see where the broken glass from the front window had lacerated the monster’s face and neck, bloodied shards still buried in his skin and glinting off the overhead track lighting. He had an arm up between them, but it was sagging, getting weak and tired awfully fast. Teeth snapped too close to his face, pink drool dangling from the creature’s lips and threatening to spill onto Everett’s own face.
“Let go,” he said again, finding the boy’s eyes and nodding. Telling him it was okay to let go. “Just let go.”
Mitch’s hand loosened. Everett raised the gun, shooting the zombie point-blank in the skull. That was where all the books said to shoot them, in the head, the only way to put them down for good.
“Come on,” Kara urged, reaching for Everett on one side, Mitch on the other.
His back screamed bloody murder, lightning bolts of agony arcing all through his spine, arms, and legs. He could hardly stand it hurt so much, and the fall, the way he had landed, had done something awful, broken something inside him. His legs wouldn’t support him, and the two youths had to keep him standing upright, the edge of the prep counter pressed against the back of his thighs.
This is it, then, he thought.
“I think I broke my hip. Ain’t that something?”
“There’s more coming,” Mitch said, looking nervously toward the swinging door.
The door was still moving, swooshing back and forth in slower, disintegrating arcs, but in those little flashes of insight toward the dining room, the three of them could make out the shuffling masses growing nearer. That door would open soon and stay open for a good while as the undead filled the kitchen.
“You two need to leave. Go on now.”
“You gotta come with us,” Mitch protested, tugging at his arm. Insistent, but why?
Because it was the right thing, because they were trapped together in some unbelievable horror and that was just what one did, or because human survival depended on trust and cooperation?
Whatever it was, it didn’t matter.
“Here,” Everett said, taking the boy’s hand and pressing the gun into it. “You need this. Take it.”
Even something as simple as passing a gun to the boy sent excruciating, knifing pains through the center of his lower back.
“We can carry you.”
“No, you can’t,” Everett said. As if an afterthought, and more to himself, he added, “My burdens are too heavy.”
“What?”
“Doesn’t matter. Hey, you know the one about outrunning a bear?”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you and your buddies are in the woods, being chased by a bear? You don’t have to outrun the bear. You only need to outrun your friend. You just need to outrun the slowest poke, let the other guy be bear food. That’s what this is. You understand?”
Talking ached, but relaying this seemed vital. Everett had to get it through this boy’s skull that he didn’t need to be a hero, not on his account.
The swinging door slammed open, the entryway crowded with bodies working to shove past one another, hands reaching out before them and clawing at the air, reaching for the young couple and the old man. One body broke free and clumsily strode forward, and that was like breaking a levy, the rest pouring in behind.
“Go!” Everett screamed with all the energy he could muster. That simple, single-syllable command died in his throat as his back seized, and he choked on the word.
Kara and Mitch looked between him and the horde, uncertain and far too hesitant. The boy raised the gun and fired, clipping one of the zombies along the neck.
Everett tried to tell him to go for the head but couldn’t drum up the words. He was busy coughing, which ignited new pains inside him. His hip throbbed, and he wanted to lie down and cry.
“There’s too many,” Kara said, grabbing her boyfriend’s arm and pulling him with her. She looked back toward the old man, tears standing in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
And then Mitch was throwing open the rear door, pulling her through and into the alley. Her mouth opened to say something more, but it was forgotten as he grabbed her and nearly took her off her feet.
As always, there was never enough time to say it all.
Everett gripped the edge of the prep table with both hands, trying to keep as much weight as he could on a single foot, his arms keeping him up. His muscles were sagging, growing shaky. It didn’t matter. The horde would be on him soon.
For all the times he’d imagined being with Lucille again, he had never considered this particular scenario as a means of being reunited with his wife.
Let Go Page 3
