by Jason Offutt
He ran through the oncoming dead, ducking the arms that weren’t trying to grab him, but Terry knew he might scream if one of those rotting hands wiped across his bare skin. He didn’t know what those assholes would do if he screamed. What was once a woman, a bride, stepped around the back of the Citgo, her wedding dress still mostly white, though blood clotted on her chest. Terry’s breath came hard as she approached. This was the one. He fished a pack of Dawson Springs Motel matches from his front pocket and held it in his shaking hands.
Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Gasoline catches fire. Terry knew that. He was a mechanic, for Christ’s sake. That’s how the internal combustion engine worked. Gas goes in, spark plug makes it go whoosh, the expanding gasses make the pistons move, car go vroom. But movies and 1970s TV cop shows all taught him gas tankers explode and he was going to light a match. Briday the Thirteenth staggered forward, but not toward him, those milky white eyes didn’t notice him. He pulled a match from the book that read along the base of the matches, “WARNING: Close cover before striking.” Babe, I got other things to worry about. He scraped the head of the match across the striking surface and it sprang into flame. Terry held it under the fine lace train that dragged behind the bride zombie. The match went out. Fuck. She waddled closer to the tanker. Goddamnit. Terry pulled out another match and struck it. The match flared to life. He held it higher up the train, moving forward with the zombie. The white material crackled to life and Terry stepped back. Orange flames danced across the back of the dress as the zombie dragged herself closer to the gushing gasoline.
Terry turned and ran.
***
The Prius was five blocks away when the tanker exploded; the shock waves sent the little Japanese car skidding across the street. “What did you do, Terry?” Doug screamed.
Terry pulled himself upright in the seat, grinning. “I lit a tanker truck on fire.”
“You did WHAT?”
He looked behind them; the entire downtown was burning; human figures stumbled around the flames, then fell to the pavement, consumed by fire. “I think I got rid of that pesky zombie problem in Dyersburg.”
Doug slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “That was the stupidest goddamned thing you’ve ever done.”
“I know.”
“I mean it was really fucking stupid.”
“I know.”
“And you smell like gasoline and piss.”
“There’s a good reason for that.”
Walter bent over and pulled a six-pack of beer off the floor. “Does anyone want one of these,” he said, his voice shaky. “Because if you don’t, I’m probably going to drink all of them.”
Terry patted his shoulder. “Go for it.”
“I mean, that was really, really messed up back there.” Walter’s words came out slowly, like his mouth wasn’t sure what was rattling around his brain. “The dead Army guys, all those zombies, the explosion.”
Terry picked another six-pack off the floor in the back and sat it on Walter’s lap. “Knock yourself out.” He turned to Doug. “Hey, you want to stop and get something nice for the girls?”
“Fuck you, Terry.”
***
The thin finger of smoke grew for the next hour before it was lost in the distance. It would act as a beacon, that much was certain, but a beacon for what? Terry lay in the back seat and pretended to sleep, his stomach in the grip of something bigger than him, something that grew inside. The Ophiocordon. It had to be. When’s my nose going to start bleeding like Jenna’s? Jenna. She might be dead already. What’s going to happen to Doug when she goes? And she’s going to go. He’s fragile now. Doug’s strength had kept Terry out of trouble; it had given him a job and a friend. Doug’s been a lot of things, but he’s never been fragile. Terry didn’t like to see his friend broken.
Terry sat up slowly, the pain in his stomach just short of lancing. He swallowed and took in a deep breath. Oh, God. It’s getting close. He slapped Doug on the shoulder and pointed out the window; a Chevron station sat just off the interstate at an intersection with a rural blacktop. “Pull over here, dude.”
“What? Why?”
“Just pull over.”
Doug stopped the Prius in front of the gas pumps and Terry got out slowly. He came back with chocolate bars, a box of graham crackers and a bag of fat marshmallows. Terry dropped them in the back seat and climbed in beside them. He couldn’t eat any of that, not with his stomach, but he needed to get them. He had to.
“I told you we should bring back something for the girls. They were really pissed.” A peace offering? Or a good-bye present? Probably both.
“S’mores?”
Walter mumbled something in his sleep, but they couldn’t make it out.
“Girls like S’mores,” Terry said. “That probably sounds sexist, but you tell me it’s not true.”
By the time the exit sign for U.S. 62 to Dawson’s Creek – Springs, Dawson Springs –appeared on the side of the highway, Terry’s insides were burning. He had to get out of the car before the bulbous stalk erupted from his chest and he killed them all.
Doug guided the Prius onto Arcadia Avenue and pulled to a stop in front of the Spring Motel. “What the shit?” Nikki and Lacy sat on the sidewalk in front of Jenna and Doug’s room, the light gray concrete a stark contrast with the new black asphalt. He threw open the door and hobbled as fast as he could without the walker that sat locked in the trunk.
“What’s wrong?” he yelled. “Where’s Jenna?”
Nikki turned her face toward Doug, her eyes bloodshot, her bruised cheeks wet with tears. “She’s sick, Doug. She won’t let us in.” Nikki pushed herself to her feet and ran to Terry who stumbled out of the car and leaned onto the brick and vinyl exterior motel wall, his face as gray as an old movie. “Terry.” He held his arm in front of him as she approached and shook his head.
“Stay back, darlin’,” he said, his words coming out in a thick wheeze. “I love you, Nikki. I love you like I never loved anything in my life, but you gotta stay back.”
She stopped, her body shaking. “Terry,” she whispered, the word dying in the still afternoon air.
“She wants to see him,” Lacy said, pointing at Terry.
Doug pounded on the door. “Jenna,” he screamed. “Jenna. I have to see you, baby.” His forehead thudded, a headache formed under his skin like a thunderstorm, tears ran from his eyes. “I have to see you.”
Walter made his way out of the Prius, the smell of beer hanging off him like a cloud. Lacy took his hand and squeezed. “She’s sick. It’s that stuff Lazarus gave her.”
Rage filled Doug, a rage that couldn’t be answered. Lazarus was dead, eaten by a zombie the people of Mayday called by name. He couldn’t make the fat man pay for his crimes; Lazarus, Tim, was already dead.
“The door’s not locked,” Lacy said, shrugging her shoulders. “You could just go in, if you want.” Doug reached for the handle, but suddenly Nikki was there. She grabbed his arm and pulled hard, whipping Doug around to face her.
“You know what happens,” she said. “The fungus, that stalk that grows out of people on Ophiocordon. It might be in there already, on Jenna, waiting for you. You can’t go in.”
“But–” he started, but Nikki grabbed his other arm and pulled him closer.
“She knows how you feel, Doug.” The bite in Nikki’s voice had disappeared. “She knows you love her. You showed her enough.” Doug’s legs gave and he collapsed to his knees on the concrete. Nikki dropped next to him and held him tightly.
Terry shuffled toward the motel room door and slowly wrapped his big right hand around the silver knob. He turned toward Nikki. Beautiful Nikki. “Afraid I was gonna leave without giving you a good-bye kiss?”
Nikki looked at him, her head pounded from crying. “Star Wars again?”
Coughs pounded his chest. Terry wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and winked, his eyes puffy and jaundice. “You’re perfect for me, you know?” he said. “I’m a lu
cky guy.” He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
“I love you,” she said.
Terry smiled through the pain. “I know.”
Nikki smiled back as he opened the door and walked inside the room where Jenna was dying. “Asshole.”
***
The room smelled. Is this what the zombie fungus smells like? Jenna sat on the bed, still unmade from her and Doug’s sleep the night before. Damn housekeeping, Terry thought. We’ll have to fill out one of those comment cards. Pearl ain’t gonna like this. The comforter was the same orange as the one the Murphys of Kansas City, Missouri, were spending their forever on over in Room Twenty-seven. Jenna leaned on one arm, her complexion slick, waxy; blood streaked her face. She could fall over at any moment.
“Hey,” Terry said. He walked into the room and shut the door behind him, sliding the deadbolt in place with a click.
“Your nose is bleeding,” she said.
Terry touched his face; it was wet, his fingertips red with blood. “Well, it’s about time.” He coughed again and spit a blood clot on the blue carpet. No need for manners anymore, you’re among friends. He staggered closer and sat on the bed. “You know what caused this, right?”
She nodded. “The Ophiocordon Timmy-Tim-Tim put in our food. I’m not stupid, Terry.”
He slid his arm over her shoulder, the weight of it felt like he was wearing brick shirt. “I know you’re not.”
She leaned into him, her face hot on his shoulder. “We’re going to turn into one of those things.”
“Zombies?”
Jenna coughed. She felt so small in Terry’s arms. “No, goddamnit. One of those fungus things that Aliens out of your chest.” She put her arm around Terry and squeezed. “I don’t want to do that.”
Who does? The pain in his chest felt like something was stabbing him from the inside. It was coming soon enough. Nikki had told him about the fat businessman when she was a waitress at Hooligans back home in St. Joseph, Missouri, when this all started back in, what was it? June? The guy had just finished a medium rare steak and baked potato; she’d stopped at his table to drop off the bill and he spewed blood across his plate and onto the seat beyond. He stood up shaking before he fell to the floor. The man stood again, but he wasn’t a man anymore, he was something else. The fungus stalk came later, but in the restaurant it was just blood, like the blood that ran from Jenna’s nose and Terry’s. He opened the holster of the 9mm on his gun belt and slowly pulled it out. He sat the Army-issue pistol on his lap and moved his hand safely to the orange bed cover.
“I’ve been going over this since I woke tied to that hospital bed in Mayday.” The gun felt heavy on his leg. That was good. A gun was a tool to do a job, like a wrench, or a hammer. Tools were supposed to be heavy. “We’re fucked.” He moved his hand and rested it on the cool metal of the pistol. “You know, I did something stupid today.”
Jenna laughed, a spot of blood dropped from her lip onto the orange comforter. “You do a lot of stupid stuff.”
Terry smiled. Yes I do. “I lit a gasoline tanker on fire. There were thousands of zombies just standing around and I walked down to them and let the gasoline fly.” His finger wrapped around the grip of the 9mm. “You know why I did that?”
Jenna shook her head, the once bouncy auburn locks flat against her face.
“Because the zombies didn’t care about me. I walked through them and they didn’t even move.” Terry hefted the pistol in his right hand. It was heavy, so damn heavy. “That’s because I’m one of them now.” He wiped his left wrist across his eyes. Tears. Why tears? Why now? He pulled back the steel slide barrel with a snap, which pushed a bullet into the firing chamber and held the pistol in front of his face.
Jenna grabbed the barrel of the 9mm and pulled it to her mouth. “Me first.”
***
A gunshot exploded inside Room Forty-three. Then another. Doug screamed and beat against the now-locked door. Nikki dropped to the pavement, tears pouring out of her swollen eyes. Lacy patted her shoulder, but none of it made a goddamned bit of difference.
October 1: The Gulf Coast of Mississippi
Chapter 22
The gulls were loud today. The white and gray sea birds, wings spread, coasted on the cool ocean breeze, hanging in the sky like a baby’s mobile, their high-pitched calls dancing with the crash of the surf. Doug hadn’t seen crows for a month or so. Thank God. The sun dropped low somewhere behind the dunes, its fading light glinted off the water like God had tossed handfuls of gold coins on the waves. At another time, screaming, laughing people ran across this beach and played in the gray waters of the Gulf of Mexico. They would have lain under big, colorful umbrellas, their children lathered in sunscreen building sandcastles and eating ice cream they bought from a vendor. Dads would fish beers out of red and white Coleman coolers while watching girls in bikinis anonymously through reflective sunglasses. Those people were dead and the beach was quiet. The surf crashing onto the sand the only sound outside of the gulls; the once-busy highway beyond the beach as quiet as this land was a thousand years ago and probably as quiet as it would be thousands of years from now.
Nikki, the Army doctor and Andi had been worried the zombies were attracted to heat and humidity. So far, they’d been wrong. Doug’s little group – always getting smaller, thanks to me – hadn’t seen a trace of the fungus monsters for weeks.
Doug sat in a beach chair under an umbrella like a tourist, as he had most of the days since they’d quietly left Kentucky; Jenna and Terry locked forever in the Spring Inn, a warning spray painted on the white door in bright red letters, “Infected.” Doug hadn’t gone into the room, neither had Nikki. The gunshots told the story well enough.
Doug’s feet stretched out before him. The heel of his bare right foot sat in the warm sand, his left foot, the cast itchy and rank as hell, lay on a one-by-six. The board was new on the beach. Nikki brought it from the shed behind the beach house where Walter and Lacy had set up, leftovers from construction of the deck that looked out over the ocean. A fifth of Crown Royal sat in the sand next to Doug’s chair.
“Keep it still.” Nikki knelt over the board, tin snips in her right hand.
“Are you sure about this?” Doug asked.
“No, that’s why I brought the whisky,” she said.
Doug had worn the fiberglass cast on his left ankle since July 17 in Omaha because some moron had let animals out of their cages at the Henry Doorly Zoo. He was lucky; the infected brown bear had really wanted to eat him; it didn’t get the chance. An Army doctor who was now dead set the broken bones and layered the cast on while Doug lay on a gurney in a morphine haze. That was fourteen weeks ago; Nikki said his ankle had had enough time to heal. She’d broken her ankle once, so she was the medical expert out of the three people he knew who were still alive and that was good enough for him.
“Is this going to hurt?” he asked.
Nikki shrugged. “Maybe, but the whisky’s not for you.”
She gritted her teeth and squeezed the tin snips. The sharp blades sliced through the fiberglass cast, cutting a line less than an inch long. Nikki sat the snips on the board, unscrewed the cap on the Crown Royal and took a drink, her face pinched as the whisky went down. “This is going to take longer than I thought.”
She offered Doug the bottle. He took it and tilted it slightly toward his lips, the amber liquid glowed in the setting sunlight as it ran through the short neck of the bottle. “Have you ever–” He stopped and coughed.
Nikki snipped another inch through the cast. “Lightweight.”
Doug wiped his lips with the back of his hand and laughed. “I’m more of a beer guy,” he said. “Terry could drink whisky.” He paused. His friend had been gone for two months. He still missed him. Doug smiled. “He could pour whisky into the bottle cap and snort it up his nose.”
Nikki slapped his leg. “Uh-uh.”
Doug took another drink. “It’s true. He won a lot of bets with that.”
Sh
e moved the tin snips deeper into the groove and squeezed again. The stench of fourteen weeks of dying skin and fermented sweat wafted up. She pulled her head away. “Oh, dear God.”
“What’s the matter? Can’t take it?” Doug grinned. He knew Nikki could take the smell. Hell, the smell was nothing. That woman was tough enough to take anything this Fallen fucking world tossed up then laugh about it afterward.
She coughed. “You know I can take it.” She shoved the snips in farther and clipped again.
Fifteen minutes later, Doug’s cast lay in the sand in pieces like discarded bits of shellfish, his leg from mid-calf to his toes as pasty-white as an Englishman’s. He took another drink of the high-end Canadian whisky and sat the bottle, crafted to look like jewels in a crown, into the sand.
“The breeze is cold on my leg,” he said. “It’s good to feel something down there I don’t have to scratch.” The alcohol was working on him, his head light, his face warm. The world had gone tits up. Friends and lovers had died and here he sat on the beach drinking booze. Something wasn’t fair, but Doug knew he couldn’t do anything about it.
“I might help you down to the water so you can try and wash off some of the dead skin and funk,” Nikki said. “But I’m afraid you’ll kill the fish.” She took another swig; the bottle was nearing half empty.
Doug was more content than he’d been in a long time. The nine-hour trip to Mississippi had been rough. They’d seen a few zombies, dodged a roadblock set up by some assholes who ran screaming when they saw all the automatic weapons and faced a section of highway washed out by what was probably a flash flood, but they wanted to experience a warm winter and have the ocean at their back. They got it. The water was one less place to worry about.
“Jenna would probably like this,” Doug said, the sound of his words flat in his ears. Jenna was already starting to be a memory, a memory that would eventually fade. He didn’t even have a fucking picture of her. How long would he remember her face? “She seemed like a spring break sort of person.”
