by Nick Cole
Holiday turned toward her, his mind refusing to say or do anything as it struggled to pull itself away from that half-remembered thought brought on by the desolation of the hill.
She stopped and just stared at him from far down the road. Then she darted across the street and into another neighborhood on the side of the street that had survived the fire.
“Wait!” shouted Holiday. But she was gone. The shamblers came on toward him. He could hear their groaning, panting moans rising in the still, hot afternoon air.
Holiday dashed back down the street toward the Vineyards, running alongside the wall surrounding the adjacent neighborhood that lay on the other side of the street leading between the neighborhood she’d disappeared into and the Vineyards. Halfway down the block, he climbed up on the wall, then looked back toward the intersection at the top of the hill. The first shamblers were already awkwardly loping around the corner and coming down the hill after him. They looked like normal people until Holiday looked too long. Then he saw the caked blood, the pale faces, the large dead eyes like lumps of coal, mouths open, claws out and reaching.
Holiday looked down from the top of the wall into that other neighborhood the strange girl who’d yelled at him had disappeared into.
Large houses on small lots. The new Americana. Cars in the street. Windows smashed. Doors ripped from their hinges. A few people… zombies, staring vacantly at nothing, still standing in the middle of the street near wide pools of drying blood. He saw the girl who’d shouted at him running toward him from the far end of the street. A man who’d been crawling along the sidewalk reached out and swiped at her. She did a short dance step and kicked out at his head, then dodged out into the middle of the street.
Holiday dropped to the other side of the wall, down into someone’s backyard, and ran for the fence that separated the front yard from the back. Halfway across the yard, a crowd of people came spilling out through a shattered sliding glass door that led into the darkened house. Their faces were pale, eyes wide with anger, gore-crusted teeth gnashing. They pushed through and over patio furniture, knocking things every which way to get at him. They wobbled away from these tumbling collapsing odds and ends after him as he hit the side yard at a run and vaulted the wooden fence, not wasting time on a flimsy latch he’d spotted. He ran across the front yard and into the street. The girl saw him, her face determined, set on escape, her eyes wide and worried that she might not.
She cut sharply toward the other side of the street, heading for a house with its contents spewed out like the guts of a road kill.
“I’m not one of them!” he shouted at her. “I’m not crazy!”
She turned sharply back toward him and halted, unsure what to do next.
The wooden fence behind Holiday was already taking a beating from the group in the backyard, as the unseen people-monsters behind it growled and smashed at it with their fists and bodies. Up the street, another large group pushed their way hungrily toward them, still following the girl. The crawling man she’d dodged on the sidewalk, the man with no legs, crawled toward her, leaving bloody tracks as he went.
“Follow me,” said Holiday.
She turned to run and saw a fat man, shirtless and bloody, lumbering out the front door of a gutted home that lay between them. There was fresh red blood all over his chest.
Holiday was already pounding down the sidewalk toward the wide front entrance that led out into the main street and toward another housing tract across the way.
If we turn right, reasoned Holiday in his head as his feet struck the pavement one after the other as fast as they could, we can get back to my place.
But they’ll follow us back there.
Across the street, another low end townhome development, the Villa Toscanos, sprawled away toward the toll road and the commercial nurseries and rolling lowlands beyond.
He turned to her as they ran. She had peaches and cream skin turned brown, a light dusting of freckles and curly hair that seemed more auburn than dark in the full blaze of noon. She was sweating.
“We can’t go where it’s safe just now,” he yelled back to her. “We’ll have to lose them first, okay?”
She nodded, gasping for air.
“This way,” said Holiday and crossed the street into that other development, the Villa Toscanos. There was little obvious damage here. Or the damage was hidden due to the design of the homes. Here there were only tall clustered townhomes, bright and burning pastel colors, closed front doors, sparse greenery, and tinted windows reflecting the afternoon glare of the sun, all stacked tightly side by side. Behind Holiday and the strange girl, the monster mob flooded out the wide entrance of that other neighborhood, following them.
Holiday ran down the street toward a T intersection, passing silent front doors, buzzing bees and the lush eruptions of red bougainvillea. He heard the girl’s boots on the sidewalk close at his heels. He heard her green canvas bag whispering against her body as she ran. He heard her short panting breaths as she gasped for more air in the hot end of summer heat. Behind them he heard the distant groans, the raspy papery roars and the uneven padding of shambling, lurching feet as their pursuers crossed the wide main street between neighborhoods, following them.
They turned left.
A short block.
The big box shape of the Walmart rose distantly in the background above the uppermost roofs of the tightly packed townhomes. At the end of the block they could only turn left again, and ten steps down the street they saw the dead-end cul-de-sac.
The townhomes lay tight together at the end of the cul-de-sac, one right up against another. There were no entrances into side yards or spaces to slip into between the houses. Only garages and doors fronted the dead-end street, forming a kind of arena of blacktop and townhome. In the middle of the street a brand new, midnight blue Dodge Challenger idled shakily. The windows were darkly tinted. Music bumped and thundered behind the closed doors and windows of the shuddering muscle car.
The girl went to the nearest garage door and tried to open it. Holiday watched as she tried to find a handle at the bottom of the door so she could pull it up. When she couldn’t, she reached down to its bottom and heaved. It didn’t budge, and Holiday was amazed she’d even tried to open a garage door that way. Automatic garage doors wouldn’t budge unless the remote was used or the track disengaged. Even he knew that. Also he hadn’t seen a handle on a garage door in years.
Holiday approached the tinted windows of the blue Challenger. Most of a face, jaw missing, appeared pressed against the glass, eyes rolling, tongue working spasmodically on the window leaving a greasy trail.
He could hear the mob down the street now. He ran to a townhome door and tried it.
Locked.
Another.
Locked.
Another.
Locked.
“What do we do now?” asked the girl, her voice high-pitched and serious. She wasn’t hysterical. She wasn’t afraid. She asked as though she’d been here before. This place. Surrounded. Outnumbered. Trapped.
Holiday cast his eyes about.
On the second floor of each of the townhomes surrounding the dead-end street, there was a small roof-like ledge, tiled in terracotta. The wide bay windows up there either looked into a stairwell or a master bedroom, guessed Holiday.
“I’ll give you a boost up,” he said, looking at the ledge above their heads.
The corpse mob rounded the corner at the end of the street. One man, a shrieking pant-er, roared with hunger as he lunge-loped toward them, a shredded and bloody pant leg dragging along behind.
Holiday boosted the girl up and she scrambled onto the narrow ledge. She turned to try and help him up, but Holiday knew her slight frame wouldn’t be enough for him. He was over six feet.
“Go through the window!” he shouted up to her. “Come down the stairs and unlock the front door.”
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She nodded at him, stood, grabbed onto the side of the building and kicked her combat boots through the window. Holiday looked down, eyes closed, just in time to avoid a shower of shattered glass.
The lunge-loper was halfway down the block and entering the cul-de-sac. Behind him, a woman who looked like a crack addict with knobby yellow teeth and a missing eye, screeched as she ran forward, her pink dress almost a pristine counterpoint to her ragged hair, taut skin, and gore-crusted fingernails.
I hope there’s no one inside there with her, thought Holiday as he picked up a decorative rock and sent it square into the chest of the lunge-loper who wasn’t even fazed by its impact for a second.
Holiday heard the distant thud of footsteps behind the pink stucco wall at his back, as though someone was running down stairs making a hollow gallop, a pause and then it resumed again. He thought about a cigarette and maybe even a beer. The mob coming at him was a horde of raving lunatics turned into monsters that were once people. Cannibals was the word that suddenly occurred to Holiday. The rushing mob filled the entire street as it came on, stumbling and reaching out for him all at once.
He heard the lock of the door being worked at his back.
He heard someone jerk on the door without success.
The loper made the driveway, his jaw wide and twisting in a ferocious snarl. Holiday could see the loper still carried someone’s severed arm in one hand. He could see the bite marks in its tattooed biceps and forearms.
Holiday readied himself, his legs wide, his fingers splayed.
Distantly he heard the sound of the lock rattling back and forth, then the soft whoosh of an opened door as a blast of cold air conditioning suddenly erupted at his back, cooling the streaming sweat he’d been drenched in. He felt a delicate, slender hand pulling his shoulder backward and he felt himself going with it, stumbling back into cool darkness as the girl pushed off his falling body and lunged for the door, slamming it shut.
The impacts that followed almost threw her off of it as the loper and others, many others, ran smack into the door. But she dug in, her slender, muscled legs straining to find purchase on the slick tiled entryway, her combat boots slipping as she pushed back against their heavings. Holiday scrambled upright and shot the lock as the jarring impacts cascaded into it with growing force.
They remained, intertwined, leaning against the shuddering door. Breathing heavily. Panting.
“I’m Holiday,” he introduced himself, sticking out a sweaty hand.
“Ash,” she whispered breathily.
And then she smiled at him.
Holiday looked at her and felt time, a mere moment in the universe, stand still. As though it had stopped its crazy turn for something important. Something to be remembered. Always.
Then time cranked into overdrive as the battering at the door renewed with vigor and growling. The door began to shake within its frame.
“I don’t know how long this door’s gonna hold,” whispered Holiday. As if to confirm this, a groaning sound shrieked from the frame around the door.
Ash shouldered her bag and made her way down a small hall and into a narrow living room. On the far side of the room, a sliding glass door opened onto a tiny unfinished patio where a lone rusty barbeque rested on cinder blocks.
“We can go this way,” she called back to Holiday.
She opened the sliding glass door and peeked out into the small concrete-finished yard. A spindly fence of thin, red wood bordered the yard.
Holiday left the shuddering door and followed her out into the small yard.
On the other side of the red wood fence they saw a nature preserve. Downslope from that, a wide main road and then beyond that, a three story apartment complex with open stairwells. Past the apartment complex, the big box of the Walmart rose above the highest roof of the apartment complex.
“There’re zombies everywhere,” she whispered matter of factly.
Zombies, thought Holiday. That’s what they are. They’re zombies.
He heard the door separating from the frame back inside the house.
All through the nature preserve, lone zombies wandered and stumbled in the high brush. Over in the apartment complex Holiday and Ash watched crowds in the stairwells, pounding furiously on random doors.
My trip to the store yesterday probably almost got me killed, thought Holiday.
Behind them, the front door to the townhome splintered, and suddenly a distant chorus of raspy groans and murmur yells was real and suddenly present.
“Over the fence, soldier boy,” shouted Ash, and grabbed the top of it, swinging her legs up and over. Holiday leveraged himself up, felt the flimsiness in the red wood slats, experienced a brief vision of the fence shattering and goring him, then vaulted down into the tall grass on the other side.
Chapter Ten
They could hear the zombies in the field laboring through the brush to reach them. One shrieked insanely as if it was being torn apart from the inside. Holiday and Ash crouched and crawled through a stand of low hanging wild oak that hadn’t been pruned all that summer. At the bottom of the preserve, they passed through a dry stream bed and entered a cluster of wisteria, pushing through its dustiness to reach the sidewalk beyond. A few of the zombies on the nearest stairwell of the apartment complex across the street saw them and fell over the railings at them, plummeting and arms waving as they tried to take the most direct route to their new prey.
Holiday led Ash downhill along the road that separated the two developments, the townhomes and the apartment complex, until they came to the entrance of a business park that lay alongside the toll road. Zombies crossed the wide field they’d left, or streamed down the stairs of the apartment complex, crashing into the wrought iron fence at the bottom of the property and beginning to build up along its length.
Each turn takes us farther away from my house, thought Holiday. A place that felt much more safe than where he found himself now, dashing up the street to the business park, surrounded by these things with no place to run to. He was feeling tired, exhausted and thirsty. How much farther can we go, he wondered bleakly.
The road up to the business park was lined with white barked spruce and a manicured lawn on each side. They jogged up the road, each of them feeling as though they should move faster, but unable to bring themselves to push harder in the thick heat of noon.
Holiday turned and tried to take the canvas duffel but Ash shook her head and managed a whispery, “No, I can carry my own gear.”
The business park was silent. There were no cars in the parking lot and all the large tinted windows in the low office buildings were dark. Only one of the suites was occupied by an actual business. The rest still had leasing signs posted in their windows.
Holiday tried some of the doors but all of them were locked.
Ash ran back to the small road that led up into the complex and came back just as Holiday was picking up the cement cover from a water meter to smash out a window.
“It’s no good,” she said. “There’re a lot of them coming up the road. Going uphill seems to slow them down. But this place isn’t any good to make a stand. There are too many windows. We go in there, we’ll be trapped for sure. We’ve got to get to a better place. Something more secure.”
Holiday dropped the concrete water meter cover.
“How far away is this safe place of yours?” she asked, panting.
Holiday shook out a cigarette from his pack and lit it, taking a quick raspy drag.
“Not far, but if we lead this bunch back there it won’t be safe anymore. We’ve got to lose them first.”
“What’s that over there?” she said pointing toward the tall corner of the Walmart.
“That’s the Walmart.”
She looked confused.
“You’re not from here are you?” asked Holiday.
Ash shook her head
and smiled quickly.
“Yeah,” said Holiday sucking down a lungful of smoke. “What other choice do we have right now?” He flicked the cigarette away.
“None that I can see,” whispered Ash.
“Okay then,” said Holiday after a moment of thinking through their route to the big box store. “Follow me.”
They climbed a set of steps that led up onto the main street and then crossed the road, climbing a grassy embankment to get up onto the wide blacktop football field that was the parking lot of the Walmart. There were no zombies up there.
Ash and Holiday lay in the grass gasping at the heat, still for a moment.
Holiday checked his smartphone.
Why did you do that, he thought. I don’t know, he answered himself. Maybe time is important right now.
But it isn’t, he heard a voice answer.
Behind them, all through the apartment complex, zombies were streaming over the low wall of the business park Ash and Holiday had come through. Heading straight for them.
“If we can get inside the Walmart we might be able to sneak out the back and then make our way over to my place. But we’ve got to lose them first.”
They pushed away from the grass, its smell fragrant and deep in their lungs as they ran across the hot parking lot where only a lone RV waited in its direct epicenter. Now they could smell the hot tar of the parking lot coming up at them in waves as the soles of their shoes burned. Ahead, the entrance to the massive store loomed above them and when Holiday turned over his shoulder to look back, he could see the first of the zombies coming up onto the grassy slope from the parkway and into the parking lot. There were more, many more of them than he’d expected to see. It seemed all the ones from the apartment complex and the nature preserve had joined with the mob that had been following them through the housing development.
“Don’t look back!” yelled Ash over her shoulder as she ran on ahead of him.
