She had suddenly ruined my entire moment, trying to interject some biblical, religious connotations. Instead of stewing on my contempt for religion, I decide to just make her an origami frog as a gift, to test my theory about making people happy. I start tearing a square out of a Newsweek cover.
“You wanna wake Vance?” she says.
“Nah, let him sleep. He was up later than me.”
Neither one of us mention the events of last night. She sits down with me and makes small talk while we eat our pancakes and I fold the origami. I’d learned how to make a few of these animals awhile back, but the frog was the neatest because if you pushed on it, it would spring up in a hopping motion.
“What is that, a little paper airplane?” she asks.
I stare at it, trying to figure out how it looks even remotely like an airplane. “No, it’s a frog,” I say, putting it on the table in front of her. “I made it for you. Look, it hops.” I push down on its back and make it hop.
“Oh lookit that!” she says. She makes it hop a couple times. “It’s so cute. Like those Chinese paper animals.”“Um, yeah,” I say. She’s so ignorant it blows my mind, but I decide not to correct her, since there’s probably no such thing as China and Japan anymore. Instead, I stew on the knowledge that doing something nice for someone just made me irritated and judgmental.
I stand up and tell her, “I’m gonna check on Vance, see if he wants any of your delicious pancakes.” Climbing the stairs, I knock lightly on his door. No answer. “Vance,” I whisper. “You hungry?”
I turn the handle as quietly as possible and open the door a crack. His bed is made, and he’s gone! His other pistol sits on top of the comforter with a note under it.
Chapter 33: Then
Hasbro pushed his way through the crowd to find whoever got bit, and I followed him. A surprising number of zombies flooded up from the east and south. Laughing revelers hacked them with axes and machetes and other gardening tools. A lot more bodies had been piling up over here than any of us had noticed.
“Holy shit!” Hasbro said, first taking in all the shadowy figures filling the streets here, lumbering toward the intersection. “You stupid motherfuckers, lookit all ‘a them!”
“We got it handled,” some kid said.
“Like hell!” Hasbro said. He walked up to the bitten kid who was lying on the ground, clutching his shoulder. The kid turned to face him, his eyes white with terror. I could hear a girl crying somewhere nearby while someone held her back.
“I’m sorry, Hasbro!” the boy said.
“You know what I gotta do,” Hasbro said calmly.
The kid nodded and squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t wanna die,” he said, trembling with emotion. Tears pooled in his eyes and he opened them. “Hasbro, don’t, man, maybe there’s some--” Hasbro raised his pistol in one smooth motion to the boy’s head and shot him through the eye socket.
I’d meant to look away, but somehow I hadn’t done it fast enough. My eyes followed the motion of the gun like some hypnotized cobra watching a snake charmer. I heard the gunpowder roar, watched the boy’s head snap back, gore exploding from the back of him, hitting the pavement with a wet sound a second before his body dropped with a soft, sickening thud.
Hasbro knelt down, pried a pistol out of the kid’s hand, and thrust it in my direction without looking at me. “Here, Sam. You need this more than he do.”
I took the gun shakily, feeling sickened at what I’d just seen.
“Check his pockets and get all his bullets,” Hasbro told me, still not looking. He aimed his gun at the nearest infected, carefully, then dropped it with one shot; aimed at another one and fired. Then he began walking towards the ones in the darkness, who weren’t illuminated by the street light.
“Hasbro, no!” Seena said.
“It’s okay, baby, I’m not goin’ far.”
I stood there with Seena, watching him put down a bunch of them before his gun went click. Then he took the shotgun off his shoulder and shot five more. Those were messier, even in the dark. Chunks of meat ripped off their heads and flew through the air. Their bodies were also propelled back by the force of the blasts.
When his ammo was expended, he walked back into the group, pulling bullets out of his bulging pockets as he did. He knelt beside me, loading his pistol clip first. “Did you get the man’s bullets like I told you?”
“No.”
“Well get ‘em. Make sure you fill yo clip up, too.”
I knelt down and reached a tentative hand toward the body of the boy who had just died. He must’ve been about fifteen. His body was still warm, and blood was pooling around his head. My eyes tried to avoid his wound, but were drawn back to the singed, bloody hole with sick fascination. It looked so wrong to me, another moment like I was in a movie, looking at special effects.
I felt the dead boy’s pockets, my skin recoiling as I patted until I heard something clinking in his right pocket. I fished out the bullets and stuffed them in my pocket, cringing at the warmth of his skin through the denim. Two bullets fell out of my hand and landed on the pavement, in the blood. I reached down and grabbed them, wiping them off on my shirt with trembling hands. This was too much for me; I could feel myself close to a panic as I glanced at the open right eye of the boy, still wet with bloody tears.
I forced myself to look away, and breath, and search more pockets. I found more and kept those as well.
Hasbro loaded his shotgun with shells from his cargo pocket.
“You’re right,” he said. “It ain’t safe here. There’s a lot of those things coming now. And I think the church is a bad idea. It’s not big enough for aybody, and shit is heatin’ up round here as far as the mobs. If the fire comes this way, we doomed in there.”
I didn’t say anything. I fidgeted with the gun until I found the lever to unlock the clip, then I pulled it out. It looked full—the bullets went up to the top.
“It looks full,” I said.
“Push on the top round,” Seena whispered. She knelt down beside me. “They’s a spring in the bottom.” She had a kind voice, and I felt grateful to her.
I pushed and the bullets went down. So I began sliding more in, one by one. Seena patted my back. “You doin’ okay, Sam,” she said.
I nodded, numbly, barely holding myself together, and so incredibly grateful for her touch that I looked in her eyes, and the kindness there almost made me burst into tears. Her hand gripped my shoulder hard, as if she were inside my head, willing me to hold it together. I thanked her silently with my eyes, and she nodded like she understood.
Once Hasbro’s guns were loaded, he stood up. “A’ight aybody, listen the fuck up!” he shouted. “That fire is moving this way, so we gonna move south. First, we gotta get people out the church, and we gotta kill every fuckin’ walker in sight.”
Walker, he said. Just like The Walking Dead. Life imitates art.
Hasbro continued. “Now I’ma come around and assign you to different details, and you gonna stay with your detail and make sure yo shit gets handled, feel?”
There was a chorus of assent, and I just watched him.
He must’ve felt me, because he turned and flashed a big, toothy grin at me. “You in charge of east detail for now,” he said. “‘Cuz you need practice.”
“What’s that?”
“These are yo men,” he announced loudly, pointing to the six closest guys. He nodded down the street toward downtown, with swarms of shadowy figures headed our way. “That’s east. Anything that come up this street, you kill it.”
Chapter 34: Now
‘Dear Sam and Marsha,’ the note began. ‘I went to Mavmart. Found it on my map and didn’t want to endanger y’all. I’m just a crazy old fool living off hope now, and my hope is that Jamie is okay. I thank you both kindly for your hospitality and wish good fortune on you. I probably won’t come back around here, but I will tell Charisse what Sam said, if I get the chance. I got another gun and figure it’s only fair we all get one. Loo
k out for each other in this world. Love to you both,
Scarecrow
Next to the gun, he’d left us a box of .40 caliber bullets as well.
Marsha and I sit in stunned silence.
“Shit,” I say.
“I liked him,” Marsha says.
I raise my eyebrow at her. I wonder if she even remembers the racist shit she was spewing last night.
I sip coffee, stunned and detached at the same time. It feels almost normal to be sitting at the kitchen table with her in some stranger’s house sipping coffee. Except something gnaws at me.
“Have you seen keys for the car in the garage?” I ask her. I’d spotted it there yesterday, a Dodge Charger, when fortifying the downstairs with Vance.
“I’ve got them,” she says.
“I want to look for him,” I tell her. “I can’t remember what I told him about Mav’s gang last night, but obviously he doesn’t understand. They’ll kill him.”
“Maybe his son’s there.”
“Not likely. Anyway, he needs to know the deal with them, make it sound like he’s got more women at his camp.”
“Okay, sure,” she says.
“And if he doesn’t find his son, then I want to help him.”
“And run all over Camillus chasing that fool’s dream?”
I shake my head. “We need to help each other. All of us. We need to find the good people and start to rebuild some semblance of order.”
Marsha snorts. “Like Mav’s Gang?”
I shake my head. “Not like them. A group that’s the opposite of them. A group that will protect people from those sorts. You know there’s more like us, scattered around. I’ve met others. Good people.”
“I think you’re crazy, Sam. A crazy dreamer. This plague brought out the worst in people.”
I smirk. “Come on, Marsha, you know we can’t just stay out here alone. People need other people.” It’s especially odd for a guy like me to be saying that, but maybe just the idea of spending my life alone with Marsha has given me perspective.
She looks at me silently for a while, sipping her coffee. Then she sighs and says, “Yeah, I know you’re right. This ain’t livin’.”
“Last night…” I start, trailing off. There are so many things that bother me about last night.
She looks at me levelly. “Last night I was an asshole. It’s water under the bridge, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. “Well, we each have a gun now. Do you know where we are in relation to Mavmart?”
“We’re on Pinafore Drive. We can take Hinsdale up to Genesee and we might catch him, depending how long ago he left.”
“Let’s rock ‘n’ roll,” I say, sounding like Doyle. And feeling almost as badass.
Chapter 35: Then
The six guys Hasbro placed in my charge stared at me silently after he was gone. Two of them were swigging beer from cans and a third had a flask of something. I couldn’t read their expressions. I looked at the street where human shapes stumbled toward us. The closest one was eighty feet away. Deep breath, I looked back at the six guys.
“It’s funny,” I said. “I shouldn’t be in charge. I’ve never fired a gun.”
“If Hasbro say you should be in charge, then you should be in charge,” a guy with wild dreadlocks said.
“I’m Sam,” I told them.
“I’m Johnny,” Dreadlocks said. “The big guy is Ornell, and that’s Juan, Max, Ezekiel, and Shayden.”
“Hi guys,” I replied. I walked up and shook all their hands, which felt ridiculous by the third handshake. “I’m not gonna remember your names,” I said. “Except Ezekiel.” I laughed and Ezekiel smirked.
“No one expects you to,” Juan replied.
“Okay you on point, Captain Sam. What you want us to do?”
I look back at the shapes in the dark. It’s hard to believe these are actually people, or used to be people. And that I have to shoot them. This goes against everything!
But there’s something electric inside of me, too. Every nerd dreams himself a hero, called by circumstance to step up and face the tides of darkness to save humanity. That’s pretty much what makes us nerds--we don’t do anything heroic except in our imaginations. Lifetimes spent playing board games, role-playing games, video games, reading comics, waiting in movie lines at midnight to see the first showing of every superhero film--we were an entire culture comprised of male masturbation fantasies about heroes that we will never be.
As I sighted down the pistol into the shadows, I could feel that childhood superhero surging inside me. The creature’s head moved closer, thirty feet away, straight down the barrel of my gun. As it entered the patch of streetlight, I could see it was a woman, dark hair, white skin. She was skinny, anorexic even. Her face was gaunt, and a large patch of skin had been eaten off her forehead, cutting up into her hairline. The details were hazy. Her eyes bulged and never left me. I aimed between them and pulled the trigger. My eyes closed reflexively.
The exhilaration of firing a gun is practically impossible to describe. It filled me with adrenaline. The gun snapped a bit and tore my ears apart with the sound. She kept coming toward me with her slow, eerie walk. I fired again, and once again nothing but tinnitus for me. She was really close now, maybe twenty feet.
Panic surged, making my hands slippery on the gun. Sweat dripped into my eye and I wiped my face on my sleeve. “Oh God, someone shoot her please,” I said, aiming again and trying to really make sure the gun lined up with her head. All I could see was the barrel wobbling everywhere as she got closer.
Johnny put a hand on my shoulder. “Relax, man, you over-thinking it. I’ma show you another way. Hold your gat like this.” He held his pistol down at his waist. “Then bring it up in one motion, aim without thinking about it, and fire two shots. Let your body aim instead of your mind.”
I held the gun down, taking a deep breath as I watched the zombie approaching, then brought my arms up and fired bang bang, two shots, just like he said.
Her head snapped back then her body crumpled to the street. My team cheered, hands clapping me on the back.
“Nice shot!” someone said. “Sam got his first zombie.”
“It’s my fourth,” I said. “First with a gun, though.”
After that, I felt confident, and it got easier. We fanned out and took turns picking them off. I didn’t hit every shot I fired, but definitely more than half. I got used to the gun pretty quickly, though after a couple missed shots Johnny said to me, “You gotta hold still when you squeeze the trigger. You jerkin’ the gun when you fire.”
“He’s jerkin’ the gun!” someone echoed, and I laughed at that.
These guys were so calm it helped me relax and even start enjoying the adrenaline rush and murder. It felt like this would be over shortly, whatever this was.
Johnny told me he used to be a cop, and he kept coaching me on proper gun technique.
Gunfire rang from all sides of the perimeter, so I kept an uneasy eye out behind me to make sure nothing slipped through. The situation seemed under control, but I knew the gunfire had increased a lot in the last half hour. Which meant that we were attracting more of them. How many bullets did we even have?
After about an hour, I was used to the excrement smell of zombies. I’d killed roughly twenty zombies, and so much carnage filled the street that zombies were even stumbling over the corpses. You never see that in the movies, but real zombies mostly trundle around like clumsy toddlers. Sometimes there’s one that moves a little faster, but those kind are rare. They aren’t scary, unless you get cornered or one sneaks up on you.
“Look at that one,” one of my guys said, pointing at a gimpy old lady zombie flopping down the street on a twisted leg.
Ezekiel said, “They all like little goofy ass toddlers, shittin’ theyselves an trippin’ on aything.”
“Yo, that’s a good thing,” Ornell said. “We don’t want any fast zombies!”
“Yeah, but what if they is like little toddlers now
and then they start learnin’ how to run?” Juan said.
Ezekiel burst out with a hyena laugh, “Oh mama, that’s the scariest thing ever. What if they can learn?”
I liked Ezekiel. His infectious laughter and light-heartedness belied the gravity of this situation. But he’d just voiced the worst thought ever--zombies evolving and becoming better at using their bodies! “I’ve seen a couple of them move better than the others,” I said.
As if he was thinking the same thing as we were, Hasbro’s voice suddenly boomed from the center of Geddes Street and Erie Boulevard, “Aight, people, it’s time to move!” He directed perimeter teams to close formation, and I could see a lot more people had joined the group to the north: children, middle-aged people, elderly. “We got ay’one from the church who wants to come. We gonna move south down Geddes to the reservoir, then get up inside the building and hold the hill ‘til it’s light out. After that, we head up Onondaga Hill, get medical supplies at the hospital, and move on to OCC. The college should be safe, plenty of food in the cafeteria, and defensible buildings. We can fortify up there.”
“Let’s take over Infinity Mall!” someone in the crowd shouted.
“Ain’t you seen Dawn of the Dead, fool?” Ezekiel yelled back. “I ain’t goin’ in some fuckin’ mall!”
Hasbro swept his arm to indicate all the zombies. “Look around, man…if this is the destiny of the United States, then that mall is prolly the worst place to be cuz zombies be poppin’ outta every clothes rack.”
Hasbro turned and gave some more orders to the people standing close to him, who I assumed were something like officers.
Seena approached me with another girl, who was short, and strikingly pretty. She had almond-shaped green eyes in rich chocolate skin, just a mesmerizing beauty. “How you doin’ Sam, alright?” Seena asked.
“I feel great,” I said, though it wasn’t quite the truth. Something inside me was unsettled every moment. “How are you?”
Destiny Nowhere Page 18
