“LUKE!!!” yelled Dad. He and DeAndre were blasting away at the edge of the crowd of zombies as the creatures rushed toward me. I saw half of them break off from the main group and turn to attack my family as I watched helplessly. Jonathan and Zach had joined DeAndre and Dad, and they were all shooting at the zombies that were advancing on them.
The main group kept rushing toward me, and I felt for my knife, grabbed the handle and brought it forward. They were ten feet away. I dropped into a fighting stance and waved the huge knife in front of me, warning them off. They ignored it completely and engulfed me.
“AHH!!!!” I screamed involuntarily. But the zombies didn’t fight me, the way they usually did. They rushed me and grabbed hold of me, lifting me off my feet. I struggled and cut at them, punching and thrashing, but there were too many of them, and they carried me off in a huge wave of rotting flesh. The last sight I had was of my family, shooting from the roof of our vehicle, except for Risa, who was down the road a bit firing and glancing my way in between shots. Just as I was pulled over the lip of the embankment, I saw her run and leap straight into the crowd of zombies that were carrying me off.
“RISA!!!! LUKE!!!!!!!” I heard Dad scream. “NOOOOO!!!!!!!!!” There was a flurry of gunshots, and I saw Risa disappear into the mob of zombies carrying me away.
“LUKE!!!!!” I heard Zach scream.
“Risa!” I screamed. “RISA!!!”
Hundreds of zombies carried me down the embankment, half running, half tumbling down. At one point, they almost dropped me, but there were so many of them that rotted hands reached and caught me, and pulled me onward. I kept a strong grip on my shotgun as I was carried away like a pinecone in a fast-moving river.
I struggled against their hold and screamed in frustration and anger. “RISA!”
SIX
I couldn’t see anything through the hundreds of dead bodies that surrounded me. I was being carried away in a sea of zombies, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. And Risa. Had she fallen? Was she fighting? There was no way one person could overcome a hundred zombies in a fight, even my bad-assed big sister. I sobbed and yelled again.
“LET ME GO!!”
Suddenly, I heard: “Luke?”
I looked everywhere, but I just couldn’t see over the horde carrying me off.
“Risa?” I called, hoping against reason that she was still alive.
“I’m here,” I heard her call out.
“Are you okay?” I called out in the direction her voice had come from.
“Yes. No. Yes. I guess so.” She called back. “I’ve got my gun but they’re just carrying me. There are too many!” The growling horde got louder then, and the mob that was carrying me off leveled out as we reached what seemed to be the bottom of the crater. I caught a glimpse of Risa as they changed directions; she was being carried like I was. They weren’t attacking us, or hurting us, they just carried us, like a swarm of ants bringing morsels of food back down to the hive. I thrashed more wildly and screamed: “HEY!!! LEGGO!!!” My heartbeat raced at the thought of what would happen to me once they had carried me to their destination. I arched my back and screamed again: “ARRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!”
I was ignored. The streaming throng of zombies carried us along as they raced down the bottom of the crater toward a dark hole in the distance.
It didn’t make any sense. Why were they not attacking? They always attacked. There was no such thing as a zombie encounter where they didn’t attack. They always tried to either rip you to bits, or, more often, they tried to eat you. Literally, eat you alive. But now they were just playing quarterback and carrying us down this black hole into some kind of cave system.
I looked around as they carried us deeper into the earth. After a few moments I couldn’t really see anything, they’d carried me so far the light didn’t even reach anymore. It was pitch dark. I had no idea where Risa was, or if she was even still alive. I tried to feel in my pockets to see if I had brought my flashlight, but the way they jostled me while carrying their burden, I wasn’t able to get my hands anywhere near my pockets. Zombies had ahold of my arms, legs and torso, and they hustled me along horizontally down, down, down into the earth
“STOP!” I yelled to them, but they didn’t care. They just kept going.
After what seemed like hours but was probably only about thirty minutes, I was hustled into a larger chamber by this crazed undead mob and set unceremoniously on my feet in front of a big rock. I straightened my clothes and dusted myself off and looked around. There was a faint luminescence to the wet cave walls. Water dripped down in small rivulets and pooled at a center depression in the floor. Lichen glowed faintly in the moisture. The underground chamber was maybe the size of a large movie theatre, and it was filled with zombies. More poured in from the side tunnel I assumed I had been brought through. Suddenly, I saw them carrying Risa from the tunnel, and they dropped her down beside me. She fell onto her side with an “Oomph!” and lay there a minute catching her breath.
“What the hell?” she said as she got up, her normal tough girl attitude firmly in place. “Luke!” she hugged me hard. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t know what’s going on. Why didn’t they attack us?”
“I think they carried us off here for some purpose. I was shooting like crazy, and I know I took down a bunch of them, but there were just too many. And even though I was bringing down zombies, they didn’t hurt me, not once. They haven’t harmed me at all, even after I took out at least a dozen of them,” she said, brushing herself off and straightening her clothes. It’s not widely known, but being carried off by a horde of freaked-out zombies can give you a wedgie.
Looking around, Risa tried to peer out at the horde. “What are they doing?”
The zombies appeared to be waiting. For what, I had no clue. But they were just standing there, looking at us and … waiting. Just waiting.
“Weird,” said Risa, looking around. “I think we’re trapped in here.” She tried to walk to the tunnel entrance we’d both come through. A dozen zombies moved to block her path, staring at her with undead eyes. She moved back to stand beside me.
“Do you think the others are coming?” I asked. “Maybe they are getting carried in here too.”
Suddenly I heard through their growls, a low rumbling voice, that was half growl, half groan, but forming a word.
SEVEN
“No,” said the voice behind us. An icy chill crawled up my back at that voice, and a feeling of dawning horror rippled through me. Risa beside me looked equally freaked out. Turning around, we looked at the horde behind us. A hundred pairs of eyes looked back. There was no way to tell where the voice had come from. I shivered again.
“Bring… them.” Looking sharply into the crowd of zombies, I searched for where the voice had come from. It had sounded for all the world like a zombie. But that couldn’t be … could it? The zombies moved us forward, nudging and pushing, but not hurting us. They forced us toward one of the walls ahead of us, where the luminescence was greatest.
“Luke, I have a very bad feeling about this,” Risa whispered beside me. I gripped my shotgun and leveled it at the crowd ahead, and she did the same with hers. We stood there, side by side, guns at the ready as we faced this zombie horde and waited.
It didn’t take long. The crowd of undead slowly parted and one zombie hobbled forward. It was in an extreme state of decomposition, its skin hanging off it in a dozen places, its eyes glazed over so white they looked blue. We could even smell it from 20 feet away, and the smell was not good. This thing looked like it had been in a grave for a while.
“No one elssse… iss coming,” it said. I blinked my eyes and wondered if I was hallucinating. Had this creature just spoken to us?
Glancing at Risa, who looked just as bewildered as I felt, I turned back to the zombie king.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“No one else is coming,” it said to me again, looking straight into my e
yes. I swallowed with fear.
“You can speak,” Risa whispered beside me. “Oh my god, you can speak.”
“Yesss,” it said, and walked forward, coming within 10 feet of me. I was speechless with amazement.
“How is this possible?” asked Risa.
“Come,” it said, and turned and disappeared down a second tunnel. Strangely, I felt a mild desire to follow this creature.
The zombie horde pushed us roughly to follow their leader, and their meaning was unmistakable. We had no choice but to follow them deeper into the earth. The tunnel sloped slightly downward, with several steep drops. Thank goodness none of the drops was more than a few feet. We must have gone a thousand feet before entering another chamber, this one several hundred feet across. It looked like a natural formation in the granite. There were several small pools of water, and a wide path winding its way through them. The zombies hustled us through all this to the far side of the cavern, while more poured into the area from several other tunnels. We were soon in the middle of what looked like several thousand zombies, and stopped at the far side of the cave, in front of the zombie leader.
I turned to Risa and whispered, “I don’t think we’re coming out of this.”
“We’re not dead yet,” she whispered back. “If I’m going to die here, I’m taking as many of them with me as I can.” She held tight to her shotgun and looked ready to use it.
Looking around us at the huge number we were facing, I knew that no matter how good we were, we could never come close to making a dent in this many zombies, let alone escape. They surrounded us on all sides. I put my free arm around Risa and gave her a quick hug. We had been through so much, and none of the Sanctuary team ever expected to live into old age; our jobs were too dangerous, and after a while the odds caught up with you. But maybe … This felt different. I sensed more than one possibility in the situation.
I looked up at the zombie king as he turned to us and approached us again. Holding my shotgun in front of me, I hoped I looked braver than I felt.
“You… are us,” it said, pointing to me.
“What?” I said, confused.
“You,” he pointed his rotten finger at me and advanced until he was directly in front of me. I lowered the muzzle of my shotgun as he approached. His finger, with bone poking through, was just a few inches away from my chest. Standing my ground I looked into its eyes in defiance.
“Me what, zombie?”
“You. You… are zom,” it said.
Risa whispered in my ear, “Maybe it’s talking about your hybrid status?”
I whispered back, “How on earth could it tell? They always just ignore me - like I’m not even there.”
“You. You… are us,” the zombie king said again. Then: “How?”
A freezing cold shiver ran down my back as I listened to this creature. How was this even possible? This was insane. Completely insane. I suddenly remembered the zombies on the roof of the store earlier today, watching us. Watching me, I now realized. Then I understood. These creatures had tracked me down, found me, and followed me. They had planned it all out, lured me into a trap and captured me. This was not like a pack of wolves, this was something more. This thing could speak, for god’s sakes. IT. COULD. SPEAK. I felt shock turn into wonder. Horror-filled wonder, but wonder nonetheless.
“My mother was human…” I said.
“Hume…” it replied.
“Human. But as I was born she turned,” I said. “She died.”
“Die…d…?” it said. It could not know what being born or dying was, since neither event really ever happened to a zombie. Killing them wasn’t really killing them, because they were already dead. It just rendered them unable to move: taking the head off separated the nerve center from the body.
“I’m a hybrid,” I tried again.
“Hie…bred…?” it said. “How… you zom… and you… not zom… you hue-mann…”
Shaking my head, I turned to Risa. “What is going on?”
“I don’t know, but this is nuts,” she said. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”
“They are trying to communicate …,” I said, turning back to the zombie. It looked like it was trying to think. Then:
“No kill I,” it said.
I leaned toward Risa and whispered, “That could be either plea not to kill it or a promise it won’t kill. Weird.”
Nodding, Risa turned to the zombie king. “What?”
“No kill zom,” it said.
“It is you zombies that are killing us off!” Risa said. “You!”
“No kill zom,” it said again.
“I don’t believe this,” I said, shaking my head. We were in the middle of a horde of thousands of zombies and they wanted us to not kill them? I looked at the thing again. I wanted some answers.
“You kidnapped us,” I said. “You did not hurt us. You always hurt humans. But not this time. Why?”
The zombie king seemed to struggle with itself, trying to find the words in its rotting brain. It must have been one in a million infected creatures that could talk. This was unlike anything we’d ever seen or even imagined.
Suddenly, a small group of the nearby zombies rushed Risa and attacked her. “HEY!!!” I yelled, and grabbed the nearest attacking zombie off of Risa. She brought her shotgun up and pulled the trigger at them in desperation, but they were too close. I knew if the other zombies also attacked we were done for. There was no way for two to win a fight against hundreds. The attacking zombies roared and growled as they tried to bite Risa.
“NOOOO!!!!!” I screamed, grabbing another one. There was a huge confusion as the other zombies struggled between reacting the same as the attackers and obeying the orders of their leader.
“NOOOOOORRRRAAWWWWWW!!!!!!!!” The zombie king roared, grabbing the nearest attacker’s head and wrenched it fiercely. In a heartbeat, it pulled, and then - WOOSH!!! and THUD! - the attacking zombie’s head separated from its body and the thing fell to the ground. The other attacking zombies backed away from us; they were quickly grabbed from behind by their brethren and swallowed into the crowd. The zombie king turned to us.
“No… fight. No kill.” It seemed to plead with its eyes.
Risa and I looked at him, then at the horde of barely controlled zombies. The mob was huge. If they decided to attack, we were done for. We had no choice but to try to work with this zombie “king” standing before us.
I thought of something that had been niggling the back of my brain for a while. It was clear they had brought me to these caverns because I thought I was one of them, but …
“Why did you bring Risa?” I asked. “Why did you not attack her? Why bring her here?”
“Yourr… friend.” The zombie king indicated Risa. “She is… your friend.” He seemed to struggle again for the right words. I, in turn, struggled to make sense of what it was saying.
“What?” I asked.
It gestured to Risa again, and then came forward and took hold of her arm. Risa struggled not to react. The zombie king turned to me, its hand still holding Risa’s arm.
“Your …friend. You… want. Zom… no hurt your…” it touched me with its finger. “…your friend.”
This was incredible.
“You all … there are thousands of you in this cavern alone. Outside there are many more,” I said.
“Yess, …many zom,” it said.
“And all across the country, here and where I come from, are millions of zombies,” I said. “Tens of millions, and they all try to attack and eat us humans. They kill us.”
“No more,” the zombie said. I couldn’t believe it.
“Luke,” Risa said. I turned to her. “I think it’s trying to form some kind of truce.”
Turning back to the zombie king, I realized she may be onto something. I thought for a moment.
“I do not represent all the human beings on this planet. Do you understand?” I asked.
“You zom. You… hue-mann,” it said. It se
emed to struggle to understand. “Hue-mann… no hurt zom. Zom… no hurt… hue-man. No… more kill.”
“I understand what you mean,” I said. “But I,” I gestured to myself, “I do not have any say for the others. I do not rule them, like you rule these zombies.”
It didn’t seem to understand. “You zom,” it said.
I sighed. “Yes, I am a hybrid. Part human, part zombie,” I said. But mostly human I thought to myself. Although I had a lot of traits in common with zombies, I had always considered myself a special human. But still human. There wasn’t any part of me that identified with these creatures. My parents had both been human. I’d been raised by humans. As far as I was concerned, I was human. “What has that got to do with anything?” I asked.
It seemed to be thinking.
“You... You can make ... fighting stop...” It struggled to make sentences that would communicate what it was trying to convey. “No killing... No more.”
Risa turned to me. “Luke,” she whispered. “Tell them we can take their message outside, to the others. Tell them we can relay it to the world, if they will let us go.” I had been bending down to hear her, so she could whisper in my ear. Glancing up, I noticed the zombie king had come in quite close, trying to hear what Risa was saying. I straightened and turned to face the zombie leader, and it straightened up and backed away a step or two, to where it had been. Had it been trying to spy on us? Weird.
Mad World (Book 3): Desperation Page 5
