“Wait,” Abby says, “Did you hear that?”
We all turn around and look at her. “What?” I ask.
“Shh, listen,” Abby says bringing one finger up to her lips. I look around the room. Cupcake whines softly. Then —
My heart thumps in my chest. It’s so loud, I see Cupcake look up to me, like the damn dog heard it. But who I don’t see is Darlene, and from the outside, I hear a banging. Not a hard banging, mind you, but a soft, squelchy banging.
“Where’s Darlene?” I find myself saying, but I don’t sound like myself to my own ears. We all look around. Now I find myself shouting. “Darlene! DARLENE!”
I told her I’d never lose her again, and here I am, looking like a total jackass.
Abby creeps to the door we came through, and I follow her, my heart hammering, Cupcake at my heels, and a rifle in my hands.
71
Abby pushes the door open, the hinges creak.
I stop, dead in my tracks. Abby stops, too. Cupcake whimpers.
The source of the sound isn’t Darlene. But it’s a zombie, except it’s not a threat…thanks to Darlene.
One of the machetes we brought with us is through the zombie’s midsection, poking out of her back. But the machete is also jammed between the rain gutter that runs the length of the little garage. Blood runs down the white metal and the zombie’s crooked mouth. She’s pinwheeling her arms, beating the siding.
I start pacing back and forth, looking everywhere for Darlene, for any sign of her, and I’m not seeing anything. Fuck. I feel like falling down on my knees. I have to go after her.
Behind me, the hinges groan again. Tim lets out a noise of disgust.
Then there’s another sick squelch and the sound of the machete unsheathing from flesh. I turn around in time to see Abby pulling the blade out and jamming into the zombie woman’s head. A flood of black brains ooze and the thumping stops. The zombie dies.
I don’t even spare it a second glance. I run back into the garage to grab the rest of our stuff. I know where she went. She went to do what we were all arguing about.
She went to save her sister.
72
“Jack, wait up,” Norm says. Now he’s following at my heels with Cupcake.
Tim comes, too. “Wait — where’s my bag?” he says.
“Huh?” Norm asks.
“My bag. The bag I brought that had the grenades.”
My stomach lurches. I picture Darlene with explosives in her hands, like the merchant near the fence. Does she even know how to work one of those? God, she’s going to blow her pretty little face off.
Jack, you sound like Grandma. Calm down. She’s tough. Tougher than you think. She can handle it, she can last until you get there.
But can she?
Abby’s surveying the rest of the garage. When she sees me, she stops and there’s an uneasy smile on her face.
“Did you take Tim’s grenades?” I ask.
“What?” she asks. “Gren — ”
And right as she speaks, the air fills with the smell of fire, cutting her off. Night bleeds into day as flames blow into the sky near the water tower.
Cupcake whimpers and takes off.
The ground shakes. Both Abby and I are knocked on our asses — me for the second time in less than five-ish minutes.
My ears throb with the sound of the explosion. My face feels like it’s been sunburned.
Then something starts raining from the skies. First it’s debris, then it’s something wet. Drops of blood. Body parts. Arms, legs, heads, all with the same sickly color of skin exclusive to zombies and corpses.
Abby is up before me, and she gives me her hand. I find it’s hard to stand, my legs are weak. I taste iron in my mouth. My tongue hurts. I’ve bitten myself with the shuddering explosion. Now, everywhere I look, I see mutilated body parts, and there’s a great emptiness growing inside of me. Because every time I glance at a head or an arm or a foot, I picture them to be Darlene’s.
73
I waste no time recovering from the explosion. I follow it.
The fire eats away at the fence and the surrounding trees and grass. The night doesn’t seem so complete anymore.
But I see no signs of Darlene.
People are running about in the parking lot. Guns blast off. Others scream. Zombies drop.
An alarm starts to wail, a loud klaxon that reminds me of the tornado siren we had in Woodhaven. I’m running toward the chaos, Cupcake behind me, Abby behind him, yelling, “Jack! Don’t!”
It’s too late. I am.
A man aims his weapon at me, causing my steps to jerk. I almost fall on my ass, but catch myself before I can. He snarls. There’s a moment of hesitation where I think he’s comprehending whether I’m human or dead, and that’s all I need.
With the blade in my hand, I cock it back and let it rip. It whistles through the air; it spins about a million times before it lodges in the man’s forehead. He crosses his eyes to look up at the blood dripping down the bridge of his nose, then he dies. Before he can even hit the ground, three zombies are on him. He screams bloody murder as the zombies rip his throat out, and when the blood spurts and washes over the parking lot, the scream turns into a soggy wheeze.
Cupcake barks like mad behind me. He darts to and from, dodging zombies and people alike. I try to grab him the next time he whizzes by, but that’s damn near impossible. Then something bumps into my back and I scream.
“Jack!” It’s Abby. “Duck!”
“What — ” She doesn’t answer my question because she’s throwing me down to the bloody pavement and pumping lead into a swarm of zombies. They fall wetly a couple feet from me. My rifle is gone, lost somewhere in the mounds of flesh.
I unholster my pistol.
The fire is loud enough to be heard all the way back in Haven.
Tim and Norm come up behind us. Norm lets off three shots. Two of those shots take out clergymen. You can’t even see the red stain their robes.
I shoot at a zombie coming up to the side of Tim. One shot blows the rotten bastard’s face off. Tim nods, trying to look cool and calm, but I can see how pale he is, especially with the orange glow of the firelight all around us.
Norm nearly drops his gun and takes Tim into his arms, but Tim pushes him away.
We shoot and bash and fight until their are no zombies left standing and until the clergymen run back to the hole they crawled out of.
74
I’m heaving. I feel like vomiting or crying, I’m not sure which. Darlene is gone. So is Cupcake.
Norm walks up to me, swipes the back of his hand across his face, smearing blood — not his blood. He then offers me help up. I don’t take it immediately and he doesn’t take it back. He lets it hang.
I look up at him. “C’mon, little bro, let’s go.”
“Where?” I hear myself asking.
Abby walks around the remains of the dead, scavenging for weapons and ammunition. In front of us, we are under the cover of part of a fence that hasn’t caught fire yet, and behind us, the fire rages and feels like it’s burning away my hair, but that’s nothing compared to how I feel on the inside. And I’ll tell you how I feel — I feel like giving up, I feel like I’ve been doing this shit for too long, I feel like the odds are not in my favor anymore, like I’m going to storm this abandoned mall and I’m going to find Darlene and Carmen dead, their throats slit and their eyes vacant.
No. You can do this, Jack.
I can.
“We’re here for you, Jack,” Tim says.
Norm nods.
I take his hand, let him lift me —
Barking. Loud. It’s Cupcake. I’d recognize his bark from anywhere. My eyes are wide; all of our eyes are wide. It’s coming from beyond the fence.
Then —
Screaming. Darlene’s screaming.
75
There’s a gash in the fence, the metal is bent back and jagged. Blood drips from a few of the stray wires, a piece of cloth. It’s dark. I reach ou
t and grab it, hearing the footsteps coming up behind me. Tim’s wheezy breath. Norm saying something along the lines of, “You gotta quit running, Jack.”
The piece of fabric is wet with the same blood dripping from the fence. I bring it up to my nose. Through the haze of flame and smoke, I smell Darlene’s scent. Her cherry-scented shampoo, her berry deodorant.
Am I imagining these smells?
I put the fabric into my pocket.
My heart is beating so fast as I scan the concrete beyond the fence. It leads to the mall’s front doors. There’s stacked sandbags in front of the glass, but they’re stacked half-heartedly as if whoever fortified this place never thought of a breach in the fences.
Norm is directly behind me now. His hand goes over my shoulder and pulls the sharp metal back.
“You’re gonna shish-kebab yourself, man,” he says.
“They’re waiting for us,” Abby says. Her voice is chilling. The fire has made the air hot, but my skin ripples with goosebumps. God, it feels like there’s a weight plate in the pit of my stomach.
I’m at the threshold of life and death, it seems. As soon as I step from this battlefield, this place where my group has come out on top, and into the unknown, I know what it means. I know exactly what it means. It means the end. It means I give up my advantage and I bend to the whim of the madman who leads these robed figures.
“Yeah, they are,” Tim says. “Walter is a smart man. I can’t say he still is after dying, but he now has the upper hand.”
“Jack?” Norm asks.
I cringe because I can already hear what he’s going to tell me. He’s going to tell me to step aside, let the real men lead this mission because if I do, someone will just end up getting mauled or maimed or even worse…dead. But that’s my fiancé in there, my dog, and my future sister-in-law.
“What?” I reply, my voice mildly grating.
Norm is nodding. “Lead us home,” he says, and he claps me on the back in almost the same way he did in Woodhaven.
It doesn’t feel like I’m on the same piece of concrete, its only difference being the division of the fence. No, it feels like I’m standing at the top of a skyscraper, one foot out over the edge and I know I’m not supposed to look down, but I can’t help it. I have to look down because if I don’t look down then whatever manifests in my own head will be worse than any hundred-story splat.
Norm nods at me. All the anger he had before is gone, replaced with seriousness, a cold seriousness only my older brother is capable of possessing.
So I do. I walk through the hole in the fence and follow the line of blood with my family behind me, backing me up.
The blood runs in a little semicircle. I picture Darlene, her arm scratched, sneaking up through the fence and toward the sandbag-blocked doors, but as we get to the curb, the trail diverts.
Inside of the mall is blackness. If anyone was in there, I’d honestly be surprised. Of course, I know they are in there and I know they’re watching us. And I can’t blame Darlene for taking matters into her own hands, can I?
The trail goes to a loading dock off the side of the mall’s front. Here, there are two large dumpsters. They were once blue, but have been flipped on their sides and pushed together to form a barricade. Most of the blue paint has been scraped off, revealing the cold steel beneath.
Abby gasps, stops. Norm and Tim nearly knock her over. I turn to them, ready to tell them to be quiet when I see their heads are craned up to the black sky. Tim slowly raises his hand and points with a shaky finger.
My head follows. Inside of me everything tightens. Every smell and sound and feeling is amplified. The blood rushes through my ears like a tsunami wave. God, who is it going to be? Is it going to be Darlene or Carmen? Am I going to see them hanging there like I saw Tony Richards hanging by my cell window in Eden, with a bullet in his head and a sign around his neck?
I almost can’t look.
“Sick fucks,” Norm says.
“For once,” Abby whispers, “I agree with you.”
That’s good. No screaming. No cries of “DARLENE! CARMEN!” So I keep moving my head, and what I see is enough to cause my legs to weaken, for my stomach to lurch and to revolt against me.
It’s depraved. It’s disgusting.
It’s exactly the type of shit I’d imagine a group led by Walter to do.
76
Two poles hang from the top of the mall building. It’s two stories high; if the things hanging above us were any closer, I think I’d probably either run away or crawl underneath them.
From these poles, which are maybe lightning rods or antennae that have been disconnected a long time ago, there are two thick ropes. These ropes were once brown, I have no doubt about that, but they are now a slick and slimy red because they’re coated with blood, much as everything is in this fucked-up world.
I find myself almost unable to breathe, looking up at them. These people weren't even zombies; that’s what the terrible thing is about all of this. If they were zombies, you could tell by their pallid flesh, their tattered clothes, the way their jaws would be crooked and locked open in preparation for feeding, the last glowing vestiges of their burnt-out, yellow eyes, and the way there is no pain on their faces because zombies don’t feel pain or emotions or even death.
These people have pain carved on their faces. Twisted grimaces that make me feel a burning in my stomach and a weight on my heart. One is a woman; the other is a man. The wedding bands they wear on their bloody fingers match, and they gleam with filtered moonlight. The man died with his head tilted to the woman. There are bloody streaks from the corners of his eyes as if his very love for his wife leaked out from inside.
I could say that was the worst of this, but I’d be lying. Sure, the death of true love can be crippling, but so can the ripping of someone’s spine. And I mean this in the literal sense. From the ropes which hang from the poles — the lightning rods or antennae — are the couples’ spinal cords, ripped from their flesh. Their bodies hang like deflated balloons from rigid strings.
Tim turns his head to the right, falls on his knees near the overturned dumpster, and vomits. He pukes up mostly foam and bubbles — all that beer from earlier. Norm bends down next to him and pats him on the back.
“Get it out,” he says. “Get it all out.”
“Walter,” Tim wheezes between retches. “Walter — ”
Abby and I exchange a glance. She looks squeamish, and I’m sure I do, too, because I certainly feel squeamish. But we’ve almost seen it all, and besides, nothing can be as sick — at least not to me, personally — than having to put a bullet in the back of a loved one’s head like I had to do with Herb. Abby saw that firsthand. We’re built for this stuff.
The thing that bothers me most about the two people dangling above us from their spines is the fact that I think they were married, youngish people in love…like Darlene and I.
I look up and my face replaces the man’s, Darlene’s replaces the woman’s, and I feel that dread weighing me down again.
Tim gets up with the help of Norm. He has spit and froth at the corners of his mouth and large blue-brown bags beneath his eyes. I hope he can hold on.
I try not to show any unease on my face. As the leader, I can’t afford to.
“You ready?” I ask, hoping my voice is strong and confident. We are going to have to climb over the dumpsters. The thought of getting that much closer to these two dangling corpses makes my blood run cold, but so does the thought of a dead Darlene and a dead Cupcake.
Tim nods.
Abby pats the gun on her hip.
Norm does nothing. He’s looking over at Tim, studying him with fascination.
“Let’s move out,” I say. I scale the dumpster, finding footholds in the metal of its underside. I’m dimly reminded of D.C., where I had to climb up that stone puzzle wall to avoid the zombies and save Doc Klein. Of course, this isn’t as high and the zombies have been demolished, but I still feel like a sitting duck. Mainly beca
use I don’t know what’s on the other side of the dumpsters.
I pull myself up to the top. I guess it’s time to find out.
77
Norm and I bend down to help Abby up. She’s done a pretty good job of scaling the dumpster with only one hand, but time is short and she accepts the help willingly enough.
What’s behind the dumpster isn’t anything. Just empty concrete and brick walls. There are no more bodies hanging by their spinal cords (though I can smell the unlucky couple behind me and they smell almost sickeningly sweet). This was a place where delivery trucks and mall tenants dropped off merchandise and packages, and now it’s eerily empty and quiet. But as I scan the empty concrete, no longer seeing any signs of blood trails — that ended near the front doors, I see a door. It’s cracked and moving slightly as if someone is lurking in the shadows, waiting for us.
It’s our way in, but I think it’s meant to be.
Norm must see me looking at it because he says, “It’s a trap.”
“Of course it is,” Tim echoes. “Walter is smart. There’s plenty of traps.”
“This whole place is a trap,” Abby says, starting to climb down on the other side. “But it doesn’t matter. We need to get inside, don’t we?”
“Yeah,” I say, following her and trying to get down before she does so I can help her off the dumpster. Turns out she doesn’t need my help. She drops the last few feet and lands as graceful as a cat stalking its prey. I’m impressed, then again, I’m always impressed with what Abby is capable of given her disability. In fact, I’m impressed with all of my family, all the way down to the way I was impressed with Herb, how he was smart enough to save the day on more than one occasion.
“Then that’s our way inside,” Abby replies, dusting the knees of her jeans off. “If it’s a trap, we’ll kill them before they can kill us.”
“Simple,” I say. “I like it.” A statement that would normally be construed as funny — but there’s no humor in my voice. I don’t know if there ever will be after what I’ve seen tonight.
Jack Zombie (Book 5): Dead End Page 17
