by A. P. Fuchs
“My name’s Billie,” she said.
“Billie, like William? No, wait, that ain’t right. Willimina?”
“No, just Billie. Just what my parents called me.”
“I guess that’s all right,” he said.
“Whatever you say, Hank.”
For now, Billie kept a couple steps behind him. It made it easier to navigate through the bushes and around trees; she feared that if she walked beside him, he might want to strike up a conversation and she could only imagine how far a talk about squirrel burgers would go.
Hank held his shotgun against his shoulder like a lumberjack carrying an axe. He walked with his head held high, neck rotating it side-to-side like a periscope, scanning the woods for any sign of trouble.
I want to see Joe, Billie thought. She didn’t know where he was. If only Nathaniel or Michael had said something before they disappeared. She hoped they were all right. Prayed they were. Were they still in the forest? Or did they transform into their angelic forms and were now waging war in the unseen world that was their domain?
It didn’t seem right they would leave her here like this. If anything, the thought just cemented they had indeed been under attack and supernatural forces came specifically for them. It partly gave her a bit of relief because for so long she had been the target. Del and May made that much clear. They had wanted her for information. Had those two been there the day when Hell broke open and the demons rose into the sky? Had they seen her, or did they just find out about her afterwards as part of whatever rank or station they held?
Billie didn’t know why Joe seemed of keen interest to Del and May and for now could only suppose it was because he had been with her on that day, too, and had witnessed the Rain’s origin.
“Shh,” Hank said, then stopped walking and quickly held the shotgun with both hands.
Billie froze; her eyes darted side-to-side in their sockets. It’s never ending, she thought.
Hank brought the shotgun up and braced the butt up against the crook of his arm. He lined up his sights down the barrel and stood that way for a solid minute or two.
“Something there?” Billie asked quietly.
“Shh,” he said, abruptly.
Again, the man stood there, frozen like some kind of honorary statue to hunting.
The minutes ticked by, each second marked by Billie’s heart thundering in her chest. She strained her ears to hear movement or groans or any other sound in the bushes and trees. All she was met with was silence.
This can’t be right, she thought. He’s crazy. Has to be. I can’t hear anything. Hank’s a lunatic! “There’s nothing there, Hank.”
“Shh.”
She sighed and waited a third time. Same results. “Are you trying to scare me because if you are, it’s working.”
“Shh.”
“For crying out loud. Let it go, there’s nothing—”
Heavy footfalls cut her words short. The bushes up ahead swayed and bent.
A grizzly bear with white eyes and fur caked with patches of blood emerged and rose up on its hind legs.
Billie shrieked. Hank shushed her.
“Shut up!” she screamed and started to back away. The bear’s dead eyes locked onto her, not really looking at her, but more through her.
Hank dropped to one knee like a man about to be knighted and aimed his shotgun up at the bear. The big grizzly leaned its head back and opened its giant mouth, letting out a wheezy bellow. Billie could tell from the flesh dangling off its long sharp teeth that it hadn’t been long since it fed.
The bear towered over them both.
What’s he waiting for? What’s he—
Hank’s shotgun boomed and the top of the bear’s head erupted like a volcano science project gone wrong. Not only did the top of its head blow off like a hat of brain and bone, but the left side of its face blew off as well, black blood spurting out like a geyser. Hank calmly stood and took a step back to allow the beast enough room for its enormous muscled body to fall to the forest floor.
The smell of gun powder still hung on the air. Billie’s ears still rang from the shot.
“There, just like that,” Hank said and spat a little wad of saliva onto the bear’s carcass.
Billie thought back to that zombie rat in her apartment, the one that tried to kill her and Des. She wondered if all animals had been infected because this bear’s undead presence surely suggested it.
She exhaled slowly. “Thanks, Hank.”
He tipped his baseball cap and gave her a gentlemanly grin. “Don’t mention it.” He popped open the shotgun and shoved another shell into it. “All right, fully loaded. Let’s go.” Hank walked around the bear’s carcass and continued on his original path.
Billie picked up her feet and did the same, not bothering to look at the bear’s headless corpse as she walked past.
Where do the demons go after the zombie is killed? she thought. Why the brain or cutting off the head? How can that hurt a demon? She supposed she’d find out the answer if or when she reconnected with Nathaniel or Michael.
She suddenly stopped. Hank didn’t seem to notice and kept going. Billie got moving again but slower this time. What if Hank was one of them? Sure, he rescued her, but that didn’t mean anything. Del and May had done the same back at the Richardson Building. This could all be a ruse to lull her into a false sense of security before either torturing her for more information, or simply killing her or turning her into one of them. But she couldn’t be turned into one of them or, at least, she didn’t think so. Nathaniel said something about her predestined immunity to the Rain. She couldn’t be possessed otherwise she surely would have. But what about now? What about still having not yet made the choice to completely surrender to God?
Why couldn’t she completely surrender? Something was holding her back and she needed to find out what.
41
Internal and External
There had been no way for Joe or Tracy to hide from the undead. The seven coming down the road toward them had seen them. Joe made a move for the shoulder lane, the zombie on the same side as the road as him drifted that way a couple moments after.
Tracy already held the heavy pipe at the ready. As a kind of afterthought, Joe was impressed she seemed able to handle the weight of it fairly well.
He raised the X-09, double checked the ammo—he’d have to reload in a few more shots—and got it ready to fire.
“I’m assuming we’re just going to keep going toward them, huh?” Tracy said.
“Yep,” Joe said. “Not much of a choice and I’m not running through the woods again.”
“Better off out here,” she breathed.
“Just don’t get crazy and get in too close. I need you alive.”
“Do you, now?”
He didn’t respond, but instead lined up his first shot: the zombie in the middle. He waited until they were around thirty feet off before firing. The zombie dropped. He fired a round into the undead next to it and brought that one to the pavement as well.
When she was close enough, Tracy took the one furthest on her side and swung the lead pipe into its skull. Its head smooshed and it went down. She brought the pipe down on its face like an ax and took it out for good.
“Four left,” Joe said.
“No, three,” Tracy said as she drove the pipe across the neck of another one, snapping it. The scrawny zombie’s body bent backward in half from the blow and collapsed.
Joe fired off another round, taking out a chunky woman with brown smears on her mouth and cheeks. He didn’t want to know from what. “Two.”
He reached for a fresh clip of bullets from the strap across his chest, popped out the old one, let it drop to the road, and clicked in the new all the while sidestepping an undead that had reached for him.
“Joe!” Tracy yelled. A barrel-chested zombie had one hand on her shoulder, the other on her head. She swung out with the pipe but only connected with the dead man’s ribs. All her blow did was make it s
huffle a step to the side.
“Coming!” Joe ran over, pressed the barrel to the side of the zombie’s head and pulled the trigger. The creature’s head erupted and it toppled over.
Its hand was locked onto Tracy’s head and it pulled her down with it. Joe was about to help her up when he felt a cold hand wrap around his face. One of the thing’s fingers had found its way across his eyes, blinding him. Quickly thinking of what this might look like if he was a bystander, he reached the X-09 around himself and shoved the barrel into something soft. He pulled the trigger. The force of the bullet’s impact knocked the zombie away. He turned around and put another bullet between the dead man’s eyes. The creature hit the ground.
Joe went over and helped Tracy up just as she finished wrestling with the deceased zombie’s grip.
“Thanks,” she said.
He nodded, and the two walked on.
An hour later, and without a single encounter with the undead, they stopped on the road and sat down.
Joe, legs crossed, felt weird about sitting in the middle of the road even though no one would be driving on it. His little stint driving the El Camino was the first car he saw moving on the road in months.
Tracy sat with her elbows on her knees. “Still want to go on?”
Joe gazed off down the road. “I came out here looking for a break, or even just someplace to just, I don’t know, stop. I kept thinking, Find someplace without zombies, close the blinds and if you close your eyes, it’ll feel like things were before. Guess I was just kidding myself. I can’t go back to the way things were. My world isn’t this one. I don’t even know if my world exists.”
“Wouldn’t it be weird if, you know, years ago, whether in my world or yours, we saw each other somewhere, not knowing how things would’ve ended up?” She looked the opposite way down the road. “Think about stuff like that all the time.”
He looked at her. “What ifs, and if onlys?”
“Yeah.” She faced him and smiled. “Always was a fan of that stuff. Like that episode of Star Trek, ‘Parallels.’ The one where Worf drifts through different realities, the point being that each choice we make, every choice happens but we only go down and experience the path we choose.” She smirked. “Not really related to what I was saying about us, but you can’t help but wonder who’s choice created this world. Mine? Yours? Someone else’s or lots of someone elses? Cause and effect and all that.”
“Too bad you couldn’t take a step back and see where each choice would lead, even experience each choice for a while and see if you’d like it.”
“No kidding.”
“I think about stuff like that, too. The scary part is you can get lost in it.” Her expression changed to something more serious, as if she knew exactly what he was talking about. “I think it’s rooted in control, you know, the desire to control. Everyone’s got one, just some more than others. You and me . . . we’re bad for that. All creative people are. We call it ‘expression’ and ‘art’ and all that stuff, but what are we really doing? We’re manifesting our fantasies and living there for a time, acting like gods. Kind of sad, when you think about it.”
“Maybe, but what’s inside us counts just as much—some would argue even more so—than what’s out here. Look at us humans: we’re physically complicated beings. You could break down things into generic sections like muscles, bones, brain, lungs, mouth, ears, etcetera. Go deeper. Start looking at cells, DNA, the water molecules running through our system, how some stuff is solid, some mushy, others liquid. Somehow it all works. I’d never buy that it happened by accident. There’s just no way. Point is, yeah, we’re physically complicated. What’s even more complicated is the stuff we don’t see: emotions, thoughts, ideas, longings, even our fantasies which combine all those things.”
“I thought—”
“Wait, not done. Call up a biologist or physician or whoever and they’ll start going on about chemicals in the brain, stuff circulating throughout your system, different nerve endings being the trigger and all the rest. Okay. I get that. All physical stuff. But get under all that. Close your eyes and an entire world materializes before you. Dip in deep enough and you can smell, touch, hear, feel. Where do ideas come from? Namely the stuff that doesn’t come from your experiences. We’ve all dreamed of flying. We’ve all felt what’s it like to have nothing but air beneath your toes, a sense of weightlessness yet control at the same time. Yet no one’s flown. I’ve lifted cars in my dreams, but haven’t done it in real life.
“Then there’s those times you walk into a place and you know, you just know, something’s not right. Chemicals and nerves? As if. It really hits home, when after you leave, you find out someone was stabbed just after you left.”
“Premonition,” Joe said.
She looked down and to the side, as if she wasn’t sure if she should say this next part.
Come on, Tracy. You got me hooked now, he thought. Talk.
She cleared her throat. “Or falling in love. Two people meet and ‘hit if off,’ as they say. Really connect. It can’t all be physical. Or those classic stories, ‘Love at first sight.’ Sure enough, not long after those people marry and live happily ever after. Skeptics might say it’s self-fulfilling prophecy. Folks like that lack an open mind, if you ask me. You know the kind: if it’s not empiric, I don’t want it.
“Really, how do people connect? Why be more attracted to someone than another? Not superficially, even. Just that part of you that goes yes when meeting someone else. Even crazier, why do some people just feel right and others don’t?
“I reckon those things are much more complicated than our already-complicated physical makeup. Our body seems to work like a machine on both external and internal levels.
“Anyway, like I said, I think about stuff like this all the time and it’s one of the reasons why I had little trouble accepting your claim of being from another world.”
“One of the reasons?” Joe asked.
“Yeah, one of the reasons,” she said with a bit of a smile.
“And the other?”
“Maybe,” she said, “I think it’s because we are very similar. Very similar. Even now” —she swallowed and looked him in the eyes— “I feel very comfortable talking to you. But it’s beyond feeling. Seems natural.” She held his gaze, as if afraid she had said too much or gone too far.
Joe’s breath caught in his throat and the words he was about to speak had no choice but to go back down deep inside else they come out a crackled mess. When he thought he could say something, he wasn’t sure if he should.
Tracy looked at him, eyes soft, even worrisome.
His eyes met hers, but he couldn’t speak. He wanted to, but now something in his heart kept the words at bay.
A few moments later, she looked away then stood up and dusted herself off.
Joe sat staring at the ground, feeling like an idiot.
“Tracy,” he said, and stood up.
She stood there, partly turned away. He had her full attention, though. She seemed frightened.
“Thanks,” he said.
She squinted her eyes, appearing to not get what he was driving at.
“What I mean is,” he said, “it’s easy to talk to you, too. And not just in a . . . in a ‘we get along,’ kind of way. I like being with you.” The words stabbed at his heart, a betrayal to April in his mind, and yet he felt as if a burden lifted.
Tracy smiled sweetly, as if what he just said was what she had been waiting to hear.
“Thanks for being my friend,” Joe said.
“Thanks for being mine.”
Their eyes met again, then he said, “I think we should head back.”
“Back where?”
“The city.”
“Okay.”
42
Hordes of the Dead
We’re going nowhere, Billie thought.
Her and Hank had been walking through the forest for at least an hour. Every so often Hank would stop, shush her, and make like he
heard something. She had wondered the first couple times if it was another zombified animal, but each time he said in the same tone, “Must be the wind,” and they would move on. The problem with his excuse was there was no wind. There hadn’t been a wind since the Rain fell. The Rain did more than just bring the dead back to life and launch a demonic invasion on humankind. It also screwed up the weather by blacking out the sun, forbidding any natural rain to fall. She was no meteorologist, but she guessed that some of the demons were in charge of keeping the weather the way they wanted it to be because no sun would equal ice-cold temperatures and not just the fall-like weather they had now. Cold and hot air masses would have converged and created all sorts of disasters. No, the demons were in charge, it seemed, and wouldn’t let the earth die of floods and storms. Not yet, anyway.
When Hank shushed her the third time, she just waited for him to have his little episode before they moved on. On the fourth, she just stood there tapping her toes and was tempted to call him on it.
On the fifth time, she said, “Okay, enough. There’s nothing out there.” Now, she was certain what happened with the zombified bear was a fluke.
“I said shush.”
“There’s no wind, Hank. You should know that by now.”
He shot her a cold look. “Might be true, but there are plenty of them things haunting these woods.” He spat to the side. “I’m sure of it.”
She grunted, frustrated, and came up beside him.
