Reinvigorated by the sight of fresh meat, the woman zombie digs her claws into the dirt and pulls herself out from beneath the subway car. She leaves her other half, crooked legs in tight and torn jeans, behind.
I’m reminded of that old party trick, the one where you cross your pointer finger over the thumb of your left hand, bend the first knuckle of your right hand thumb, put the halves of the thumbs together, and pull it away like you’re yanking the top of your thumb off. ‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’
But this isn’t a party trick. This is the real deal. The zombie is coming for me, and for the moment, I’m frozen—unable to get up because my ankle is flaring with white-hot pain.
“Jack!” It’s Abby’s voice, louder than the terrible banging noises, louder than the moans of the dead.
It jars me out of the funk I’m in, and I manage to slide backward. As soon as I put weight on my bad ankle, though, the pain is almost unbearable, and I fall back down again.
Abby stops her banging.
The others are unaware of what’s happening. They’re too invested in distracting the hundred other zombies.
She reaches the ladder. I look up past her and see the old, crazy woman has her face pressed against the glass, smashing her features. Her tongue slides all across the window. She looks like one of those fish that clean algae off the glass. As she’s doing this, she’s still managing to screech and bang the window with her fists.
Thump-thump-thump.
Her knuckles crack and bleed. The skin flaps up and down, up and down. Why I focus on this, I don’t know.
Abby loses her balance. The metal railing of the ladder creaks and moans like her weight is murdering it. Then—
It snaps, and Abby falls. She hits the ground and clocks her head against the bottom part of the car.
This makes the woman shriek all the more. She’s hitting the glass so hard, I think it’s about to break. It won’t, though. It’s lasted this long; it’ll last a little longer.
The whole time this is happening the zombie woman has been making her way toward me. Now she’s just inches away.
Her jaw opens. The rotten teeth she’ll devour me with drip with black spittle and blood and gore and God knows what else.
I reach to my right, into the Gucci bag. My fingers grasp the first hard object they find. I don’t know what it is until I pull it out: it’s a hair straightener.
The only reason I know this is because Darlene had one. She’d forget to turn it off after she used it sometimes, and by the time she realized it, she was already halfway to work, stuck in the Chicago morning rush, and she’d call me and tell me to unplug it, and I’d made the mistake of grabbing it by the business end and burning skin off the tips of my fingers.
So I have this straightener. It’s heavy, well-made, probably cost an arm and a leg, and the cord dangles at the end of it. I grab the cord, wrap it around my knuckles as fast as I can. The trick, when fighting zombies, is to keep a good distance from them. I know this. You know this. Everyone knows this. Since I’ve already failed in that aspect, I have to work with what I’ve got.
I cast the straightener over my shoulder like a fishing rod. As soon as I hear it thump in the gravel and dirt behind me, I swing with all my might. What little abdominal muscles I have clench with the force I put behind the swing. The woman with half a head of hair looks up. I see the purple straightener reflecting in her eyes, and then—
Crunch!
The metal blasts through her skull. Brains and bones and blood spray every which way. It’s the grossest piñata I’ve ever seen.
As gore runs down what’s left of the zombie’s face, she lets out a dying croak before her body goes slack and she hits the dirt, down for the count.
I scramble up now. The pain in my ankle isn’t as bad; I just tweaked it a little. Lord knows I’ve had way worse in my fifteen years of traversing this hellscape.
I hobble over to Abby and give her a shake. She’s dazed, but she opens her eyes.
“What happened?” she asks. Her speech is slightly slurred. “Did I fall?”
“Yeah. C’mon,” I say. “Get up. Get back on the sub.”
“Sub?” she says.
I lift her up. It’s not easy. I struggle so much that I almost bite through my tongue in the process.
That’s when Lilly screams, “It’s not working! They’re coming!” Her footsteps thunder above us on the metal. She leans over the side, cupping her hands so she can shout into the tunnel. “JACK, THEY’RE COMING!” She looks down, sees me, looks up, does a double-take. “Jack? What the hell?”
“We had a little mishap,” I say.
“Shit,” Lilly says.
I have Abby around the waist. I turn, ready to help her up the broken ladder, as Lilly is reaching down.
But it’s too late. The herd of zombies have migrated around the car. Their crisped legs make a crunch-crunch as they come toward us.
“Hurry!” Lilly shouts at me.
The banging and whistling and shouting stops. The others have caught on to what is going on.
Roland says, “Oh shit.”
Zombies pour in from every crevice, every opening. I can’t help but think of moving a piece of bark on a dead tree stump, and seeing a legion of ants crawling there, climbing over each other in sheer madness. Because that’s what is happening. The zombies have smelled me. Those that still have eyes have seen me. They stick their arms out and lumber toward us.
I look over my shoulder, toward the dark opening. Already from that way, inside the tunnel, the dead pour from between the cracks and the downed rocks.
The crazy woman is shouting “HOBGOBLINS! HOBGOBLINS! I TOLD YOU! I TOLD YOU!”
“Fuck it,” I say, and I scoop Abby up into my arms.
We can’t go back; there’s no way we’d make it up the ladder before the herd reaches us. Abby isn’t going to get up it by herself, anyway. She’ll move too slow, and then we’ll both be goners.
And the zombies are here.
Thirty-One
I hear Lilly calling our names as we get deeper and deeper into the tunnel, but we can’t turn back now. The zombies are chasing us, moving in their glacial way. They can’t be stopped when they all group up like that unless you have a tank, and even then, I wouldn’t bet my life on that tank.
Their low, guttural moans echo off the rock walls, amplified a hundred times over. They sound like they’re everywhere, all around us.
Abby is just coming to. She shakes her head. I don’t know how I’m able to carry her and still run on my bad ankle, but I’m doing it.
“Jack? Put me down, Jack,” she says.
“Jesus, I thought you’d never ask.”
“Never mind, keep carrying me,” she says.
I put her down. “Now’s really not the time for fake injuries.”
She brushes off her jeans, reaches, and brings up a sharp piece of broken concrete.
“What’s that for?” I ask.
“In case the door isn’t there,” she says.
“You gotta have hope,” I say, and even I know how this sounds.
All hope is lost. We’re going on the word of a crazy woman, and now we can’t go back. I sigh.
Through the green glow, shadows dance on the walls, the shadows of the shambling dead. Now it’s my turn to drop down. I find the thickest piece of concrete, and fill my hand with it.
“We keep going,” I say. “Until we have no place left to go.”
Abby nods. In the faint light, I can see the fear on her face.
Of all the ways to go out in the apocalypse, I know she wouldn’t want to be eaten by zombies. She’s been bitten once before; she knows the pain that comes with the spreading infection. She knows the fire, and the delusions that fill your mind while being on the cusp of death.
“If I’m gonna die, Jack,” she says, “I’m glad it’s with you.” A pause. “But I wish it didn’t have to be in this place.”
The tunnel bends, and we stumble over
a few fallen boulders. They’re not tall enough to slow the zombies down, though, at least not for long. Over these rocks, I see the end of the darkness. This is where the green glow oozes.
There is no door. There are no hobgoblins.
We turn around now. I shift the piece of concrete into my left hand, and Abby sticks her left wrist into my right hand. I feel the ghost of her fingers close around mine even though they are not there. We raise our other hands, the ones holding concrete slabs given to us by the detonation of a nuclear weapon.
The zombies are so thick that they almost don’t fit into the narrow passageway. Over the fallen rock they come. There are so many. The yellow eyes combine into one pulsing orb, almost gelatinous in its movement. Dead limbs. Guts hanging from their opened bellies.
I picture Darlene. I picture Junior. Their smiling faces. Anything but the terror in front of me.
We step back.
“Jack,” Abby says over the zombies’ noises, the groans, the moans, the squelches.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For saving me.”
The leader of the pack has made his way over the barrier first. He is a man that is mostly intact. This in of itself is surprising. He wears clothes that have not fully rotted away, unlike most of his face: a button-up shirt open almost to the navel. It was once white, but now it is the color of stormy skies. I can still see the blue stripes going up and down. One of his eyeballs dangles on his cheek, and he is missing an ear.
“Do you wanna take him, or do you want me to do it?” Abby asks.
I don’t answer.
She steps forward. With a sigh, she says, “It really is like the good old days, isn’t it?”
Now comes a woman with no arms. A rail-thin male reaching out toward us.
The lead zombie lunges. Abby slides out of the way and bashes it in the back of the head. It collapses in a heap.
The no-armed woman comes at me. I swing my arm down and bring an end to her second life. Then the rail-thin man jumps, and he moves faster than I expected. I stumble backward and hit the pile-up of rocks behind me.
The instant pain in my spine jolts through the back of my legs. Abby cleans up the mess I’ve made by bashing this zombie in the back of the head, too. Unfortunately I’m there to take the spray of rotten brains. They slap my chest wetly.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Same old, same old,” she says. “Even until the end.” Then she’s looking down at me, there on this pile of rocks. “I’d offer you a hand, but, you know…”
I nod. I know.
I decide I’m not going to die lying down. I’m going to stand up and fight until I no longer can.
As I’m making up my mind, the stone I’m lying on wiggles like a loose tooth.
My heart, already pounding in my chest, skips a beat. The zombies are all around us. Abby swings and kicks and swings and kicks. The blood is flying, the bodies are dropping.
I pry the stone free, and the glowing phosphorescence of radioactivity hits me in the face. I pull another stone out. Then another.
This is no hobgoblin’s door, but it is a way out.
Thirty-Two
The hole is wide enough for us both to fit through. I don’t ask. I don’t wait for Abby to finish smashing this zombie to smithereens. I just grab her and pull her through.
We tumble backward down another pile of rocks. Dust and soot invade my nostrils and lungs. I’m coughing, and my ankle is flaring with pain again. I’m not even sure where Abby is, but I know I have to get up before the zombies start pushing their way through the hole atop the pile. They’re relentless.
On shaky legs and a painful ankle, I grab the biggest rocks I can find and start piling them. Limbs push through with a force I can’t comprehend. I move the stones over them anyway. One arm lops off, spraying blackish blood over the rocks like a macabre waterfall.
Abby is up now. She’s helping me pile the stones.
As we work, I’m thinking in the back of my mind that I’m going to turn around and see another legion of zombies just standing there, waiting for us to finish so they can chow down. The thought is so real I can feel the cold air expelling from their lungs on the back of my neck, raising the hairs there.
But when I spin around, when the rocks are piled and the groans from the dead on the other side are all but muffled, I see there are no zombies waiting for us.
“Wow,” Abby says as we’re trying to catch our breath.
I glance over at her. She’s covered in blood, dust, dirt—you name it. I can’t imagine I look much better. Never mind that, I can’t imagine the last time I actually looked moderately presentable. Roaming around the wastelands in a cloak, with long hair that falls back from my brow, and a beard—both speckled with gray, I might add—is hardly presentable, even in this day and age.
“ ‘Wow’, what?” I reply. “We made it out again? We survived?” I smile. “Are you really surprised about that? You’re with Jack Jupiter. All I do is survive.”
She hits me. “No. Wow, you really pulled that one out of your ass.”
I shrug. “Not really. When you think about it, with the radioactivity in the area, the aftereffects of the bomb leaking out into the prison, the old woman knew what she was talking about.”
“Hobgoblins.”
“Right. She somewhat knew what she was talking about.”
“Most old people do,” Abby says. She shakes her head. “Hobgoblins.”
“Hobgoblins,” I repeat.
Now we’re looking at where we wound up, and we’re not seeing much. It’s very dark in here, with only the faintest of a green glow. The darkness, however, has its benefits. For example, the golden eyes of the dead would stand out in the dark. Right now, I see none, and that’s a good sign. A really good sign.
My own eyes begin adjusting as the adrenaline in my body starts returning to its normal levels. I see the muted gleam of silver tracks, more wrecked pillars. An old turnstile, its bars pointing up like a frozen spider.
“C’mon,” I whisper. “And be quiet. Our voices are probably carrying.”
I step up on the platform as Abby makes a point of not letting me lead her. She weasels her way in front of me, moving carefully around debris.
Though my eyes have adjusted, they’ve not adjusted very well. I can hardly see farther than the downed turnstile. I’m searching for an exit, for some kind of light, focusing so intensely that I don’t even see the dead body in front of me.
I hit it and almost fall on my face. The body makes this crunching sound, like stepping on old newspaper.
Abby stops.
I bend down and put my hand on what I think is a leg. The flesh is very well-done. Burned. The explosion blasted through here like it blasted through the other side of the pile of rocks.
Touching this body’s leg doesn’t bring up a feeling of disgust, or anything like that; all it brings is pity. They could’ve been a zombie at the time the fire cooked them, or they could’ve been a regular person just seeking refuge underground—it doesn’t matter. All that matters is they are dead before their time. Taken.
“Jack,” Abby says. She’s about fifteen feet in front of me, judging by her voice. I stand up straight, the pain in my ankle all but forgotten, and go to her. “Stairs,” she says.
I can’t see them all that well. They really just look like a hunk of rock vaguely in the shape of the steps, but there’s a tunnel here around them, mostly intact. I run my hand along the rough surface of the wall, and feel something.
Paper.
I pull my face close to it, close enough to make out a few letters in the darkness. The font is white, that helps. It’s a poster, the kind you see in almost every subway from here to New York City.
I make out the words at the bottom of the page. It reads, ‘PAID FOR BY THE CDC’. I pull the page out of its fractured frame, and look over the rest of it, willing my eyes to adjust further. They listen to me
…somewhat. The message atop the page says, ‘Please wear your masks!’ and the picture accompanying it shows an Asian woman fitting what looks like a more advanced version of a surgeon’s mask over her ears, a perfect white smile just visible.
Abby looks over my shoulder at the page, shakes her head again. “There’s more,” she says. “I’ve seen them before. The government was really trying to save face after what happened. Whether it was accidental or on purpose, who knows? But it’s funny, isn’t it? They knew what they we were dealing with, the virus, they knew how dangerous it was.” She takes the poster out of my hand, grins. “And they still tried shoving their public service announcements in our faces. Half the world was probably dead by the time they printed up this one, yet they kept going. Crazy.”
I nod. The anger is still present, though, not really simmering down yet. Seeing the poster hasn’t helped, but at least the anger masks the fear. Right?
“There was one,” Abby continues, “that showed a man in a trench coat and hat and sunglasses clutching his arm. The heading on top of the poster said, ‘Don’t hide a bite! Go to a government-approved clinic today!’” Her eyes flash with anger in the darkness. “By then, I’m guessing everyone knew just what those ‘government-approved clinics’ were.”
I nod. I can imagine.
The government’s goal was to stop the spread of the infection as quickly and as quietly as possible, but the disease went through the country like wildfire—an old simile—and by the time the secret of the clinics came out, it was all too late. The secret, of course, being that behind the facade of scrubs and mask-wearing doctors and nurses was a small army in hazmat suits. They would throw the infected person in a room with a bunch of other infected persons, dim the lights so they couldn’t see their eyes, then blast them all to hell with their government-approved rifles. They knew there was no cure. They knew there was no stopping the disease. The only hope they had was to kill all those who were infected…nearly two decades later, here we are.
It happened. I can’t change the past. I have to live in the moment.
The Dead Collection Box Set #2: Jack Zombie Books 5-8 Page 52
