I crept silently, ducking to check under cars, then creeping along them, spying over the roofs for any signs of movement up ahead, slipping like a cat to the next car. A car alarm shrilled somewhere far away. Screams. Gunshots. The wind sighed its eerie lament through the cars and bridges, gusting garbage and leaves along the road.
I was so fixated on the dark roadscape ahead that I failed to register the body splayed on the hood of the Dodge until he lifted his head right beside me.
“Gaaagh!” I shouted, flinging myself back as he reached for me, his legs pinned between the car and a minivan. I should’ve smelled his dogshit cologne, but I wasn’t paying attention. His face was so ordinary, except for the eyes. What was it about the eyes? They looked normal, just…emotionless. His left arm dangled uselessly at his side, and the flesh beneath his polo shirt was bitten and festering.
No sound came from his mouth. No growling, snarling, hissing, no request for ‘braaaiinnns.’ This was my first opportunity to study one of the creatures in captivity, and I stared for so long I was lucky some ninja stealth zombie didn’t creep up and get me. The scientist in me was fascinated by the zombie phenomenon. When I was in survival mode, I didn’t think about it at all, but now I had a bit of safety on this bridge and kept finding myself insatiably curious about what was going on inside the minds of these former humans.
Suddenly, I realized what was weird about zombie eyes—it wasn’t the lack of emotion at all. They didn’t blink. Ever. They just stared, and they were a bit wider than a living person’s eyes, as if the skin was being pulled back by rigor mortis or something. But he was able to move his limbs, albeit slowly, and rigor mortis should’ve paralyzed every single one of these creatures. So they must not actually be dead.
Just to the left of his head, a bumper sticker on the back window of the van caught my attention; ‘Northstar Granite Sluggers’ it read, with two crossed baseball bats.
I’d been forced to play two seasons of little league as a kid. It was so boring that I used to sit down in the grass in right field. My dad and the coach would literally yell to me to stand up while I was sitting there looking at bugs crawl around the grass, and I was so far away I just ignored them. I liked the peace when I ignored the game. Go in come out, go in come out. Baseball was the tides, eroding my childhood happiness like a sand beach. Even as a child, there was something wrong with me, something defective that didn’t fit with the others; kids were supposed to love baseball.
All those endless miserable hours culminated into something important right now--which is that I recognized the little league bumper sticker. I opened the side door on the minivan, climbed inside, and sure enough discovered a stash of sports equipment in the very back behind the rear seats. Tennis rackets, badminton, a soccer ball, a football, and finally my fumbling hand closed on the gold—an aluminum baseball bat!
Pulling it out, I climbed out of the van, glanced around to be sure there were no more creepers sneaking around here, then began swinging the bat. It was smaller than a real bat, and so light weight it felt perfect swinging with one hand.
The creature turned to watch me approach it, and without any hesitation or feeling, I just swung the bat as hard as I could and watched it thunk against his head. The sound it made was wet and solid at the same time. It reminded me of the jumper at Infinity Mall who fell six stories and landed with a splat fifteen feet away from me. It sounded like one of those collapsible tables from a school lunch room crashing to the ground with a bowl of punch on it--a heavy thud and a sick, liquid splash. I’d heard the crash behind me at the mall and turned, with zero thought in my head that it was a person. There was no head left, just his shoulders and legs sticking out of the cracked tiles. His blood had gotten on the back of my shoes and pants, I later noticed. Chunks of meat had landed so far away that when you looked at them it didn’t look like they had anything to do with this guy; more like he’d jumped with a big tray of goulash in his hands and it got all over the place.
Everyone in the mall froze and then surged forward. People were taking pictures of the corpse beside me and from the floors above. Then security showed up and wouldn’t let anyone near the body. I remember thinking--that fucking dickhead could’ve landed on me and killed me!
The trapped zombie turned to look at me again, his mouth open and blood pouring freely down its chin. Little pieces of teeth stuck to his shirt while the blood soaked in. I swung again and watched the bat split his forehead open like a watermelon, red and pulpy. His head didn’t dent, like the old man’s had. Stronger bones, I guess. His blood splattered onto my forearms.
I calmly walked back to the van, grabbed the white jersey inside, and wiped my arms off with it. Then I returned to see the creature convulsing on top of the hood of the car, mouth and forehead open and gushing blood, eyes staring lifelessly ahead.
I wanted to swing again, but the wet feeling of blood on my skin grossed me out, and I worried about catching the disease.
Something else took hold--rage at the man who’d stolen my gun. We were all here, faced with this horrible decay, and that cowardly man with his own gun had come out to take mine. I was filled with adrenaline, bloodlust, awareness of my power. Nothing could stop me. I would creep up, smash his window and his skull, and get my goddamn gun back!
I began creeping back the way I’d come, toward that guy’s car, staying low, making my way along the bridge railing so he wouldn’t see me coming.
Chapter 22: Now
The man with the gun is four houses away from ours. As an afterthought, Marsha pushes the couch and armoire back a little and lets the front door hang ajar, long before the stranger gets near enough to hear. Both of us head up the stairs to look out from above.
“If the door’s open, he will know there’s nothing in here except maybe some trouble,” she says.
“But leaving the door open is gonna make zombies come in!”
“Not with him out there,” she says. “If there’s any out there, they’ll try to eat him. When he’s gone, we’ll close it again, simple.”
It makes sense. I actually admire her sensibility.
We watch tensely as the guy approaches our house. He looks calm, but his head keeps cocking, as if he hears sounds or something. Maybe he just has Tourette’s Syndrome.
The stranger reaches the yard before ours. Then he’s in front of our house. He glances at the door with the big peace sign, which had attracted me to this house, and then his eyes swing to the road ahead and he keeps walking. Relief floods me, until he stops at the next house. He turns to face it. Something seems to have caught his attention.
“What’s he looking at?” I ask.
“How the hell should I know?” Marsha says.
The man walks toward the neighboring house suddenly, and Marsha pads away down the hall so she can watch from a side window. I follow her, cringing as the floor makes a loud creak beneath my foot.
“Sssshhh,” Marsha says.
“It’s not my fault, I just followed you.”
We watch the guy enter the house next door. Marsha gently pulls me back into the room. “We can’t have him spotting us from their windows. Just stay out of sight.”
She’s missing the most obvious horror now. “We need to close our front door—zombies can come in now and he’s not out there to shoot them.”
“We can’t,” she replies. “When he leaves, he might notice our door closed. In fact, we can’t stay here any longer. That peace symbol is like a magnet. I thought it would be a good idea to make a signal that people could see but zombies couldn’t. I was wrong.”
It’s interesting she’s saying ‘we’ now, like she doesn’t want to kick me out anymore. I guess I grow on people after a while.
Chapter 23: Then
I chickened out getting my gun back. I made it to within sight of that guy’s car and saw his stupid paranoid face in the windshield, darting about.
He must’ve caught some movement from me, because he suddenly stared in my direction. I
stayed low behind a Honda sedan and felt like he was staring right into my eyes, but I know he couldn’t actually see me.
In the end, I decided he was too alert and panicky; there was no way to get to him. At least I had a bat now. I turned and skulked away in the direction I’d been going, west down 690.
The empty cars clogging up the freeway looked like a normal traffic jam, except it was night time and there were no drivers. Walking past empty car after empty car, it really started to sink in that everything I know had ceased to exist. All my normal routines like stopping for coffee on the way to work, sitting in the drive-thru for 5-10 minutes and candidly observing the person behind me in my rearview mirror. Most likely the person ahead of me was also watching me in their rearview! Or maybe I’m the only one who spies on people in the drive-thru. For me, it’s like studying humans in their habitat just to see them fidget and put on makeup and text their friends. There were so many daily rituals people endured and didn’t notice, then suddenly my entire city is a ghost town. Or, rather…a zombie town. Bad pun, I know.
Up here on the overpass, I was far away from everything, looking down at the city I’d grown up in. I found it peaceful. The lights were still on in the buildings. The plague must’ve reached Syracuse sometime in the morning or afternoon and just spread like wildfire. I hadn’t noticed it, because I never noticed the world much. Society looked like a great big hamster wheel with a carrot dangling in front of it. Everybody running for the carrot, maintaining the pretense of civilization, while in reality their entire week revolved around a job that preys on peoples’ naiveté in one way or another! I was training students in psychology, which could also be called ‘the science of manipulating humans.’ Think about it, were there any jobs that didn’t require some sort of soul-selling predation?
Jobs are gone now, and good fucking riddance.
I was uniquely adapted to actually feel okay about the end of that world. No family connections. No close friends. The apocalypse must be far more shocking to a normal person than to a loner. To me, it was the great equalizer. Now everyone was as lonely as me.
I passed the West Street exit. One glance down showed me that there were a lot of dead people walking around in the city streets below the overpass.
Gun shots went pap pap pap pap up ahead. It was a steady barrage, maybe 30 or 40 shots. They were in the distance, but I knew that’s where I wanted to be. Wherever people had guns. Lots of guns. There must be some police mobilization going on; I just had to follow the gunshots, like a breadcrumb trail to safety.
An engine sounded, revving loud and getting closer. Looking down from the highway, I could see headlights approaching from south to north. I think it was Clinton Street. There was a big delivery truck flying this way, and silhouettes kept popping up in its headlights and then thump, thunk, fwap, bodies just knocked aside.
I climbed up onto the abutment, waving to the driver as they approached. They didn’t slow down, just charged under the bridge then I watched their tail lights moving north. Not sure why I waved. It wasn’t to get them to stop. What was I gonna do, jump down off the bridge onto their truck? I guess I just waved because we were both alive, and it meant something.
Before the tail lights were out of sight, a strange sound came to me. It was familiar but so out of place in this new world. An airplane! I scanned the sky, and sure enough there it was. I could see its flashing lights, south of the city, flying pretty low. It was headed for the airport. Seconds crawled past and the city seemed to hold its breath, as if all eyes everywhere were focused on the plane. Everyone alive had heard it too; maybe even the zombies were watching it.
By the time the plane was over downtown, I could read the word Delta written in blue letters, with their little red logo next to it. I could see the landing gear almost clip the Jefferson Tower building. Something was wrong here.
The plane flew in front of me, so low that its engines ripped the air apart and I plugged my ears as the wind from it tore across the highway, blasting me with heat and dust. It was going down, I knew. And those last moments flew so fast but the memory stayed in slow motion of the plane flying frame by frame across my vision like stop motion. The aircraft tilted madly to the left as its right wing sought to avoid a high rise, but I saw the whole thing, the wing buried itself in the building, cutting into it like cheese. The rest of the plane flung itself with tetherball momentum, until the wing ripped clean off and the fuselage careened into some lower buildings, exploding so loud the ground shook. The fireball hurled upward like a nuclear mushroom cloud, and more crashing sounds followed as scraps of metal and seating and bodies and luggage rained across the buildings, shattering glass, hitting metal, stone, wood, and pavement.
I fell on my ass, just dumbfounded by what I’d seen. It had to be somewhere around Bear Street or Hiawatha Boulevard, which wasn’t far from here. Maybe they were aiming for the Infinity Mall parking lot to land, or maybe for Onondaga Lake. Should I go and try to help? I wondered for a ridiculous moment. Yeah right, help who? All the people who’d just been vaporized inside the cabin right in front of my eyes?
I understood the gist--some passenger had boarded with a bite. They began sweating, feverish. Then it happened, they bit someone next to them. A bunch of other passengers tried to restrain them and got bit in the process. Nobody knew they had to kill it!
The fire lit up everything; it must be ten or fifteen blocks of nothing but fire. It was reflecting on my face and arms, and I swear I could feel the heat from it. The smell of gasoline filled the air, and barbeque, burned hair, and plastic. The wing embedded in the building hadn’t exploded, but it must’ve spilled fuel all over the building and ground because another massive fire erupted--like lighter fluid on a campfire, just WHOOSH! The brick building became an inferno, burning quick and bright for two minutes, glass shattering from the heat, and then it subsided to a steady burn within. Deep black clouds of smoke billowed like a hydra sculpture in the sky.
I wept openly, rubbing my hands across my face wet with tears, but I didn’t feel anything specific. I didn’t feel remorse for the people in the plane; I didn’t feel bad that it had crashed; I didn’t feel anything but numb, just totally removed like I was at the Museum of Science and Technology watching some IMAX pyrotechnics. There was more intensity and feeling, but I wouldn’t allow myself to feel it. I stared, got lost in the dance of the flames until I realized that a hundred zombies could’ve snuck up unnoticed then I bolted upright. Nothing but empty highway around me.
I was in such shock I thought about going back and talking to that guy who stole my gun. It was just too huge to see alone, but I also didn’t want to see that guy again. He’d probably shoot me in a panic.
I kept walking. If this were a film, you would see my body walking along a bridge, silhouetted by this giant conflagration in the background in pure poetic loneliness. In real life, it was hopelessness setting in for the thousandth time.
After West Street, the highway took a dip down and went beneath some other overpasses and bridges. I moved out of sight of the fires. High cement walls blocked my view of the whole city. I felt so exposed down here, below the highways and buildings. Back there, I’d had a bird’s eye view providing the illusion of safety. I was actually more vulnerable up above, because down here if I was cornered, I could actually jump or climb back onto ground level and run. Up there, jumping was a death sentence.
Entering the shadows beneath the first bridge really set my hackles up. My hands were raised in some fake kung fu grip with the baseball bat in one hand, and I started at the slightest noise. Everything from the city sounded stranger under here, dampened in a way and also more hollow. The acoustics just did their own thing here.
I probably wouldn’t have even noticed the bundle of rags at the top of the bridge except that I was so wound I expected the shadows to come alive with fifty zombies and that’s when my eyes caught the vague man shape. Squinting into the gloom, I could see it was a man, sitting up under the bridge, the w
ay homeless people do.
“Hello?” I said.
No answer. Shit. It’s one of them, about to turn or something. Acting weird and disoriented like an animal with rabies.
“Are you okay or… Or do I need to shoot?” My feeble attempt at bluffing tough.
“I’m okay, how ‘bout you just move along,” a raspy voice replied, echoing beneath the bridge. He sounded pretty old, but I couldn’t make out his features.
“Did you hear the airplane crash?” I asked.
“I felt it. Shook the whole ground. Probably gonna be more.” He paused and we looked at each other. “You need something?” he asked, a bit of an edge to his voice.
“No trouble,” I said. “Just…it looked like you might be turning into one of them.”
“Nope,” he said. “They haven’t even spotted me all night. Neither have the living ones.”
“Good for you,” I said. “Have you just been sitting there?”
“Yup. A lot of them walked by earlier. Didn’t even look up.” A light flared as the man lit a cigarette. “You’re more alert than the others, so you’ll probably do fine.”
“Sounds like you’ll do okay, too,” I said. “Don’t go back that way though--there’s some crazy asshole in a car who held me up and stole my gun and all my gear.”
The guy laughed. “It’s gonna get worse than that. When everybody’s out for themself, things get real ugly.” He inhaled his cigarette, blew out a cloud, then asked, “You want a smoke?”
“No, I don’t smoke.” Pause. “Thanks though.”
“All good.” More silence. “Them’s not too smart, you know. Just stay off the roads and in the shadows and you can avoid them.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Sure.”
The gunshots still sounded from up ahead, and I could hear distant voices shouting. I wondered why this guy didn’t want to go see what was happening. It sounded like a real stand being made, which meant only a few blocks stood between me and safety!
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