Seena laughed. “Uh…zombies!” she said.
Her friend laughed too. The top of her head came up to the middle of my chest.
“Hey, shorty,” I said to her, cracking myself and the girls up. “I’m Sam.” I shook her hand.
“Ma’Sheea,” she said, smiling at me.
“That’s a pretty name,” I said.
“Okay, Sam, knock it off?” Seena said.
“What?”
“You wanna touch her hair, too?” Seena and Ma’Sheea both laughed. She exaggerated her voice to imitate me and said, “Oh Shonequa, what a pretty name!” Both girls laughed at me. “Quit actin’ so white, dude!”
“Oh what, ‘cuz I like her name?” I said, feeling embarrassed. “Whatever, Ma’Sheea is a pretty name. And… yeah…there’s zombies! What the hell is this world coming to?” I felt goofy, but it’s easy to feel that way when pretty girls are talking to you.
I looked at Ma’Sheea a little too long and wanted to say something else, something to make her laugh, or tell her she’s pretty or something. Her eyes were hypnotizing me, the contours of her face alien and beautiful. She kept staring into my eyes, as if she could read my thoughts, and we had this intense moment of connection until my eyes darted nervously away. I was a creepy guy, thinking creepy thoughts, in the midst of a creepy zombie apocalypse.
“Sam and Ma’Sheea sitting in a tree,” Seena said, batting her eyelashes.
I blushed and fidgeted, and Ma’Sheea smacked Seena’s arm playfully. “You stupid,” she said.
Seena kept going with it, “You know Hasbro made Sam a lieutenant-- he in charge of all these men.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Ma’Sheea said, smiling at me.
“He a college professor, too,” Seena said.
I pretended I was scoping the perimeter. My crew was still watching the street and shooting anything that got near, and I knew I should be helping them, leading by example or something. Not talking to this girl. I fired off a couple rounds to feel useful.
“Oh now he’s bein’ all Sergeant Slaughter,” Seena said. “You blushin’ Sam? Cuz I see your white cheeks lookin’ all pink and you got a tentpole in your pants!”
More uproarious laughter at my expense. I did not have a boner either!
“You guys are goofing around like nothing happened,” I said. “Why’s this so funny to you guys?”
They both cracked up. “Sam, do you smoke weed?” Seena asked.
“Uh, no.”
“Okay well, weed makes aything better. Just sayin’, if you want some.”
“No thanks.”
“No you welcome,” Seena said, giggling. “You should try it.”
“No, that’s okay. In case you haven’t noticed, the world is ending. We kinda need to do something about it.”
“Do you want a beer?” she said.
I hesitated, looked back at the street, which was still under control. Hasbro was still organizing people in the crossroads and it looked like we’d be awhile. A lot of other people were drinking. I told her, “A beer sounds pretty goddamn good right about now.”
Chapter 36: Now
Marsha drives through the wall of fog toward Mavmart, while every bush, tree, mailbox, and garbage can looks like a goddamn zombie. I wince each time some new zombie-esque shape materializes out of the fog.
“Relax, Sam--you’re making me fuckin’ jumpy!” Marsha says. “Every time you see a fuckin’ fire hydrant, you spaz out! I really can’t believe you’ve survived this long.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
She takes a few turns then we’re on a main road, heading out of the suburbs. Here, you can’t see anything but fog, and then we pass under a bridge, casting us into shadow for a few moments like a cloud passing over the sun. The fog thins for a quarter mile as we idle along, parking lots ghosting by, with the dark vacant eyes of retail stores gaping at us.
Soon, we’re climbing up a hill, and the fog becomes sparse enough to see suburbs with small yards, the houses pretty close together.
“Is that him?” Marsha asks, and I see a figure up the road, still obscured by mist.
“No. Vance has a trenchcoat.”
She eases closer and the figure faces us. I can’t see any sign of wounds as the stout man lurches toward the car. You can tell by his walk that he isn’t well, though.
“It’s a zombie,” I say.
“No shit.”
We’re close now. “I don’t see any wounds on him.”
“You wanna get out and ask if he’s okay?” she snipes.
“No.”
The guy tries to get in front of the car, and Marsha steers around him. “I hate running them over,” she says. I see the empty hunger in his eyes. It takes his brain a long time to see us inside the car, and we’re past him when he reaches a hand out into empty air. Marsha continues, “I’ll do it if I have to. But it makes me queasy, that sound of the body hitting.”
“I know, I hate it,” I say. “I’m not really scared of the zombies anymore. They’re slow and it’s easy to hear or see or smell them coming. But I hate watching them move, or being near them.”
“I have nightmares about them surrounding me,” Marsha says. “And yeah just watching them gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“Did you ever get almost bit?”
“Few times,” she says. “One of them grabbed me from behind up on a balcony, so I hurled myself off and in the air we must’ve flipped over because I landed on top of him. That zombie saved my life!”
I think about if I’d gotten grabbed, I probably wouldn’t have jumped. Way too scary. I would’ve been bit.
“You know what,” I say. “Let’s get Vance, and then find some big RV, turn it into a Mad Max bulletproof shitbox of death and drive somewhere good like Key West. We can just pick up all the people we meet on the way, close off the island, kill every zombie on it, and live like celebrities.”
She smiles but doesn’t say anything, which makes my words feel childish.
Ahead, the dead stoplights of Genesee Street dangle and beyond that the high school. Marsha turns right on Genesee.
“That high school looks like a fortress,” Marsha says. “Probably safer than most other places.”
“Only if we could clear it out. All it would take is one of those things crawling out from under the bleachers in the middle of the night and we’d be zombie chowder.”
She turns right onto Genesee, which is a wasteland of smashed cars haphazardly abandoned. There’s no people in sight, living or dead, just four lanes of sprawling boulevard. It smells like something burning nearby, a bonfire maybe, somewhere out of sight.
“Stop,” I say.
The car creeps forward. “Why?”
“They have snipers on top of the Bonton.”
She brakes. “You mean they’d just shoot us for driving here?”
“I doubt it.”
“Okay then. Relax, Sam. Just relax. Has anyone ever told you that you’re really hard to be around because you make everything tenser than it needs to be?”
“No.”
We roll past a perfectly intact Dunkin Donuts that looks like it’s closed for the night. Marsha says, “How much would you give for a Dunkaccino and donut right now?”
“Oh man that sounds good.” My eyes linger hungrily on the building. “Somehow soggy English muffins and mediocre coffee feel like heaven right now!”
“Oh shit,” Marsha says. “Walmart’s gone.”
I look across the lot and sure enough, hanging in the fog is the skeleton of what used to be Walmart, blackened half walls protruding like rack of ribs from the ground, dark wisps of smoke rising from the smoldering corpse of a retail giant.
My first thought is that Doyle somehow managed to burn the place down after all his men were captured. My second thought is: Charisse!
Chapter 37: Then
Seena and Ma’Sheea were a welcome contrast to the crazy stress going on. They were clowning around and flirting with me but obvious
ly having sport as well. My shoelace had snapped in half when I tried tightening my shoes, so they were having endless fun calling me ‘gimpy’ and ‘peg leg’ because of the way it made me limp.
The rest of the main group was far enough away, trying to incorporate the seniors and children into its structure with minimal bickering.
Another group of twenty or so people had followed the gunshots and asked to join the group. They, unlike me, were accepted without question. But I guess that’s what happens when you don’t try to sneak away from people.
A guy came around, bringing bullets by the box load. I had no idea which kind of gun I had.
“That’s a 9 millimeter,” Seena said. “Captain Hook here don’t even know what gun he got!”
“Captain Hook didn’t have a peg leg,” I replied, coolly.
“Ooh lookit Mr. Schoolteacher tryin’ to edumacate the savages!” Ma’Sheea and Seena laughed at me, but in the back of my head, I knew I should grab some shoelaces off one of the dead bodies lying all over the place. It’s weird how much you can get used to bodies all over the ground. One moment, it’s the most horrific thing you’ve ever seen and your brain refuses to accept it, and the next moment, corpses are as common as wrappers in the gutter.
“Can I see you load it, Mr. Sam?” Ma’Sheea said, sidling up against me so her arm was holding my elbow and her leg pressed against mine. Normally, I would be a nervous mess about this, but I could see she was having sport and I decided to roll with it.
“It’s just Sam, not Mr. Sam,” I said. “Sure, I’ll load my gun for you, Shea. Do you want to watch it shoot?” I grinned at her, not cheesy or self-conscious, but with an actual confidence that tasted foreign.
It was dark and Ma’Sheea was dark, but I swear she blushed a little, and I felt kinda cool. Or at least, I understood how coolness started with not being a constant nervous dweeb. Ma’Sheea looked at me then she laughed. “Sure, Sam. I’ll watch you fire that big gun of yours.”
We both smiled and then I set to loading the gun. I had no idea what I was doing flirting with this 20-year-old girl. I wasn’t really thinking about it. I felt a weird connection which I had no intention of acting on, so it felt safe. And above all, fun.
Would I have sex with Ma’Sheea if she made a move? I probably couldn’t resist her. But I wasn’t thinking about that. And it was nice not to think about it, and to not think about the zombies.
I swigged my beer and walked ahead of my own perimeter, shooting at the oncoming mob.
“Ma’Sheea, do you want to shoot some?” I called back to her. “It’s fun.”
“Oh no, I don’t know how to fire a gun.”
“I thought black people were born knowing how to shoot guns,” I quipped.
This got laughs from my team.
“Nah that’s basketball you thinkin’ of,” Ezekiel called out.
I wasn’t sure when I made the joke how it would go over, but it felt good to laugh at racism.
“It’s easy to shoot,” I told Ma’Sheea. “I just learned tonight and I’ll show you.”
“Nuh uh. I hate guns,” she said.
The road from the city was really increasing with zombie traffic. They were so slow there was still nothing to worry about, but I knew we had to go. I found a shoelace and put it on.
Then finally, Hasbro materialized out of the disorganized crowd behind us. “Sam, your squad is going to take up the rear as we move up the hill. We got old folks and kids in the middle, moving slow. Stay close to them, keep your eyes on the buildings an’ the bushes to make sure none of them things get the jump on you.”
“How many came with from the church?” Johnny asked.
“At least seventy, maybe a hundred.”
Something was gnawing away at me and I took Hasbro aside. “That’s a long, steep hill on Geddes. Old folks and kids will collapse. Can we get some busses or some vehicles to carry them?”
He said, “You a smart man, Sam. I already sent scouts up and they reported the road’s all jammed up with cars. It’s dangerous, and we might lose people on this trip, but all we can do is try. I don’t know what else to do.”
“That church might be okay, after all. The fire doesn’t look like it’s getting close anymore.”
“Yeah, it don’t look like it’s getting close. But I been thinkin’ about how forest fires burn up hundreds of miles of forest because there’s no fire department, and this could happen in a city, too, where aything close together. I don’t like bein’ trapped if the fire does spread here.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I looked up Geddes in the direction we were heading. “Man, this is gonna be fuckin’ brutal, and it feels like we’re sitting ducks.”
Hasbro put a hand on my shoulder, and looking at his face, I really felt like we could do this trek. “We got this, Sam. We just gotta stay organized and protect the center of the group.”
And this is where things went really, really wrong. It started with a blood-curdling scream behind us, coming from the very center of the group.
Chapter 38: Now
We approach what’s left of Mavmart in the car.
“It smells like a campfire,” Marsha says.
“A really big campfire.” I look for snipers on the rooftops, but there’s no sign of anyone living. A few shapes amble around the parking lot, obviously infected. The fog is sparser than in the valley. Bodies litter the ground in the parking lot, but I don’t recognize any of them.
Whatever happened here seems to have only affected Walmart. Marsha takes us right up to the front doors, and it’s obvious that a huge fire consumed almost everything in the building. Not much of the walls are left standing; just blackened jagged remnants like decayed teeth gnawing the sky.
“Let’s go inside,” I say, getting out of the car, stepping on bullet casings.
“I don’t know about that.”
“Look who’s being a pussy now!” I chide. The casings litter the parking lot, so there must’ve been a firefight. But with who? Doyle against 30-40 guys? There must be some other gang.
Marsha says, “I got a bad feeling. My sixth sense tells me there’s more to this than it looks like…maybe a trap.”
I scan every part of the visible building and the surrounding lot. One of the zombies is heading my way--a doofus-looking khaki man with a fleece who I assume came from Mav’s Gang. I pull out my gun, take aim, and…Oops, some things never change like idiot Sam forgetting to turn the safety off. I shoot the guy.
“Guess that lets them know we’re here,” I say mildly. I’m in no mood for creeping around. If life is just going to be this constant skulking misery, then fuck it let’s just go out in a blaze of bullets.
Charisse is the only thing I care about. She’s the reason to keep going. Fuck civilization--all I want is a corner of the earth to wake up with her beautiful face adoring me every morning. I’d learned enough skills to keep us safe from zombies and marauders.
I leave Marsha sitting in the car and walk up to a gap in the wall. You’ve never seen what fire can do until you’ve seen what’s left of a burned-out Walmart. Literally everything in the store has burned completely to ash. Doyle had called Walmart a donut box, and now I understood what he meant. Piles of ash are strewn about this huge open space; some of them the height of a man. Black metal bones protrude from the carcass in places, which I assume were the remains of clothing racks and fixtures.
I enter the space cautiously, but there seems to be no one around. No infected have even entered here.
There’s nothing left. Some fixtures remain intact, but no food, clothing, or items of any value. As if the entire store has been doused in gasoline, and then someone threw a match. Doyle maybe? He’d planned to start a fire as a distraction, back in the automotive section, then send in zombies to cause more confusion. Doyle is the only one of us who was going in solo, and I witnessed the rest of the team getting caught. Did he burn the whole goddamn store down?
Strangely, the only structural thing that’s
pretty intact are the restrooms in the front of the store. They’re blackened, but the walls mostly held up. My memory leads me into the men’s room, blood pressure rising as Charisse sings through my mind.
The sooty urinals still cling to the walls, and there’s a sadness remembering the last kiss she gave me. Geography becomes tainted by memory, like driving route 90 West and remembering when I used to drive that way to see Veronica. That highway forever felt empty without her, and this bathroom is just a tomb to Charisse now. She’s gone, maybe dead, and my brain plays a once happy memory of her and me kissing and falling in love in this room.
A thought strikes me, so I follow it to the tables where we’d all eaten our banquet. There’s nothing left but ashes and metal bones. Overhead, a jillion stars glitter in the night. You never knew this many stars were even visible until all the light pollution is gone. It’s so beautiful I stop and stare and take it in for what might be the most peaceful moment I’ve felt in years. One day, Charisse, you and I will lie beneath these stars together. My mind plays that movie like some desperate prayer. It isn’t even real, but it gives me hope to imagine her lying in my arms, staring up at the stars, finally feeling that solace that every single person has always craved so deeply for amidst the emptiness of our lives.
I leave via the entrance my armored truck was supposed to smash through, heading up Kasson Road. There in the dark I see the looming monolith of Team Doyle’s truck, still crouching there. I approach cautiously, like David in the arena with Goliath.
Even our weapons and supplies sit in the trailer untouched! The first thing I grab is a Colt LE6920 tactical rifle with a 30-round mag. Army Dave had once told me this gun was highly illegal due to New York State passing a law that limited gun owners to 7 round magazines. This happened because some kid walked into a school and shot a bunch of other kids with an assault rifle. That kind of thing used to happen a lot and it boggled all of us: society abused everyone and sometimes people just snapped. But in the aftermath, it feels like the government left us as sitting ducks in a situation like this. Fortunately, nobody really abided by what the government said so there were a lot of guns with large magazines to help us survive.
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