by Guy James
A white hot pain, deep in his abdomen beat him to it.
He looked down in disbelief at the gnarled forearm sticking out of his body.
Before he could begin to wonder, Brian felt an unimaginable pain in his insides, and, just before his consciousness began to fade, he noted an unmistakable loss of pressure in his chest. His lungs were no longer drawing air.
Brian’s last thought as he sank into himself was that he would be dead long before he could suffocate.
The zombies made it true.
114
The shotgun dropped from his hand.
Sven could only stare.
He was far too late.
Brian’s eyes were closed, and Sven hoped that his friend was already dead.
There were zombies—dozens of them, hundreds maybe. Sven couldn’t see the end of them as they piled in through the open doors of the stockroom, trying for a chance at Brian’s flesh.
One of the zombies had a hand in Brian’s abdomen, pulling out his entrails and feeding on them in fitful spasms. Another zombie was working its fingers into the soft part of Brian’s neck.
Many more were pulling on his limbs, pulling in different directions.
If it was an attempt to quarter Brian, it was a failure…or rather, a partial failure. The zombies that had Brian’s right leg tore it off at the hip, falling backward with their prize. The zombies that had been pulling at the other parts of Brian’s body fell in the opposite direction, apparently pulling too hard now that the zombies on the leg were no longer a part of the gruesome tug of war.
More zombies emerged from the stockroom, swarming over Brian’s fallen body, ripping, tearing, crunching, slurping, dragging away—
Sven drew both of the machetes in a single motion that the most practiced of machete-wielders would have envied.
Then the dark clouds were there, blocking out the overhead lighting.
***
The trees bled, filling the space in which Sven stood with a revolting, palpable dread. He was holding his breath, trying to keep it out, trying to hold on to what was left.
Sven’s lungs began to burn, demanding. He wouldn’t let it, he couldn’t let it.
But the pressure outside of him was too great, and like a great dam bursting, his mouth opened and the blood-tinged air filled his lungs, replacing the burning with something far worse.
The powerful, limber woman reappeared, creeping out from behind one of the thicker trees. She ducked under a bleeding bow, putting a hand against the tree’s trunk.
She locked eyes with Sven, and took her hand away from the trunk. It was smeared with blood.
She glared at Sven as she raised the hand slowly up…up…and to her lips.
***
Now, in the Wegmans, the darkness poured into Sven, filling him, and pushing everything else out.
Fury.
Reprisal—dark reprisal.
Wrath.
He was breathing hard, like a beast, his whole body shaking with every mouthful of air.
Thought was gone.
All he could do was feel, and all he could feel was rage.
115
Sven leapt into the undead throng, landing in Brian’s still-cooling blood.
Retribution.
An inhuman ferocity gripped his body. He was the wild death, the bringer of the blade, the silencer, the ender.
Sven brought the twin blades down with an unassailable malice, feeling no pain in his body, feeling nothing but raw emotion.
If this was evil he wanted it…and more of it—to never leave this place, to feel it forever.
Two zombie skulls split open simultaneously, hacked down the middle, revealing grey bone and putrid brain matter. Chunks of flesh sprayed in all directions.
Each half of the torn zombie heads sagged away from each neck, opening upward like vile, twin flowers of the damned.
Then the bodies slumped and fell, and more zombies came forward, overtaking their fallen brethren, lunging for Sven, grabbing, gnashing their teeth and lolling their dry tongues menacingly.
Sven’s machetes never stopped, never slowed, as he plunged deeper into the undead that were falling all over themselves trying to get in through the stockroom doors.
The zombies snapped at Sven with their gnarled jaws, begging for decapitation, and he and his discolored machetes obliged…gladly.
Sven reveled in the frenzy, letting his anger feed and grow stronger through his eyes.
He absorbed the carnage before him as if he were a man who would never see again, who needed to imprint the vision of the world into his soul.
Gobbets of putrid flesh flew and zombies fell, limbless, headless, bodies torn asunder with a fury not of this world.
Sven’s darkness feasted on one sight in particular, in addition to the dual cleaved zombie heads with which he had begun his offensive. Once, twice, three—no—numberless times he slashed down on a zombie head in profile, chopping off the front part of the head so that everything in front of a cut section of brain and remaining back piece of jaw were gone.
Staring into the thing that remained—a strange device hanging with no ascertainable purpose atop a rotten, lifeless body…was…sublime.
As Sven leapt and cleaved and left sliced-open shells containing zombie brains in his wake, fighting his way deeper now into the stockroom, to the source of the zombies, holes—large ones—sometimes appeared in the zombie heads around him and the zombies fell, and in his frenzied state, he didn’t know why it was happening, just that it was, and that it was good.
Sometimes the zombies’ heads just disappeared. The darkness must have been outside of him too, helping him, feeding itself without vehicle, shaping itself through the air.
Wrath.
Then a different feeling came—one that didn’t really belong with the others. It was a calm, gentle feeling, and it touched Sven within the melee. It was a calm like none he had ever felt before, as if he were moving in slow motion in a certain structure, in a clear harmony within the violence.
Pure, unrestrained fury.
More holes appeared in the zombies around him, and more fell victim to his mottled blades.
The zombies began to thin, and then all of the ones inside the stockroom had fallen.
When it was over, Sven stood in the middle of a mass of hacked and slashed zombie flesh, lopsided chunks and gobbets surrounding him, as if he had been at the center of a great zombie combine.
And he had been.
Some of Sven’s normal feelings began to return to him, but they were dull, like unpolished, rough pieces of crumbling rock compared to what he had just experienced.
He turned around. Lorie and Jane were watching him. There was fear in their eyes, or maybe it was just apprehension. Whatever it was, it was directed at him. Sven felt shame for a moment, but then that feeling, coarse as it now felt, darted away, as if launched by its incongruence with the receding darkness, and was gone.
Sven wiped his machete blades on some of the fallen zombies’ clothing, and sheathed the blades. He wiped the sweat from his face and began to walk toward Jane and Lorie. Jane was holstering her gun—the big one.
They backed away as he drew nearer. The girl raised a hand up in front of her face, as if to protect herself. From him?
He stood there, watching them for a moment—watching them watching him.
“What is it?” Sven asked once his panting was under control. He felt a twitch in his jaw and neck, and tried to stifle it.
He heard something, whirled, and saw that another zombie had begun to stagger in through the—
It hadn’t registered before. The way the zombies had gotten in, they hadn’t forced their way in as Sven had assumed, they had…but how could that be?
Lorie and Jane came closer, apparently seeing what so perplexed Sven.
Lorie’s voice came muffled from behind her surgical mask. “How could one of them do that? They can’t even get out of cars or open doors, how could they?
&nbs
p; “We have to get out of here,” Jane said in a stern voice. “We have to go now.”
Right on cue, as if they were on the set of a horror movie, a tearing, rending sound came from a distant part of the supermarket. Sven couldn’t hear the moans, but he was sure the zombies would be coming.
The stockroom began to swim, and Sven suddenly felt like he was sinking.
Too late, he realized that he didn’t have his mask on, and then his body went numb.
116
Sven fell, landing on a severed arm. The bloodless stump shot upward, as if telling Jane that her demise was now as certain as the separation between the arm and its previous owner. This was it, the zombies were overrunning the supermarket, Sven was gone, no way out, death—
“Help me get him out of here,” Lorie said, jolting Jane into action.
They grabbed Sven by the arms and dragged him out of the stockroom. Jane tried to ignore all the zombies and zombie parts that they brushed against and pulled Sven over to get out of that room. The jumble of parts made Jane’s own death seem so inevitable...to think she would soon join them.
She looked at Sven. His face, now extremely pale, was twitching violently. The thought pattern that had struck her when Evan was ill was now revisiting her, and though she tried to put it out of her mind—she couldn’t see any wounds on Sven, any sign that he had been bitten—the thought pattern didn’t yield.
Jane looked down at Sven, willing him to wake up, to wake up and to be alright. Her mind flashed on a picture of him just moments earlier, overtaken by some kind of violent rage. He had been so terrifying, but he had lashed out only against the zombies, and his protective instinct remained intact throughout the carnage. She felt a pang of longing when she recalled how he had shielded her and Lorie with his body when the zombies were on the verge of grabbing them.
If only he would wake up!
Jane shook him, and his head began to move. Ivan was there too, lapping at Sven’s face, prodding Sven’s head with his paw.
Sven came to, looking like death. “Back there…did you see?”
Jane nodded. “Yes, but there’s no time for that now. We have to go...I think they’re getting in, not just there but in other places.”
“They are,” Lorie agreed. “They’re in at the side door, I can see them.”
Ivan hissed, and Jane found that it amplified her dread, the feeling of being trapped with the undead closing in around them.
“Okay,” Jane said, controlling herself, “Sven you have to get up.”
Sven’s eyes began to roll back into his head.
“Sven! Do you hear me? Lorie, come on help me get him up, we have to go.”
“Go where?!” Lorie screamed.
“To the car, we have to get out of here, drive somewhere.”
Jane and Lorie continued to pull on Sven, and finally, the man regained enough of his physical composure to stand up. Jane and Lorie helped support Sven’s weight, and the three of them made their way to the Wegmans entrance. They dodged two zombies on the way, apparent evidence of the slow leak through the access point that Lorie had seen, or of another yet unknown leak in the building.
Jane and Lorie helped Sven lean against a checkout counter, then they pushed aside the shopping carts that were blocking the shuttered entrance.
Jane approached the shutter and peered through it, out at the parking lot.
Her world reeled, and she recoiled from the sight, staggering backward.
Lorie caught her by the arm, helping balance the world a little. On seeing her ashen face, Jane was sure that the girl had already seen it.
“What?” asked Sven, slurring the word. “What’s out there?”
Jane turned to him, gripping the .460 XVR for support. It had served her well in the stockroom, covering Sven, but it couldn’t take care of what was now awaiting them outside. “They’re all over the car. There’s no way we can get through that.”
Sven tottered to his feet. “There’s a way. We’re not gonna end this here.” He was still slurring his words, and had to lean on a rack of paperback romance novels for support. “You stay here with Lorie and get ready. Here are the keys.” Sven handed his car keys to Jane, who took them, not knowing how to react. The man seemed to be choking, making gurgling sounds in his throat and swaying as he spoke. “I’ll pull them off the car.”
Jane’s mind resisted this at once. “What? No! You can’t do that, you can’t leave us like this. We can’t face them alone.” Lorie put her hand on Jane’s forearm, but Jane pulled it away harshly. “You’re in no condition to be doing that, if you go out there, if you…” She couldn’t overcome the sob that strangled its way from her throat.
“No,” Sven said. “This’ll work, I’m sure. I’ll pick the shotgun back up—I still have a lot of cartridges—” Sven patted the bulging pockets of his mallard pants, “—I’ll go out through the loading docks, get their attention, start shooting ‘em up real good. They’ll get off the car, and then I’ll run around. I’m sure this’ll work.”
Jane shook her head. “No! Sven, no! There’s gotta be another way, we just need a little time to think it through, there’s gotta be another way to do it.”
“This is the way. Trust me.”
Jane took off her surgical mask and thrust it at Sven. “Take this.”
He must have seen the resolve in her eyes, because he took the mask and put it on without a word.
He looked at her for a moment longer, then surprised her with a hug. When it ended and he broke the embrace, Jane felt an unbearable anguish, as if her very being were ripped apart.
He turned to Lorie and tousled her hair, still saying nothing.
And then he quickly limped away, and was gone.
Ivan padded off after him, faithful to his loving master until the bitter end.
Jane knew she would never see Sven again, she had never been so certain of anything in her life. She wanted to run after him, to go there and face death with him, but she didn’t. She just stood there next to Lorie, knowing that he had been there a moment before, but never would be again.
117
Sven circled back to his sleeping bag, where he’d forgotten the shotgun in his haste to follow Ivan. He picked up the Benelli SuperNova in black synthetic, knowing that it was for the last time. This was it.
Jolts of pain pulsed through his body. Every step felt like burning, every breath, every movement. The only thing that helped was touching the handles of the machetes, and there wasn’t even time for that now.
Loading the Benelli as he went, Sven limped through the stockroom and to the breached loading dock entrance.
He stopped for a moment, and stared at it in sheer disbelief. He felt betrayed, confused, completely lost. But there was no time to figure that out right now.
He had to make it possible for Jane and Lorie to get away. He had to make it happen. There was a way. There was a way. He kept telling himself there was, but—
“Oh, to hell with it all,” Sven said, and he stepped out through the breach into the balmy, stinking air. His head went fuzzy for a moment, and he forgot what he was doing. Then it all came back to him like a sickening headache.
No time to freeze up now, he told himself.
He limped around the perimeter of the Wegmans, avoiding the few zombie stragglers that reached for him. They weren’t worth wasting energy or ammunition on. He turned the corner, making his way up the side toward the front of the store.
Almost there.
Sven hobbled up to the corner of the building and peered around, recoiling at the sight, and feeling the fear reach into him. He put a hand on one of the machete handles and tried to make the darkness come back, the invincible feeling from before, but it wouldn’t.
There was no time for standing around.
He took a deep breath, not at all making peace with the thought that it would likely be his last, and limped out from behind the corner.
He faced the sea of undead head on.
“Hey
zombies! You hungry?!”
They began to turn toward him—their answer in the affirmative.
He opened fire.
Even as the zombies nearest him fell, the zombies behind them began to pile toward him, reaching for him, wanting what he had—his flesh.
Sven emptied the shotgun into them, barely making a dent in the horde.
He backed up as he reloaded, staying out of reach, mindful not to step on Ivan.
Ivan! Sven was so grateful for Ivan being there now, with him at the end.
He backed around the corner of the Wegmans, then began backing down the side, watching the corner of the building and waiting.
He didn’t have to wait long.
It was working!
The zombies were turning the corner after him, reaching for him with eager, gnarled hands, moaning in anticipation.
“Yeah, that’s right! Here I am, but you gotta catch me first!”
The smell—their smell—intensified as they drew nearer, and even though Sven was backing away, he caught himself reeling, his hands on the shotgun growing numb almost to the point of uselessness.
He had to fire while he still could.
Continuing to back down the side of the Wegmans, Sven fired again, dropping the front lines of the advancing undead.
As before, the volley made no visible dent. More zombies came, staggering on and over their fallen comrades, insensitive to the loss.
Ivan hissed and Sven spun around just in time to dodge a zombie’s snapping jaws, much too close to his face. He jerked the Benelli awkwardly at the zombie’s head, cracking the skull sideways and dropping the zombie to the pavement.
The creeping numbness was making Sven careless. Of course there were a few zombies behind him—the remnants of the loading dock incursion, he had passed them just moments before.
Then he was backing up again, trying to load the Benelli.
The first cartridge slipped through his fingers.
