by Fuchs, A. P.
* * * *
Des turned his head in the direction of the gunshot.
Joe, he thought with a grimace. I don’t need to be there to know you saved her.
“Fine,” he grumbled and smacked the pipe into another of the undead. “See you at the bridge.”
* * * *
Billie looked up at him, blue eyes wide, pink hair a mess, blood covering her chin.
Joe held his hand out to her. “You all right?”
Her hand shook as she extended it to him. When he took her fingers in his, there was a moment there when he realized how small they were, how smooth.
How perfect.
“No,” she said softly. When she straightened, she had her hand over her mouth.
“I already saw it,” he said. “Let me take a look.”
She shook her head and pulled away her hand. “Mm-uh. I don’t like it when you look me over, and I’m not taking my clothes off for you again.”
Was she flirting with him? No, you idiot. She’s mad at you. Besides, even if she was, you don’t have room for her in your life. Too much at stake as it is. Anyway, what would April think?
“I just want to see if—Get down!” He pointed the X-09 just past her and took out a zombie coming in from behind.
With a wave of his hand, he said, “Come on!”
Billie didn’t move.
“What’s the matter with you? Let’s go!”
She just stood there.
She’s in shock, he thought. Great. It didn’t quite make sense. She’d been in worse. Perhaps it was finally all piling up.
He ran over and gave her a shove from behind.
Finally her feet started to move.
* * * *
Des tried the cemetery’s front gate. It was chained shut and bound with a padlock.
“Grrgh!” He gave it a shake then climbed over the black metal fence.
The Disraeli was a long sidewalk length to the right. He started walking down it.
Three more shots rang out.
Joe and Billie ran toward the fence, Billie with a dazed look on her face, Joe pointing the gun every which way and dropping zombies as fast as he could.
When they got to the fence, Des debated going over there to help Billie over.
Let the hero handle it. He kept walking.
“Des! Hey, Des!” Joe shouted from behind.
He just kept going, and didn’t look back.
22
The Bridge
“Hey, Des, wait up!” Billie called after him. She didn’t like the way her words came out all muddled and fat thanks to her sore tongue.
He kept on walking and only stopped when she caught up to him.
“Hey, didn’t you hear us?” she said.
“What? You guys called me?” he said.
“Ah, yeah, like a hundred times. You deaf?”
“No. I hear just fine, thanks.”
“As if you couldn’t hear us.”
“Well, sometimes people don’t hear each other, all right?”
She rolled her eyes. She knew what he was driving at: her and Joe not hearing him when he called after them while they walked along the river. And to think she was going to give him a hug, glad that he was okay. Not anymore. And he didn’t even ask about the blood on her mouth or why she sounded so funny.
Joe came up to them, gun still drawn. He cocked the hammer. Des’s eyes landed straight on the large pistol. For a second there, Billie thought Joe was going to shoot him.
“Uh, I found the bridge,” Des said, thumbing to it over his shoulder.
“Then let’s get over it,” Joe said, unmoving. He remained planted there until Des finally turned around and took the lead.
Billie wasn’t sure if she should walk beside Des or hang back with Joe or just stroll somewhere in the middle between them. She opted for the latter.
The three began their ascent up the first large hump of the two-humped bridge, staying on the walkway, each with a hand on the railing. The metal was cold and covered with flakes of dried, gray rain.
From behind, the undead droned in the distance. Billie kept glancing over her shoulder and peering past Joe to see if any were following them. The undead just stood there, calling out with hoarse voices behind the cemetery fence, either too stupid to figure out how to climb over or simply unable to.
Soon they were crossing over the river. The skeletal forest lining it seemed much more peaceful from up here. If this had been before the rain, you could have mistaken it for just another fall day, if not for the boatload of abandoned cars on the bridge, some smashed into each other, others piled onto the cement divider separating the north and south lanes, a few others smashed into the railings on either side. At one point they came up to a car that sat with its hood smashed against the bent railing at a forty-five-degree angle, its front end jammed into where the railing met the walkway, the railing having stopped it from flipping over the edge. They walked around it. Billie could only wonder how many cars had actually gone over and plummeted to the river below.
On the descent of the first hump, Des finally spoke, cracking seven minutes of silence. “What’re we gonna do when we get downtown?”
Billie didn’t know and she wasn’t sure Joe did either. Not specifically anyway. He also didn’t reply.
“I said, what’re we—” Des began.
Joe cut him off. “Not sure.”
They crossed the little valley in between the two humps of the bridge and rounded a transit that had tipped over onto its side. Billie doubted anybody was left within and when she saw the ring of glass bordering the vehicle, she knew that it was empty and whoever was within had smashed their way out. The bloodstains on the pavement suggested either these folks had been killed or had been caught in the rain and were transformed.
They began ascending the next hump.
“How can you not know?” Des said.
Joe didn’t reply.
“Aren’t you supposed to be the guy with the plan?”
Does he have to keep it up? What’s with the jerk-change all of the sudden? Billie wondered. “Joe will probably tell us when we get there,” she said, trying to reassure him. “Isn’t that right, Joe?”
“More or less,” he said from behind.
“What does that mean?” Des asked.
“It means just what Billie said: I’ll tell you once we get there.”
“Why not now? Or do you not know?”
“What’s your problem, Des? You’ve been nothing but a—”
“Oh, like you’re one to talk.”
“I didn’t even finish.”
“Like you needed to. What were you gonna say? I’ve been nothing but a jerk?”
“Yeah, since we hooked up by the river.”
“See, called you on it, didn’t I?”
They were hitting the apex of the hump. Joe stormed passed Billie, and grabbed Des by the collar of his shirt and shoved him against the railing.
“Joe, don’t!” she said. Oh no.
The guy had Des bent backward over the railing so far that she thought his body would snap. Des’s eyes darted between Joe’s and the ground several stories below.
Joe still had his gun in his hand and Billie wasn’t sure if he realized it or not. If that thing accidentally went off . . .
“You wanna settle this now?” Joe said.
Des spat in his face.
With a violent jerk, Joe yanked up on Des’s collar, then with a mighty heave slammed his shoulder blades against the metal railing. Des howled then took a swing at him.
With the iron pipe.
* * * *
Joe’s shoulder rocked in its socket as the metal crashed into the bone. His left arm immediately went numb, leaving only his gun-filled right hand available.
He aimed it at Des’s head.
“Go on, coward!” Des screamed. “Wanna cap me? Go right ahead. Got nothing to live for anyway.”
What? He kept the shot squarely lined up. All it would take wou
ld be a simple squeeze of the trigger and a one-inch-round hole would materialize between Des’s eyes.
“Joe, stop it! Put the gun down!” Billie screamed.
“Why should I? He’ll only get us killed! Look what he’s done so far!”
The iron pipe was suddenly in the air then Joe felt as if his fingers had been torn off right along with the gun from his hand. He had to double check just to make sure. They were still attached but there was no feeling in them.
“GRRAAH!” Des screamed as he came in with another swipe of the pipe.
Joe ducked and the pipe smacked into the concrete next to his leg with a dull, metallic clunk.
His boot was in the air and he kicked Des in the gut. The guy doubled over, wheezing and pawing at the air in front of his mouth, as if trying to scoop in handful after handful of sweet, sweet air.
He could barely be heard between panicky moans. “I . . . ca . . . bre . . .”
Fingers tingling, Joe forced them to curl into his palm. His fist was weak, but he didn’t care. He sent an uppercut flying into Des’s chin. The young man jerked backward and flipped over, landing backward on the pavement, the rear of his head smacking the ground.
He didn’t move.
Joe searched for his gun. It wasn’t on the ground.
“Good-bye, Joe,” Billie said. She cocked the hammer.
23
Just Leave Me Alone
August sat up, waking to the dark. He was back in the vault and had gone down for a nap after scouting the Square some more.
A chill swept through him, his sweat-soaked clothes clinging to his body. He remembered what he dreamed about: his family.
It had been Christmas and all of them were there: Eleanor, Jonathan, Lydia, David and Jan; the kids: Jon junior, Bella, Finch, Katie and Stewart. His wife had served the turkey. He stood from the table, all set to carve, about to deliver the story of Christ’s birth as he did so when, after he pulled off the lid of the turkey roaster, instead of a big and juicy, fat, old bird, there was his own zombified head, bloated, with oily gray skin, staring up at him with those awful white eyes. His family was gone from the table when he went to tell them what was in the roaster, each suddenly at his side as if materializing out of thin air, all dead—all undead—with clawing hands. August tried to ward them off with the electronic cutter, but Eleanor got to him first, grabbed the hand with the cutter and bit into it, tearing off first one finger then another, picking it clean like a turkey bone.
Screaming, August shouted at his own head in the roaster to help him. The dead head’s jaw popped open; pointy teeth sharper than razor blades shot out from its face and latched onto his throat. They tore out his jugular in a blaze of pain and instead of dropping dead like he expected, August was suddenly on his back on the floor beside the table, his family tearing the limbs from his body, chowing down, blood and ligaments dripping off their chins.
He couldn’t move and only awoke just as his wife bent at the waist and gave him a kiss, her breath hot and foul and filled with maggots.
Alone in the dark, August hugged his rifle to himself then, as if discovering the instrument of death anew, tossed it to the side.
He had killed his family. He had to. But he still killed them.
“How much longer?” he whispered.
Head throbbing, a thousand voices filling his brain and calling him a murderer, he lay back down, hugging himself.
“Just leave me alone.”
24
It Ain’t What it Used to Be
The look of concentration behind Billie’s icy blue eyes made Joe shudder. She wasn’t kidding. He had just dropped her best friend. No one in their right mind would stand for that.
He could only hope that after today’s ordeals, she wasn’t in her right mind. Yet at the same time, maybe this was a good thing. It’d been a long year, one that felt like a lifetime of dragging around the pain and memory of the girl that got away. The haunting and soul-wrenching conviction that he’d murdered somebody. Murdered so many. You could call it what you wanted: self-defense, self-preservation, righteous judgment, whatever. Still, death was death and who was he to administer it?
Maybe a bullet to the brain or heart would finally cure him of the pain he was so sick and tired of carrying around. Maybe finally—finally—he could let April go because death was the only way he would be able to let her go.
But you don’t live in a world where the dead stay dead. You could come back, if it rains again or if one of the creatures start gnawing on you. He eyed Billie squarely. She didn’t flinch. Des was trying to say something but he was too low to the ground and too messed up to be coherent. You could even still carry memory. April could still be with you.
“Do you really want to kill me, Billie?” he asked her.
The statement must have hit her like an arrow laced with realization because her eyes glazed over.
“If you want to, you can,” he said.
“You deserve it,” she said, her voice curt yet at the same time uncertain.
“For?”
“You’re a murderer. You were going to kill Des.”
“Des was going to kill me,” he said.
She didn’t reply to that. He took a step toward her.
“Don’t move,” she said and aimed the barrel of the X-09 squarely at his head.
He raised his hands. “Okay.”
Des muttered something else, coughed, then said, “Bill . . . don’t . . .”
She flinched at hearing her name. A single tear leaked out of the corner of one eye. Even now, ready to kill him, Joe couldn’t believe he thought she looked beautiful.
Stop it, he told himself. Don’t let her take you.
“You’re going to have to make a decision, Billie. I can’t make it for you,” he said.
She sniffled . . .
. . . and pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
Air wisped passed his face and then instantly after a jolt shot him when the car some twenty feet away blasted into the air aflame then came crashing down in a shrill metallic BANG!
Billie stood there, mouth hanging open.
Joe took two quick steps up to her, wrapped his hands around hers, grabbing the gun by the handle, pointing it upward. “Give me that.” He yanked it away and clicked the hammer back up so another shot wouldn’t go off.
Billie turned and put her face in her hands, sobbing.
Des exhaled what sounded like a breath of relief.
Joe went over and stood over him. “Are we done?”
Des nodded.
“Then let’s get moving. They’ll probably be here any moment.”
* * * *
When Joe and the others made their descent down the second hump of the Disraeli Overpass, he opted to take the lead, X-09 ready, the other two single file behind him. He toyed with the idea of Des leading the way and acting as a body shield should any more zombies show up, but he knew these streets and preferred to take the responsibility upon himself.
Downtown was his home. Its streets were where he used to spend hours just walking and thinking and dreaming up comic tales in his old life. He used to live out here. He could probably walk the majority of them blindfolded and know where he was. They were also his patrol ground, a concrete grid to hunt down the undead and wipe them off the face of the city.
The place of his redemption for killing April.
“So where were you when the rain fell, Joe?” Des asked from last in line.
“Home.”
“How exciting.”
Billie shooshed him.
“Why, where were you?” Joe asked.
“I’ll save it for when we settle down wherever we wind up and we’ll have a ‘Kumbaya’ moment.”
Look forward to it, he thought facetiously.
As they approached the intersection of Logan, Lily and the Disraeli Freeway, Joe wondered what would be the best route to take. Go left, and they’d wind up behind the museum, concert hall and the old buildings that
made up one side of the Exchange District. Go straight, and they’d land on Main. There would be buildings either way, but going straight would be more out in the open and not as confined as the zigzag route they’d have to take through the Exchange to get to Portage Avenue. He decided to head up to Main then turn left.
He informed the others.
“Works for me,” Billie said.
“Ditto,” Des said.
Weaving their way through and around the cars clogging up the road, they went up to Main Street and turned left, sticking to the sidewalk, it being the clearest path with only a handful of cars having driven up onto it on that terrible day long ago.
They walked in silence, which Joe found peaceful. After his and Des’s exchange on the bridge, he needed the break. First real human contact in months and it had to be with a loud-mouthed nerd who had a bad temper. Billie, though . . . . He hated the way his neck ached to glance back and steal a look at her. He had to keep reminding himself that the only reason he wanted to was because she reminded him of April. Put a long, black wig on her and, from the back, they’d probably look the same. Even in the face Billie bore a resemblance to her, the biggest difference only being the thick-framed glasses she wore.
