From Oblivion's Ashes

by Nyman, Michael E. A.

  They huddled together in the dark, listening for any sound of approach, but the silence seemed impenetrable.

  Not a zombie? At this stage it was impossible to tell. Marshal turned and brought his mouth down close to Angie’s head.

  “I’m going to investigate,” he whispered, his voice so quiet that he could barely hear it. “You get back to Crapmobile. Right now. Whatever that thing is, it’s just at the end of the hall in the garage. It’s not in here with us. I know this place. If it’s a zombie, I can detect it without being seen. If it’s not, I have the gun. Go. I’ll try to follow as soon as I’m sure that you’re safe.”

  Angie didn’t answer, but her hand grasped at his sleeve.

  “No arguments,” he whispered. “Go as soon as I move.”

  Without another word, Marshal slipped away from her, inching down the aisle and into the hall that led to the chop shop. The room was pitch black, but with the afterimage of the flashlight fading, his eyes had begun to adjust. Soon, he was able to perceive slight nuances in the dark, deeper shadows, and the faintest of illumination filtering in from distant light sources. Coupled with his memory of the place, he moved with a powerful sense of direction, confident and deadly.

  He drifted right up to the doorway, and gazed, wide-eyed into the vast chamber beyond. Though dark, he found it easier to see in the open space of the garage. Thin cracks in the boarded-up windows and around the edges of the blocked up garage doors leaked tiny fractions of daylight into the room. He could faintly make out the silhouettes of cars still up on the hoists, chains dangling from the ceiling, and looming, black cliffs of the walls and ceiling beams. Somewhere, across the room and up above, Luca’s private office sat invisible.

  Marshal sniffed the air, and hesitated.

  A lingering, acrid stench was thick, all around him, a scent like...

  Body odor?

  His eyes widened as the implications reached him. Cold clarity settled his thoughts. Raising his gun, he stepped backwards.

  But he was too late.

  Something huge rose up out of the darkness near him, a specter of pure blackness that blotted out the faint light of the room. Hands like iron smashed down unexpectedly on the wrist of his gun hand, sending the weapon spinning away into darkness somewhere to his left.

  He ducked, and a powerful swing from a hidden attacker whizzed over his head in the dark.

  Adrenalin gave him an extra boost as he sought to evade his assailant’s follow-up attacks. Even as the fear and panic raced through his body, Marshal calmly dropped to the floor and rolled left, moving in the same direction the gun had gone. His attacker followed after him, but instead tripped when his knees banged up against Marshal’s crouched position. With a grunt, he toppled over in a noisy clattering of falling paint cans.

  Marshal tried to scramble away, but collapsed as a flailing hand caught hold of his ankle. He kicked out with his other foot, and found that he might as well have been kicking a slab of concrete. He kicked again blindly, and heard a snarl as his heel caught something vulnerable. The hand loosened, and Marshal managed to wriggle free.

  He tried to get to his feet again, but his attacker proved quicker. Marshal was bowled over again when an empty barrel smashed into him. Realizing that his opponent must have thrown it, Marshal rolled with the strike, allowing it to knock him backwards and away. He landed amidst a pile of chains and loose tools.

  Whoever was attacking him, he thought, they had just thrown a fifty pound, metal barrel like it was a baseball. The strength it would required to heave that barrel…

  He tried to regain his footing, and found stars dancing in his vision. He forced the dizziness away, grabbed the chains at his feet and flung them towards his enemy, aiming low.

  He rolled out of the way as something big tripped over the chains, became tangled, and crashed to the floor with an animalistic snarl. Again, flailing hands tried to seize him, but Marshal kept on rolling until he was out of arms reach.

  Fighting off the sparkling darkness of impending unconsciousness, Marshal continued to try to put as much space in between himself and his attacker as he could. Coming up on all fours, he scrambled off in a new direction, hoping that somehow, the creature might lose him in the dark. He still had his blanket, but as it was more of a hindrance now than a shroud, he flung it off of him in the direction of his attacker.

  His attacker, who’d managed to regain his feet, recoiled in the dark, fighting the blanket as it entered his embrace.

  Suddenly, there was light.

  “I’m here, Marshal!” Angie cried out, waving her flashlight across the room. “I didn’t leave you! Marshal, I’m here!”

  Blind panic found Marshal then, and the world entered slow motion. In the pantomime of terror and regret, Marshal felt a sinking weight of pure despair, remembering that he’d chosen this. Angie had warned him, begged for them to leave. Now, in the chaos and the terror of the moment, his choices might be the cause of her death.

  He saw his assailant, huge and brutish, still fighting against the blanket. Magically, in his desperation in the dark, Marshal’s wild throw had deposited the thick, black blanket shroud over his attacker’s head. For the moment, the figure was tearing ineffectually at it in confusion.

  “Get the hell out of here!” he screamed at Angie.

  “Shoot him, Marshal,” the girl squealed, pointing at the floor near him. “Shoot him!”

  “Run!”

  Then, all at once, he saw where she was pointing. The gun lay not five feet from him. In a flash he dove on it and rolled to his feet, his hand closing on the familiar grip. He came up in a crouched position with the gun raised and ready to shoot.

  “Marshal?”

  The deep, sobbing voice, muffled under the blanket, was like a cry out of Hell, filled with misery and regret.

  “Shoot him,” Angie shrieked, pointing her flashlight at the attacker.

  “No! No, please fucking God, Marshal, no!”

  The voice seemed to be trying to speak through its tears. Heavy sobs erupted as big hands frantically clawed at the blanket, flinging it away at last.

  “Oh God, Marshal. I’m sorry! Don’t shoot me, please! I’m so fucking sorry!”

  The light fell on the attacker, who had sunk to his knees in supplication, his heavy gasps wracked with despair, exhaustion, and regret. The sunken eyes squinted into the unforgiving light of Angie’s flashlight, matted with hair, hollow with weeks of fear. Two weeks growth, the unchanged, tattered clothing, the accumulated filth, gave the monstrous man the look of a wild beast. Yet he merely sat there on his knees, unmoving, staring into the light and the gun with an expression that bordered on the edge of madness.

  Confusion rose up in Marshal, followed by disbelief. He scrambled backwards, climbing to his feet, keeping the gun trained on the weeping man in front of him. Eventually, that too seemed unimportant, and as he gazed at the apparition before him, he lowered the gun in wonder.

  “Luca? Is that you?”

  Before he could so much as scratch his head, he was swept up into a desperate embrace. Lucenzo Sabbatini, a broken man, wept openly onto his shoulder.

  Chapter Eight: Day 20: You Do What You Gotta Do

  It was after six, and already getting dark, when Crapmobile began its journey back to the apartment.

  “You sure this thing is safe?” Luca asked. He’d assumed the rearward pushing position, allowing Angie to ride. She perched atop the tall skid, which was now so overburdened that she had to duck her head to avoid the ceiling.

  Crapmobile was wobbling under all the extra weight. Luca’s welding gear, a set of four tires, twelve batteries, and a few of Luca’s tools, had seriously exceeded Marshal’s estimates of the maximum load. Even so, Marshal had decided to risk it.

  “She’ll get us home,” Marshal said, hoping this was true.

  “Fuckin’ hope so,” Luca muttered, much recovered from his earlier display of vulnerability. “I’d hate to survive two weeks in hell, just to get eaten b
ecause you can’t build a fucking car. I’ve seen box carts from seven year olds that have more structural integrity than this.”

  “It’s the best I could do with what I had,” Marshal snapped. “I didn’t see you building any luxury cars while you were hiding out in your junkyard. And whether or not you think Crapmobile is a piece of shit, you owe your life to it, so show a little respect.”

  “Respect? Pfft!” Luca said. “All right, then. Fine. Respectfully, I don’t think that Crapmobile is a piece of shit. I know it’s a piece of shit. I’m kinda fucking amazed we made it this far. Look at this fucking thing! You call that a steering column? Fuckin’ boats got better steering than this. And couldn’t you give this thing an engine? What, am I, Fred Flintstone over here?”

  In spite of her loyalty to Marshal, Angie giggled.

  “If you don’t like it, you can get out and walk,” Marshal said. “Besides. Any engine we put in this heap would bring every zombie in the downtown area down on top of us. You think of that? So if you think you can do better, you’re welcome to try.”

  “Jesus Christ, Marshal,” Luca said, “I’ve been taking cars apart and putting them back together since I was sixteen. Trust me! I can do better. A fucking retarded monkey with a broken hammer could do better than this. As for the engine, chew on this, smart guy. I got three Tesla engines back at the yard. Electric motors, capable of firing off 300 clicks on a full battery carrying a couple of thousand pounds. And they don’t make a sound.”

  “You have Tesla’s?” Marshal asked, his surprise crowding out his resentment.

  “Hah?” Luca said. “That got your attention, didn’t it? Three of them. With you to do my wiring – which, I’ll admit, is something that you’re pretty good at – and me to do the rest, we can turn Crapmobile into a lean, mean, garbage machine.”

  “I knew there was a reason I didn’t leave you behind,” Marshal said.

  “You’re funny,” Angie said suddenly, grinning at Luca.

  Luca gave the girl a wink. “Price of genius, sweetheart. And you’re kind of unexpected, ain’t ya, kiddo? How’d you manage to wind up slumming with this loser?”

  “Marshal saved my life,” Angie said loyally. “He’s smart and brave.”

  “He did?” Luca laughed harshly. “Well, it goes to show you that even a broken clock gets it right twice a day.”

  “You shouldn’t talk about him like that,” she said in a scolding tone. “He said that you two were adopted brothers, and that you were his best friend. He said that he’d go to jail for you, if he had to.”

  “Angie…” Marshal said.

  “He said that, did he?” Luca said, a hint of mockery in his voice. “Ain’t he sweet? Course, I’d have had to get thrown in jail right after him, just to keep his punk ass alive, but I got used to that. Fucking girl guides would have beat him up for cookie money without me to look out for him.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Angie,” Marshal said. “Underneath that big, stupid, lumbering, homicidal exterior, Luca’s just a big, fluffy, teddy bear, looking for a hug.”

  “Hey! I will rip your arms off and make you eat them!”

  “Big talk for a man who smells like an open sewer.”

  In truth, Luca smelled worse than an open sewer. It was the kind of eye-watering odor that made you imagine how lucky the zombies were that they got to travel around on the outside.

  “Well, I’m a big guy, aren’t I?” Luca snapped back, his voice rising slightly with embarrassment. “Non rompermi le palle, all right? You try not stinkin’, after two weeks without a shower or cologne or havin’ to piss an’ crap into jars every day!”

  “Are you two fighting?” Angie asked. “I can’t tell.”

  “And another thing,” Luca continued. “Since when do you carry a gun? It’s not like it’d do you any fucking good against the dead. I coulda killed you back there. You start out with this creepy music, like, from out of a fucking horror movie. Next thing, there’s a guy sneaking through my shop with a gun in his hand.”

  “Marshal had to shoot some bad men a couple of days ago,” Angie said. “They were going to hurt me, and he killed them. There’s more dangerous things out there than just zombies. Can I call you Uncle Luca?”

  A long silence followed, during which Marshal steered and pushed Crapmobile with intense concentration. The wheels were squealing under the extra weight and had developed a strong tendency to steer to the right. Marshal’s hands were growing sore from gripping the wheel.

  We share everything, the disembodied voice of Ted said.

  “Did you hear me?” Angie asked. “I asked if it was okay to call you Uncle Luca.”

  “What? Oh.” The big man smiled down at her with sudden fondness. “Yeah. Sure, kid, I think I’d like that. Uncle Luca. S’got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Angie said.

  Another silence fell.

  After a few seconds, Luca said, “So, about these two guys-”

  “Zombie ahead,” Marshal interrupted. “Oh shit, it’s Frank. Stop pushing. Let’s let him get ahead of us.”

  “Frank,” Luca said. “Are we talking Frank, as in our brother, Frank?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” Marshal said, feeling a stab of guilt. “I’m sorry, Luca. You shouldn’t have had to find out this way. I should have already told you.”

  “What? Frank’s a zombie? Marone!”

  “Yeah,” Marshal agreed. “But it’s more than that. He’s also a bit of a pain in the ass.”

  “Yeah? Well, at least that hasn’t changed. What’s he doing here?”

  “That’s the big mystery,” Marshal said.

  “He doesn’t act like other zombies,” Angie explained.

  “He came by on the day of the outbreak,” Marshal said. “Told me over the phone that he had something important to tell me, though he never got around to saying what.”

  “Oh yeah,” Luca said. “I remember him sayin’ he was gonna do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Never mind. I’ll tell you later. Just tell me what happened.”

  “He… had Cassandra with him,” Marshal said, with some difficulty. “She was his first victim, I think.”

  Luca let out a choking noise. “Cassie?”

  Marshal sighed. “Yeah. It was pretty bad. I saw it all from the window. Anyway, I don’t know if that had anything to do with it, but Frank’s been acting weird ever since, even for a zombie. He never leaves the streets outside the apartment.” He paused, thinking of the night at the pharmacy. “Or almost never. It’s like he’s searching for something. But that’s just the start. Once, I saw him actually start eating another zombie.”

  “He did what?” Angie asked in surprise.

  “Yeah. Sorry I haven’t mentioned it before now. It happened a few days before we met. Another zombie wandered into the area, just lurching around in search mode, when Frank walked up to it and took a huge bite out of its shoulder. He ate half an arm before the other zombie started to notice. It fought back for a few seconds, then ran away.”

  “That’s weird,” Angie said.

  “You can fuckin’ say that again,” Luca muttered.

  “The point is,” Marshal went on, “he seems to be both smarter and more erratic than the other zombies. He still hasn’t been able to find us, but he never stops looking.”

  “Fuck,” Luca said.

  The sun had set when Crapmobile pulled into the back hallway of Marshal’s building. Despite the extra weight, the skid-lift had no trouble lifting Crapmobile and all its contents.

  “Home at last,” Marshal said, squeezing around the edge of the skid and pushing his way out the back door. He turned to Luca. “You! You need a shower, pronto, before your sheer toxicity burns a hole through my floor for the zombies to climb through. Try not to waste water, but use whatever you need to get rid of your stench.”

  “Quit hitting on me, Marshal,” Luca grumbled. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “I’ll get dinner st
arted,” Marshal continued. “How’s a big spaghetti and meat sauce dinner sound?”

  “How does it sound?” A feral glint entered Luca’s eyes. “Marshal, only a day ago, I was forced to kill and eat a rat, I was so hungry. The catering truck food went rotten in the middle of last week, and I was too fucking scared to go looking for anything else. How does it sound? It sounds great. Only, the two of you go rest. Tonight, I’m making the dinner.”

  “Okay,” Marshal said, knowing that Luca had worked in Sabbatini’s just like him. “That sounds good. But shower first.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Luca said. “Quit yer whining.”

  “Can I finish watching Harry Potter, Marshal?” Angie asked.

  “Yeah, go ahead. I’ll join you in a bit.”

  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was in full swing, with Harry and his friends on the run from death eaters. Marshal sat down on the couch with a weary sigh. Beside him, curled up and barefoot in the corner of Marshal’s massive couch, Angie watched a wand battle with intense attention.

  It had been a day.

  Luca.

  Apparently, his trip to Montreal with Vincent got canceled when the ‘client’ they were going to visit unexpectedly managed to cover his debts at the last minute. And so, Luca had taken the opportunity to drop in at the auto yard, but had planned to visit Marshal later in the evening... until a ravenous horde of eight or nine undead charged into Luca’s Junkyard Villa, and descended on the catering truck. Most of Luca’s employees had been out at the truck when it happened, and had been taken in the span of five minutes.

  Luca witnessed the early parts of it from the window of his office in the rafters. After watching a 450lb mechanic named Georgio be torn apart by a zombie that had a crowbar still impaled in its head, he made the assessment that confrontation wasn’t the answer. Not that this revelation alone would have helped him. After finishing off the crew, the monsters had proceeded to do as they do: smash in every window, batter down every door, and search every nook and cranny for prey.