by Nick Cole
Some were evident. Others impossible.
Chapter Seven
“So, what happened?”
Frank the Groovy Man looked up tiredly at Holiday, almost too tired to answer the question put to him.
“Another beer?” asked Holiday when Frank didn’t reply.
Frank looked down at his ash covered hands, the lines there dark and sooty.
“No. I’m done.” They sat in front of Holiday’s townhome on the little tiled steps listening to the birds, watching the sun burn off the last of the night’s strange fog. After the intersection, they’d wandered back down the hill and started looking at the car wreck at the end of the street. It really wasn’t much of a wreck. There was no damage to the metallic orange SUV other than some superficial battering and a lot of bloody handprints left behind on the orange metallic paint job. The vehicle had simply turned askance to the direction of traffic in the middle of the narrow road, its doors still wide open. In the back they found the body of a man.
He was armless, legless and mostly torso-less.
His mouth still moved, even though his lips and throat were torn away. He made a growling, gnashing whisper-rasp. Turning toward them as they opened the rear door, the man’s eyes rolled wildly, then suddenly focused with an inner hate as he stared at Holiday and Frank.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Holiday stepping back.
Frank just stood there holding the big pipe wrench he’d carried throughout the night.
“How’s he still…”
“Alive?” asked Frank after the long pause of Holiday’s unfinished sentence hung for a moment in the morning air between them and what was left of the man in the back of the car. “Three days ago someone on the news jokingly called it zombies,” Frank spoke tiredly, never taking his eyes off the still living corpse. “Riots were just being reported in all the major cities. People were acting like wild animals.”
The thing growled, crowing gutturally, enraged and helpless to do more than merely whisper at them.
“Two days ago it was a joke. The networks were bringing in zombie “experts” almost as a laugh. Some guy who wrote a scifi book that got turned into a movie with Brad Pitt. He seemed serious. He said we should take what was happening as proof and start preparing. The news people just laughed and cut to the next segment. Imagine that.”
Frank grabbed the thing that was once a man and pulled it out through the rear hatch of the metallic orange SUV, letting it flop down onto the street, its entrails following in a greasy black trail. It flopped around on the road as Frank raised the pipe wrench over his shoulder and heaved it downward onto the skull of the once-man. He merely grunted with the effort.
The thing stopped moving. Its dislocated jaw agape. Its eyes now vacant.
“Imagine that,” said Frank.
Holiday lit a cigarette.
They’d walked away from that place, the place of the wreck and the rat pile and the once-man that still lived even though it had been ripped mostly to shreds.
Now, sitting on the steps amid the thick heavy scent of Holiday’s garden and the late summer morning, too tired to do the next thing, whatever that was, they listened to the overwhelming silence all around them. The sound of nothing else alive for miles and miles.
“I don’t believe it,” said Holiday and swallowed some beer.
“I don’t either. But…” Frank nodded toward the wreck at the end of the street. “We might not have much of a choice about what we do and don’t want to believe anymore.”
A crow called from a nearby light post. Calling to other crows. Distant crows. Crows were still alive.
“What happened to all the other people that were on the street yesterday morning?”
Frank stood up. Stretched. Holiday could hear bones cracking in his thick neck. Frank said, “I noticed they got interested in the noise. The gunfire up the hill where someone was probably making their last stand drew them toward whatever was going on up there. Until then, they just kinda wandered the streets. People down near the freeway at the bottom of Bake Parkway were doing the same thing, except there was a sea of them. Sometimes they’d swarm cars where people, other people, were still trapped. I just thought…” Frank sighed. Then, “I told myself it was because of the politics. That people had finally had enough of this lousy government and this was our little French Revolution. I saw some things I ignored because I didn’t want to see them. When I got back up here I thought the few people I’d passed were on drugs. I got back to my house… after a few minutes I heard them pounding on my garage door. Later, when whoever that guy was…” He nodded toward the metallic orange SUV. “When whoever that was tried to make a run for it… somehow he got trapped and ended up leaning on the horn. Maybe he thought someone would come and help him. That’s when I noticed all of them heading up the street.”
“Yeah. I noticed that too,” said Holiday.
“And did you hear all that shooting before the fire? Up there in…”
“Yeah.”
“Well, soon as that started they all headed that way. So, noise seems to attract them. They don’t seem quick or agile. Just mean. My guess is it has something to do with that superflu they’ve been talking about on the news. The one that’s got China quarantined. Somehow it got out over here and… well, the emergency rooms were filling up but they said it was a different virus. Maybe they lied, know what I mean, buddy?”
Buddy.
I’ve never been called anyone’s “buddy” before, Groovy Man, thought Holiday. Still he liked it. He liked the old guy.
“So what do we do now?” asked Holiday. His beer can was empty. He was already thinking about getting another.
“I need a shower and some rest. I’m going home. I live in number 17 at the end of the street. The one down there on the corner that looks out on the orchard. Well, where the orchard used to be. Let me sleep for a few hours and then we’ll make some dinner and figure out what to do next. In the meantime I’d keep quiet and if you’ve got a gun or a weapon, you might want to keep that handy. Otherwise find some weapons.”
“Okay,” replied Holiday and watched Frank, still in his bathrobe and slacks, gold chain around his thick neck, walk back down the street. When he was gone Holiday got a beer out of the fridge. It was cold. The power was still on.
He tried the TV again. All the stations still showed the same STANDBY message. He couldn’t connect to the internet. He thought about watching a movie but he couldn’t access the ones he’d saved on his DVR. He went through his disks and landed on Top Gun but he couldn’t get into it. He poured some bourbon and mixed it with coke, wishing he had a lime. He went into his garage and before he could check himself raised the loud automatic garage door. It grated noisily as it worked its way up the tracks. He stood there listening. There was no noise anywhere.
There were no cars.
No radios.
No neighborhood kids riding bikes and skateboards.
Just the occasional unseen crow barking its “caw” at something or nothing.
He walked outside, standing in the blaze of noon as it reflected off the garages and the houses all around his parking court. The heat felt warm and heavy in the silence. He drank his drink and lit a cigarette.
So who’s gone now?
He thought about that. His parents had been gone a long time. He’d never known his mother. His dad had died a few years back. He had relatives, but he only barely remembered them.
Is that why you drink?
He drank.
I don’t think so.
He thought of any weapons he might have lying around. He had a big kitchen knife. He’d bought it after watching the Food Network show with the crazy blond spiky-haired guy. Guy Fieri. It was a kitchen knife with flames on the handle. He’d gotten a fat check that week from a stand-in gig on a police show that had gone into overtime, so he�
�d bought the knife on Amazon. He liked to cook late at night. When he had a date, after going out he’d come home and make her a late night snack. Or he would whip something up for all his drinking buddies when they’d finished a night of carousing down at the Spectrum. He’d whip up some street tacos or a big bowl of pasta. He often thought that if the acting thing didn’t work out he might just go to cooking school.
So, I have the knife.
With flames on the handle.
What else?
Not much. Some garden tools. A good walking stick solid enough that he could trust it to actually…
Trust it to do what?
Defend yourself.
You mean bash someone’s head in like Frank did?
I guess so. If I had to.
He looked at the wreck down the street.
“I guess I might have to,” he whispered.
He finished the drink, went back inside, and washed out the glass.
I know where there’s a gun.
He walked back down the street. Back to the scene of the Rat Pile. The scene of the crime they’d called it in all those police detective shows he’d worked on. Done background in.
Scene of the crime.
And what exactly was the crime at the scene of the crime? Was it Frank bashing in that guy’s skull? Or was it Frank bashing in the monster’s skull? Another man, now a monster, his skull. Or was the crime somewhere in the Rat Pile? What the Rat-Piling had been all about. The scene of the crime.
Who had been leaning on that horn? Begging for someone to come and help them while you watched through the venetian blinds like some film noir detective. Watched while murder was being done in broad daylight.
At the scene of the crime.
I think too much, Holiday told himself.
But I heard a gun being fired.
He replayed the three pop, pop, pops in his memory.
He looked in through the open doors of the metallic orange SUV still waiting at an odd angle in the middle of the road. He checked the floorboard without actually getting in. There was congealed blood everywhere. Flies rested and then suddenly hopped up, darting off like circus performers to other viscous pools. There were bullet holes in the smashed windows. They were small. Very small. But there was no gun.
Then what happened, he asked himself. What happened here?
Think.
The gunfire at the top of the hill. Up there at someone’s palatial gang-star home. They’d all… those people… the Rat-Pilers…
He walked over to the edge of the road to the small walkway leading between the two townhome unit buildings. There was blood along the small landscaped path between the homes. Drops of it. Ahead he could see where the Rat-Pilers had climbed a low concrete wall and started up the hill through the landscaping. The people in the street yesterday morning. The monsters. Homing in on all that gunfire from the Gang-Star’s house on top of the hill.
You don’t know that it was a gang-star, he heard himself think.
I don’t.
But you know the type. Worked hard in school. Studied computers while I wasted my time with acting. Six figure salary at some game start-up down in Irvine. Cool, hipster clothes. Glasses. Model girlfriend. High end SUV. Table parties in Vegas. And all day writing code for video games. The most boring job in the world. But when he gets home he returns to a mansion straight out of some show on MTV. Luxury pool. Movie room with obligatory SCARFACE poster. Designer kitchen that no one knows how to use half the stuff in it.
Jealous?
Sometimes.
He found an arm in the grass on the hill. It was still holding the small automatic pistol. After a moment, Holiday pried the fingers away from the grip.
I have no idea how to use a gun, he told himself.
He knew other actors who took classes in Hollywood on how to use guns just so they’d look like they knew what they were doing when they got cast to actually hold a gun. He’d never been asked to hold a gun in any of the movies or shows he’d done background in. He’d always figured that if he got a role that required him to hold a gun, he’d take a class then. He knew a guy who taught classes.
Everyone knows a guy.
Is it loaded?
He remembered someone once saying to always treat a gun, even a prop gun, as though it were loaded. He carried it gingerly back to the garage. It was two o’clock now. He got a rag and wiped off the blood while pointing the end of the barrel away from himself.
Berretta .25 was stamped into the gun metal.
He set it on the kitchen counter.
He got out his flame knife.
I know where there might be other guns.
Could they have survived the fire? He asked himself.
I don’t know. I’ll have to go look.
At the top of the hill, standing in the wide flat intersection underneath the skeletal remains of the still smoking neighborhood, he realized the immensity of the task. The task of looking for guns in all that hot, ashy ruin. Or rather the impossibility of looking for still usable guns in all that burnt and blackened pile of once-somethings. The ashes were too hot to even set foot in on that side of the street. The ground burned beneath the soles of his Docs when he tried to go five steps into it. He had no idea where, in all that melted, blackened rubble, he would even begin to look for the weapons used in the last firefight at the Gang-Star’s house.
If all those surrealist twisting bathtubs and melted cars he could see had not survived, how could some guns? Guns that were probably empty now.
He lit a cigarette.
I’ll wait. In a few days it’ll cool off. Then I can go up in there and see if anything survived.
In his heart he knew it would be more than just that.
It would be like a graveyard up there.
It would be like… a lonely place.
He was thinking about it when he heard her shouting, running at him, waving her hands. “Hey!” she shouted at him from far down the wide road that led to the big box stores.
Behind her, shambling figures stumbled up the long curving road that led back to the commercial center of Viejo Verde.
“Hey!” she shouted again as she ran toward him. “Are you one of them?”
Chapter Eight
Winter sleet screamed across the bullet-riddled parapets of the burning Schloss, high among the purple shadows of the Bavarian mountains. Down in the courtyard, the burning wreckage of the Hind MI-24 Helicopter belched black smoke as the last sniper, charged with guarding the wounded pilot, slapped a half-loaded magazine back into the M-16 he’d picked up off the deck of the downed bird. The weapon had jammed. He’d cleared it. He was surrounded. Spetsnaz paratroopers were shooting at him from every direction. The castle walls. The castle. The high windows. The pilot was dead. The helicopter was on fire.
A Soviet F-1 pineapple-shaped grenade flew through the open door the sniper had been firing from. It bounced off the engine compartment of the chopper and rolled under a canvas seat out of easy reach.
A second later it exploded, killing the sniper.
Deep in the bowels of the ancient German castle, she stood over the dying man.
The dying Nazi, she reminded herself as she pulled back the charging handle on the Ak-74U, sliding the first bullet into the firing chamber.
In the center of the lab, the amazing machine whined as a pulsing howl crooned through the shifting blue colors between the impossibly infinite collapsing rings at its center.
“Bitte…” he gasped. “Bitte, meine frau…” he gasped again and coughed. “Ich bin freund.” Then desperately as she raised the assault rifle and pointed it at him, “ICH BIN FREUND!” he shouted at her, pointing one long bony finger toward the red hammer and sickle on her beret.
“ICH BIN…”
She unloaded the entire clip into his chest, the comp
act assault rifle making a long staccato burp. His body jumped from the floor as the wicked machine gun marred and mutilated the lanky frame of the old man.
The old Nazi.
Her face, a few freckles, normally peaches and cream, was pale. Bloodless. She was lithe, even with all the bulky Soviet arctic pattern field dress. Her curly hair spilled out the back of the paratrooper’s beret.
She started to turn back. Started to turn back to the halls that led back… back and up and out of this accursed place.
“Don’t ever go back,” she whispered, catching herself. But those words weren’t her words.
No, not at all.
She bent and picked up the canvas bag. She walked toward the machine, letting the assault rifle dangle on its strap across her chest.
The machine was beginning to howl. No, it had been howling, now it was keening. As though it were in pain. As though it were tearing reality in two with its screamingly urgent pain.
She bent down near the master control panel and opened the bag. She placed all three explosive charges on the ground.
The machine’s cry split the very fabric of noise but she blocked it out. Still, it managed to make her feel nauseated.
She wanted to cry.
She wanted to stop.
She wanted to…
“I don’t do that anymore,” she whispered and picked up the first charge.
That was when the machine imploded. Because it had to. Because it couldn’t possibly ever, that was impossible, turn any faster.
It had to implode.
And when it did… it took her away from there.
Chapter Nine
She was lithe. Long curly dark hair flying behind her as she ran. She wore cut-off jeans, a tank top and combat boots. She had a green canvas bag flung over one shoulder.
