Still hazy from my head wound — and my inconvenient mental playback of the previous two weeks — I had a slower reaction time than I’d have preferred. The first zombie slammed into me, and we both tumbled to the ground, where I once again smacked my head against the concrete steps.
Chapter 3
“My easygoing nature is gettinʼ sorely fuckinʼ tested.”
– Bill Pardy, Slither (2006)
Fortunately, I didn’t lose consciousness, but the pain still jostled my concentration. I had to stay focused and subdue the zombie quickly — not just to avoid being his breakfast, but also to liberate myself before the second zombie became a problem. The only thing preventing him from attacking me was that he’d inadvertently caught his coat on a nail jutting from one of the fence supports. Given the crappy condition of the fence — and the zombie’s apparent determination to reach me — I knew it wouldn’t hold him for long.
I shifted my attention back to the creature on top of me. Based on the expensive suit he wore — presently spattered with blood, thanks to the gaping, ragged hole in his shoulder — he appeared to be a businessman of some kind. Maybe a lawyer or a banker or some other white-collar type that rarely endured a zombie apocalypse. At least in the movies.
Although the gore on his face made it hard to tell, the guy seemed to be about my age: mid-forties. But, damn, he must have worked out a bit more than I ever had. Even as a mindless zombie, the dude had unnatural strength.
As soon as the businessman had fallen on top of me, he’d grabbed my shirt and pulled himself toward my face. His weight threatened to suffocate me, and his gnashing teeth moved closer to my cheek. Luckily, the axe once again came in handy. It really was a solid zombie-killing device.
With some effort, I managed to push against the zombie’s chest and simultaneously shove the axe handle into his mouth, smashing several of his once-perfect teeth in the process. Not that the dental dilemma stopped him. He simply responded by chewing on the wood with his remaining incisors, trying his damnedest to reach my hand. Putrid saliva, pus, and blood dripped onto my face as I slid the handle through his mouth. When the axe blade caught against his cheek, I yanked the handle downward and, amid horrendous cracking and snapping sounds, sliced his lower jaw away from his head.
More foulness gushed onto my skin and clothes, but luckily, I’d clamped my own jaws shut to avoid contamination. Besides, the distraction enabled me to wriggle out from beneath the businessman and roll him onto his back.
Stumbling to my feet, I glanced toward the other zombie, the one dressed like a familiar-looking cowboy — complete with tan pants, a maroon work shirt, a brown knee-length duster coat, a hip holster on his belt, and brown leather gloves, boots, and suspenders. I could only assume the cowboy and the businessman had become compatriots after the zombie apocalypse began — and not before. Regardless, the cowboy still struggled against the same stubborn nail, the suede coat apparently too sturdy to tear easily.
Before I could deal with the hapless cowboy, the jawless businessman started to rise. With little hesitation, I set the axe on the table, picked up the spare propane tank beside the grill, heaved it above my head, and smashed it down onto his mangled face.
Four blows later, he lay motionless in a heap of gore, and my arms ached from the weight of the propane tank. Setting it on the ground, I kept my eyes on the bloody zombie, just in case he wasn’t quite dead yet… although, the vile, shattered mess that used to be his head should’ve been my first clue he wasn’t coming back. The chunks of skull and brain matter dripping from the propane tank only solidified that fact.
A ripping sound alerted me to his partner’s presence. The cowboy had finally broken free of the fence and stumbled through the foliage lining the courtyard. Hastily, I inverted one of our patio chairs, snagged him with the legs before he could reach me, and maneuvered him to the right side of the building.
Three large air-conditioning units (one for each apartment), plus ladders, hoses, and various tools, filled the narrow alley, rendering it more of a cramped storage area than a pathway to St. Ann Street (like the alley on the other side). In addition, thick brown vines covered the ground, snaking around the A/C units and making it easy to trip. I’d once watched a repairman take a nasty tumble there, so I figured I could simply prod the cowboy — actually, he looked more like a certain space cowboy — with the chair and push him over the first A/C unit.
Although I managed to pin him against the metal frame, my victory didn’t last long. With surprising strength and a zombie’s typical stamina, he pushed the chair aside and immediately righted himself. Luckily, before he could get close to me, he slipped on a vine and smacked his temple on a corner of the A/C.
I hoped the blow to his head had killed him, but after a moment, he again rose to his feet. What the fuck? Seriously, the left side of the guy’s face had caved inward, but his brain was somehow still active, and he clearly hadn’t given up his desire to eat me.
While moving forward, he accidentally stepped inside a nest of vines. Both of his boots snagged the root-like foliage, and he fell forward onto the pavement, his lower half trapped as if in quicksand. He tried to wriggle out of the vines, but the more he fidgeted, the more tangled he became. The space cowboy had finally grounded himself. Of course, I kicked his head anyway — just for good measure.
Chapter 4
“Itʼs Halloween. Everyoneʼs entitled to one good scare.”
– Brackett, Halloween (1978)
Leaving the space cowboy to his own tangled mess, I returned the chair to its rightful spot and retrieved the axe from the table. With a towel I’d accidentally left in our covered dryer, I did my best to wipe off my face as well as the axe. The bloody feathers, fur, and hide had seen better days, but at least the blade was relatively clean. An effective zombie killer, it would make a solid addition to the lengthy list of weapons I’d purchased while preparing for the apocalypse.
In our more than seventeen years together, Clare and I had never had a lot of money. Since I figured what little we did possess would be pretty useless once the zombie chaos started, I decided I might as well spend it all preparing for the end. So, after persuading Clare to trust Samir’s insane message, I’d started buying everything I thought we’d need for our hasty exodus from the city. I even chronicled the entire process on my blog, which, by the end, had only attracted about a hundred readers.
Not bad for such a short run, though I doubt it did any good. Even those who’d “believed” me were probably not prepared for how bat-shit crazy the situation would get.
For the benefit of my meager audience, I’d cataloged everything I’d bought and why. Kept urging people to prepare for doomsday, trying to convince them of the government’s lies, hoping to make them believe the infected dead would really, truly rise. I’d blogged every night, for the first nine days of my preparations, then my blog had experienced “technical difficulties” and no longer appeared. Fucking government. Guess I just should be grateful Clare and I hadn’t disappeared along with my public ramblings.
The people who’d followed my blog generally fell into one of two categories. First, those entertained by the rantings of a lunatic, chiding me with their inane comments, claiming I was just another unhinged nut seeking attention for his crazy conspiracy theories. But, right or wrong, they kept giving me the attention I supposedly craved.
The rest of my readers considered themselves doomsday preppers. While most of them weren’t the sort of folks I’d want to socialize with on a regular basis, they certainly shared a lot of decent ideas and ultimately steered me in the right direction for some of my survival prep work.
Following the curious shutdown of my blog, I’d simply continued to gather supplies and ready us for life during the zombie chaos, periodically combing the web for any mention of what was happening in America and overseas. Not surprisingly, there hadn’t been much in the way of accurate news.
Then, fourteen days into the twenty-one-day countdown — an
d yes, we’d actually intended to leave town before the very end — Clare had decided to head to Baton Rouge. The reason? She’d hoped to convince her mom to come with us when we fled north.
Now, just to be clear, Clare’s mother had despised me ever since we’d gotten married fifteen years earlier, so the idea of her coming with us didn’t exactly thrill me. Then again, compared to the imminent apocalypse, she was the least of my worries. And Jill’s presence was bound to put Clare at ease, which might even make the whole trip less stressful for me.
In essence, our plan was to head north to my parents’ property in northern Michigan and hopefully ride out the storm (so to speak). Clare, who admittedly hated driving, had reluctantly ventured the eighty miles to Baton Rouge by herself, while I’d stayed behind to finish loading up the old step van I’d purchased.
After much tug-of-war between me (the purger) and my wife (the hoarder), I’d managed to pack up or ship out almost everything of importance (including a small selection of Clare’s nonnegotiable photos, jewelry, and other memorabilia). Following my final supply trip to the secure lot where we kept our van, the only precious items left included a go-bag and our furry child: Azazel, a seven-year-old, short-haired tabby.
We’d named her after a demon because she hated everyone except me and Clare. Her fickle personality had always bothered my wife, but I, on the other hand, thought it was hilarious. She was my attack cat, meant to keep people away, and I had to admit: I loved watching Clare’s mother try to pet her every time she visited and, without fail, receive a hiss and a bite for her trouble. It’s the little things that make life worth living.
The fourteenth day of my pre-zombie grace period had actually been Halloween, normally a big deal for everyone in the Big Easy. Like children everywhere else in America, the kids down there dressed up and went trick-or-treating door to door, but the adults were another story. New Orleanians would embrace any opportunity for a party, and Halloween was no different. It was also one of the rare occasions Clare and I relished meandering through the French Quarter — mainly to check out the creative costumes and joyous mayhem.
Didn’t hurt that women typically took the chance to don the sluttiest outfits imaginable. Whether they’d decided to dress as a vampire, a cop, a superhero, a nurse, or something else altogether, they would almost always choose the most scantily-clad version.
During one Halloween a few years earlier, Clare and I had been in a strip club (where the women typically fawned over her) when in walked a priest and a nun. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it was true.
At first, we’d thought it was just a pair of religious nut jobs — the ones who often tried to convert tourists doing the “Bourbon crawl” (that is, strolling from bar to bar, getting blotto on Bourbon Street as only college students, conventioneers, and first-time visitors to New Orleans could do). Expecting a lecture from the overzealous Christians, we’d been pleasantly surprised when they sat at a table and ordered high-priced cocktails instead.
Almost immediately, the nun had bought herself a lap dance, and the lucky lady she’d chosen was soon sliding her hands up the nun’s tunic, past her stockings, all the way to the Promised Land. Safe to say everyone in the club, including me and Clare, opted to watch the girl-on-girl lap dance instead of the solo dancers on stage.
Yeah, we loved New Orleans at Halloween — and sadly, we’d missed the latest one. But, given the zombified pirate, businessman, and space cowboy lying in my courtyard, that didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
While Bourbon Street was packed on most nights, Halloween could become as dangerously crowded as Mardi Gras. Wall-to-wall people shoving their way up and down the street. Not the best place to be during a zombie epidemic.
Still, since we’d thought we had more time, that wasn’t exactly the reason we’d ignored our favorite holiday. Frankly, with Armageddon on the horizon, neither of us had felt all that festive. So, instead of venturing out for one last drunken, costumed spectacle, Clare had decided to skip the festivities altogether, borrow a friend’s car, and head for her mom’s place with the misguided plan of persuading her to join us on our mad dash up north.
I, meanwhile, had opted to stay at home on All Hallows’ Eve, not only to finish packing, but also because the Quarter mayhem was never as much fun without my partner in crime. I just hoped, given what had happened in the Big Easy, Clare was safe at my mother-in-law’s house. Surveying the bloody, body-filled area that had once served as our private sanctuary, I decided the time had come to get out of town, head to Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, and snatch my wife along the way.
Chapter 5
“I canʼt profess to understand Godʼs plan. Christ promised the resurrection of the dead. I just thought he had something a little different in mind.”
– Hershel Greene, The Walking Dead (2012)
Before grabbing the last of my stuff, I crept toward the gate and listened for any activity in the street. One aspect of the courtyard Clare and I had always enjoyed was the bizarre way it dulled sound. We could often hear our neighbors along the sides and at the rear, particularly when they had rowdy company, but street sounds were faint at best.
Honking car horns, rumbling delivery trucks, and blaring karaoke songs from the gay bar on the opposite corner were all much less obnoxious than they might’ve seemed from the two front apartments. The clip-clopping mules, creaking carriage wheels, and cackling late-night revelers headed toward Bourbon Street were less intrusive, too.
The courtyard walls, plus the houses surrounding us, provided a barrier of insulation between our hidden oasis and the outside world. Oftentimes, Clare and I would find it difficult to know what was happening on St. Ann without venturing to the gate for a look-see. Even Mardi Gras parades — including our favorite, the dog-centric Krewe of Barkus — had passed by the building without disturbing the relative peace and quiet of our courtyard.
The night before, however, had been an unusual situation. I’d been preparing a quick dinner in the kitchen when I heard the first screams. Right away, I’d realized those weren’t the normal sounds of drunken revelry but, rather, bloodcurdling shrieks of a much more fucked-up nature.
After snatching the decorative axe from the wall, I’d slipped out the door, tiptoed down the alley, and opened the gate, only to be rewarded with my first encounter with a zombie. The very same undead pirate lying in my courtyard, oozing foulness from his head.
As I approached the gate, I didn’t discern much of anything — just a few shouts, groans, and gunshots in the distance. Similar to the sounds I’d often heard in the French Quarter. In a way, it was worse than hearing the screams of living victims, since it implied most of the people in the French Quarter had been either killed or turned during the late-night and early-morning hours.
Then, as I strained my ears, I gradually heard it. A perpetual buzzing sound, like the droning made by a hive of hungry bees in a rose garden.
Slowly, I unlocked the gate, tightened my grip on the axe, and stepped onto the sidewalk, hoping my curiosity wouldn’t result in the same antics I’d experienced the night before.
Immediately, I noticed dead bodies in the road. A lot of bodies, in fact. Partially eaten, lying in haphazard piles, their costumes torn and bloody. Even worse than the mangled corpses, though, were the body parts: just random heads, limbs, and torsos, like the aftermath of a terrible plane crash… or the lair of a rogue alligator. If the street cleaners who scoured the Quarter biweekly were still in business, they had quite a task ahead of them.
A tuft of bloody fur caught my eye, and stepping closer, I realized humans weren’t the only victims splayed along St. Ann. Amid the costumes and gore lay several feral cats and leashed dogs, too. Obviously, no living organism was immune to a zombie’s hunger.
I felt more sadness for the lost animals than the deceased people. Not a revelation for me: I’d always preferred cats, dogs, goats, elephants, and other innocent creatures to my fellow humans. People usually hated me for t
hose beliefs. I just hated them right back.
The buzzing had increased as I’d neared the asphalt roadway, and I could finally see the reason why. Hundreds of flies hovered, dove, and landed on the corpses, doing what flies did best: scavenging from the dead. Numerous rats crawled and nibbled their way across the bodies, too. I wondered if sampling from the zombies’ victims would turn them into undead insects and rodents. If so, I hoped they couldn’t spread the infection to other unsuspecting animals and humans. As if it weren’t already a plague to end all plagues.
Familiar scents wafted in the autumn breeze: stale hints of urine, vomit, feces, beer, and trash, just as typical in the French Quarter as the more pleasant aromas of coffee, boiled seafood, and sweet olive trees. But, beyond such common aromas, I noted a burning smell on the wind, like that of a distant fire.
Worse, though, was the oppressive stench emanating from the bodies, so foul it was actually making me dizzy. I’ve never known much about how fast a body could decay, but it seemed as if the corpses were more rancid than I would’ve expected. Maybe that was due to the mangled body parts, covered with every kind of gore you’d never want to imagine.
Glancing up and down the street, I didn’t see anything — or anyone — in motion. No breathing, no twitching, no struggling to stand. Despite the horrifying scene, I found the relative stillness reassuring: at least those victims were too brain-dead to be reanimated.
Then, I noted movement in my peripheral vision. Turning my head to the right, I spotted a young woman dragging herself down Burgundy Street. From a distance, I couldn’t see the details of her face, but she appeared to be missing the lower half of her left leg. She was either one tough survivor — or a zombie on a mission.
When she paused to taste a fallen police officer, I had my answer. After a bite or two, she crawled over the uniformed torso. Guess the body wasn’t fresh enough for her.
Zombie Chaos Book 1: Bloodbath in the Big Easy Page 2
