Where am I? I don’t know. I don’t remember the way to Edward the gamer’s house, and I don’t care. He’s dead. Everyone is dead. Charisse is dead to me.
The street is dark, but I can see a peace symbol spray-painted in dark paint on a white front door. I aim my body at it like a bullseye. The front door is locked and I can’t even think; I just kick as hard as I can and the wood splinters while lock tears from jamb.
“Who’s there?” a female voice says from above as I run inside. Most women have died or are sequestered away by guys like Mavreides.
“Not a zombie,” I bark. “Does it matter?” Gruff and animal. The light from the doorway shows the faint outline of a stairway directly in front of me.
“Get out of my house!” she squeals in response from somewhere up the stairs.
I don’t even think, just charge up the stairs, feel a warm body, pin her down, and clamp my hand over her mouth.
Chapter 14: Now
I have a woman in my grasp; it’s been a long time. One hand holds both her wrists, and my other hand is covering her mouth while she thrashes her legs.
“Mmmmphhh mmmm mmmphhm,” she says beneath my hand.
“Shut the fuck up!” I hiss at her. “They’ll hear you.” I’m not even myself now. She’s so warm and soft and alive beneath me. This must be how zombies and rapists feel--it’s just a flesh fetish, and they’re horny all the time. And they have no impulse control. Maybe that’s the entirety of it? Or maybe I’m being stupid again.
I whisper, “I’m not going to hurt you,” because I realize how much this must feel like rape to her. I ease my hands back and…
WHAM! Her knee hits my chin hard, white light explodes behind my eyes, and I fall back, clutching my face.
Suddenly, a weight is on top of me, and something sharp presses to my neck.
“No, I won’t hurt you--” I manage to gasp, just before her hand shoves hard against my windpipe. This is it, I decide, I’m going to die now with the weight of her body on top of mine. I actually notice the heat of her crotch straddling my chest. Because something is warped in my brain, and women and sex are everything I couldn’t have in this life.
I don’t want to die.
Our ego is a living thing that breathes, inhaling strength and exhaling weakness, all of us flowing up and down like an endless wave, trying to feel confident in ourselves.
I’m laying helplessly underneath this woman I can’t see, with her knife and pussy pressing on me. Irony of irony that I couldn’t get pussy to save my life and suddenly it’s going to kill me!
“Please don’t kill me,” I tell her mechanically. It’s the only thing I can think of. I said it calmly, with no pleading, no groveling, just a soft request.
“Who are you?” she says, harshly, her knife hand pressing with emphasis and her thighs clenching like a boa constrictor.
“I’m Sam. I’m a professor at S.U.… I’m just a--” I almost say coward, but then I start sobbing. Everything at once rises up like a tidal wave and my entire body is wracked with crying. Charisse floats into my mind, and I cry more. I remember how she felt, how she looked into my eyes, how she saw that I was different and she appreciated it. Zombies or not, I could live out my life happy if I had her. But there’s just no way.
The pain lasts and lasts, and this strange woman’s hand covers my mouth to muffle my sobs, her knife pressing firmly against my throat, one spasm away from opening me up.
Chapter 15: Then
The police cruiser had so much power. I’d never driven a car so powerful, and I gunned it like the Terminator was chasing me, feeling like a race car driver.
I knew nothing of cars. When I was a teenager, I’d worked at an auto-detail shop near my parents’ house in Kirkville. It was the only place within walking distance that hired me, and I didn’t belong there. I worked on a detail crew with a diversity of rednecks (meaning no diversity).
There was a 53-year-old bearded guy who introduced himself my first day, “I’m Rick the Prick. That’s what they call me, ‘cuz I don’t give a fuck.”
He made all kinds of racist comments as drivers came through and we shammied down their cars. Every time an Asian came through, Rick found some creative way to work ‘gook’ into a sentence while they sat in their car being shammied. Shammying is rubbing a cloth towel over their car and buffing it up to a shine. “This is a gook day for shammying,” he would say. Or “Sam, make sure you wipe all the gook off that window.”
I motioned for him to be quiet the first time I heard him say ‘gook,’ and I pointed into the car, trying to indicate the driver was Asian. And Rick the Prick looked right at me, grinning. “I told you I’m the kinda guy who doesn’t give a fuck.”
There was another kid on the crew named Donnie who was 24, the second oldest, and he apparently knew what kind of engine was in every single car ever made. And he wanted to tell us about every single car that pulled up. And every time a 4-cylinder pulled up, he said, “Here comes another 4-banger.”
The other kid was around my age, and he thought Donnie was the coolest guy on earth. I was mostly quiet, and I hated all of them.
One day they talked about how they’d all dropped out of high school. I was graduating in three months, and I stayed quiet. Rick the Prick looked at me and said, “You probably finished high school, didn’t you?”
“No,” I said.
“Alright,” Rick said, excited. “That makes four of us who never finished high school!”
“Fuck school,” Donnie said. “Ain’t nobody gonna tell me how to live my life.”
“Fuckin A, right,” Rick the Prick said.
In the bathroom, a hand-written sign taped above the mirror told us all, ‘You’re looking at one of the finest auto detailers in the world.’ I wondered if it made these guys work harder. It made me feel like a schmuck.
That job drained me so much, not because of the physical work but because of the mental energy required to interact with these people. But all of those guys had something I didn’t--they were comfortable in their own skin.
I was asked to leave that job after two weeks. The boss said I was too slow and told me to go home, get some rest, and that I could come back tomorrow and try it again if I wanted.
I never went back. Rick the Prick would probably work there until he died. That was my only experience working with cars, other than buying cars from dealerships and getting butt-raped by mechanics who knew I didn’t know anything.
Driving this police car, I was a race car god. I took it up to 105 miles an hour on Erie Boulevard, which used to be the Erie Canal. In the 1920s, it made Syracuse beautiful and mysterious, like Venice, but they paved over it and built every shitty retail store and chain restaurant known to man along it. Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Applebee’s, Best Buy, Kmart, Sam’s Club--Erie Boulevard is the zombie metropolis of Every City, America.
This road used to be where all the cool kids in high school hung out and raced muscle cars. It was the lamest testosterone fest you’ve ever seen, but I wound up here a lot because some of the kids I knew were car geeks. They always wanted to come and hang out behind the McDonalds where all the racers and groupies were. But we all had shitty cars, and none of us virgins knew how to talk to all the slutty white trash girls anyway. We would just peek out the windows of our car with envy at the party that we weren’t a part of, or park among the others and stand around and interact with each other like a bunch of lame asses.
What’s crazy is these muscle car aficionados acted like they were cooler than me, and I believed them, because they were the only non-gamers who invited me to do anything. This was the only glimpse I got into how other people lived.
The funniest thing I did was pull my Chevette up next to muscle cars at stoplights and start revving my engine to race and laughing at them.
The last time I did this, we got followed by one of the racers. He started tailgating me, and then roared up in front of us and slammed on his brakes, forcing me to swerve around him. There wer
e four of us, and only two guys in their car, but we were really scared.
“Next time he’s in front of you, just pull into a parking lot at the last minute,” my friend Steve said.
I did that and pulled into Goldberg’s furniture store. The muscle car slammed on its brakes, squealed down Erie Boulevard in reverse, and pulled into the parking lot backwards. We locked our doors as the guys got out of their car and walked up. They looked like real men, with facial hair and muscles.
The driver smacked my window. “Get out of the car, you fuckin’ pussy,” he said.
“Oh shit oh shit,” I said to my friends.
“Don’t open the door,” Paul said.
“Duh.”
Shane said, “Run him over.”
“You want me to punch out your window?” the guy said, raising his fist.
I unlocked the door, and he flung it open and grabbed me and tried to pull me out of the car, but my seatbelt was still on. This seemed to make him madder, and he unclicked my belt then dragged me out of the car by my hair and made me crawl on my hands and knees on the asphalt.
“How funny are you now?” he said.
“Not funny,” I said.
“What’d you say?”
“Not funny at all.”
He let go of my hair. The other guy was banging on my passenger windows, and none of my friends would open the door.
“You’re banned from the boulevard, do you hear me?” the bully said to me.
“Uh huh.”
“If I catch you on Erie Boulevard again with your piece of shit car, I’m gonna kill you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
He smacked the back of my head really hard. I was still on my hands and knees. “Can I go now?” I said.
“You better go now before I change my mind and fucking kill you now,” he said.
I stood up and he shoved me toward my car so hard I flew like a ragdoll and crashed into the door. That’s when I saw Paul had rolled down the passenger window a few inches and was handing the guy a gold necklace he’d been wearing. “Here you go, sir,” Paul said.
“Got anything else?” the other guy said.
“No, sir,” Paul said.
I got in the car and drove away, shaken to the core of my being, my body trembling, my mind reeling from the shock of such violence.
“Why’d you call him sir?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Paul said.
“Why’d you give him your chain?”
“Because he said he was going to kick my ass if I didn’t.”
“We’re not allowed on Erie Boulevard anymore,” I said.
“Oh what are they gonna do?” Steve replied from the backseat.
“I’m not coming back,” I said.
Paul agreed.
“Fuckin pussies,” Steve said, then he mocked Paul, “Yes, sir!”
“Shut the fuck up. You sat in the back and didn’t do anything,” I told him.
“There were four of us; we should’ve just fought them,” Shane said.
“No way. Those guys were on steroids,” I told him.
“We should get some steroids and then jump them,” Shane said.
Our 10th-grade minds thought steroids were some drug that gave you instant Hulk muscles.
It just so happened that Paul knew who the passenger was, because he’d seen him at baseball practice. Jamie Dinoff was on the Varsity team, and Paul was JV, but we had his name.
It took us a week to find out that the driver was Ron Deemer. We found their addresses in the phone book, and thus began two years of routinely egging their houses. We didn’t start it right away, because we didn’t want them to know it was us. We waited a few weeks, never acknowledged them in school, never told anyone about the incident. And then it was open season. We probably egged both of their houses about fifty times each. Because that’s what we did. While all the other kids were out at parties, we were just driving around together, egging their houses and our shitty art teacher’s house.
In the cop car, I flew past that parking lot where Goldberg’s furniture used to be. I had a Geekpower fantasy of being a cop and pulling over Ron Deemer now, kicking the shit out of him and tazing him and just making up a story about how he’d attempted to assault me…
Amazing that two decades and a zombie apocalypse later, my mind could still hear the echoes of that day and feel that stab of humiliation. Some psychologists suggest that everything we’ve ever experienced is still inside us.
Those guys are probably dead. Who cares, I tell myself.
But I still care. All alone in this police car, I feel it. I feel this loneliness that has been with me forever--so alienated. I’m no less alienated now than I was my whole life, really. Something is different about me; other people all seem connected and I’m just trapped inside of myself. If Ron Deemer and Jamie Dinoff suddenly needed me to save them from the horde, I would let them get eaten and I would laugh. Obviously, my pain has a long memory.
I began rage-swerving toward every zombie I see. It’s projection: I want to kill these fuckers, because I hate myself. I love the feeling of their bodies breaking against the car and the sight of them flopping and bouncing like rag dolls across the pavement. This was Grand Theft Auto Syracuse, with vibrating steering pad!
One body flew like a torpedo over the hood of the car and against the windshield, leaving a big spider crack before it tumbled wetly across the roof and vanished into the air behind me.
“Fucker!” I growled, looking back as its inert body toppled into the road. That crack impeded my vision a bit, but worse, it weakened the glass, and I suddenly didn’t feel as protected in this cop car.
Up ahead, a car wreck blocks the road, eight cars jamming up all three lanes of traffic. I pull onto the sidewalk in front of Pizza Hut and avoid the mess, then I gun it again into a bunch of shambling corpses congregating in Michael’s parking lot. They scatter like bowling pins, the sound not as loud as that crashing echo in a bowling alley, but just as satisfying.
I accelerate again, past Thompson Road. I’m laying zombies out like genocide is in vogue when I suddenly glimpse movement from the highway behind the Pep Boys to my right. There’s headlights on it, running parallel to me!
Now I’m not even watching the zombies; I’m craning my head trying to see this vehicle. There’s too many buildings and trees to get a good look. I’m gunning it down the road and just past Chuck E Cheese there’s a wide gap, and I catch sight of the highway in the distance. And there it is, an 18-wheeler, driving west, toward the city!
I’m thrilled to see someone else alive. It doesn’t even occur to me that there could be any bad survivors at this point--this situation is so desolate and fucked that I’m assuming all humans will naturally befriend each other.
I start planning my route to intercept them--I can get on 690 West at Midler, a couple miles down, and then flag them down. I lay on the gas, wanting to get ahead of them, my spirits so relieved and excited.
Then I had to slam on my brakes when I neared Sam’s Club. Zombies were packed like subway commuters across the road--a huge mob. There were cars strewn about and abandoned here, and some kind of gun battle happening in the Sam’s parking lot.
I could barely see what was going on, just muzzle flashes and bodies moving across the pavement. A fire burned inside the store, and flames dancing beyond the glass doors though it hadn’t reached the exterior of the building yet.
Fuck fuck fuck. A panic overtook me. Should I help the people? They looked royally screwed. And this road was impassable--I had lost my one chance to catch up with the survivors in the big rig on the highway! I tried to get a better look at the parking lot, but there was no way to tell human from zombie. It looked like the muzzle flashes were moving in the direction of the highway, though.
And then my view was swallowed by the horde of bitten-up undead people as they surrounded my car. They began thumping limply against the glass. Like those old carwashes where the rubber mop arms begi
n flopping onto your windshield like darkness and evil, while the inside of the car feels like a claustrophobic sanctuary. Except it didn’t feel safe right now because of the big crack across the windshield.
Chapter 16: Now
The woman’s hand is gentle as it cups my mouth. It’s comforting. I feel her there without seeing her, and I imagine her to be Charisse, to be beautiful, to be in love with me and seeking a protector. One last sob chokes out of me as I compose myself. “Please don’t kill me.”
“Shut the fuck up you goddamn sissy,” the woman hisses. “You’ll attract them.”
I freeze. The knife is suddenly gone. I try to sit up and look down the darkened stairs where I’d left the door wide open. Her body is pinning me and I can’t see anything. “We gotta close the door,” I say.
“You gotta get the fuck out of my house,” she says.
“No please, don’t make me go back out there,” I whisper. “Let me stay the night then I’ll leave in the morning. I can’t see anything out there. Everyone I know is dead. Please, for the love of God just…”
A faint rasp sounds from somewhere down the stairs. It could’ve been the wind against the door.
“Did you hear that?” I ask.
She’s off me in a heartbeat, her silhouette moving silently down the stairs, a panther stalking prey.
Sitting up, I see the faint rectangle of the door at the bottom of the stairs. Her body moves so slow it almost doesn’t appear to be moving at all. A step creaks under her and we both freeze. My ears strain, and I wonder if I should just bolt into the house, barricade myself in a room somewhere and wait ‘til morning. That never works, though. An image of cinema zombie fists punching through plywood doors kills that plan.
Plan B was to watch her and hope she doesn’t get eaten. What will I do if she gets bit--if one of those things begins fumbling its way up the stairs? I look around and can’t even see the layout up here. The shades are all drawn. There’s a carpet under me, but the stairs are hardwood. If she gets killed, I’m doomed to wander like a blind man in the dark, unfamiliar house while some goddamn zombie sniffs me out.
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