by Chloe Garner
Her glare had turned serious. He hadn’t noticed that. He held his hands up.
“Fine. Whatever. Just don’t get in the way.”
“If one of us is going to be in the way, it’s going to be you,” she said, shrugging again.
“I didn’t mean anything,” he said to her privately.
“I know,” she said. “But this bag is the difference between life and death more days than it isn’t. I don’t just give it away. Ever.”
He nodded.
“I respect that.”
“I know.”
They loaded into the Cruiser and Jason glanced into the back seat again. He really didn’t want her coming. Zombies were decently slow, but they had the nasty habit of showing up en masse. Sometimes you really did have to be quick to get away. They didn’t hunt living people - he had no idea why - but he had once seen them surround someone who was in a cemetery at the wrong time, and he had no illusions that they wouldn’t have killed the man if he and Sam hadn’t intervened.
Goblins and the stunning display with Carly notwithstanding, she was laid up, and she should have accepted it. Going out with an unreliable body was the height of foolishness. Everyone he knew knew that.
She caught his eye in the rearview and glared at him with mocking defiance, then smiled. Tough chick. One he was glad was on his side, certainly.
He drove across town to the old industrial area that the search had indicated and parked next to an abandoned building.
“We’ve got an hour, maybe an hour and a half before dusk. We need to be back at the cemetery by then,” Jason said. “How do you want to do this?”
“Split up, cover more ground?” Sam asked. Jason glanced at Samantha.
“I don’t think I like that one,” he said.
“Okay,” Sam said. “Grid sweep, then.”
“Probably want buildings with few or no windows, or a basement level,” Samantha said. Jason jerked his head to look at her.
“What? The undead that only come out at night? I expect they like dark, right?” she asked.
He grinned.
“We’ll make a Ranger out of you yet.”
They executed their search with their normal brutal efficiency. Samantha was willing to stand outside buildings while they did quick searches inside, but it was frequently obvious that the buildings were unused. She kept up remarkably well between buildings on the crutches, and Jason resisted asking if he could carry the backpack, again. Arthur would have hit him in the back of the head for letting her carry it.
They came out of yet another dusty, empty building and Jason called it.
“We need to head out. If you insist, we can come back tomorrow, but we need to go cover the cemetery tonight,” he said.
“No…” Samantha said distantly. “No, we’re close.”
“Close, not close, we need to go.”
“Don’t you smell it?” she asked, returning mentally to turn and look at him. For a moment, he thought she was doing her freaky savant thing, but when he actually focused, he could smell it. Dry, earth rot. He nodded, and she set off, following the scent.
Less than a block away, the smell of decay was becoming overwhelming. Jason opened the door to a large building and they were knocked back by a new scent - fresh death. He pulled out his gun.
“Headshots,” he said. He wished he had a hundred yards distance and a rifle sight to work with, but they were here now, and he was actually curious. It had never occurred to him to wonder where zombies went during the day. Maybe they would all be asleep, and they could just pick them all off.
The blade of Samantha’s machete rang as she pulled it out of her backpack. The main room of the building was well-lit with large windows up high on all four walls. Jason motioned to a doorway.
“Basement,” he said.
The floor was nearly clean, the footprints were so thick, except for the fresh dirt squished against the cement. Samantha kicked at a clod with her toe and Jason approached the door and motioned to Sam to open it. There were a few bodies strewn on the stairs, and, as he moved quickly to count and get back away from the doorway, one of them looked up and groaned.
“Brace yourselves,” he said. Sam shot the first one and retreated from the open door. Jason heard it go thumping down the stairs, rousing the rest of the ones he had seen.
“Stop,” Samantha said. “I need to get a good look at one of them.”
“Yeah, right,” Jason answered, taking aim at the doorway. The next shot was his. He hit the next one square between the eyes, and it sagged back against the third, which moved its arm up and around to let it go falling down the stairs in order to continue to charge Sam. Sam hit it, but far enough to one side that its skull ripped open, and it continued forward, anyway.
“Mine,” Samantha ordered, hobbling in front of Jason. He tried to step to the side to get a line on it, but she kept herself between him and it. She held out her machete and the creature turned to the side to follow her. She shuffled back at about the same rate that it shuffled forward. She held her arm out to Jason.
“Mine,” she said again.
“Be careful,” he warned, walking to stand next to her, taking clear aim again. “They’re contagious.”
She snorted.
They walked back as it walked forward.
“Dumb as rocks,” Jason said. “We could probably do this all day.”
“Jason,” Sam called. He fired again. Then again.
“He needs a scope to hit a zombie square,” Jason sighed to Samantha. She smiled, still evaluating the zombie.
“You okay?” he called back.
“Yeah. Just heads up,” Sam answered.
“Knock it down,” Samantha said. Jason sighed.
“You are not doing an exam on a live zombie,” he said.
“From the sound of it, looking at a dead one isn’t going to do me any good. I’d knock it down, but I’ve only got one leg,” she said.
“Exactly my point,” Jason said, glancing over at Sam again, then shooting the zombie in the chest. When it stumbled back, he gave chase, kicking it over backwards. Samantha dropped her backpack next to the zombie and put her casted foot on its neck. There were various sickening tearing and popping noises. It scrabbled for hold on her leg, but her pants held up. She reached down and put her hand firmly on its chest, pulling her hand away every time it tried to grab her. She got frustrated after a second and lopped one arm off at the elbow. She slid the hand under her foot and it went mad, grabbing at her, but she stood over it with an impassive face.
“You’ll touch that, and Sam is too gross?” Jason asked. “Remind me not to let him handle my food.”
“No heartbeat,” she said.
“Un. Dead,” Jason answered. She glanced up at him, confused.
“Jason,” Sam called, firing four more rounds.
“You have him?” Jason asked Samantha.
“Does he look like he’s getting away?” she asked, twirling the machete in her left hand for dramatic flair. He didn’t like it, but he went back to cover the door. A clot of zombies was struggling to get around a dead one in the doorway. Dumb. As. Rocks. Sam fired again, and Jason killed three more, one, two, three, then looked at Sam and shook his head.
“We’ve got them bottled up, and you can’t hit them?” he asked. He fired again, killing the last two. Sam was fine with center of mass, and put a baseball bat or a blade in his hand and he was lethal, but the more nuanced shots with a handgun eluded him. Had since they were kids. Took too long for his brain to tell his hands to pull the trigger, Jason thought.
The clot dissolved and a single zombie came struggling out of the pile. Sam walked up closer to shoot it in the back of the head, glancing down the stairway.
“Clear,” he said. Behind them, Samantha barked a sharp noise that was more anger than pain. Jason turned to look as she pulled her hand out of the zombie’s mouth, its hand reaching desperately after her bloody wrist, and cut its head off. Jason ran over to her as she str
uggled to stand one-footed.
“I know what they are,” she said. “Kill them all.”
“Are you okay?” he asked. She frowned at him, then looked at her wrist.
“You think I’ve never been bitten before? Demons love to bite. I’ll be fine.”
“You should wash it out,” Jason said.
“What, so it doesn’t get infected?” She looked down at the shriveled, gray body at her feet and shuddered. “Second thought, you have a point.”
She reached into her bag and brought out a plastic bottle with a snap-top lid, opening it and squeezing a stream of water over the wound, washing it until the flesh was visible through the thinned blood.
“Holy water?” Jason asked. She shook her head.
“R.O.”
Jason glanced at Sam for help.
“Reverse osmosis. Perfectly clean.”
“That might be enough,” he said, still worried. She looked up at him and laughed.
“Please. I am not going to turn into a zombie. Go kill them. I’m fine.”
“Are you coming?” he asked.
“I may make it down the stairs by the time you’re done. Depends on how much work you’ve got left.”
Jason nodded, then looked at Sam. Sam looked less worried than Jason felt. You didn’t get in arm’s-length of a zombie, because they bit, and because they were contagious. This is why he had learned to shot them from a hillside while they dug. And then Sam-the-girl had gone and tempted fate… He pushed it away. What was done was done. They had a basement to scour.
Sam pulled a long knife and went down the stairs in a crouch, with Jason following. The stairs ended at a wall with a doorway on one side. That was the dangerous moment, opening that door, when Jason would have the hardest time covering him. They stepped carefully over bodies, Sam hacking off heads just to be sure. Behind him, Jason heard the clunk of Samantha’s boot on the first stair. There was a fleeting moment of guilt as he considered her trying to go down a staircase littered in zombies with crutches and a massive backpack, but Sam approached the doorway and Jason’s focus zeroed. Sam was against the far wall, leaving Jason as much room as possible. Hitting an arm, even a hand, obviously wouldn’t kill them, but it would give Sam an extra moment to back up and get down so Jason could get the head shot as they rounded the corner.
Sam whipped the door into the far corner, then slowly stood from his prepared crouch, letting his arms drop to his sides. The stench rolling up the stairs was almost unsurvivable. Jason covered his mouth with his sleeve as he joined Sam.
The room was dim, lit by a couple of recessed windows against a far wall, but what was happening was unmistakable.
A large group of zombies, at least thirty or forty of them, stood around a pair of bodies, eating. Sam covered his mouth with his hand and choked. The sound of ripping and slopping fluids was secondary only to that of chewing. Samantha joined them.
“Big, bad warriors you two are,” she said. “I’ll help.”
She set her backpack down with some difficulty and pulled out a wire shape that Jason didn’t recognize as a lantern until she reconstructed it. She screwed a pot of oil to the bottom of it and reached into a front pocket on the backpack to produce a lighter, lighting the wick and setting the lantern around the doorframe, to cast the scene in flickering orange light.
That was definitely worse.
At the sound of the lighter catching - the tiny whoosh of gas lighting - every grotesque head in the room had turned, and now, in the insignificant firelight, they stared, blood and bits of tissue dripping off of their faces and hands. As a wave, they turned from the mushy piles that had been human bodies and started to walk toward Sam and Jason.
Jason opened fire.
At one point, certainly only moments later, but in his rush of focus a distant time from his first shot, Samantha pressed a new gun into his hand and took his own weapon, reaching around him into his jacket pocket to pull the second mag. Sam reloaded his own gun, taking down zombies maybe every third or fourth shot. Jason took aim, pulled the trigger, killed.
He emptied the second mag, and Samantha handed him his own gun back.
“Go,” he said, taking a step back from the doorway as the zombies pressed closer. He grabbed Sam’s shoulder, pulling him around behind. “Get her out of here.”
“You’ve got it,” Samantha said, not moving. He braced his hand again and fired. One, two, three, four. They were climbing over a pile of bodies, now, tripping on limbs and heads.
“Eight,” she said.
One, two, three.
“Five.”
He took another step back and she backed up a stair to give him room, leaning her head around the doorway. He went to the far wall, the spot with the best visibility and range.
One, two.
Sam shot another, then dropped his gun into his holster and beheaded the one that had gotten too close, using the knife he had never put away.
The final shot echoed through the room, then silence.
The smell hit him again.
“You’d be a better shot if you aimed with two empty hands,” Jason said.
“You know I wouldn’t,” Sam answered. Jason looked at Samantha.
“You had a gun, why didn’t you use it?”
“One footed with a sore wrist, it’s faster to let you do it than reload my own,” she said. Fair enough.
They looked over the basement.
“I vote we torch it,” Sam said. Samantha nodded.
“They’ll burn like sawdust,” she said. Jason sighed. He hated to leave a string of burnt buildings, but he couldn’t think of a better way to deal with them.
“Get her out of here. I’ll light them,” Jason said.
“You need him to bring the rest of them down here. The building has got too much cement. It isn’t going to burn down before someone sees it,” Samantha said. “I’m fine. I’ll meet you guys up top.” She paused and glanced at Jason. “Watch him.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jason said. “The way you move, we’ll beat you out.”
She grunted and started up the stairs on her crutches. He had one last urge to offer to carry her backpack, then set to work kicking the bodies into a slightly more coherent pile. He heard thumps as Sam kicked the bodies down the stairs. The higher pitched thumps were the heads. Jason kept his gun out and waited as Sam pushed the pile of dry flesh into the room and added it to Jason’s pile.
“That it?” Jason asked. “Including the one that bit Sam?”
“All of them,” Sam said. Jason looked down at the ground, stepping across bloody smears to join Sam in the doorway.
“That is truly gruesome,” Jason said. Sam nodded. Jason grabbed Samantha’s lantern, unscrewing the oil from the bottom and pouring it over a fragment of cloth a nearby zombie wore, then tilted the flame so that it would catch the oil and stepped back. Samantha had been right - like dry sawdust. They headed upstairs to the sound of flames whooshing from body to body.
“What are we going to do about her?” Jason asked. Sam shrugged.
“She doesn’t seem to think anything is going to happen,” he said. Jason frowned at him. “Have you ever known anyone to go zombie?”
“No, but where do they come from, otherwise?” Jason asked. “We know people who have seen it.”
Sam shook his head.
“I know. It just feels like something as silly as a zombie bite shouldn’t be able to beat her,” he said. Jason had to give him that.
“She’s out of her depth, with them,” he said. “Demons, sure, I’d agree with you, but she’s never seen them before.”
“But I know what they are,” Samantha said from the outside doorway.
“Do tell,” Jason said. She turned to join them, swinging along casually on her crutches like she had always had them.
“They’re people.”
“They were people, no doubt,” Jason said. She shook her head.
“No, they’re still people. Live ones.”
“Y
ou yourself said they didn’t have a heartbeat,” he said.
“Can you name the three great goals of magic?” she asked. He opened his mouth and closed it. She laughed.
“I can. Lead into gold, world domination, and immortality,” she said. “Lead into gold is possible, but by the point you actually can do it, it isn’t worth it - there are easier ways to make money. World domination is just a constant battle against… everybody, let’s face it. Immortality. That’s the tricky one. Man was made to be mortal. The Angel of Death, my friend, ensures that everyone receives final justice. It’s the balance to free will. Death. Invincibility and eternal youth are impossible, because of that tradeoff, but you can sacrifice more and more of your soul, exercising greater and greater levels of freewill in order to continue to live. There are a few ways of doing it, and all of them involved sucking life out of something else. Well, okay, that’s not strictly true, but the easiest ones do. Not that they’re easy.”
“Are we getting to a point, here?” Jason asked.
“Lifeblood. The core life organs. Like I said, they’re worth a lot. For someone who is prolonging life by consuming living tissue, a brain is a goldmine. That and the heart are the core of your symbolic life. Lungs, stomach, kidneys, bowel. There’s a long list in order of symbolic value, with blood midway down it. After that, I guess, they just eat everything else. They’ll be constantly hungry. The body knows it is dead. The tension between mind and body has got to be excruciating.”
“But the bodies were dead,” Jason said. She nodded.
“They’ve degraded to the point that they can’t get living flesh. Not off a human. But it takes a long, long time for everything in a body to actually be dead. Weeks.”
“They never hunt humans.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“We just showed up. I’ve never seen or heard of a zombie attacking a human other than opportunistically.”
She shook her head.
“Well, I can’t explain that. I’ve never had a conversation with someone who has swapped for immortality. Killed a few, but never talked to one. Maybe they have rules they can’t break, like gray demons do. I don’t know. But the point is that it’s a freewill decision. You have to choose it. It can’t be contagious.”
