“Fuck!”
It was then that the hunger set in. Having eaten very little since we left Jimmy’s Sporting Goods two days ago, my stomach was churning and growling almost as loud as the zombies.
I heard a gunshot from outside and I decided to see what was keeping Jimmy. I put my pack down and left the room. What I saw when I rounded the corner was Jimmy’s body on the floor. He had a bullet wound in his head; Harry’s pistol was in his right hand. I thought he said there were no more bullets. The shit had lied to me and killed himself rather than trying to survive. After he gave me the speech about not giving up? I couldn’t believe it. Next to his body was a folded piece of paper. I picked it up and read:
Dear Dan,
I have always thought of you as a son and that is why I am doing this. I got bit back where Harry died. I hid it from you, but it’s gotten worse. Check my left shoulder if you don’t believe me. This is the only way I won’t be a danger to you. I have nothing to live for anyway.
Jimmy
P.S. There really are no more bullets in the gun now. Sorry I lied to you. Good luck.
Just then the front door collapsed and the first zombie peered through. I bolted for the room, slamming the door behind me. Holy fuck, I’m on my own. It hit me like a train. No one is left besides me.
The pounding began on the door to the office. What the fuck can I do? I’m trapped. If they break down this door, I’m doomed. This is a bad dream. When will I wake up? Will I wake up?
I took a deep breath. After composing myself I thought for a moment. I reached down into my pack and took out Harry’s camera. I turned it on, pointed it at myself, and started recording.
“Maybe Harry was right. Maybe someone will find this when the nightmare is over.” I took another deep breath. “When I’m long gone.”
I thought of exactly what I was going to say next, and then it hit me. “You will see Harry’s story. You will see my story. You will see that I refuse to go down without a fight. And you will see that fight I shall until my last breath.”
I stood up and placed the camera on the shelf behind the librarian’s desk so that it could see the whole room and have the best view of the door. Then I turned toward the door, embracing my fate, gripping my bat tighter with every second. The doors hinges began to give way, the door fell over.
The camera filmed the rush of zombies into the small room. Dan’s valiant head-cracking blows to the zombies. Dan being overwhelmed. Dan’s last breath. Feeding zombies until the tape ran out and then, nothing.
Tony Monchinski, PhD, a high school teacher in New York State, is the author of the action-horror zombie novel, Eden and its sequel, Crusade (Permuted Press). His academic works include Education in Hope: Critical Pedagogies and the Ethic of Care (Peter Lang), The Politics of Education (Sense), and, with John Gerassi, Unrepentant Radical Educator (Sense). Tony also writes and shoots the East Coast Muscle column in MuscleMag International.
overwhelm airwaves…*EWZN* early dismissal of reports by medical
Run Through the JungleReported By Tony Monchinski
When we rolled the metal awning over the pharmacy up to let Danny’s father out, we inadvertently let the wounded man with fatigue pants in.
“What the fuck happened to you, mister?” Chris demanded.
“My name’s Jeff,” the man in military pants said, and when he noticed how everyone’s eyes in the store—including my own—were focused on the bloodstained bandages he had tightened around his upper arm, he breathlessly added, “and I got shot.”
“Shot?” Michelle, the rail-thin young Asian woman with dreadlocks who’d come in yesterday, asked. She was wearing some municipal employee’s uniform.
“Oh my lands,” Angie, an old white lady with a walker, shook her head.
“We should close the gate,” Mark noted, nodding his curly, dark-haired head towards the outside. “Here they come.”
The first of the zombies on the street was staggering towards the drug store. Its stomach cavity was gaping and empty as it stumbled towards us, one hand reaching out, its lower jaw working up and down like it was trying to talk to us.
I saw the wary glance Chris cast at the wounded soldier as he and Mark pulled the metal awning down and secured it.
“We should move further back into the store,” Michael, the middle-aged man with a youngish, honest face, said. There was something instantly likeable about Michael. He put you at ease; he put me at ease. “So they can’t see us from the street.”
The large panes of glass in the windows were covered by the awning, but the awning itself had a metallic weave at eye level which afforded everyone in the pharmacy a view of the street and the zombies on the street, a view inside the store. I honestly didn’t want them staring in at me, so I turned and followed the others into the back.
As we moved towards the rear of the store, it was obvious Jeff was doing a quick head count. Including Jeff, there were nine of us, plus the boy in the back room.
“Who was that man that ran out of here?” Jeff asked as we settled down where the zombies couldn’t see us. Moving as slow as she did, the old lady with the walker was the last to reach our group. Her ankles were almost as thick as her knees. I was worried about her.
“How’d you get shot, Jeff?”
Jeff looked Chris in the face and pursed his lips. “My own people shot me,” he said quietly.
“What are you, some kind of military?”
“Yeah, Army,” Jeff said. “I was—”
“What do you mean, was?”
Mark looked at Chris. The man with the gun, Chris, had a confrontational style about him that was growing old fast. Mark looked down at the baseball bat he held in his hands. I’d known Mark long enough, working in the supermarket next to his pharmacy…I could guess what the druggist was thinking. Gun versus bat; bat doesn’t win. He sighed.
“What I mean is,” Jeff was saying, “I don’t know if there still is an army.”
“Say again?” my coworker, Justin, tall with short hair, asked. At eighteen, Justin was a year older than me. He’d been putting on a good act of being tough these last couple of days, but I knew Justin well enough from school and work to know he was as frightened as I was.
“He’s a soldier,” Angie stated, her face polka-dotted with age spots.
“It’s real bad out there,” Jeff indicated towards the front of the store and the streets beyond the awning. He looked like he didn’t know what else to add. “How long have you been in here?”
“This is my store,” Mark said. “I’ve been here since Thursday. Angie has been here with me since then. Justin and Kelsey, too.”
“We worked next door,” Justin spoke up.
“At the market,” I said. Jeff looked at me and there was pain in his eyes. I’ve always been good at reading people; Momma said it’s something some people are just born with. It was almost as if I could see myself through his eyes, and what he saw looking at me was an anxious, young, black girl with straight, black hair and auburn highlights.
He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me. Something I can’t put a name on, something inside me, told me Jeff was keeping stuff from us…he wasn’t honest in an innocent way like Michael. But he wasn’t as menacing as Chris came across, not that Chris had done anything particularly alarming since he’d been here with us…aside from just possessing that gun. No, Jeff was ultimately okay, I realized, even if there was something about him I couldn’t pin down.
The soldier winced as a bolt of pain shot through him from the bandaged wound. He was getting his breath back.
“I got here this morning,” Linda was saying. Linda was a chunky white woman, and reminded me of my own mom, aside from her skin color. Tough but kind. “And I was lucky they let me in.”
“You’re lucky he let you in,” Michael was referring to Chris.
“He’s a soldier,” Angie repeated, shifting her weight on her walker to look at Jeff. “Chris, why don’t you give him the gun? He’
ll know what to do with it.”
“You have a gun?” Jeff looked at the other man, and I watched the soldier’s eyes narrow just a little bit.
“Yeah,” Chris waved his handgun in the air and then let it hang at his side. “You’re a soldier. So where’s yours?”
“Lost it.” Jeff ran a hand across his forehead.
“How bad is it out there?” Mark wanted to know.
“They’re all over the place,” the soldier said. “The city’s locked down. No one gets in or out.”
There was something in the air, some faint odor… what was it?
“What does that mean?”
“They’re shooting anyone they see on the street,” Jeff said. “They’re not asking if you’re alive or not.”
“Christ,” Michelle said, shaking her dreadlocked head.
“Just like that?” Michael asked. “They’re just shooting people?”
“I know I should have gone to Florida,” Angie sighed.
“They can’t do that,” Michael murmured incredulously.
“It’s hairy out there,” Jeff added.
Michelle looked at Linda and said, “Danny’s father.”
“Was that Danny’s father that ran past me on my way in?” Jeff asked.
“Yeah, he was going to get help,” I said.
“Help,” Chris spat. “Like I’ve been saying, there is no help. If we’re going to survive this, we have to help ourselves.”
“Who’s Danny?” Jeff asked, suddenly guarded. It was obvious his arm wound was causing him a great deal of pain. I imagined it must be if he’d been shot.
“Danny’s in back,” Mark nodded his head over his shoulder. “Kid’s hurt bad.”
“Real bad,” Justin confirmed.
“Hurt how?” asked the soldier.
“His father was going to try and make it to the hospital,” I said.
“The hospital is a death trap,” Chris pronounced.
“Hurt how?” Jeff asked again, more firmly. “Is he bit?”
“Yeah, he was bit,” Linda confirmed. There was something silent and final in the way she said it.
“You guys know what happens when someone gets bitten, right?”
“They die, don’t they?” Justin offered.
“And then they come back, right?” Michael added. The way he said it sounded like he wanted someone to deny it, to deny what we had all witnessed with our own eyes over the past days.
“Does anyone smell smoke or something?” I asked. There was definitely something in the air.
“There’s got to be a cure, an antidote or something,” Mark said, looking over his shoulder to the shelves of pharm-aceutical products lined up neatly.
“There’s not,” Jeff sighed. He looked at the gun in Chris’ hand. The guy wasn’t aiming it anybody, which was good. “Where’s this Danny kid?”
Angie protested, “You surely can’t be thinking—”
“It’s like I’ve been saying we oughta do.” Chris finally looked pleased. “But let’s hold our horses here, G.I. Jeff. How’d you say you got that wound again?”
“I said I got shot,” Jeff looked at Chris hard. Chris must have been older than Jeff by twenty years. And while Chris had a gun, and Jeff was hurt, Jeff’s look said, don’t press me.
“So you say.” Chris ignored the look, and I was worried things might get ugly fast. “Mind if we see the wound?”
“Listen, all of you,” Jeff looked at each of us, Chris last. “We’re in a serious situation here. This city is quarantined—”
“So we sit tight and wait it out—”
“No, Mark,” Jeff said, shaking his head. “You smell that, right?”
“It’s smoke, isn’t it?” I was glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed it.
“This block is on fire,” Jeff confirmed my suspicion. “The buildings down the street are burning.”
“Holy shit…” Justin breathed.
“We can’t stay here,” I pointed out.
“Well, what are we supposed to do?” Michael wondered. “Go out there, with them?”
“He’s right,” Jeff said, as if Michael had provided a statement and not a question. “We have to get out of here.”
“If the fucking block was burning,” Chris prodded, “why’d you run in here then, cowboy?”
“They’re going to bomb the city at noon,” Jeff announced. “I’ve been running all day...”
“Yeah,” Linda noted. “You don’t look so good, Jeff.”
“Bomb the city? Who’s going to—” Michael’s voice rose.
“Who do you think?” Jeff cut him off. “I was there. I heard all about it. Our orders were to contain the city so the Air Force could come in with their bombers and jets and level the place.”
Michael looked at his watch.
“They’re going to destroy the whole city and everyone in it.” Jeff shook his head. “That’s why I’ve been running.”
“Well, we’ve got to call them,” Michelle said, holding up her cell phone. “Tell them there’s still people alive in here.”
“We haven’t had cell phone signals since last night,” Mark said quietly. “Everything’s down. Land lines, cell phones, internet. Nothing on the TV, the radio…”
“They jamming us?” Chris looked at Jeff. “That anything you know about?”
“That I don’t know,” Jeff admitted. “But it sounds like it.”
“We can’t leave this place,” Angie said. “There’s Danny to think about. His father is going to come back here looking for him, for us.”
“Danny’s father isn’t coming back,” Chris shot, exasperated. “If he’s alive out there, he’s not coming back here.”
“What do you mean?” Michael asked.
“If it was you, would you?”
“Yes, I would, if that was my—”
“Yeah, well I wouldn’t,” Chris said. “The kid’s father knows what’s going to happen to the kid. He just didn’t want to stick around for it.”
The look on Danny’s dad’s face when the man left… I’d wondered if he had any intention of coming back. I was afraid Chris was right. I couldn’t imagine abandoning a child. I hope Momma had stayed at home or evacuated like everyone else in the suburbs. I hope she knew I was tough enough to make it out of the city. I couldn’t imagine something bad happening to Momma.
“Oh, that’s crazy,” Michelle said. “He went to get some—”
“Bullshit,” Chris cut her off. “He couldn’t handle what came next. He didn’t go to get help. That motherfucker’s long gone by now. He left us to clean up his mess.” He looked toward the back room where the kid was. “Selfish fuck.”
“Someone will come,” Angie’s voice held hope.
“There is no someone or something,” Chris said. “There’s us.”
“He’s right,” Mark said, the disdain of confirming Chris clear in his voice.
“What time is it?” Linda asked.
“Ten after eleven,” Michael answered.
“Christ,” Justin muttered. “Shit.”
“Mark, this is your store.” Jeff was fatigued, but the running wasn’t over and we all knew it. “What do you have around here that we can use as weapons?” He looked from Mark’s baseball bat to the mop stick Justin grasped. “And water, we’ll need water—”
“So it’s decided then?” Michelle demanded. “We’re just leaving like that?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear, lady,” Chris spat. “But this place is going to burn to the ground.”
“What about,” my voice trailed off, my eyes shifting quickly to the old woman with the walker, “…and the boy in back?”
Chris looked at Jeff.
“We’ll carry her,” Jeff said, who didn’t look like he could carry anyone.
“I’ll stay,” Angie volunteered. “I’d only be slowing you down. Someone has to stay with Danny and wait for his father.”
“No, Missus Buckley,” Mark said. “We’ll help you—”
&nbs
p; “It’s okay, Mark. You go. You all go. I’ll wait here in the store.”
The acrid smell of smoke was strong in the air now.
“But—”
“No buts, dear,” she smiled at him. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll wait up front and play some instant lottery tickets.”
“Play them all,” Mark swallowed something down in his throat.
“We’ve got protein bars,” Justin said. He and Michael had filled plastic bags with various protein and candy bars.
“Okay,” Jeff said. “Here’s the plan. We get outside, we’re gonna run for the river. We get down to the river, we get across, we get into the forest.”
“Run through the jungle,” Justin sang.
“Creedence,” Michael said. Justin smiled, but I didn’t know what they were talking about.
“I can’t swim,” Chris said.
“We deal with that when we get there.”
“River’s a good mile from here,” Michael noted. “Maybe we can grab a car?”
“Yeah, my car is outside,” Michelle offered, holding up the keys.
“I have a mini-van,” Linda added.
“No, the roads are clogged,” Jeff told us. “We’ll never make it.”
“So we’ll drive right through those motherfuckers,” Chris brandished the gun for emphasis.
“The road’s too clogged with cars and other vehicles. We’re not going to drive through those,” Jeff repeated.
“He’s right,” Mark agreed. “We gotta hoof it.”
“Jeff,” I looked at him. “How many of those things are out there?”
The soldier just shook his head.
“Okay then…” Justin murmured.
“Where’s the back door?” Jeff asked Mark.
“Come on.” The pharmacist led us to the rear of the store. We passed the boy, Danny, on a pallet of blood-stained blankets and sheets. Someone had placed a water bottle next to the kid. He was deathly pale and moaning faintly.
Eye Witness: Zombie Page 10
