by Zuko, Joseph
A car crash blocked the intersection ahead. The vehicles were burnt out shells. Black smoke filled the sky. A group of infected roamed the accident, looking for a snack. Their bodies were charred and smoldering. When they moved, flakes of ashed skin floated to the asphalt. A few of the monsters had spotted the approaching truck. The horde took off and raced toward him. They moved as fast as their barbequed bodies could carry them.
He mashed the brakes with both feet. The meat cleaver slid off the seat and fell to the floorboard. The palms of his hands worked quickly to turn the wheel. At this speed the truck’s tail end spun around and Cliff’s rear quarter panel made contact with the leaders of the group.
The metal around the rear tire folded easily under the weight of their scorched bodies. The fire had weakened their joints and their limbs crumbled on impact. He took out four of them, but a large group still gave chase.
He was headed in the wrong direction and did not have time for this bullshit. On his right was a parking lot to a strip mall. Cliff cranked the wheel and pulled into the lot. He got the truck heading back in the right direction. The crispy bodies followed him into the parking lot. They reached out and grabbed for the side of the truck. They hit the front quarter panel of the Dodge. Cliff’s passenger side mirror knocked the block off one of the infected. Their blistered arms folded backwards and the bodies were knocked to the ground as he zipped by. Cliff pulled out of the parking lot and was able to bypass the whole horde without any head on collisions.
He maneuvered past the accident and kept rolling down the street. At the next intersection two police cruisers had formed a V shape in the center of the road. Four officers stood in the center of the V. They emptied their pistols at the oncoming pack of infected.
The nine-millimeter bullets ripped in and out of the diseased torsos, having no effect. Cliff downshifted and turned south at the intersection. Two of the shots missed the infected and hit the passenger side door of the Dodge. Foam stuffing exploded out of the passenger’s seat.
“Fuck me!”
The gunfire faded in the distance. Then there were no more shots. Cliff checked his mirrors. From this distance he could tell they were overrun.
Goddamn!
Four officers with proper training and equipment didn’t stand a chance against them.
What kind of chance did he have with a meat cleaver?
Leaving the apartment was a bad idea.
He was only a minute away from his mother’s. Cliff stepped on it to get the truck back up to sixty.
Cliff pulled his truck into a parking lot and turned down the heavy metal music. A crashed sedan rested on top of a sparking transformer at the edge of the block. The sedan probably knocked out the electricity to his mother’s building. Great! The place was called East Vancouver Retirement Community. It was a bland two-story building with no discernable features. Cliff hated that his mother lived here, but it was the best they could afford.
He came to a screeching stop in the emergency lane outside the front doors. He killed the engine and reached over to pick up the cleaver from the floorboard. The parking lot was full of the staff’s cars. It was black inside the double doors that led to the main entrance. The eaves above the doors blocked out the sun.
He saw no movement inside.
Cliff popped the glove compartment and fished out a flashlight, checked the batteries and luckily they still had juice.
Thank God!
His mother’s room was on the second floor. No power meant he would have to carry her down the stairs. He moved fast, jogging to the front door. The sliding doors stayed shut. No power to the sensor. He spotted a big ceramic flowerpot next to the doors and picked it up. He heaved it into the glass and the windowpane shattered. The flowerpot exploded on the floor and the potting soil spread out across the white tile that led into the main lobby.
Cliff paused before entering. He wanted to see if the sound alerted anyone or anything to his arrival. After a moment he heard feet shuffling down the main hallway for the lobby and as the figures stepped from the dark hall into the light of the lobby, Cliff recognized the two women. They worked the front desk, answering calls and checking people in.
One of the women looked like she’d been scalped. Her skull, exposed on the right side of her head and the rest of her brown hair was matted with blood. Two steps behind her was a heavyset woman. Massive chunks of flesh had been bitten off her thick arms. Excess skin hung down off the back of her triceps. Their pace quickened as they entered the lobby. The scalped woman kicked over what was left of the plant as she moved for the busted window.
Cliff couldn’t stop his body from shaking with fear. When the scalped woman stepped over the threshold he buried the cleaver in her face. Before it dropped he grabbed the dead body by the throat and forced it back into the lobby.
He got enough momentum going to knock it into the other infected woman. The corpse acted as a shield and he pushed both of them backwards until the heavyset woman tripped on a coffee table in the middle of the room. Cliff pinned her down with the scalped woman’s limp body and swung the cleaver at the top of her head. The cracked cranium drained black blood out onto the white tile. He extracted the blade and tried to hold his breath to listen for anymore of the infected staff or tenants of the building.
He was met with silence.
Cliff peered down the dark hallway. He couldn’t make out any movement. He tried to remember how many people worked here. There were at least ten nursing staff, probably a janitor or two, plus the forty occupants that were just waiting around to die. Fifty potential infected people could be waiting in the dark corners of this place.
“Fucking fantastic,” Cliff whispered to himself. He clicked on the flashlight and shined it down the hall. The light illuminated a sign that read “STAIRS”.
Cliff snuck down the hall. He paused to listen for any movement. Still nothing.
Where the hell was everyone?
Cliff moved next to the door that led to the stairwell. He pointed the flashlight through the small glass window in the door.
A set of bloody dentures crashed into the glass.
Cliff yelped as he jumped back from the door. He covered his mouth with his forearm to muffle any more noise from escaping. Black eyes cased in wrinkled skin watched him through the window. The thing’s head bobbed back and forth as it shuffled behind the door. It did not know how to open the door.
As it swayed, Cliff was able to see a dozen other seniors behind it. All of them had turned. He took a step closer and tried to look past the old person’s twisted face. He flashed the light into each of the infected faces and didn’t recognize a single one.
He took a deep breath and kept moving down the hall. He flashed the light into each room he passed. There were bodies on some of the floors and some were resting in wheelchairs. Blood covered the beds and walls in nearly every room.
An infected old woman lay on the floor at the end of the hall. It crawled towards him. Its atrophied legs dragged behind it. Cliff hurdled the old woman, but he came to a stop a few feet from her, realizing he needed to take her down now. He wouldn’t be able to jump over it while pushing his mother’s wheelchair. The infected had already started to pivot on its belly and chase after him.
“I’m sorry ma’am.” He swung the cleaver and put her out of her misery.
At the end of the hall was the last set of stairs that led to the second floor. He flashed his light through the window and it was clear. Just to be sure Cliff knocked at the window. The sound echoed up through the concrete corridor.
He waited.
The sound of unsteady footsteps echoed through the stairwell. Cliff couldn’t tell how many infected were in there until he saw the lone staff member stumble down the last few steps. It was a male nurse.
It crashed into the door. It was a big fella and his weight hit the door with a heavy thud. Its powerful arms banged over and over into the solid oak. If there were any others up in the stairwell they would have com
e down by now.
One infected was better than a dozen.
Cliff pushed the handle and put his shoulder into the door. He hit it fast knocking the door into the big guy. The infected fell back onto the stairs. Cliff jumped through the doorway and landed on it, cleaver first. He hacked the steel blade into its big head. Its skull smacked against the stairs and crunched from the impact.
When Cliff fell forward onto its dead body his flashlight hand landed on the big man’s chest. He propped himself up and his flashlight sunk into the gaping wound in the dead man’s ribcage.
The stairwell went black.
Cliff pulled his hand out of the bloody hole and the flashlight’s glow had become a dim, red color.
“Shit!” Cliff’s stomach wanted to eject the beer he drank not that long ago. He wiped his hand and bloody flashlight against the small clean spot on the man’s uniform. He wiped the light a few more times and extracted the cleaver from the dead man’s skull.
Cliff put his back against the railing and inched up the stairs. The light now shined with a soft pink glow. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t slow his breathing.
He crested the landing and ascended the last flight of stairs to the second floor. He stepped up to the door and peeked through the window. The hallway was dark. Only a few bedroom doors were open letting sunlight into the place. His mother’s room was in the middle of the hall. Room 210. Again he knocked against the door and waited.
He heard no movement.
The door creaked open as he stepped out into the second floor hallway. He couldn’t move the flashlight fast enough to see everything. The dim old bulb only shined a two foot wide pink cone of light. Something scurried along the floor and grabbed at Cliff’s leg.
Without looking he sliced the cleaver an inch from the back of his calf. He could feel the impact of the blade hit something. On the follow through he spun away from whatever was on the ground.
The pink light flashed across the face of a young, attractive woman in a nurse’s uniform. Her eyes were the familiar black of the infected. From the ground she held up what was left of her forearm. Her wrist and hand dangled by a tiny stretch of tissue.
She lurched forward on her good arm. Another old body lay on the floor next to the infected nurse. Its body was riddled with bite marks. She had been feeding for a while. Bits of human meat hung from her adult braces.
Cliff leapt back away from her reach. One of the nurse’s legs had been eaten to the bone. Only a few scraps of muscle left. That was why she was stuck on her belly. Cliff wasted no time and gave her a taste of his cleaver. The wrecked body dropped dead.
In the bedroom, behind the dead nurse, sat an old man. His belly was extended past the realm of normal fat belly. It was so overloaded from the meat of her leg, it kind of looked like a pregnant old man. The weight of the ingested flesh kept it floor-bound.
Something moved around in one of the bedrooms down the hall. Cliff’s heart raced like a jackrabbit in his chest. A woman’s screams were followed by a gunshot. A muzzle flash came from room 210.
He took the last few steps to her door and pushed it all the way open. Another gunshot rung out. The round punched through the doorjamb inches from Cliff’s head. He ducked.
“Stop shooting!” he screamed into the room.
“Clifford? Is that you?” the familiar old voice called to him from the room.
“Mom?”
“Clifford, did I get you?” she slurred.
“No. Where are you?” he searched the room with the flashlight. Then he saw a shaky hand sticking out of the closet. A snub-nosed revolver waved around unsteadily in a wrinkled old fist. Cliff stepped into the room and locked the door behind him. His feet hit something on the floor. He aimed his light down.
A nurse’s body lay on the floor. She had an entry and exit wound through her skull. He stepped over the body and around the end of the twin sized bed, heading for the closet. He opened the door and flooded the closet with pink light. Cliff’s mother squinted her eyes when they were hit with his light.
“Turn that shit off!” she cursed. All one hundred and ten pounds of her sat tucked back between her old leather jackets. Her wheelchair was pushed as far back as it could go to hide her away. Cliff turned off his flashlight and opened the blinds behind him. The sun instantly lit up the room.
She rolled herself out of the closet. She wore a faded old black Led Zeppelin t-shirt and her hair was dyed jet black. So black that it was comical in contrast to her aged body.
“Mom, what happened?”
“How many fucking times do I have to tell you call me Morgan?!” the words bled into each other. A lifetime of legal and illegal drug and alcohol abuse had given her a permanent slur. Cliff found a bag in the closet, “What happened, Morgan?” he loaded a pharmacy’s worth of pill bottles from her nightstand into the bag.
“Crazy bitch.” She pointed with the barrel of the gun at the nurse on the floor. “She comes in here, yelling crazy about someone biting her and she says I need to hide. I’m like, “Hey honey, I don’t give two squirts of piss about your problems, leave me the fuck alone.” Then she pushes me into the goddamn closet. You believe that? A couple minutes later she’s breakdancing on the floor. Then the bitch comes at me. So BLAM! I shot her.”
“Why do you have a gun?” Cliff put his hand out for her to hand it over.
“Protection! I don’t want one of those damn man nurses climbing up on me in the middle of the night. Getting his dirty rocks off. No thank you!” she slapped it into his hand.
“What?”
“You think cause I’m old they don’t want a piece of this? When I was your age men would fight over me!”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the stories. Morgan we have to get out of here. Do you have any more ammo for this gun you shouldn’t have?” He grabbed her favorite black leather jacket from the closet.
“Extra box of bullets in the drawer. Where are we going?”
Cliff opened the nightstand drawer.
“You’re coming home with me,” he said as he dug around and found a full box of .38 caliber.
“I’m not leaving, are you crazy?” She wheeled her chair around to face him.
He opened the chamber and pulled the two spent shells out and replaced them with fresh rounds.
“There is an infection spreading and it’s not safe here. What else do you need?” He put the gun into his back pocket and dropped the rounds in the bag. He grabbed some more clothes from her dresser drawers and jammed them into the bag too.
“What are you talking about?” She wiped the excess saliva from the corners of her mouth. Her unfocused eyes tried to stay locked with his.
He knelt down in front of her so they were face to face, “There is some kind of infection spread through bites. Everyone else in this building is dead. I’m taking you home to stay with us. Do you understand?”
She smiled at him and raised her hand to his face. She gently touched his cheek. Her hands were cold to the touch, “When did you cut off all your beautiful hair?” That was as close to a “Yes, I understand.” that he was going to get from her.
He didn’t have enough hands to hold the light, cleaver, gun and also push her wheelchair. Cliff placed the cleaver into the pocket on the back of the wheelchair. The blade was long enough that the handle stuck out and was an easy grab if he needed it.
“Okay, let’s get going.” He pulled her arms into the sleeve of her jacket.
He grabbed the nurse’s body by the ankle and pulled her out of the way of the door. He slung the bag up onto his shoulder and wheeled her for the door.
“We’ve got to stay quiet, all right?”
She put her index finger up to her lips and gave him a wink.
“That’s right. The elevator’s out so we are taking the stairs, okay?”
“I ain’t walking down any stairs,” she said as she folded her arms in her lap.
He opened the door and spun her around so he could be the first one out. The
hall sounded clear. He pulled her out into the dark space. Got her faced in the right direction and he sprinted down the hall. The front wheels squeaked loudly at this speed.
A figure moved out from one of the bedrooms. Cliff came to a full stop and got his flashlight up and on the moving object. An old man stood naked in front of them. His pale skin sagged off his old frame.
“Goddamn it, put your clothes on, Phil!” Morgan turned her head in disgust.
Phil’s teeth snapped at them and he shuffled forward with his arms outstretched.
Chapter 9
Karen finished off the last slice of her pizza. The salty, buttery crust flaked a little as she took the last bite. Her tongue ran a lap around her lips to clean up the remaining flakes. She was able to get Robin to fall asleep in her arms. Valerie had an old set of headphones on as she played her game on the Internet. Karen found them in the closet and thought it would be a good way to distract the little girl until her father finally got home. The headphones would block out any of the sounds caused by the unwanted infected monsters that might wander by.
Karen couldn’t stop herself from compulsively checking her phone for updates on the carnage that was taking place across Portland and Vancouver. She knew that the images would haunt her, but she was desperate to find out any real information that could help her answer her questions.
Was this happening all around the world and was there a cure?
Most of the info she found was only guesses. Untested theories thrown together by scared humans. As far as the Internet was concerned there was no known cure. None of this was making Karen feel any better. She started to regret looking at her phone. The last link she clicked on was a disturbing article that claimed everyone was already infected. Bites from a turned person made the transition from a living human to blood thirsty murderer take place faster, but the main point of the page was that if anyone passed away for any reason they would still turn. Karen’s brain felt like it was melting from the concept.
