by Anthology
Towards his house.
Quietly, slowly, he eased the door open. From the small front porch he could see to the end of the road. There was movement in one of the windows of his house, a twitch as a curtain fell back in place.
Sheila and the kids. They’re still alive. And those things––things like me––are heading towards them.
But how can I save them? I can’t even trust myself around them. What if I get hungry again? Images of his wife and children torn apart to feed his unnatural appetite filled his head.
No!
He turned away and was immediately confronted with the abattoir he’d created. Even now, with his stomach filled to bursting, the sight and scent of the bloody organs sparked a hunger in him.
Wait. That’s it!
He knelt down by Tom Henderson’s corpse and started stuffing pieces of intestine and other organs into the pockets of his gore-crusted pants. From a closet he took one of Tom’s jackets and put it on, filled those pockets as well.
The only way to keep from becoming a dangerous, crazed monster like those things outside was to keep his stomach filled. And if that’s what it took to save his family, by God he’d do it.
He chewed and swallowed two big pieces of Enid’s liver and then ran out the back door. This time he didn’t bother with the gate. Instead, he crashed through the hedges separating the Henderson’s property from the Thompson’s. From one backyard to the next, dodging lawn furniture and swimming pools, he made his way towards his family.
I’ll show them I’m not a monster.
~
Sheila watched the three zombies shambling down the street and knew her family was in trouble. They hadn’t looked at any of the other houses; in fact, from the moment they’d appeared they’d been staring in their blank, malevolent way at only one home.
Hers.
Damn John. Why couldn’t he have owned a gun?
Why couldn’t he be here now to protect them?
“Bobby. Go get your sister’s baseball bat.”
The fact that he didn’t ask any questions, just took off at a run for his room, let her know the seriousness of the situation must have finally sunk in.
“Mom?” Stacie stood by the other window. “There’s more coming.”
Sheila looked past the three approaching in their lumbering but steady fashion and saw that her daughter was right. More of the creatures were visible at the end of the road, their heads and shoulders cresting the top of the hill where Turtle Dove and Culver split. Six of them, maybe more.
Bobby returned with the bat.
“Go down to the basement and hide,” she told them in her best no-nonsense voice, the one she only used when they were in the worst of trouble.
“What about––?”
“Just go! I’ll be fine.”
She grabbed each of them and gave them a hard kiss, then pushed them towards the kitchen. As she turned back to the window, a flash of movement behind the Pasternack’s house caught her eye, but when she looked nothing was there.
Too fast to be one of them. Must have been a cat or something.
The first three zombies––the word came so much easier now that she’d accepted her fate––were only two houses away. Close enough to see their green-brown rotting skin and the way their sunken eyes and open mouths gave them a death’s head appearance. One of them wore the remains of a white lab coat with Pascack Valley Hospital stitched on the breast pocket; the other two were naked, with giant ‘Y’-shaped autopsy incisions on their chests.
The squeal of tires from of the Pasternack’s driveway startled her so badly she dropped the aluminum bat and felt a sharp pain in her chest as her heart gave an extra kick. The lime-green Cadillac roared down the driveway and into the three reanimated corpses, sending them into the air like human bowling pins. The car skidded to a stop and then backed up, crushing the skull of one naked zombie and sending grayish matter flying across the blacktop.
The driver leaned out the window and time seemed to freeze for Sheila.
John!
Then he ducked back into the car, turned it around, and gunned the engine, aiming the heavy vehicle right at the large group of walking dead further up the street.
He’s alive!
Then, on the heels of that thought, the image of his face came back to her. The pale flesh, the dark hollows under his eyes.
No. It’s impossible. He can’t be one of them.
She watched the car drive over the dozen or so zombies at the beginning of the circle. John piloted the car back and forth, a neon-green shark feasting on trapped seals. None of the zombies attempted to avoid being struck, further evidence in Sheila’s mind that none of them had enough brainpower to start a car, let alone drive one.
That meant John had to be alive. Hurt, maybe. Tired, exhausted, even sick.
But alive.
With the final zombie dealt with, the car turned and came back down the road at a more sedate pace. Without warning it swerved and struck a mailbox, coming to rest halfway across a front lawn. The driver’s door opened and John staggered out, his movements uncoordinated and slow. Even from three houses away she could see blood covering his clothes.
Oh, God, he’s hurt. She grabbed the binoculars and hurriedly focused on her husband.
Just in time to see him pull something that looked like a giant pink sponge from his pocket and shove it into his mouth. Gobs of the strange material fell onto his shirt as he chewed and gulped like a starving man who’d just found a steak.
Her stomach did a slow somersault as the hammer of truth struck her.
John, her John, was gone. Replaced by something that shouldn’t even be possible.
As she watched, the man who had once been her husband shoved the remains of the unidentifiable organ into one pocket, straightened up, wiped his arm across his mouth, and began walking in a normal fashion towards the house.
What the hell’s going on?
A crash from the kitchen interrupted her thoughts. Turning around, she found a fat woman with one arm climbing through the broken glass of the patio door. Two more of the undead waited behind her.
“John!” The unintentional scream burst from her. Without looking to see if he’d heard, she picked up the aluminum bat and prepared to defend her home.
~
John Grainger knew Sheila had seen him. He was too far away to tell what her expression had been, but there was no mistaking the flash of blonde hair as she turned away from the window. Hopefully she’d noticed how he’d taken care of the monsters, that he wasn’t like the others.
“John!”
Sheila’s voice. Something was wrong. He sprinted for the house, slammed his shoulder into the front door. There was no pain, just a loud crash as the door pulled from its hinges and fell to the floor. He looked around the living room but she wasn’t there.
Glass broke in another room. The kitchen.
He hurried across the room.
~
The bat hit the dead woman’s head with the same sound as when Stacie connected with a softball. The corpse’s face caved in on one side and her jaw hung at an angle, but the single hand still reached forward. Behind the woman the other two zombies entered through the shattered door.
She tried to swing again but the bat struck the wall, throwing her aim off.
“Mom?” Bobby shouted from the top of the stairs.
She leaned against the door. “Stay there! Don’t come out!” With one hand she pushed the button to lock the door.
Something heavy hit her, knocking her to the floor. At the same time, a sharp pain exploded between her neck and shoulder. She shoved the end of the bat under the dead woman’s head and pushed. The creature fell back, blood and green slime running from its mouth. Sheila looked at her shoulder; a piece of skin the size of her fist was missing.
The zombie swallowed and leaned in for another bite. Sheila brought the bat up again but the woman was too heavy; despite only having one arm, her extra strength forced
the bat down towards Sheila’s neck.
Then the weight was gone.
Shelia sat up and saw her attacker struggling with someone in an ugly brown jacket.
John!
Her husband grabbed the woman’s misshapen head with both hands and pulled. The entire thing came free, tearing from the neck in a staccato series of snapping bones. Without pausing, John put his shoulder into the next zombie, an old man in blue pajamas, and knocked him into the teenage zombie. All three of them went down but John rose almost immediately, moving just as fast as she’d seen him do on the racquetball courts for so many years. He grabbed a carving knife from the butcher block and stabbed each of the monsters in the eye. The damaged orbs collapsed inward and stinking yellow fluids gushed out.
The zombies collapsed. Neither rose.
Dropping the knife, John turned to her. “Are you all right?”
She started to answer, but then the room seemed to swim.
Everything went black.
~
John carried his wife into the living room. He heard the children shouting and pounding at the door, but for now Sheila occupied his thoughts.
He laid her on the couch and tore her blouse away, exposing the damage done by the zombie’s teeth. Blood still oozed from the wound. Staring at it, he found himself wanting to put his mouth to it, to taste the blood, feel the flesh against his teeth, tear her open with––
No!
Backing away, he dug pieces of intestine from his pockets and gulped them down. In a moment, the feeling passed and he was able to touch his wife without thinking of her as food.
Her eyes opened.
“John?”
“It’s me, honey. I’m here.”
“But you’re…”
He nodded. “I don’t remember how it happened. But I’m okay, as long as I…” He stopped, unable to tell her that the only way he could remain human was with a constant supply of human flesh.
“One of them bit me.” Tears welled in her eyes as she said it.
He held her hand. They both knew what it meant; the only question was how long before she turned.
“Will I be like them or you?”
He smiled. “No, I’ll make sure you’re like me. We’ll do what we have to. I won’t lose you.”
She started to reply but her eyes closed and her head fell back onto the pillow. He touched her neck. No pulse.
She’ll be hungry when she wakes up. Have to keep the kids safe from her.
Only one way. Now, before his own hunger came back.
The monsters don’t eat their own kind.
He went to the cellar door. “Bobby? Stacie? It’s me, Dad.”
“Dad?” Their voices, so eager, so innocent.
It’s for the best. After, I’ll bring them food.
Hopefully they’ll understand why I had to do it.
“I’m opening the door. Everything’s going to be fine.”
The Way of Things in Fly-Over Country
AARON POLSON
The search beams crossed in front of the gate when my buddy Dan––broad and strong like a spit of granite––hunched over on all fours, making a little scaffold out of his back for me to climb. I scrambled over his shoulders, flopped over the gate, and dropped to the ground on the other side. The first over, Davin, was waiting for me with his shotgun poking out into the kill zone. Once I dusted off a bit and straightened my glasses, we waited for the lights to swing by again before tossing Dan the rope; I held the outside end steady while he climbed. Davin kept me covered. I was scared, shaking like chimes in the wind, but Davin held steady.
Once Dan dropped to the ground I reeled in the rope, and the three of us hunched in the shadow of the big gate while the lights swung by once more. Davin looked at Dan and me, smiled crookedly, and nodded. The lights rotated away and we sprinted for the shadows at the edge of Old Town. I figured the guards probably saw dumb kids like us half the time, but no one ever fired a shot.
So there we were: seventeen, full of piss and stupidity, creeping through ruined streets on a Friday night with a couple of jars of Uncle Jeb’s homemade booze, our guns, and an ache to celebrate Dan’s eighteenth birthday. One week later, hopping the fence would land Dan in the stockade—a crime believed to endanger the whole village, but this was coming of age, our ritual. Plenty of other dumb bastards snuck out of the compound before they officially became men; Dad even admitted to sneaking out just before his brother’s eighteenth.
I glanced over my shoulder at the wall: randomly fused sections of steel, brick, concrete, and stone. Originally a desperate measure against the walking dead, that wall had stood for something like eighty years. For boys raised in captivity the world outside the wall reeked with mystery, and we devoured grand lies that became our motivation to hop the wall—a man’s right to be free, all that crap. The older men in the compound filled us with stories, baiting us like a lantern to a moth, knowing we’d bite, go over, and look for danger. The stifling closeness behind the wall pushed us, too—personally caught me in the throat. “What’ll it be, boys?” Davin asked once we found the shadows. The moon shone pretty bright that night, drawing the silver out of the world. Davin shimmered like a bit of fresh aluminum.
“Hell, I’m itching to splat a couple tonight.” Dan walked ahead a few steps with long, loping strides, the pinnacle of our small triangle.
“Old man Jantz says we have to check out the church. Says it’s beautiful, sacred ground. Inside the building, with a moon like this, the whole place lights up like a rainbow.” Davin stopped and cocked his head to once side, pointing toward the hill that led to the little building. We all knew about the church, the center of so many stories. Supposedly, that building remained mostly intact after all these years; a vestige of old superstitions lurking in our new ones kept folks from smashing it up.
“Fine, but I want to show you guys something first. Something my brother told me about.” Dan pointed the barrel of his shotgun into a thick patch of inky shadow and strode forward.
Most of the big trees in Old Town were gone, knocked down for safety, but saplings, crooked grass, and snaking weeds groped toward the sky all around. I was surprised at how well I could see with just the moon. With the bright searchlights back at the wall, the rest of the night world look as black as spent oil, but the hunched backs of old houses, broken business, and other buildings rubbed against the blue night and field of stars in plain detail as we walked through Old Town.
I’d heard some stories, mostly from Grandpa, that the bigger cities had drained the plains of their population long before the end. In the meantime, the big corporate farms finished off the aquifers and sucked the land dry. Without water, there wasn’t much reason to live in the flat land. Without too many people out here, there couldn’t be too many of them, the zombies. Hell, I’d only seen maybe a dozen in my life, but they left the taint of decay smeared across everything. You could see it all over Old Town.
As we stumbled down the split asphalt of an ancient street, Dan reached into his pack, rummaged around, and produced a jar of booze. It was nothing but rot-gut moonshine, but it was all we had because most drivers wouldn’t risk a run through the wastelands just to drop off some beer for a bunch of hold-out hicks. That’s the way Grandpa painted it, anyway. The scavengers in the wastelands seemed worse than a whole stockyard of zombies. Dan screwed off the lid, tossed back a swig, and shook his head. “Not bad, boys.” He slowed, passed the jar to Davin.
“No,” Davin said, waving Dan off with the barrel of his gun. “Not until I’m kicked back in the church.”
“Nate?”
“Sure,” I said, cupping the jar in one hand while clutching my shotgun in the other. The gun had been my great-grandfather’s. Grandpa said he used it on birds—quail and pheasant, mostly—as a boy. I’d only fired the thing a few times myself, typically at wooden targets that wouldn’t bite. The guns did make me nervous; we were warned against using them as the report would rouse any undead in the area. I
tossed back a swig from the jar. Damn, that shit tasted awful, but the warm humming feeling that grew out to my fingertips after a few swigs kept me going.
“Did hear about Stacy’s cousin over in New Colby?” Dan asked, reaching for the jar.
“Yeah,” Davin muttered.
“Gawd, I never want to see another burning in my life.” Dan spat on the street. Davin’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t want those superstitious old bastards to set me on fire when I kick off.”
I shook my head and fingered Dad’s old lighter in my pocket, fighting a shiver born of too many burnings. Mom, for one, after Melina was born. Too much blood, not enough medical knowledge, a bad mix of both. Dad tried to explain the need for a burning, the whole ritual, but I wanted none of it. I know you can’t just bury the dead anymore—paranoia, hysteria, and the real likelihood that the undead will sniff out a fresh corpse. When I was five, watching my mother burn to black ash, none of that rationalization amounted to a hill of shit. Grandpa whispered something about Viking warriors in my ear that day, trying to cheer me. “Great big pyres, big as a house,” he said, “it was pride, not fear and shame made ‘em build those pyres.”
Dan clicked on the lantern he’d taped to the barrel of his gun. “Here we are fellas. Used to serve food here. C’mon.” The light reached out, starting to grope the heavy shadow inside a mashed up brick building. I’d never heard anything about that particular spot, and I couldn’t figure what he wanted us to see.
Rows of benches stretched down a tiled hallway; some broken with bits tossed askew to the grid. Across a counter to our right sat the old kitchen, a steel grill and some broken cash machines. A few coins littered the floor, shining on the floor like dead minnows. The whole place rested under a thick dust like frost on a January morning.
