by Fuchs, A. P.
They were hungry.
Yet that wasn’t what bothered August the most about what he saw.
There was something else.
21
The Cemetery
“Jerk,” Des said right after Joe disappeared between the trees in front of them.
“Yeah, you said it,” Billie said.
Quietly: “Did I do anything wrong?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Did I say anything?”
“Nope.”
Man, did his nose hurt. Des slowly pulled his hands away. Blood was pooled in his palms. He shook them out then checked his nose. The bleeding seemed to have stopped. He pinched the bridge and tilted his head back, just in case.
“You gonna be okay?” Billie asked.
“I’ll live.” His voice was all nasally.
A soft ringing bounced from one side of his brain to the other, back and forth. Joe had popped him hard but, obviously, not hard enough to do some serious damage. Whether that was intentional or not, he didn’t know. The guy had no right to get all upset. He had been the one who saved him.
Zombie wrangler? Not today. More like zombie smacker or something. It still felt good, though, to line drive those deranged dogs.
“Think we should go after him?” Billie said.
It’d be better if we didn’t. But we can’t leave him alone despite what just happened. Grrrgh! I hate being all moral inside! “Might as well. Dude’ll get himself killed if we don’t follow.”
“I don’t know. He’s got a gun.”
“Yeah? Well” —he bent down and picked up the iron pipe— “we got a bat.” Didn’t sound as clever as it had in his head. He pulled his fingers away from his nose and checked for blood. It seemed to have stopped for good. He wiped his nose with his shirt then gestured to Billie for them to get going.
They went up to the trees, parting the jagged branches with their hands, and pushed through. Just on the other side was a chain-linked fence. And just beyond that was a graveyard.
Cemeteries always got the best of Des. When he thought about them, he only envisioned a few tombstones, a couple shrubs and some flowers. Every time he saw one up close—and he’d only been to two real funerals in his life—he was always reminded how serious a business death was. Everybody wound up in a place like this at some point or another. Everybody had their place amongst a sea of graves, just another number in the long, long list of life gone bad.
He always pictured his grave as out in the open, the tombstone a lone marker on a hill, a few daisies in small, pottered vases on either side of the stone. But, he realized, looking out on what had to be over a thousand graves, his would more than likely be in a place like this, his tombstone just one among many, passed by without second thought by everybody not there to visit him. And even if humanity did pull through this season of death, none of his family was left or his friends. And so far, aside from Billie, he hadn’t made any new friends either. Relationships had never been his strong point. He’d only had a few friends while growing up but even those relationships were distant, as if those guys never really wanted to get close to him but only wanted to use him for his Nintendo.
“Need help?” he asked her, one hand on the top bar of the fence.
“I got it,” she said and climbed over.
He tossed the iron pipe to the other side, hopped over, then picked it up.
He scanned the cemetery. “See him?”
“No. Should I call?”
“And wake the dead?”
She gave him a screwed up look.
“Sorry. Couldn’t help it,” he said, smirking.
They walked slowly between a row of graves, their eyes going between the plots and the rest of the cemetery beyond.
“Juice box hero, na na na na na,” he sang softly to calm his speeding heart. “Juice box hero, na na na na na.”
Billie stopped and turned to him. “What?”
“Huh?”
“What’re you singing?”
“That ‘Juice Box Hero’ song,” he said, not believing she hadn’t heard it before.
“What?”
“You know, ‘Juice box hero, na na na na na.’”
She huffed and rolled her eyes. “It’s ‘Jukebox Hero,’ Des.” And walked past him.
He stayed there a moment. “Thought it was ‘Juice Box Hero.’” He shrugged and whistled the melody as he caught up to her.
After, once they cleared the first section, Des’s heart skipped a beat when they entered the next.
The dry, yellow grass on top of some of the graves was torn up, soil and a few shards of wood lay scattered atop the dead blades.
“Do you believe this?” he said. She didn’t seem to hear him, her eyes transfixed further down the line. He tugged at her shirt and only now saw the thick lines of blood running from her waist to just under her arms. “What happened?”
She followed his gaze to her T-shirt. “Oh. Had a problem with a few broken boards. It’s nothing.” She winced as she bent from the left to the right.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
He cleared his throat. “Do you see this?” He pointed with the pipe to one of the torn-up graves.
Billie took a step closer to examine it. “The rain must have gotten to them, too.”
“How?”
“I’m only guessing, but it probably soaked into the earth and got in between the cracks in the cement casings that hold the casket. I’m also betting some of these graves are just a wooden box buried in the earth, too. The really old ones, anyway.” She checked the tombstone. “Yeah, see? Elizabeth Martin, born eighteen-oh-four, died eighteen-sixty-eight. This one’s a hundred-and-forty years old.”
“That’s heavy duty, man.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Think any of them are walking about? I mean, around here?”
She looked around. “Don’t see any, but you never know. If there were any, they’re probably en route to the Haven like the rest of them. Which is why we better get moving. The highway’s just over there, right?” She nodded straight ahead of them.
“Yeah. Leads up to the Disraeli then it should be just up and over, twice, and we’re done.”
“It’s a long bridge to walk, Joe said.”
“Speaking of which, where is he?”
* * * *
“Those idiots better follow me. I’m not going back for them,” Joe muttered as he made his way between a row of graves. Already having taken note of the several he saw with stirred-up tops, he had the X-09 drawn and at the ready.
He shouldn’t have hit Des despite how much the guy deserved it. And it wasn’t even that. A shot to the face for acting like a jerk? That kind of thing didn’t merit a bleeding nose.
But jerks did.
He’d encountered too many in his life, the last real one being Dan, April’s boyfriend or ex-boyfriend or whatever he had become to her after that glorious weekend together. Dan had been your typical tough guy, the kind that bullied up on the girl. He had even hit her once, April told him. What drove Joe nuts about the whole thing was that April had taken him back on the promise it would never happen again. And Joe had no way to verify it didn’t happen again either.
Smacking Des was just a knee-jerk reaction, nothing more.
Yet Joe didn’t feel the need to apologize. If the guy thought he could handle himself and Billie out here alone, fine. Let them see that fighting the undead wasn’t a joke and unless you knew what you were doing, they’d take you in a second. Wait, they already knew that. He had saved them twice!
Joe passed by a mausoleum, where banging and muted groans came from behind its stone door.
At least those ones are trapped, he thought.
He turned around and surveyed the cemetery for Des and Billie. There they were, four rows over and two sections behind, just two dots amongst a plethora of tombstones.
Another dot was moving slowly toward them.
Then another.
&nbs
p; Then another.
* * * *
“I’m not going to wander around this cemetery till tomorrow, looking for him,” Des said.
Billie didn’t have to look at his eyes to know he was dead serious.
Des spun the iron pipe with his wrist then planted one end of it on the ground.
“No, you won’t have to. We’ll just keep going toward the highway. He’s probably standing there, waiting for us.”
“You think?”
“Probably. Seems a decent enough guy to not leave us hanging despite how cold he sometimes seems.”
“Wonder why he’s like that?”
Billie thought back to her chat with Joe in his kitchen and the way his eyes went vacant when he talked a bit about his old life.
“Just don’t think we need people like that right now. You know as well as I do that people need to get together when crazy stuff like this goes down,” Des said.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone approaching them. Still mad at Joe, she didn’t feel like looking up at him right now. “Shh. He’s coming.”
Des must have felt the same because he didn’t look up either, not until the humanoid shadow came up behind him and wrapped both hands around his neck. “Hey! Quit it! Where do you” —he twisted himself around, trying to wriggle out of the hold; instead the hands held on— “get off?”
“Des!”
He shrieked, dropped the pipe and grabbed the pair of wrists attached to the hands with gray and dead fingers around his neck. The zombie must have been a local because it wore a dark, navy suit appearing to be from the ’40s, its owner’s head a shrunken skull with a couple tufts of black and dried, curly hair. Its face was all sunken in, its eyes deteriorated to nothing, just black vacuous holes in a crusty gray, patchy-skinned skull.
Billie shot out both arms and drove them in between Des and the zombie, attempting to use them as a crowbar to pry the two apart.
More shadows.
Three more undead, all in outdated clothes, were drawing near to them.
With a grunt, she shoved her elbow into the zombie’s chest with one arm and the palm of her other hand into Des’s, shoving him away.
“Run!” she shouted, and she and Des turned tail and darted away from the walking dead.
Des doubled back.
“What are you doing!” she screamed.
He grabbed the iron pipe off the ground then zipped back toward her.
They poured on the speed and leaped over a pair of tombstones and kept cutting across the rows, running, leaping, running, leaping, until it felt like she was flying. Another leap at the next set and—floonk! Her toe caught in between a pair of headstones and her body went horizontal. The next moment, she slammed chest first into the ground, the bottom of her chin smacking into the packed earth beneath the dead grass, sending her bottom teeth across the tip of her tongue. Her mouth immediately filled with blood.
Tears springing to life, her vision went and all she could see was the blurry yellowy-brown of the dry grass and the dark lines of shadow running in between the blades. When she looked up, a murky figure was running on ahead. Des didn’t seem to have noticed she fell. She seemed to be tripping a lot lately. Maybe she had been pushed so past her limit that even her coordination was giving out on her?
She tried to cry out but instead only produced a semblance of his name followed by a gush of blood from her mouth. Fire lit the tip of her tongue and she wondered how bad the damage was. Hand to her mouth, she flinched when her fingers touched the sensitive flesh.
Unable to help herself, she dragged her caught foot off the tombstone, let it thunk against the grass, then, sobbing, got on all fours.
Crnnch. Crnnch. Crnnch.
Footsteps on the grass.
Des?
She glanced up. An undead hand with bruised fingernails reached down toward her and grabbed her by the back of the neck and jerked her to her feet with remarkable strength.
Shrieking, she plowed her fist into the side of the dead man’s jaw, the bone so brittle that the jaw broke and just dangled there to the right side, hanging on by a few, purply-gray ligaments. She shoved the zombie away and ran like a mad woman, screaming, arms flailing, not caring if she looked like an idiot.
Wiping her eyes with the bottom of her shirt helped clear her vision a little, but it still didn’t help the inferno inside her mouth.
Blood filled her mouth so badly she had to spit every few seconds as she ran, each spurt of crimson mucus either landing on her shoes or, because of the wind caused by her sprint, splashing back onto her in sticky strands.
Des was nowhere to be seen. She cried out his name, thought she heard cursing somewhere to the left, but was quickly distracted when two rows over a throng of twenty or so undead moved between the headstones, a few of them stumbling over the markers.
The highway! Where was the highway?
Spitting then gathering her focus, Billie forced herself to slow down enough to get a clearer look around. There! The road was just ahead and over to the left.
Where was Des?
* * * *
Giving it all he had, Des swung the iron pipe into an old fat woman’s head, the heavy end lodging itself into the skull bone and sending up a sploosh of blood like a basket of eggs getting smacked off a T-ball stand.
Another heavyset woman came in from behind, this one much younger, maybe even this old one’s daughter.
Des whirled around and brought the pipe down like an axe onto the woman’s head, passing through her curly blonde hair and delivering fifteen pounds of iron into her brain. She dropped to her knees, fell forward and, pipe still lodged in her head, clawed toward him on all fours, trying to get a piece of his ankles. Des yanked back hard on the pipe, the motion strong enough to dislodge it but also enough to throw him off balance. He landed hard and fast on his keester. The blonde took hold of his foot and pulled it toward her mouth. About to sink her teeth into him, her head suddenly spun on its neck as he brought the pipe swiftly across her face, the edge of the pipe cleaving off a chunk of cheekbone. Black blood gushed out. It got on him, got on her, got on the grass.
Getting to his feet, Des was about to sprint off toward the highway when he came to a halt just as a teenage boy in a nice black suit raised his arms at him. This one’s clothes weren’t dated like the others. He wasn’t even that gray. The young man must have died just before the rain came.
“Sorry, man,” Des said and brought the pipe to the ground, holding it like a hockey stick.
He allowed the dead teen to get a little closer then, bringing the pipe back, delivered a slap shot to the kid’s knackers, the blow so hard it lifted the young man off his feet and sent him onto his back. Des then rounded to the boy’s head and brought the pipe down, mashing iron into bone like one driving a tent stake into the ground.
“I’m gettin’ the hang of this,” he said.
Billie . . .
He couldn’t see her, just a pack of the undead off in the distance, with a few more ambling through the rows on either side toward him.
* * * *
Barely able to breathe, Billie ran in between a couple of trees then stopped to catch her breath. She spat another wad of blood to the ground, wiped her mouth with her wrist, then walked quickly around another tree and came to rest against the doors to a mausoleum.
Panting, she closed her eyes. Just one second. Maybe two. Just one second. Her chest heaved up and down, each breath feeling as if her lungs had to rise up against a hundred pounds.
I’m not that out of shape, am I? she wondered.
The tip of her tongue was more numb than painful and the blood flow seemed to have slowed. She touched it and pulled her finger back when the salt of her skin stung the open wound.
Someone wheezed behind her. But there was no one there. Just a couple of large, stone doors.
Hheeehnsh . . . hheeehnsh . . . hheeehnsh . . .
DROOM!
Billie yelped as several pairs of dead hands pop
ped out of in between the pair of mausoleum doors. She bounced off the wall and backed up a few steps. Gray-green hands blotched with purple flesh clawed and grabbed from the crack. She scanned the door and saw the hinge-and-lock was nearly broken off, the hinge bent so much it allowed a bit of space for these creatures to get their fingers through.
Must be cracks in the roof or something, for the rain to have gotten through.
It took a few moments, but she realized the mausoleum was getting further and further away. An unsettling feeling rose in her stomach a moment later: she had decided to stop her instinctive backward steps at the same time she bumped into something.
Something soft yet with an underlay of bone and—
Billie screamed.
A shot rang out.
Billie ducked and covered her head.
The body dropped behind her.
