by R. M. Smith
They seemed more interested in the burning hotel. They didn’t come my way.
I turned around to start making my way to Seattle, but was stopped dead in my tracks by a zombie that was no more than 3 feet away from me. Half of its face had been ripped off. It stood there, gawking at me. He stood there for a second, almost as surprised as I was. He lunged at me.
I swung my 7 iron at him. It cracked the side of his head. The zombie didn’t slow. I swung again, smacking the side of his nose, breaking it, sending skin off like a bad duff on the tee box.
He grabbed my left arm. His grip was very tight. I felt his broken fingernails dig into my skin as he dragged me toward his mouth.
Quickly I flipped the golf club around. I jabbed him in the gut with the grip end. He ooofed! Bile and blood washed out of his mouth. His grip loosened a bit. I yanked my arm free, then whacked him hard again across the head with the grip end of the club.
Another set of hands was on my back. I was yanked back toward the van. I expected teeth to bite into my neck, but the hands were softer but firm; not the itchy scaly hands of a zombie.
It was a man wearing a brown UPS uniform. He rushed past me on my left as he took a stainless steel baseball bat to the zombie’s head. After two good hits the zombie’s head split open. It went down with a thud.
The UPS guy crushed the zombie’s head with 3 more strong smacks.
He turned to me “You gotta smash their heads. That stops ‘em.” He looked haggard. “You alright?”
“Yeah thanks” I said, breathing hard.
“He bite ya?”
“No.”
The UPS guy looked me up and down looking for bite marks anyway. “Anyone else with you?”
“No,” I managed. “Just me.”
“Alright,” he said, “let’s get out of here before we get eaten or burned up.”
We both ran down the highway, not speaking, just running. I still held my golf club, he still had his bat.
About 200 yards down the crumbling highway, we both stopped running to turn to look back at the fire. The whole hotel was now engulfed in flame. Flames were shooting 50 feet into the air. The mountain where the plane had crashed was also burning. A huge column of white smoke covered most of the sky.
“Damn” I whispered.
“I saw you this morning coming out of the hotel. I was like that dude is gonna get burned up!”
“Yeah I was lucky to get out of there when I did. The smoke woke me up.”
“You’re a lucky man,” he stretched out his hand. “Name is Norm. Norm Bennet.”
“Hey Norm,” I said with a shuddery laugh. “I don’t know, maybe I’m on a lucky streak. I mean, the zombies are scary as hell, but yesterday I survived the plane crash that caused all of this.”
“What? You survived a plane crash?” he asked me, one eye squinted.
“Yeah up in the mountain there” I pointed. There was no sight of the plane wreck – the smoke was too thick up there.
“Holy shit!” he said, looking up at the mountain. “I live around here and was coming home off my shift last night when I got bounced all over the highway. I don’t know what the hell happened….what’s your name, man?”
“Dan Kingsley.”
“What do you think happened last night, Dan?
A sonic boom?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I think my flight got hit by another plane or something. It was weird. After we crashed I was looking around for survivors and I saw the skyline of Seattle. It looked like the horizon flipped.”
“I thought I saw something like that, too. Then everyone started to crash on the highway.”
“Well you’re lucky too,” I said, smiling. “I think we’re both lucky.”
“I agree,” he said. “Did you hear any of that stuff they were talking about on the radio last night?”
“No, what were they saying?”
He stopped short. He was staring down the road. His throat started working like he wanted to say something, but no words came out. His face was unshaven, his brown hair messy. It looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. He was frozen in place.
I looked at him, “What’s wrong?”
Suddenly he sprinted down the highway toward the fire. I followed him, not really knowing what he was doing, but he ran as fast as he could. He stopped by a small red car on the side of the road. It was tipped up onto its left side.
“Norm you ok?” I asked, out of breath as I caught up to him.
He bent down as he looked in the car. Quickly he stood back up. He spun around to his left, smacking his back on the hood of the sideways car. His bat clattered down onto the highway. “That’s Donna,” he whispered, tears in his throat. “That’s my wife…”
“What...” I looked into the car through the broken windshield. A woman inside was dead, slouched sideways against the driver’s side window. Her body was chewed apart on the exposed right side. Her hair had also been either eaten or ripped out of her scalp.
“You sure it’s her?” I asked.
“It’s my wife’s goddamn car!” Norm hollered. “It’s my goddamn wife! I’d know my wife if I saw her, even if she was...eaten…” He leaned forward putting his hands on his knees. “I was out here all night looking for her…I knew she would be coming home from work about the time when the whole fucking world went ape shit!” He leaned in to look at her. “She was here the whole time...I missed her...I must have walked past this fucking car 50 times last night and I didn’t even recognize it…but now I do…” He was hard to understand, his voice was crying.
“Jesus Norm, I’m sorry.”
He swallowed hard. “Where’s Janey? Where’s my little girl?”
I looked back into the sideways car. The backseat was difficult to see through the cracked windshield. I thought I could make out the top of a child seat back there and maybe something that looked like a red toolbox? If Janey was in there, she would probably be on the floor of the car.
“We’ll need to push the car onto the wheels to see,” he said.
Norm nodded through his tears. We both started to rock the car until it teetered and fell onto the tires. Norm’s wife went with the rocking. She fell over onto her eaten side when the car landed. She sagged as she fell over onto the center console.
In the back, Janey’s car seat was empty. Norm tried to open the back door on the driver’s side but it was jammed. I ran around the other side, popped the door open. Janey was dead on the floor. It looked like the side of her head had been bashed in.
Norm backed up. He fell over, crying.
“Jesus man,” I whispered.
There was a scuffle to my left. A woman zombie in a bloody flowered dress came around the back of a pick-up truck. Her face was covered in slimy fresh blood. She was wearing high heels. She swung at me as she reached me. A bracelet twirled on her wrist. I spun around with my 7 iron whacking her good in the jaw. The force of the impact knocked a wig off she was wearing.
Norm picked up his baseball bat. He went over to the zombie. He slugged the zombie in the head so hard with his bat that I heard its neck break. The zombie went down. Norm literally beat its brain in. He continued to slam the bat down, over and over, until there was nothing but blood splattered on the cement.
I touched his shoulder. “C’mon man, let’s get out of here.”
Norm stopped, wiping the sweat and tears off his face.
There was a suburban sitting in the median of the highway not too far from where we were. I ran over to it. The keys were still in the ignition. There were no bodies inside. I got in and backed up over to Norm.
“Come on man,” I said to him as I rolled the window down.
He walked around to the passenger side.
We headed toward Seattle.
We didn’t talk a lot as we drove. Most of the time Norm had his hand over his mouth, crying, holding back tears.
I was driving slow; amazed at the things we passed.
The destruction was massive.
It was as if the entire world had thrown up onto itself. The whole forest was snapped over from east to west. The highway was littered with vehicles, burned or still burning. Some cars had gone into the ditch or had fallen into large cracks that had opened in the road. In one spot we had to leave the highway entirely because a highway overpass had collapsed onto the road below.
The ground was broken and ribbed with large cracks that stretched as far as the eye could see. The cracks looked like they had been caused by something shoving up from under the ground. It didn’t look like volcanic damage; more like a major earthquake had split the earth. The cracks were everywhere.
The air was thick with smoke. In places smoke drifted over the highway. We had to drive slowly to get through it.
Also as we drove, we saw a lot of dead people, but no zombies.
Finally I asked Norm “What do you think caused all this?”
“I have no idea,” he whispered.
I asked him “Do you even want to go to Seattle?”
He thought about this for quite some time then said “Yeah, I have some family there.”
“Yeah that’s where I’m from too” I said.
“What do you do there?”
“I’m a computer tech.”
He nodded.
We didn’t talk much more. There really was no reason to talk about what we did. Obviously those jobs were meaningless now. We were in the midst of a major cataclysm here. The world had been destroyed; the dead had risen and were now walking amongst us. It was like we were living a disaster movie.
I didn’t expect an answer from him but I asked “Do you think this is the end of the world?”
He said with a tearful voice: “It is for me, man. The world is over. My wife and daughter are dead. My truck and business is destroyed. My home is probably burnt to the ground…what’s left here for me?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Could you drop me off here?” he asked. “I want to get out.”
I stopped the suburban. “Sure.”
He sat there a moment, then opened the door. “The bruises,” he said. “Did you notice them?”
I thought about it for a second then remembered the people on the plane: the fat man next to me, the woman across the aisle, the zombies. “Yea.”
“What caused it?” he asked, wiping a tear from his stubbly cheek.
“I have no idea,” I said, slowly shaking my head. “It has to be related to all of this somehow I would guess.”
“On the radio,” he said, “they said something about a nuke.”
“A nuke?” I asked, shocked.
“Yeah…they were saying that everyone needed to get to disaster shelters. It was a nuke. Then the radio died…like my wife…and daughter…”
He looked at me for a second, nodded, and then got out.
I sat there for a minute, not really knowing what to do. Who was I to tell him he couldn’t leave? I wasn’t going to give him a pep talk and tell him that his wife would have wanted him to try and survive. I also wasn’t going to tell him it wasn’t a good idea to get out of the car because he might get eaten. I had no idea what to say to a man who had just lost everything that was important to him in the world. If the man wanted to get out and fend for himself, or even go get eaten or even commit suicide, then that was his own choice.
The door was still open. He was leaning down looking at me. He said “Every single person I’ve seen since this has happened has had a bruise on their head somewhere - except for me and you. Explain that to me.”
“I can’t.”
“How come Donna had to be bruised…and Janey? Why did they have to die?”
I slowly shook my head. I didn’t have an answer.
He slowly closed the door.
I decided that I needed to find my family even though I hadn’t seen them in months. I was single, living on my own. My parents and little sister lived on the north side of town. I needed to know if they were ok.
A few more miles down I came to a destroyed bridge. It had fallen into a river below. It was called the Raging River, but it was hardly raging – it was more like a trickle. There was no way that I would be able to drive down through the mess of boulders and split earth. I had to leave the suburban behind.
Before abandoning the vehicle, I looked through it to see if there was anything worth holding onto. In the glove compartment I found a bottle of aspirin. I put those in my front right pants pocket. In the back of the car I took the tire iron next to the spare. I figured the tire iron would be a sturdier weapon than a golf club.
I was able to hop across the river where the highway had caved in. Chunks of the highway stuck up here and there with oddly angled steel struts sticking out of them. There was also another crumpled car down here on its top but no one was in it.
Norm had said that people were told to go to disaster shelters. Maybe that’s where all of the people went. I wondered if my family had gone there.
There have been many conversations about what happened that day.
I think most people believed a pole shift occurred. So many people saw the whole horizon lift up, some even said they saw it flip.
But really, it was much worse than that.
As day started turning to night, I finally walked into the suburbs of eastern Seattle. Here, too, the damage was overwhelming. As I came into the city most of the highway overpasses were down. I would have to walk up the onramps on almost every single exit; and even then most of the exits were blocked at the top by large cracks in the cement or by badly wrecked vehicles.
I could make out the skyline of the city every now and then in the distance. It looked like many of the skyscrapers were burning or had partially collapsed. The skyline that I had come to know and love over my years in Seattle now looked unfamiliar. The Space Needle was severely damaged. It still stood, the observation deck angled, ready to fall off under its own weight. Smoke rose up into the air all over the place. Almost every building that I could see had some damage. Parts had collapsed or walkways had fallen down. Water was leaking from the sides of homes. Roofs had collapsed or had blown off. What I had seen from the top of the mountain right after the plane crash turned out to be real and not my imagination.
I crossed a damaged bridge. The river underneath was no longer there. Instead, a flow of zombies walked along. They saw me, raised their hands to reach me. I knew they wouldn’t be able to get me - I was too high above them. I watched them, lunging, falling, reaching. There were thousands of them. All dead people. Alive now, but undead.
With goose bumps crawling up my neck, I quickly crossed the bridge. I came across an undamaged minivan. Inside I saw the keys dangling from the ignition. The engine fired right up. I needed to get out of here – far away from the river of undead. Once I found a safe place to park, I would park there, lock the doors, and sleep there for the night. Whenever it got light enough outside, I would need to find a gun.
Whoever owned the van had come from a grocery store before the poles flipped. There were plastic bags full of groceries in the rear. I put all of the items that had spoiled on the ground outside the van and kept the non-perishables with me.
I also found a cell phone in the van’s center console. I tried to call my parents but the phone didn’t work even though the signal was strong. I figured, if nothing else, I could use the phone as a flashlight if I needed it.
I drove the van through the destruction. I had to weave in and out around crashes on the highway or around downed power poles, traffic signals or trees. As I came into the suburbs, I kept my eyes on the side streets for a full parking lot. It was starting to get dark, and I needed to park soon. I figured a full parking lot would be better than an empty one. I wouldn’t want zombies to take an interest in a single van.
I was still a long way from my parent’s house, and I really didn’t know the eastern suburbs that well. I never came over here. I remember that I had made a computer repair house call once in this area, but that w
as long ago while I had been training with another guy.
I found a truck rental business up one frontage road. The building had been pulverized. The lot looked untouched. I quietly pulled into the back lot between two small moving vans. My headlights were off – I didn’t want to bring any extra attention to myself.
I shut off the van, locked the doors, and climbed into the back seat where I found a couple blankets tucked away. I covered myself up and quickly went to sleep.
It wasn’t long after I went to sleep that something woke me up. Something bumped the van strong enough to jar me awake.
It was pitch black outside. I had no idea who or what was out there.
The van bumped again, hard enough to make it rock.
I had the cell phone next to me on the seat. Did it dare turn it on? If I did, the backlight would definitely light me up - and maybe light up whatever was right outside the van.
Should I turn it on?
Bump. Bump!
Quiet.
Nothing.
Heavy breathing? Right above me, on top of the van.
I had to know what it was! I flipped open the cell phone for one second and looked out both windows. I couldn’t see anything but my own reflection in the windows. It scared the shit out of me.
Back to darkness.
Quiet.
Listening for anything, even a pin drop. Nothing. All I could hear was the pounding of my own heart in my ears.
Then…someone above me on the roof of the van tapped the roof two times with their finger.
“Hey!”
It was a girl’s voice in a loud whisper.
“Hey in there! Let me in!”
I threw the blanket to the side. I flipped open the cellphone. Grabbing the tire iron off the front passenger seat, I unlocked the sliding van door and jumped out into an ocean of zombies.
TARA
I only had seconds to act. Milliseconds, really.
Quickly, I looked on the roof of the van. I saw a girl up there laying on her belly, her head turned toward me, her eyes glowing in the dim light of my cell phone.
