by A. P. Fuchs
His eyes.
Something was happening or already happened.
“Josh . . .” she said and touched the side of his face as his lips brushed against hers.
Then his mouth opened. She jerked her head back just as his mouth snapped shut, barely missing her lips.
“Josh!” She dropped the umbrella and he stumbled toward her, still trying to grab her. At first she let him, on reflex, she having never before turned him down for an embrace.
Something’s not right, she thought. He can’t touch me. Later, but not now. She moved to pull away from him but his fingers gripped the side of her arms, dragging her close. With a few twists, she wrestled her body free and ran several steps back. Josh was part shadow again.
“Where is it?” she said, searching the ground for the umbrella. She thought she saw the side of the canopy. A step toward it and it lay upside down on the sopping gray grass. She pulled it toward herself by the sides then righted and emptied it of the rain before holding it normally.
The rain. She was fine. She got a little bit on her tongue. It tasted like chalk, but stunk of garbage and old fish. She spat it out just as Josh emerged from the rain again, this time a grimace upon his face. He came toward her with purpose, those fingers of his still opening and closing against the drops.
“Please don’t,” she said. She wanted to run, but felt compelled to stay. Despite the way he looked, she still loved him. He just needed to speak and they could work this out. But Josh didn’t speak. He only groaned and shambled toward her.
She stepped back, one foot at a time.
Josh picked up his pace.
Shaking her head, she said, “No,” then turned to run.
He grabbed her from behind, yanked her in close. She dropped the umbrella again. Quickly, his mouth was on her neck and she felt his lips peel back against her skin.
“Josh!” She elbowed him in the ribs, the force enough to get his head away from her neck. He yanked her close again, this time tightening his grip. “Josh, no!” she said and thrashed about, shooting her arms out to the sides, twisting her hips and moving her head—anything to get away from him.
He let go and she fell forward on top of the umbrella. The metal pins sticking out of the canopy dug into her. One might have punctured her flesh. She rolled off the now-bent umbrella, picked it up and swung it at him. The end of the umbrella socked him in the side of the head. Josh’s head moved with the blow. He seemed dazed, but his focus refreshed anew and he moved toward her again.
“ARRGGHHH!” With everything she had, she let him have it, bringing the umbrella across his head like a baseball bat.
He twisted in his place and stumbled to the side. She hadn’t meant to hit him so hard, but instinct had taken over.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Josh didn’t seem to care and instead stomped toward her, his expression blank, his gaze empty. Screaming, Tracy clawed at his face, her nails bringing four black slashes across his skin. She looked at her fingertips. Black blood ran off them.
“What’s—” Anxiety kicked in and her breaths grew short and less filling. “No. What are you? Josh? Answer me. No!”
He opened his mouth and moved to grab her.
“No!” she screamed and brought the umbrella to the side of his head again. The force was enough to bend its shaft and collapse some of the thin metal arms holding out the canopy. She didn’t care. She brought the umbrella back along its path and hit him again. Josh stumbled to the side, looked at her, opened his mouth and growled. She came back, swinging with everything she had. The umbrella connected with the side of his head. The shaft bent some more, requiring her to step closer. She did, and hit him again. Then again, and again. She beat him to the ground. Soon, the umbrella broke through his skull. She watched her hands swinging the umbrella over and over as if watching a first-person movie.
Stop, she cried inside. Stop. Stopstopstopstopstop. Stop! But she didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Her muscles wouldn’t respond. Not until Josh’s brain began flying out of his skull like saucy ravioli. Even then, she wanted to continue beating him.
She suddenly stopped mid swing. Her knees buckled beneath her and they bent on their own, giving way. Something else gave way, too. Something inside. She felt her heart break, but not in the way from a relationship gone wrong. It was something deeper. It was like the muscle had been torn in two, ripped right down the middle.
Something boiling with hate burned within, a fire made of rage and desire. One that took over her brain and muscles and made her draw the umbrella back and bring it down into Josh’s head until there was nothing left of it, just strands of flesh and mashed bone.
Josh didn’t move.
He was dead.
Just like her.
19
The Car-Truck
If this was home, Joe wouldn’t have felt as exposed as he did right now. Out here, amidst the clouds of dust from the crumbling building, the drones of the dead on the air, being in a world that was not his own—a chill swept through him and he wondered if he was doomed to spending the rest of his life blowing the heads off zombies, or if there was hope that someday the fight with the undead would be over and he just couldn’t see it yet.
As before, he knew he had to get himself into a place where he called the shots, and staying out here on the street wasn’t the environment for that. X-09 drawn and ready, Joe shielded his eyes from the dust on the air and made his way toward the shadow of another building. A few moments more and his feet were on the sidewalk by it.
Up ahead, a shadow shambled his way. He fired. The shadow dropped. To his left was another; he put an end to that one, too. He checked the X-09’s clip to see how much ammo he had left.
Not much, he thought. Going to have to reload soon.
He kept his eyes peeled for more movement.
Groans and growls rose on the air.
“Here we go,” he said, and got ready.
The dust began to clear the further down the sidewalk he went. He crossed the street and went over to the next block. Stepping out from under an awning, a chubby undead kid around eight or nine years old with a neon-green-spotted black T-shirt began his slow march toward him.
The kid’s eyes bulged on either side of his nose; a snarl framed gray teeth caked in flesh. White eyes, good and empty, fixated on Joe’s.
“Sorry, kid,” Joe said. He pulled the trigger. The top of the kid’s head blew off and sent a spray of bone and brain into the air. The kid’s body toppled over onto the sidewalk at Joe’s feet. He stepped around the corpse and moved on.
Feet scraped along the ground. At first, one set then two. Then three. Then four. Then many more. Joe looked over to the left. A row of zombies crossed the street from the foot of the building across the way.
Joe grabbed an extra clip of ammo off his belt and fired off the remainder of what was left in the X-09, taking down a few zombies, before reloading.
Even when the zombies in the first row fell, the others walked over them, a few with their arms held out, eyes ever-fixated on their prey.
Joe took down a couple more. Boom. And another.
More zombies emerged from the side streets. Others moved in from down the road. In a few moments, he’d be surrounded, and barring a miracle or the sudden ability to fly, he’d be dead. He glanced up. The building beside him had shallow window frames, nothing wide enough to climb and stand on. He could shimmy up the lamppost, but the zombies would no doubt grab hold of it, shake it, push it, even try climbing it themselves. There’d be no way he could keep his balance near its top.
“Don’t have much of an option here, do I?” he said, scanning the area past the dead for a safe haven or someplace where he’d be more in command of his environment. No go. Too many zombies.
He took aim with the X-09 at the undead in front of him. Quickly, he pulled the trigger as fast as his finger could manage. Bullet holes appeared in the middle of zombies’ foreheads. Dead bodies went from slowly stepping forward t
o collapsing face first to the pavement. Joe ran, gun firing, clearing a path through the undead surrounding him. One zombie grabbed hold of his arm. Joe swung toward it, punched it in the head, and yanked his arm free. Another stepped toward him from the side. The creature’s foot came down on Joe’s own and it was enough to make him lose his balance and fall down. As he was getting to his feet, a zombie grabbed him by the calf and started pulling him toward it. Joe fired a bullet into the zombie’s face. It blew off the instant the sound of the gun cracked on the air. He pulled his leg free and got to his feet and ran with all he had, every so often tossing his arm back and firing off a few shots, killing what he could.
A brown car—no, a truck—no both—sat at an angle against the curb up ahead. A couple other cars surrounded it. All of them bore dents and were awash with dry gray from the Rain. Joe ran around the El Camino’s hood, using it as a vantage point while the dead shambled down the street toward him. More and more zombies joined the undead’s ranks and soon an entire parade of them was headed his way. He glanced to the right. More were down the street and would be here in a couple of minutes. Same with on his left. A building was behind him.
He couldn’t stay out here. Not with so many of them.
He tried opening the El Camino’s passenger door. It was locked. He put the barrel of the X-09 up against the keyhole and was about to pull the trigger. Wait. Won’t help. He shot the window instead, reached in and pulled up on the lock pin, then opened the door. He stayed low in the seats, X-09 ready to blast the head off anything that stuck its face near the vehicle.
Through the open window, the sound of undead footsteps floated into the truck. Hundreds of them.
“This was a bad idea,” Joe said.
* * * *
“I’m going to kill him,” Tracy said. “Just flat out shoot him.” Idiot.
She climbed down the gas line then jumped the rest of the way to street level. A couple zombies lingered by the building’s corner; nothing she couldn’t take care of. The undead by the corner caught sight of her and started to head her way. One was male, the other female, both with one arm missing. The guy’s was cut off at the elbow, the girl’s closer to the shoulder. Each had a head of stringy brown hair.
Tracy pulled out her gun, took aim, then pegged off the guy. Without a sound, he fell to the ground the moment the bullet passed through his skull. Tracy brought the barrel over to the girl, lined up her shot, then fired. The female zombie stopped dead in her tracks, her head snapping back, her forehead gushing black blood. She folded backwards and hit the ground.
Tracy jogged down the length of the building, pawing at the air, trying to clear it of the dust. When she got to its edge, she looked up to see the giant zombie kneeling before the building’s front, oodles of blood still running from what was left of its skull, down its body, and pooling onto the street below like a backed-up sewer system.
She scanned the area for Joe. There was no sign of him.
He could be anywhere, she thought. She listened carefully, thinking maybe she’d pick up running feet slapping against the pavement, or the sound of gunshots. The most she heard was the groaning of the dead far up ahead. There must be a whole lot of them if I can hear them from here.
“Great,” she whispered. “Head for safety or check to see if they’d made a meal out of Joe. What do you do?”
The choice was obvious.
* * * *
Joe lay partly curled up on the driver’s seat, keeping himself out of view from the windows. Hopefully the zombies wouldn’t even go near the car and instead slowly but surely shamble on to their next source of food. Wherever that was. Aside from him and Tracy, he hadn’t seen any other humans out here.
X-09 held tight, he waited. The sounds of the dead didn’t abate, but instead drew closer. A low thunk echoed throughout the car as something smacked against the driver’s side door. Another low thunk filled his ears when something whacked the hood. A couple other low thuds made it clear this vehicle wasn’t the only one being smacked. The ones nearby were also getting hit.
Just then a worn green army jacket filled the driver’s side window.
Whoompwhoompwhoompwhoompwhoomp. Pasty palms drummed against the roof.
The rearview window was clear one moment and the next began filling up with faces of the dead as zombies climbed up the back and drew near to the cab. They slapped their decaying palms against the driver’s side glass.
The instinct to shoot them almost made Joe do so, but if he blew away the glass, they’d climb in and he’d be dead.
The passenger window! A zombie was coming toward it. Then another.
Sitting upright, Joe immediately reached for the ignition to turn the key . . . except there was no key.
“Um, um, um, um . . .” He reached under the steering column and yanked out whatever wires he could find. “Okay, no idea what I’m doing but—” A dead arm reached across the passenger seat and tried to grab hold of him. He aimed the X-09 and blew the creature away. Another zombie, the one in the green army jacket, beat on the glass beside him.
Joe fiddled with the wires, using the trigger guard of the X-09 to strip their coating. He began crossing one wire with another, seeing if any would get the thing going.
Another zombie reached into the vehicle. Joe blasted its face off.
Back to the wires.
Sweat ran down his face.
Zombies groaned outside the car.
Dead hands slapped against the metal and the glass.
Another creature came up to the passenger window and started climbing in. It managed to get in waist deep before it tipped forward face down against the passenger seat. Joe put the X-09 to the back of its head and pulled the trigger. Blood and bone splashed over him, the seat, the floor. The zombie’s body stopped moving. Fortunately, its body plugged a good part of the window, making it more difficult for the other creatures to enter.
Joe crossed more wires.
A blonde undead woman with missing teeth stuck her head over her dead kin’s rump and snarled. Joe wiped the sneer off her face with a bullet to her brain.
Back to work. This wire with that one? How about this one? Maybe like this?
He crossed them, rubbed them—sparks snapped. A couple more and—the engine came to life.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” he shouted and threw the El Camino in drive. Foot to the gas, he plowed through the zombies in his way. Dead hands slid off the vehicle.
Wham! He crashed into one, then quickly into another.
Standing before him was a wall of the undead.
He pressed down on the gas. The El Camino sped forward and connected hard with several zombies at once, their decaying bodies going up into the air then flopping down onto the hood. Some dropped to the ground upon impact, no doubt kissing the grill with that rotting mouth of theirs. A few hands tore from the creatures’ arms; one hand smacked into the windshield. Another zombie’s body cracked in two, folded over the hood then rolled forward. Joe drove over it, a huge bump in the road.
“Yeah!” he roared, emerging on the other side of the pack of the undead. He gunned it down the street. Now to find Tracy.
20
The Parkade
Mark thought he heard Michelle call his name. His reply was met with silence. Upon tumbling into the hole, he hit the ground hard, scraping his elbows. There was hardly any light except for what came through the hole some fifteen feet above him, at the top of the mound of rubble. The gray and brown sky generated barely enough luminescence into the hole for him to see his hand in front of his face.
“Srrrmmmoonnnngggrrr . . .” he heard.
Someone? Mark thought, and made his way further into the dark, hands held out so he wouldn’t bump into anything. “Anyone there? Dillon? That you?”
He glanced back over his shoulder. He could barely make out the hole that landed him in this place. “Don’t go too far,” he said quietly. “You’ll be okay. Just not too far.”
Cautiously, he stepped furt
her in, each footfall taking him on a gradual decline as he walked the ramp that led down into the parkade. His toe jammed into something hard with a slight bit of give. He reached forward and felt the smooth metallic surface of a car hood. Mark brought his foot back and kicked the car tire. “Lucky. So lucky,” he said, thankful it wasn’t his knee or shin that took the brunt of the blow.
“Srrrmmmoonnnngggrrr . . .” The voice sounded not too far off, perhaps just past the other side of the vehicle in front of him. It was hard to tell as it seemed to come from all sides.
Keeping his palm on the hood of the car as a guide, Mark slowly rounded the vehicle. He checked back toward the entrance hole. He couldn’t see it. Heart racing, he called out, “Dillon?”
Footsteps shuffled in the dark, followed by a low moan.
* * * *
Michelle backed her way into the hole in the rubble on her stomach, the flashlight clamped between her teeth. She slowly shimmied her way in and shone her flashlight. She stood on a heap of broken cement and rebar, with the trunk of a car sticking out from it. She aimed the beam into the dark to get a sense of what she was climbing into. Getting off this pile of rubble and debris didn’t appear too difficult a climb. Just a few navigated steps and she’d be level with the ramp that went down into the parkade proper.
Cars were lined up bumper to bumper, some of their windows smashed. The flashlight’s beam didn’t reach all that far, maybe twenty feet. It was bright enough for her to make out the dried blood on the walls along with its dried counterpart pooled on the ground. A few bones lined the side of the ramp.
