Rise of the Dead

by Jeremy Dyson

  We take cover behind an SUV about fifty yards from Quentin and focus on clearing the way for him. I waste bullets, spending three or four rounds sometimes to take down a corpse. The amount of ammunition we are expending could come back to haunt us later, but all that matters to me right now is getting out of this.

  Finally, Quentin reaches the vehicle, and we retreat to the alley. We have to stop several times to create a path in front of us and slow the crowd of undead at our backs. Inevitably, some of our rounds miss their targets. I shoot the window of a nearby vehicle and set off another alarm. Danielle looks over at me and rolls her eyes. I just shrug and keep shooting. By now there are hundreds of corpses converging on us anyway. This whole thing turned out to be a very bad idea.

  We meet up with the rest of the group, and then we keep moving up the alley alongside the thickening crowd of corpses on the streets. After a few blocks, the alley dead ends at the back of a parking lot. Fletcher shoots out the lock on a loading door, and we take cover in a low-end mattress store. We stay in the stockroom because the front of the building is floor-to-ceiling windows. At least, we have a clear view of the street and can easily assess the situation from inside.

  Stitch hops up on the first mattress he sees and walks in circles. He sniffs the padding, then lays down in a tight coil. I drop my pack next to him and remove a water bottle and gulp half of it down at once. Fletcher crawls up to the front window, careful not to attract the attention of the crowd of corpses out in the street. He checks to make sure the front entrance is locked, then retreats to the rear of the store.

  “We should be safe here awhile,” Fletcher whispers. “At least a few hours.”

  I retrieve one of the MRE’s from my bag and rip open the outer packaging. I remove a candy bar and the crackers and save the rest of the food for later. I tear open the candy bar and begin devouring it. I notice that Kyle is staring at me hungrily, so I toss him the package of crackers. He fumbles with the plastic, then tears at the package with his teeth to get it open.

  “When was the last time you ate, college boy?” Quentin asks him, handing him a bottled water from his pack.

  “A few days ago,” Kyle says.

  “Go easy then,” Quentin suggests. “We don’t need you getting sick out there.”

  I finish the candy bar and lean back against the wall, and watch the stumbling figures out in the road. The sun is coming up now and casting the long shadows of the dead across the windows of the store. Every so often one of them almost seems to stop and stare at the storefront until I am sure it has some idea we are inside, but all of them eventually wander away except one. There is a middle-aged woman in a kitchen apron splattered with blood that lingers just beyond the door. It gazes at the glass, and I wonder if it is looking inside or if it is merely staring at its reflection. After the first five minutes, I just want her to leave. Some of these things just creep me out more than the rest of them do.

  “You sure you don’t want to head back?”

  I turn my head and find Fletcher crouching beside the mattress. He is digging through his pack and taking stock of what remains of the ammunition. He pauses and looks up to see my expression.

  “I didn’t think so,” he says. “But you should know if we run into trouble like that again we aren’t going to be able to shoot our way out of it.”

  “You don’t have to come,” I remind him.

  “You didn’t have to come back and get me out of that tunnel either,” he says. “I guess this will make us even.”

  I stand up and begin reloading the food and ammunition into my pack. “If we keep moving, we should be able to get there by early tomorrow morning,” I suggest. No one else looks particularly eager to get going again. They watch me loading my pack in silence. Even the dog is staring up at me while it continues to rest on the mattress. I worry that if I allow myself to stay here even a moment longer, I might not have the will to start moving forward again.

  I look over to notice Danielle is putting a new magazine in her rifle and readying to leave. Reluctantly, Quentin pushes himself up off the floor and hauls his pack up onto his shoulders. He looks worn out, but he gives me a small smile to let me know he is okay to keep going. Stitch rouses from the mattress and shakes himself briskly on the bed then hops down to the floor and stretches his legs. Once everyone is ready to go, I push the back door open slightly to peer into the empty alley. I spot a gap in the wooden fence along the back of the alley and we cut through into the backyard of a subdivision. We keep moving north alongside the road that will take me home.

  Twenty-two

  The day is warm, and the neighborhood streets are quiet and empty, and if you can manage to ignore the bullet holes in the cars and the bodies that are rotting on the ground, it might almost seem like any ordinary day. Except the moment you let that happen, you’re dead. We walk in silence mostly, always aware of every small noise we make. By avoiding the main road, we travel with relative ease. For some reason, the side streets contain significantly fewer corpses than the main roads. They seem to crowd the same places they used to crowd. I could almost believe this shows some kind of mental attachment to their former lives, but the truth is that they were likely drawn there by the last humans that survived.

  There are plenty of cars parked in driveways along the road, and I debate the possibility of checking the houses for keys. The roads are so difficult to navigate that I think we might be better off traveling on foot. As midday approaches, the streets begin to seem more familiar. We reach a vast nature preserve that I recognize instantly. The woods runs along the highway through several towns, before it eventually ends at the expressway. We cross over Route 59 and follow an entrance into the preserve.

  After several minutes of walking without the slightest trace of danger, I shoulder my rifle. We stop for lunch at a pavilion. I sit down at a picnic table and heat up an entree from the MRE. Since we are several miles from the road, we don’t worry about the smell of the food or the sound of our voices giving us away. Stitch discovers a tennis ball and convinces Danielle to stop eating her lunch and play fetch. For a few minutes, I sit back and close my eyes and savor the feel of the sun hitting my skin again.

  The tongue of a dog lapping my face wakes me, and I open my eyes to Danielle giggling on the ground next to me. I wipe a thin film of sweat off my face and am immediately angry with myself for falling asleep.

  “How long was I out?” I ask her. I get up and take a sip of water and begin to gather my gear together.

  “Maybe a half hour,” she says.

  I’m already regretting the time lost. It’s been a long time since we slept, but I have to keep pushing ahead. I look around at the tired, dirty faces around me and can tell no one wants to move yet.

  “We can’t keep going like this,” Danielle says. “Everyone is exhausted.”

  “I know,” I sigh. “I’m tired as hell too. I have to go, though.”

  “How much farther is it?” she asks.

  “Maybe ten miles,” I guess. I know exactly how to get home from here. The route will take me through more nature preserves and undeveloped land. It seems like the least dangerous area we’ve encountered, and I can probably make it there by myself if I avoid the main roads. I’ve been wrong about that kind of thing before. I won’t blame any of them if they decide to stay behind, but I have to keep moving. “Once we get over the expressway, it’s a lot of open farmland. We might even be able to get there before dark.”

  “Then what?” asks Fletcher.

  I am not sure how to respond, I haven’t thought past getting home. I can’t allow myself to think beyond that moment. “I guess, we’ll just see what we find first.”

  We set out again on a gravel trail that meanders through the preserve to the parking lot that borders the expressway. The lot is full of empty parking spaces. The frontage road that leads to Route 59 looks deserted as well. The expressway is still a nightmare. Corpses wander through a junkyard of automobiles that spans the entire eight
lanes of traffic.

  “Holy shit,” says Kyle as he looks down upon the scene for the first time. He turns and looks at Natalie, who looks terrified. The rest of us have seen this before. We are maybe two or three miles west of the medieval restaurant. Hard to believe we went through so much to end up back where we started almost.

  “How are we going to get across there?” asks Natalie. “This is crazy.”

  “We can try and go down to that overpass,” Fletcher suggests, squinting his eyes to peer into the distance. The closest overpass is, at least, a mile to the west, and located near a huge shopping center and movie theater. He takes a pair of binoculars from his pack and holds them to his eyes. “Don’t look like that way will be much better, though.”

  “We go across here,” I say. “There is another forest preserve on the other side. It’s the best chance we have.”

  For a long moment, no one says anything.

  “They’re packed together pretty tight down there,” says Quentin. He crouches down and rests his rifle across his knee looking for the best possible route across. “It won’t be a walk in the park; that’s for damn sure.”

  “We don’t have the ammo for this,” Danielle says. “There’s too many.”

  Fletcher returns the binoculars back to his pack and removes a cutter to make a hole in the high chainlink fence that separates the forest from the highway. “We stay together and keep low,” he says. “Draw as little attention as possible. Don’t shoot unless you have to. We can do this.”

  Fletcher finishes cutting the hole, and then we move through to the other side and down a small hill of thick weeds toward the highway. The uneven ground is tricky to manage, and I nearly lose my balance trying to shift the heavy pack on my shoulders. We reach the bottom of the hill and crouch behind the concrete divider that separates the easement from the highway. I can smell the overwhelming odor of the dead on the other side. Stitch sniffs the air. The hair on his neck bristles.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” Natalie murmurs softly. I look past her to see Fletcher give me the nod; then he rises to his feet and disappears over the wall. I hop the barricade, and then wait as the others make their way onto the highway. We follow Fletcher through the maze of wrecked and abandoned cars. We pass by a corpse pinned to the side of a sedan by the grill of a pickup. It claws at the metal and opens its mouth when it catches sight of us approaching. It won’t be able to grab us, so Fletcher keeps out of reach of the corpse and moves past it. This maneuver seems to be the best option until the thing begins to bang loudly on the hood of the pickup while struggling to grasp at us. I turn and fire a round through the skull of the thing. After its head smacks the hood of the truck, it is quiet and still again.

  I hold my position for a long moment, hoping the noise has not alerted more corpses to our presence. We have a long way to go across the expressway, and who knows how long it will take to weave through the mess of cars. I lower the gun and turn back when I glimpse something moving in the periphery of my vision that stops me cold. A corpse claws at the window of the sports car behind me. The teeth snap, and there is a dull thud as the thing hits its skull on the glass.

  I feel a momentary flood of relief with the realization that the glass separates the corpse from my face. The moment doesn’t last long. As the zombie struggles to reach me, it lays a hand on the horn of the car. The blaring sound sets my heart racing.

  “Shit,” Fletcher growls. He springs to his feet and begins selecting targets and firing round after round.

  “Run!” Quentin urges as he stands up and opens fire as well.

  I push Natalie forward and wait as she climbs over the crumpled hood of the car. I scurry over behind her, and then bring the rifle up to fire into a handful of corpses making their way toward us between the lanes of traffic. Danielle drops down behind me and takes out several zombies coming from the opposite direction.

  Natalie and Kyle remain crouched between the cars. They look too scared to move. “Keep going,” I urge them, and then I climb on the hood of a taxi cab and begin firing at several corpses on the other side. I feel something brush against my leg and ready the rifle to put a bullet in whatever was about to grab me, but I look down to find Stitch. He hops down and disappears beneath the undercarriage of the next car.

  I remove the empty magazine and replace it. There is only one more before I have only the handgun. We’ll never fight our way across the highway. The crowd of corpses closing in on us continues to grow faster than we can shoot them down. With every moment that passes the chances of us making it across seem to get worse. I reach the concrete median and begin to climb over to cross over into the westbound lanes, but a hand grabs hold of my shirt and pulls me back. I turn, ready to fight to free myself, but realize it is Quentin.

  “Head down!” he screams and pulls me toward the ground behind the median.

  I look around and try to understand what he is warning me about. From the roof of a car Fletcher throws something across the median in the direction of a cluster of corpses. Then he shoves me to the pavement and drops down beside me. A series of concussive blasts on the other side of the concrete shock me senseless. Behind the ringing in my ears, I hear a voice telling me to run. I turn around and start to pull myself over the concrete divider when I notice the street looks like a bomb went off. Several cars have exploded, and the blasts sent pieces of jagged metal flying in every direction. The skeletons of several scorched cars are smoking on the pavement, but otherwise, the road is relatively clear of the dead. Coughing on the smoke, I make a run for the other side of the expressway.

  Once I reach the fence, I shrug my pack off and toss it up and over the top and start to climb. I have no idea how close any of the walking dead might be behind me. After I pull myself to the top of the fence, I can only muster the strength to swing my body over and drop down to the ground below. I land hard on the unforgiving ground. My exhausted legs buckle and I roll over onto my back and gasp for air. The incessant high pitched tone is all I can hear for a moment; then the sound of a dog barking far away.

  I push myself upright and see Stitch digging in the dirt at the base of the fence. Everyone else is still climbing over the top, so I grab the chainlink and pull it up as much as I can until he can squeeze his body underneath. I collapse back on the ground and watch the others climb down the fence. For several minutes, we all rest on the ground and stare back at the expressway. The walking dead continue their slow pursuit of us, and they converge on our position on the other side of the fence. The first of them to reach the barrier has a face that is charred black on one half and still smoking. The smell of burnt, rotting flesh motivates us to find the strength to get up and start moving again.

  Twenty-three

  After half an hour, the ringing in my ears finally begins to subside but leaves me with a splitting headache. I squint my eyes and pinch at the bridge of my nose as if I could squeeze the pain out of existence with my fingers.

  “Here,” says Danielle. She nudges my arm with a bottle of aspirin. I take it and down a couple and thank her when I hand it back.

  Our pace has slowed since crossing the expressway. Aside from the exhaustion, the nature preserve on this side of the highway doesn’t have any trails to follow. We have to push through marshes and fields of tall grass and densely wooded acreage.

  “These fucking mosquitos, man,” Kyle whines and slaps at an insect on the side of his neck.

  “At least, it’s just the bugs trying to bite your scrawny ass out here, college boy,” laughs Quentin. “I’d take that any day.”

  The sound of crickets begins to fill the air as the sun drifts downward toward the western horizon. We stop when we come upon a small stream about a hundred yards from the road. I drop my pack and bend down to splash my face with water.

  The forest preserve ends up ahead, and we’ll have to take to the street as we head towards town. It will be too hard to move through the woods in the night, and the road runs through a sparsely populated s
tretch for the next several miles. We scout the street to be sure it is clear. No sign of anyone, alive or dead. It doesn’t seem right. Though there aren’t many houses or businesses along this stretch of the road, it was used by lots of people traveling between towns and would get congested during rush hour. Amanda usually took it to get to work from Abby’s school. The last thing she said was that she was stuck in traffic. It just didn’t make sense, and I felt more anxious now than ever about what I might find ahead.

  “You okay?” Danielle asks me.

  A million different scenarios play out in my mind now as I wonder what might have happened to my family. As desperate as I am to find them, I dread facing the likely outcome that I may not find any trace of them. I may even find something much, much worse. These thoughts cause me to slow down, and when I look up to respond to Danielle, I realize I’ve dropped well behind.

  “Yeah,” I lie.“Just a little tired.”

  Danielle looks at me long enough that I can tell she knows something else is wrong. After everything we’ve been through, I still have a hard time telling her what bothers me. It’s not in my nature to willingly show any sign of weakness, even when it’s obvious. She seems satisfied when I force a smile on my face and decides not to pry any further.

  “These houses are amazing,” she says to change the subject.

  “Hold up,” Fletcher interrupts. “We got something up ahead around the bend.”

  I try to squint into the bright setting sun to see. I can’t tell what it is, but a long metallic object appears to be blocking both lanes of the street. That would explain why there are no cars at all. Whatever it is must have been here since this whole thing first started.