by T. S. Ward
I’ve wanted to do this forever. Ever since I discovered this little trick.
The fishing line usually acts like a trip-wire, or a guidewire for the small things. I used to have my bedroom wired up to turn the light off and shut the door with it. I had the mini fridge in the living room wired to pull open and knock a beer out straight to the couch before I broke a few too many of those and everyone got pissed off. Even the chickens got their bucket of feed down a chunk of eavestrough that had been torn off in a storm and never fixed, straight from the living room window.
Lazy finds a way, even if it takes a little effort in the beginning.
It doesn’t take long to figure out that a can of whipped cream lodges perfectly under a counter near the entrance, that a wooden board set up where the sliding door opens will fall straight onto the nozzle, and with a little fishing wire keeping a can from falling, will release it on its journey all the way to the end. A few shelves used, a few more items. At some point the left-over round fruits and vegetables will all topple and fall, nudging a cart toward the fireworks.
I don’t really intend to set them off. Until I’m standing by the front door imagining it all going down with a smug grin on my face, and I turn just as a back door opens and Soldier comes walking through.
“Oh, come on!” I call to him, throwing my arms out. “You ruined it!”
“Get away from the door,” he hisses, waves me over to him.
I look outside before I do.
A group of people clad in black, armoured head to toe like some goddamn SWAT team, make their way down the street. One splits off to the bait and tackle shop. The rest start toward us.
I do as Soldier says, but not before I make a quick pit stop to grab the axe and the cooking torch I found earlier.
I slip around the aisle, grin at him as he tries to usher me back out, and sneak up to the cart as fast as I can. The nozzle lodges through the bars of the cart, and I tie it in place with some fishing line, and eye up the piece that’ll press the trigger and start the fire up. Easy, peasy, light-show in a grocery store.
“Ghost!” Soldier hisses, and I reach him just as the doors open.
I hesitate in the doorway as I hear the sound of the board falling and confused protests as the whipped cream hisses from the can. I can’t see it, but I can imagine the stream of it across the intruder’s shoes.
It all starts falling into place as I wanted it to, and I wish I could watch, but Soldier’s dragging me after him and back across an empty parking lot into the woods, heading for our shit.
I can’t help snickering when the sound of a city’s worth of fireworks start bursting in one compressed little space. I can see some escaping through the open door.
We stop to grab our things and then keep going.
Soldier keeps a hold of my arm. He moves faster than I can keep up.
“Ghost, come on,” he slows down, pushes me ahead of him, his hands on my shoulders. “There’s a car up here they came in. We can grab it, if we get there first.”
It’s almost disappointing to have no reaction, but I think I hear some amount of disdain, or anger even, and that—I think that makes me feel… guilty? Upset? Whatever it is worming through my gut, it’s a bullshit reaction. Bullshit that makes me keep my mouth shut the entire time he’s ushering me across the road to the SUV parked on the shoulder.
The entire goal is to annoy him, to prove I’m right.
He tries the door, and surprisingly, it’s open.
I push past him to hotwire the thing while he takes our gear and goes to load it. I stop, before breaking into anything, and check the ignition. The keys are there. The fucking idiots left the keys, too. I climb in, start the engine, and shift over to the passenger seat.
“Started that pretty fast,” Soldier says, shutting the door and hitting the locks. Then he sees the keys. “They left these behind. Weird.”
That feeling is still worming through my gut.
I climb into the back as he starts driving and lie down across the seats. This vehicle is a relief for my back. A relief from worrying about undead assholes attacking us.
“This feels too easy,” Soldier says. He’s scanning the woods as he drives, but keeps glancing back to me, too. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I say quickly, but it doesn’t sound convincing to me, and sure as hell won’t convince him. “I’m fine. Just slept on a rock. S’all good.”
He nods, and I see him raise an eyebrow. “S’all good? So what was that?”
“What was what?”
“You know what. You were in a great mood when I walked in there, and now you’re quieter than you’ve ever been. Explain. Tell me. You set a trap or something?”
I breathe out slowly. Lift my arms, rest my hands, my knuckles, against the cold glass of the window. “Something.”
“Like a, uh… what are they called? Goldberg machines?”
“Rube Goldberg, yeah.”
“And you just know how to do that?” He sets a hand on the back of the passenger seat. “You set that up in there that fast. Blew up all those fireworks, just… that easy?”
“Yup.”
He’s quiet for a while, and then he starts laughing. He’s laughing so hard he’s wiping tears from his eyes. He looks back at me, grinning like some fool. “That’s amazing. That’s awesome.”
“Sure,” I mumble.
“So what’s the sour mood about?”
“I don’t know, really, probably the end of the world, or something.”
He taps his hand against the seat. “You sure you aren’t just upset that your thing didn’t go as planned because those people interrupted? Because I’m a little sad I missed it.”
“You think I’m a little bitch? Takes big things to upset me. That is small beans.”
“Okay.”
“I am mad that there wasn’t any coffee. That’s big beans.”
He nods and either accepts my excuses or accepts that he knows they’re excuses. He starts talking about something else. Logistics of travel or whatnot. The amount of fuel in the car, how far we’ll get. How he’ll take the long way around just in case those people had another car and follow us. It’s a lot of serious talk that I tune out, watching the clouds and the treetops going by above me.
I think I fall asleep.
I definitely fall asleep.
Day Thirteen
“Ghost!”
Soldier smacks me awake for the second time and I sit up, groggy, sore from the way I was sitting.
“The fuck do you want now?”
He waves a hand toward the windshield. “Take a look. They just appeared out of nowhere and I’m hoping to all hell that these ones aren’t agile. We’re running on fumes. If we turn around now, we get stranded a bit further back.”
I peer through the darkness at the sharp cut of the headlights on the road. A shambling army is packed densely across the entire width of the road. All I can see are their torsos, their legs, dangling arms. It feels a hell of a lot more real now, seeing this.
A goddamn horde.
I clear my throat and shift in my seat. “What makes you think they’d be agile, exactly?”
“Local groups. The virus mutates differently in every community.”
“Okay, there, Doc,” I hold a hand up. “You sound like you know more about this than you’ve let on. A virus is different than an infection. Why change it now?”
He drums his hands on the steering wheel. “I do know more. But it was all speculative and no one could decide on what exactly this is because it acts like a virus in transmission but mutates cells. Like cancer.”
“Oh, joy. Infectious cancer. Great,” I mutter. “So can we ram them or what?”
He looks at me with a frown. “What? No. They crawled over cars. The road is thoroughly blocked. I’m asking if you want to get out now or turn around? We’ll have to run if we get out here.”
“But it’ll be faster to get out here and cut through the city, right?”
“If it looks like this here, I don’t want to risk going further. We’re going around either way.”
His hands keep drumming on the wheel. He looks at me with concern wedged between his eyebrows for a while, chewing on his lip, and then he puts the car in reverse and starts driving back down the road, his hand on the back of my seat.
“Screw it. Screw it—we’re driving until this thing stops.”
The headlights show more of the horde that’s coming at us, show the cars all twisted and gridlocked on the road. I watch one of them climb over the hoods without care for an arm that’s bent three ways to Sunday.
“Bloody acrobats,” I say.
Soldier swears, double checks the door locks, makes sure all the windows are up. “Seatbelt on? Hold tight.”
I barely have time to make sure that I do have a seatbelt on. He floors it, and the SUV jolts backwards, heavy thuds smacking into the back and making speed bumps as they fall. I grip the oh-shit handle and try to not look at the aftermath on the road ahead of us.
They keep coming, pouring over the divides and the barrier at the shoulder. It’s like the whole city is out here, coming after us, and suddenly I wish we left all of this on day one.
“Almost out,” Soldier tells me.
He whips the car around, hard, a body slamming into his door. The thing’s head bashes against the window so hard there’s a crack left in the glass.
I breathe out sharply. “Holy shit. Holy shit—”
I smack Soldier in the arm with the back of my hand. In front of us, there’s a massive one. It looks like a body builder jacked on steroids and meth, heaving in the middle of the road. My stomach drops as a string of drool pours from the corner of its mouth.
A nervous laugh spills from me. “Don’t think you can drive through a brick wall, huh?”
“I was not prepared for a boss battle,” Soldier says, and reaches over to unbuckle my seat belt.
“What are you doing? Benji? You don’t expect us to go out there—”
He barely gets his seatbelt off before Captain Roid Rage starts charging the car with almost as much force as a car crash.
It roars this strange garbled sound, loud as all hell, and starts slamming its fists into the hood and the windshield. The glass cracks immediately, shatters into a web that it starts to rip apart.
I’m about to open the door and jump out just as Soldier does, but the rifle is in the back. The axe is in the back. All of our stuff is, and even though we won’t be able to outrun this thing with all of it, there’s shit we’ll need to get out of here unscathed.
I dive into the back head first, pull the knife from its holster at my waist, and turn just as the thing rams its head through the windshield. Broken teeth gnash wildly. Beady eyes lost beneath swollen flesh stare blankly at me. I force the knife into one eye socket.
The thing rears back with a screech and takes half the windshield with it, and I take the opportunity to hit the sun roof button.
I slip the axe up onto the roof, grab the rifle and sling it over a shoulder, and push myself up through the window. Soldier has his pistol, standing at the side of the road. He’s looking at me like he’s afraid. Like he’s terrified. And I’m on the roof of the car, standing up, axe in hand and a gun hanging across my back, staring down this thing with a horde at my back.
Captain Roid Rage climbs onto the hood of the car.
I bring the axe down, aiming for its head, but it drops it at the last moment slipping on its own skin, and the axe sinks into the back of its neck and shoulder.
It rears back again.
I can’t get the axe back fast enough, but I use it as leverage, swing myself onto its back. It is horrifyingly solid, even if its skin is loose, greasy, and melting like wax to a flame. I grab the knife and wrench it out of the thing’s eye socket, and bring it down again.
The blade sinks into the big lug’s head. Pierces through at the base of the skull. I pull it out, and do it again. Again. Again, until it drops under me and I land against the hood of the car.
Soldier is right there beside me, pulling the axe out of its back. He’s breathing harder than I am.
He waves me to him, slips an arm around my waist, and helps me climb over the divide. The horde is right here, on us. The scent of rotted flesh and decay makes my stomach churn, and the sounds of groaning and wet, gargled moans kick my heartrate up.
And then Soldier’s gone.
I stumble back, knife clutched tight in my hand.
He was there, right behind me, right beside me, and now these creeps are flooding the road between the divide and the car. They’re falling over the divide, coming at me, moving fast—
Lights start flashing along with a piercing sound. The car alarm.
Soldier comes running around again, both bags on his shoulders. He skirts around the horde as best as he can, but then one of the creeps grabs a bag. More catch up as he struggles.
They rip it apart at the seems.
He’s halfway over the barrier when he finally gives up and lets go.
The alarm is attracting them. Keeping them away. Mostly. I lunge at the one reaching for Soldier and shove the knife up into its chin with a growled shout.
Soldier and I run.
We ditch the car, and the horde. We ditch half our supplies. We run into the woods and don’t look back.
Day Fifteen
Soldier’s disappeared again.
He spent all day yesterday close by and disappeared at some point in the night. That rager scared him. My facing it head on like that scared him—and he’s the army guy.
Truth be told, I don’t know what kind of stupid bravery came over me.
But, after travelling until the sounds stopped, we found a place to hole up in. Which is nicer than sharing a tent out in the open with things like that hanging around. After losing a second one on the highway, and half my shit, this feels like a mirage of a vacation.
This feels like a façade of a town that’s about to blow over in the wind.
I don’t wait around hoping Soldier will show up again. Instead, I dig around a few of the empty buildings—hoping that they’re empty, anyway.
There’s already dust coating everything.
There’s a house full of junk and silence, the ticking of a clock, and no power. I spend most of the day there, digging through a life.
Marie James lived here with her son, whose expired gym membership had his date of birth, putting him somewhere in his twenties. There’s a game system and a TV in one of the bedrooms and a shit ton of dirty clothes and crusty dishes. It smells almost as bad as the creeps.
For a while, I think poor Marie, but it doesn’t seem like she kept her house in much order herself. Her own room mirrors her son’s energy drink cans with Caesar cans. It’s littered with full ash trays made of things that weren’t originally ash trays. There’s cat litter scattered on stained carpet.
By the look of it, all the pictures, there are at least two cats somewhere. Smells like ten.
I find a six pack of beer in the fridge. Not warm, but sure as hell not cold either. There’s chamomile tea for Soldier, a half-used jar of decaf coffee for me. I leave those by the door for when I leave, and then I take the beer and a tattered old paperback novel to the upstairs balcony.
I sit on a folding lawn chair, feet up on the balcony rail, drinking, reading. Sunglasses too big for my face rest on my nose as the sun sets in a brilliant blaze of colour.
Our little hideaway sits in a slant of hot sunlight. I don’t see Soldier coming back yet.
It seems pointless to get worried. It won’t help anything to. But, still—I am relying on this stranger. I don’t drive. I’m turned around with where we are. I make too many stupid decisions to be left alone. And it doesn’t help that the guy reminds me of a golden retriever puppy. It’s hard to not be worried.
Stupid decision: drinking all this beer on an empty stomach, already a little dehydrated.
Good decision: snagging the toothpaste from M
arie’s bathroom so I don’t have to worry about morning beer breath.
Honestly, the shit’s disgusting and getting warmer by the second, but I am comfortable. Relaxed, as much as I can be. After fighting that rager, I think I deserve it.
Even if Marie has shit taste.
As the sun sets, I find myself closing my eyes, paying less attention to the book and more to the few tops of the city towers I can see in the distance. Between long blinks, I go between scanning the trees for Soldier and watching the city. It’s dead and lifeless. Strange, to not have lights burning a second sun into the sky.
I don’t know how long I’m sitting there before I’m actually sleeping, before anything happens.
A whistle wakes me up fully, and I don’t move at first. Not until I see Soldier.
He’s standing outside the building we holed up in, looking around, listening. The door is open behind him. I’m about to respond when a sound fills the air.
It is fast, loud, and growing louder by the second.
A dark streak cuts through the night overhead. Heading straight for the city. It isn’t the only one. More follow in a blanket pattern, tearing through the air.
I stand up, mouth hanging open, tossing the sunglasses to the balcony deck. The city lights up red and white as I watch. Burning, exploding. I can hear the sound from here, see the plumes of smoke billowing up as heavy clouds of flat gray.
They bombed the city. The whole damn thing. Holy shit.
I duck into the house as the shockwave rolls through and rattles the old bones of this place. I nearly lose my footing on the stairs but grip the railing, rush through the house, and grab my scavenged shit. I hurry back.
Soldier is staring at the sky, disheveled and hollow eyed.
“Not everyone left,” I growl, this sickness building in my throat.
He nods. His voice is strained. “I know.”
I’m in the doorway when I hear more.
I stop, turn around, and look toward the city we almost walked through. The one Soldier convinced me to walk further away from. There were buildings on the outskirts I suggested we stop at, at first, but it was never far enough away for him. This was barely far enough.
