by A. P. Fuchs
“It’s okay.” He abruptly pulled away from her. Slowly, he stepped toward his mom.
Michelle kept a gun aimed just over his shoulder, ready to pull the trigger at an instant.
“Mom,” Mark said, but before he could say whatever it was he was going to, Rhonda’s body stirred on the ground.
At first, she twitched, then slowly sat up. Her bloody and mangled face immediately turned toward Mark. She opened her mouth and groaned.
“Mark, get back!” Michelle said.
The boy ran over to her. “Are you going to . . . ?”
“I’m going to have to,” she said even though she didn’t want to. Rhonda was her friend. They had talked about what to do if one of them got bit. They regularly reminded themselves that whoever rose after death before the other was not the person they once knew, but instead something else. That was how they hoped it worked, anyway, and it wasn’t a case of the person knowing they were deceased and having lost control of themselves as they became one of the living dead.
“Kill me right away,” Rhonda had told her. “Especially if Mark is around. I don’t want you to wait. I can’t hurt my son. Even if you have to shoot me in front of him. Better to get it done and over than prolong it with debate. Promise me, Michelle. Promise me that’s what you’ll do.”
“I promise,” she had told her, and said it now.
Rhonda brought her knees to her torn-open gut, and stood without loss of balance. She faced Michelle and Mark squarely and started her march toward them, arms outstretched.
“I can’t look,” Mark said and buried his face into Michelle’s side.
“Cover your ears,” Michelle said.
Mark did.
She fired.
Rhonda dropped.
26
Humans Weren’t the Only Ones
Tracy watched as a dead world moved past her through the passenger window. The trees were bare of leaves; even the evergreens had lost their needles. They drove past a few neighborhoods; the streets were empty except for the undead that roamed them. Joe hit the zombies often and if any of them made a mess on the windshield, he’d simply spray a bit of fluid then clean them with the wipers.
Long ago she thought maybe her and Josh would get a house out here. Not necessarily directly off Main Street, but out here outside the city limits away from the smell of exhaust and the sound of honking horns. They would work from home as fulltime artists, if she didn’t get the job at Disney. It would have been perfect.
“It’s really quiet, isn’t it?” she said.
“Hm?” Joe said.
“I said it’s really quiet.”
“Yeah. I haven’t been out this way since the dead rose. I mean—you know what I mean.”
“Uh-huh. Same here. I liked taking drives out this way back in the day. Maybe around once a month. Seemed like a nice place to live at some point.”
“Would be.”
“Makes one wonder, doesn’t it?”
“Wonder what?”
“Just, you know, how your life might have turned out had the undead not come.”
“I try to not think about that.”
“But you do.”
“We all do. Can’t help it. You grow up thinking things are going to be all right, that life will unroll more or less normally. It’s not fair, really. Actually, it isn’t fair. You’re a kid; Mom and Dad take care of business for you. You’re in school; same deal. You graduate and a lot of the time you’re kind of eased into the real world. You either live at home or get some entry-level job somewhere. That’s the norm. At least it was where I come from. The problem is you forget you know deep down there isn’t a norm. You forget that life can just sneak up on you and kick you down so hard you might never get up at all. You saw glimpses of it growing up: kids with only one parent, some in foster homes. You saw the guy sleeping on the bench at the bus stop or the one picking through trash looking for something to eat. You see the commercials where kids are starving and the older one has to take care of their five younger siblings. But you don’t mind. It’s not you. Not yet. Hopefully not ever. And life happens. Sneaks up on you and beats you to your knees. In our case” —Joe peered out the driver’s side window and gazed up at the sky— “it was brown and gray clouds and some crazy rain that sent the world into a spin.”
A zombie crossed the road in front of them. Joe hit it dead on. The corpse rolled up onto the hood, up the windshield, over the roof of the car and back down the other side.
A moment later, Tracy said, “Got hit, huh? You, I mean.”
“In more ways than one.”
“Me, too.” She told him about Josh, their plans, what Josh meant to her. It was hard to do so without her voice breaking and tears wetting her eyes.
When she was finished, he turned toward her. His eyes met hers and it was clear he understood her pain. Joe set his eyes back on the road, just in time to avoid a stalled Chevy that sat at an angle across their path.
“You know, I’ve heard people say that life can hand you anything, it just depends what you do with it,” he said.
“And?”
“I don’t think it’s true. It’s one thing for something to happen and for you to be able to look at it and go, ‘hey, this is what went down, these were the consequences, and this is how I can react to it.’ And those people are right, to a point. There is a lot of stuff that happens that we can deal with by choice. You lose your job? Get another one. Kid won’t listen? Discipline them instead of letting them rule your life. Not feeling well? Go to the doctor. Too fat? Eat right and exercise. There is no magic answer, just common sense. Just take a step back and look at things.”
“Your point?”
“I’m not finished.”
“Okay.”
“The other part is, yeah, life can hand you something, but sometimes that something isn’t tangible. Sometimes it isn’t something you can mentally or physically change. I’m not even talking about emotions, as those can be controlled for the most part. Sometimes life hurts you so bad you break inside, that you’re damaged beyond the point of emotional distress. Your spirit is broken. That’s something you can’t change, can’t fix. It’s not a light switch you can just flick on and off.”
She understood what he was getting at and, from the tone of his voice, it seemed very few people understood him. It seemed he’d been down a road like hers, one where the connection to someone or something else went beyond love, to that place where love is inadequate to describe it. To somewhere and to something deeper, connective and sacrificial, where one life became another whether you knew it or not at the time.
“She meant everything to you, didn’t she?” Tracy said.
Joe glanced at her, his eyes soft, not the same set of hard and determined eyes she was so used to seeing on him. “She was everything.”
“I understand.”
He took a deep breath and sighed. “That’s why I told you. I thought maybe . . . I thought maybe it’d help us somehow as we try to figure out our next move. I think we have more in common than we realize and that we should use that somehow.”
“Me, too.”
Tracy’s heart ached at trudging up memories about Josh. A part of it was therapeutic, she had to admit, but every time Josh rose in her memory, a sharp pain pierced her heart and anger brewed inside against her inability to go back and make things right. Being helpless to heal would kill her in the end, she knew. She just wondered how long she’d be able to hold on until she’d throw in the towel.
Joe hit a couple more zombies. They were far enough outside the city now that the houses got farther apart. Most had expansive yards, the once-green grass now pale yellow and dry, spackled with gray.
“Do you think you’ll ever go back home?” she asked.
Joe pressed his lips together and breathed out through his nose. He gently shook his head.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. Not that there was much to go home to, mind you, just that it is home. That’s what I’ll miss.”
“Must be hard.”
“It is.”
“Anything I can do?”
“No.”
The two rode in silence.
Suddenly, Joe pulled over, the tires grinding to a halt against the gravel of the shoulder lane. Tracy’s heart leapt into her throat.
* * * *
Joe threw open the door and rounded the front of the vehicle. He stood not far from the passenger door. Tracy came out of the car and stood beside him.
He turned to her. “We got a big problem.”
She nodded.
Before them was an old, rickety fence, nothing more than a series of pegs a couple meters apart, with a couple of slats spaced about a foot apart starting at the ground. A solid fifty meters from where they stood was a black horse looming over what appeared to be another horse’s carcass. Though the horse’s facial features were hard to make out this far away, there was no mistaking its loose stance and the way it stumbled side-to-side as it tried to maintain its balance while gorging on the animal on the ground.
“I didn’t know . . .” Tracy started.
“I did. It was like this back home. The rain got to the animals, too.”
“Then maybe the only difference is the giants?”
“Looks that way,” he said.
The horse leaned down and tore a stringy piece of meat off the carcass.
“Think it can see us?” Tracy asked.
“No, but we should be careful.” Joe surveyed the property. To the side of the corral was a yellow and white two-storey farmhouse. A gray Ford pickup sat in the driveway; an old and rusty transport that looked like it could fit a couple horses sat about thirty feet from it.
Tracy must have noticed the furrow of his brow because she asked, “What?”
“Just thinking that that horse is eating one of its own. Fine. Makes sense if the other horse was alive, just regular. But if that was true, the healthy horse would have been long devoured by now. Seems undead animals eat other undead animals.”
“Unless it’s a fresh kill. Let’s hope it goes that way for the human ones. Maybe they’d just kill themselves off and that’d be it.”
“Or at least the big ones.”
“There’s something altogether different about them. They don’t go after each other. They don’t eat the regular zombies. I’ve seen them eat people, but where are they getting enough people to fill themselves?”
“Don’t know. Don’t really want to find out, either.”
She nodded.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get going.”
The two began making their way back to the El Camino. That’s when Joe heard the low whinny of a horse. He spun around.
The undead horse stumbled, regained its footing, stumbled, regained its footing, as it tried to run toward them.
“Move!” Joe shouted at her.
Tracy bolted for the passenger side door and dove into the car. She immediately closed the door behind her.
Joe rounded the front of the vehicle. The horse was fast despite being dead. Moved like a horse at a trot than a run, but it was fast enough to close the distance between them in a short period of time. He got into the driver’s side door just as the horse hit the fence. It crashed into the horizontal pickets and bounced back a few feet, its creamy white eyes fixated on the car.
“Hit it!” Tracy said.
The snap of wood startled him and he looked out Tracy’s window just as the undead horse rammed into it. The horse’s big black head shoved into the El Camino, its teeth like giant yellow Chiclets snipping at the air before finding her hair. It got a mouthful and pulled Tracy’s head toward itself as she screamed.
Joe fumbled for the X-09 off the seat. Once he got a firm grip on the handle, he aimed its barrel between the horse’s eyes and fired. The horse’s skull exploded in a burst of black blood and eggshell-white bone. Brain and grue splashed onto Tracy.
Joe got out of the car and went to her side. “You okay?”
She didn’t respond, but he did hear spitting. She probably didn’t want to talk with the horse’s blood all over her face.
He checked where the horse’s mouth met her hair. The teeth were clamped tight onto it, the sudden impact of the bullet probably having forced the horse to tense its muscles before it died.
He leaned over the horse, looked Tracy over, and located a knife on her belt.
“Hold still. I’m going to cut you free,” he said.
Tracy stopped moving as he reached down, pulled the six-inch blade from a holster on her belt, then got to work cutting her hair where it met the horse’s mouth. Blood from the horse’s open skull gushed out on his hands. He did his best to use them as a kind of umbrella so that it wouldn’t flood onto Tracy’s face and stop her from breathing through her nose. Once he cut her hair free, he threw the knife to the ground and grabbed what was left of the horse’s head by the mane and heaved it away from the vehicle. The horse weighed a ton and the best he could do was pull it to the side so it was just clear of the car.
Joe picked up the knife and ran back around the front of the El Camino. “One more sec.” He drove ahead past the horse’s body. He put it back in park, got back out and went to Tracy’s side. He opened the door and helped her out of the car. Immediately she went to work wiping the blood from her face, shaking her hair out and getting as much of the flesh and goop off as she could.
Joe was back on the driver’s side and rummaged around, checking under the seat. Maybe there was something under it Tracy could use to clean herself up with. Instead he found nothing. He checked her way to see how she was coming along. She got most of the blood off her face, but her hands were filthy.
“Here,” he said, and took off his trench coat. “Use this.” He reached across the seat and gave her the coat. She still had her eyes closed so he climbed across and stuck it directly in her hands.
Tracy scraped the suede coat against her face and cleaned herself. When most of it was gone, she blinked open her eyes. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She continued to wipe the blood off as best she could. “This stuff stinks.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, thank you. I appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome.”
A few minutes later, Tracy was relatively clean, but Joe’s coat was covered in undead horse blood.
“Just chuck it,” he told her. “But let me check the pockets.” She passed him the coat. Joe emptied a few items from the pockets then tossed the coat by the side of the road.
Joe went back to his seat and Tracy got back in the car.
“You ready?” Joe asked her.
“Yeah.”
He put it in drive, pulled away from the shoulder and got back on the road. A few minutes later, he rounded another stalled car and drove on.
They didn’t talk much since the incident with the horse. Joe didn’t hit the zombies that wandered the road here and there. Instead he drove around them, eyes fixed forward. They couldn’t go too much farther, though. Gas was down to an eighth of a tank.
There was something on the horizon ahead on the side of the road. The closer it got, the more it took shape. Another zombie. As it got even closer, it grew into a young man with dirty blonde hair and matching beard.
Joe looked out the window at him as he drove past.
The young man was alive.
27
Michael
“Is he much further?” Billie asked Nathaniel.
The angel walked as if the trek through the woods demanded little effort. Billie, being much shorter, had a harder time keeping up.
So far they hadn’t encountered any more undead or demons.
“He was close for a moment, but then was gone,” Nathaniel said. “I sensed him briefly, but I also sensed something else. More than something else. Several creatures at once.”
“Are they still here?”
He shook his head. “No. I suspect Michael either dealt with the
m swiftly or, sensing me near and knowing I was with you, drew them away to protect you.”
“Could a” —Billie was having a hard time switching gears and dealing with demons on top of zombies even though the two, it seemed, were the same thing— “could demons kill me if they wanted to? I mean, in demon form, not zombie?”
Nathaniel seemed to think for a moment. “There was a young man who loved to climb. One night he and some friends decided to go rock climbing in the dark. There was a climbing wall outside a neighborhood community center and they entered the lot even when the sign said not to do so after ten at night. They began to climb. The young man wasn’t the best at it in the group, but he still held his own and managed to get a solid twenty feet off the ground before he fell. He hit the ground and broke his neck. Couldn’t walk after that. Later, when he was in the hospital and was well enough to relay the story to his friends and family about what happened, he said that as he was climbing, he felt a sudden viselike grip grab his wrist and pull his hand away from the climbing hold. The force pulled at his hand so hard he lost his balance and fell.”
“So you’re saying a demon caused it.”
Nathaniel stopped walking and looked back at her square in the eye. “I was there. I was fighting other creatures not far from the pastor’s son. There were so many and I was temporarily bound. One got past and went for the young man.”
Billie fell silent.
Nathaniel kept moving.
