Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  “Follow them,” Weaver commanded.

  He was pointing down the space the zombies had made when they bunched up in the path of the others. There were more turning toward Amy and Weaver every instant that went by. Amy was going to say something, but Weaver was already gone. She was alone in a world of the hungry dead. There was nothing to do but run.

  Patrick lost his mind. He didn’t know what was happening until they turned the corner onto Main Street. The little Mexican woman couldn’t run for anything, and Patrick kept crashing into her back. Ahead of her was the girl with the blue hair, which was completely the wrong shade for her complexion.

  This was the worst nightmare ever. Patrick thought a lot of things were the worst nightmare ever, but this was the real deal. This one was for the record books. The Mexican woman had a snouty pistol in her hands and she was firing it with real proficiency, picking her shots even as she ran. She can’t hit dick, the cool, calculating voice in Patrick’s head observed. But she knew what she was doing. Patrick was about to be devoured by monsters, and somewhere in his mind he could still spare the resources to be jealous of someone else.

  It was the adrenaline. Every second was a long, complex thing to be examined and considered, even as events unfolded. But his mind was not trained to this heightened state of awareness. It was much better off ad-libbing snarky comments in front of the cameras; give him a press conference and he could outquip anybody. This isn’t a press conference, the voice remarked, and Patrick realized that on top of everything else he was babbling inside his head again. Weaver wouldn’t do that. Weaver was up in front, leading them to safety.

  Then Weaver was going past Patrick in the wrong direction.

  “Run!” Weaver shouted, and hammered his way through the zombies that were closing in behind them. Patrick saw that Maria was almost out of sight ahead, the zombies closing in like the spectators closing in around the winning cyclist of the Tour De France.

  He did what Weaver said, and ran.

  Danny thought they could possibly jump from roof to roof of the vehicles still parked all over Main Street and Route 144. From up on the Suburban she could see the cars like low islands in the undead river. If they could jump far enough and not slide off upon landing, and if the hands didn’t close around their limbs before they were able to jump to the next one. Weaver reloaded while Danny fired into the crowd, and they both stomped the fingers that snagged at their feet.

  “Fuck,” Weaver mumbled. He was standing there looking at one of the zombies. Danny turned and sighted down the barrel of the shotgun on its head. Charred flesh, boiled eyeball. It was Mitchell Woodie, the cook from the Wooden Spoon. It didn’t look like he felt any pain—only hunger, pushing through the crowd around the Suburban, unaware of the appalling damage to his flesh. Danny knew how much that should hurt. Despite all the horrors Weaver had seen in the last ten minutes, he appeared mesmerized. The adrenaline was wearing off, Danny realized. They were in a temporary place of refuge, and he was crashing.

  But Danny had an idea.

  It was the blackened remains of Mitchell Woodie that clued her in. She should have thought of it before. But it wasn’t too late. She adjusted her aim.

  “Gas tank,” Danny called out, and squeezed the trigger.

  The explosion made the pavement vibrate under Michelle’s feet. She was running fleet as a deer through the zombies, blue hair flying. They couldn’t touch her. She didn’t know or care who was around her or behind her or anything except she knew she had to run, as fast and as far as she could. She knew how to run. She had been on the track team at school for an entire season before she realized how stupid competitive sports were and how it was just another way for the Adults in Charge to keep the more interesting kids occupied and tired so they couldn’t cause trouble.

  She didn’t stop running when the explosion came, but she felt the heat on her back and the bounce in the asphalt, and a moment later there was a strange slapping sound among the zombies that were lurching up the street toward her. Not so many zombies here—she could handle it. Until a severed arm and part of a head came down and hit her and she fell and scoured the skin off both her knees. She got up again and it stung like fire, and now she was facing the wrong way and she could see the slapping sound was chunks of dead bodies raining down from the sky.

  A big, greasy torus of black smoke rose into the fading sky, and below it huge orange flames jumped up from the zombie crowd.

  The woman named Maria was coming up right behind her, huffing and puffing, her face blotchy. Michelle had lost her lead in the race. Maria took her by the arm and said, “Let’s go.” The gay man with the bleached hair was right behind Maria now. That was Patrick Michaels, the famous guy with a TV show about how to live in attractive and inviting spaces, just like the rich and famous, without spending a fortune.

  The zombies were starting to turn in their direction, though Michelle had only fallen for a couple of seconds. Time to run again, even if her knees really, really hurt. There was another explosion, louder than the first, and something metal clanged off the building to their left. Michelle put her hands over her head. More chunks of meat were thudding down on them.

  “There it is!” Maria shouted, and sure enough, the motor home was ahead of them, only a few zombies in the way. Michelle didn’t see anybody else there. She didn’t see her brother. Maybe they were all inside. She saw people behind the big windshield, waving and pointing. Troy, the nice fireman, came down out of the driver’s door with an axe in his hands and ran toward them and Michelle felt her legs turn to rubber. She fell down again and a very thin, tall zombie woman with her hair in a knot on top of her head was reaching to bite her. Her crooked smoker’s teeth were tanned pegs in a bloodless face.

  Maria tried to shoot the woman, but her gun was empty. Then the woman crashed to the ground beside Michelle, the fireman’s axe sticking out of her back. She was still reaching for Michelle with the arm that wasn’t immobilized by severed muscles. Troy scooped Michelle up and carried her away from the zombie, and Patrick and Maria ran past them. Patrick had the keys. He had to make it no matter what, or they were all dead.

  He did make it. Eager hands pulled them both into the RV, and Michelle felt herself lifted up, too. Her bloody knees smeared the upholstery as people set her down inside in the back, where she saw her kid brother coming through the people to throw his arms around her. Next, Troy was up front in the driver’s seat, slamming the door on the gray, clutching fingers that wanted so badly to grasp the warm flesh packed inside the vehicle, to pull it down to snapping jaws.

  Patrick clambered through the crowd to the passenger’s seat beside Troy. Michelle saw that Patrick’s hands shook with such violence he couldn’t get the keys out of his pocket.

  “Pardon me,” Troy said, and dug the keys out himself. He selected the ignition key, and a moment later the enormous diesel engine rumbled to life.

  The first blast knocked Weaver off the roof of the Suburban.

  Danny had not expected such an explosion. She’d seen plenty of vehicles burn, and she knew they seldom blew up. And it wasn’t the car she shot that went up—it was the one right next to it. So the whole effect of the thing was ten times what she had intended. She only wanted to set fire to the zombies. They might respond to fire, that most primal fear of human beings. But even if they didn’t fear it, they would burn. Danny had a hunch that zombies on fire wouldn’t be quite as single-minded. It’s hard to go after prey with eyeballs that are melting out of your skull.

  The roar of the blast continued, and Weaver flew through the air. Danny didn’t see where he landed; she was flung off her feet and smashed down on her back across the roof rack. It hurt as if her spine was broken, which meant it wasn’t.

  A zombie immediately hooked its fingers into her ear, and she tore painfully out of its grasp. She got on her knees, craning to look for Weaver, but he’d already disappeared beneath the undead, wherever he was. Danny’s ears were ringing, half-deafened. She coul
d hear a bell-like note sustained above the faint sound of roaring flames and the zombie moan that rippled through the swarm. If Weaver was down, she couldn’t even find him. He might have been knocked out by the explosion, or killed by the fall, or he might be right as rain, crawling through a forest of cold legs.

  A zombie was pulling her down by the belt. She aimed over its head and fired another shot at the nearest car, a low maroon sedan.

  This one didn’t explode. The shot punched a big hole through the rear quarter panel, low by the wheel well, where the gas tank would most likely be. She could smell it now, the gasoline and the burning rubber and that rich, sweet stink of roasting human flesh. Danny fired again, and the gasoline spilling from the maroon sedan caught fire with a whump she could barely hear, although she felt the heat on her blistered face. The zombies shuffling through the gasoline went up like torches. Danny chopped with the shotgun at the hands that were pulling her down. She struggled to her feet. The Suburban was standing in a sea of burning, crackling bodies, their slow limbs flailing, the flames spreading from one to the next. The smoke stank obscenely and made Danny’s eyes stream.

  If Weaver was lying senseless on the ground, he was going to burn. It was the worst way to go, but there was nothing else Danny could do. She wasn’t going to throw her life away without taking a bunch of these things with her, and if Weaver was already dying, she didn’t want him coming back like Larry’s wife. Danny had to move from her position; the paint on the Suburban was rising in fat blisters from the heat of the fires.

  She jumped down on the hood and kept her momentum as she leaped for the car in front, a hatchback. It was a messy landing because of the blazing arms that flailed at her in midair, and she hit the hatchback badly and broke the rear window, then fell sprawling on the ground. Immediately the things were coming after her, even the burning ones. Gobbets of blazing fat and clothing were dropping all around her, and through the legs she could see the hungry flames turning the asphalt into boiling syrup. Danny crawled on her belly underneath the hatchback and kept on going, ignoring the scrape of bolts and fittings that projected beneath the vehicle. Hands reached for her, and some of the things were even down on their knees, looking for her, their eyes glittering in the firelight.

  A ribbon of flaming gasoline meandered toward her from under the sedan. She was going to burn, too, unless she moved quickly. There had to be some avenue of escape in all this chaos. She hoped to God that Weaver had found it.

  She should have given Weaver more warning before she shot the tank on that car. She didn’t expect there to be an explosion. No excuse, but she just didn’t know. Now it was time to move. One of the hatchback’s tires was burning. The panic was hitting Danny like a million tiny knives all at once.

  I’m going to burn.

  A dozen cold hands had gotten hold of Danny’s legs and they were pulling her backward. In a matter of moments she would be exposed again, and the biting would begin and her legs would be eaten first so she had plenty of time to experience some serious agony before she was ripped apart or caught fire.

  From her position a couple of inches above the ground, she could see the undersides of several vehicles. Through gaps in the maddened zombies, she could see the axles, the suspensions, the gas tanks. It was worth one more try, and if she was lucky the explosion would blow her head off.

  If not, she had a couple more shells in the gun. She would do it to herself.

  Danny could not remember what happened next, just as she could not remember what happened when she got knocked over the side of Route 144 with the Explorer. She took aim, and suddenly the claws grabbing her legs dragged her back a foot or more, and she fired the shotgun. Her hearing cut out on detonation, that much she knew.

  Then there was a jump in the chronology.

  Suddenly she was standing in the middle of what looked like a butcher’s shop hit by a missile. One of her eyes was closed and she was still holding the shotgun, but the stock had broken off, leaving a sharp stump like a broken bone. Several cars were overturned within a dozen yards, and the hatchback under which she had been lying was now standing on its side behind her, resting up against the burning sedan. Huge clouds of black smoke filled the sky and the red flames were brighter than the fading daylight: The sun might not have been all the way down in the flatlands, but evening comes early in the mountains.

  It was absolutely silent: no ringing in the ears, no screams, no crackle of flames. Fire was everywhere, and the grotesque shapes of bodies with no limbs and limbs with no bodies. Strewn in the wreckage were heads, black and red, with the ears and hair burnt off them so they looked like huge roasted thumbs. Danny tried to walk, but her feet wouldn’t move, and she looked down and discovered she was ankle deep in human intestines. She looked at her own body and didn’t see any big holes. The intestines belonged to somebody else.

  Outside the ring of twisted metal and fire there were still hundreds of zombies, although the first few rows of them were scorched and torn up to such a degree that they were impeding the forward motion of the ones behind. They couldn’t see or hear or smell. Some of them couldn’t bite, either, because their faces were torn off. Danny wondered briefly what she had done to cause all this destruction. It worked pretty good, the voice observed. But Danny seemed to recall she was supposed to be dead. Maybe she was. Maybe she was one of the zombies now.

  Then she saw Weaver.

  He was dragging his left leg, and it looked like the knee might be broken. The foot faced almost backward. He was moving away through the zombies. They ignored him. He was pretty beat-up looking and Danny thought maybe she, too, was in such bad shape they’d mistake her for one of their kind.

  Weaver, she tried to say, but no words came out. She didn’t know if it was because she couldn’t hear or because she couldn’t talk. But he was headed toward the gymnasium, so she followed after him, marveling on some level that her legs continued to work at all. The zombies couldn’t catch her. She was a superstar, and so was he, and they were going to make it—all the way back down Main Street, together, after which she could explain to Weaver why she’d risked setting him alight.

  Danny reached him in front of the Quik-Mart and tried to call his name again but could only croak. Still, Weaver turned around. And Danny saw the milky eyes and the waxen skin and the windshield wiper arm protruding from his chest with a waterfall of blood spilled down below it and she knew that Weaver was dead before he hit the ground after that first, surprise explosion. So whatever brought people back, it was accelerating. There wasn’t any down time, any more. She fired the shotgun almost casually—after all, she knew him a little, no need for ceremony—and Weaver’s head blew apart.

  Danny made it halfway down Main before the zombies came for her. But when they did, they were as enthusiastic as ever, while Danny had lost her zest for everything: life, hope, love, even the sacred absolution of death. Still, force of habit—she fought back.

  A couple of zombies reeled back with smashed faces, one she definitely killed, because she hit it clean on the temple and the broken butt of the shotgun went in like a cake knife, and a couple she shot the legs out from under. But the last shell, the one she knew was there for sure, was for her. She didn’t figure it would hurt, and if it did, it would only be for a moment, and even then, would she know it? Pain traveled through the nervous system at three hundred feet per second. All those pea-sized nuggets of metal (number four buckshot, twenty-seven balls) would pass through her brain at thirteen hundred feet per second. It wouldn’t hurt, but it would permanently change her hat size. Sucks to be me, Danny thought. She was concussed now, that was for fucking sure.

  The only thing intruding on her perfect well of self-pity was Amy. Her friend’s voice was coming in high and fast, cutting through the deafness, shrill as always when she was worked up. Incoming! But Danny could definitely hear Amy calling from somewhere. From right about here, Danny realized.

  Amy was beside her.

  “Jesus, Danny, you lo
ok awful.”

  They were surrounded.

  “Why are you here?” Danny asked, although she couldn’t hear if it came out of her mouth. For that matter, she couldn’t hear Amy. But she could read the shape of her mouth.

  “I told them to go,” Amy said. “The motor home is leaving.”

  “Why?” Danny croaked. She wanted to understand how, despite all this effort, she had failed to get Amy, of all people, out of this nightmare.

  “You,” Amy replied.

  Danny fired that last precious shot and blew a zombie down. It was coming at Amy. Instinct took over. Danny cursed. Last shot wasted. Now what was she going to do, stab herself to death? Then she saw the highway patrolman, Officer Park, the corpse shambling along toward them, arms half-outstretched as if it didn’t quite believe it had found prey. Danny strode forward as well as she could with a pair of half-working legs and pulled the automatic out of the highway patrolman’s holster. He didn’t mind. He wasn’t interested in guns anymore. He was all about the teeth.

  Danny pulled the patrolman’s Smokey hat down over his eyes and fired the automatic through his head. The hat caught fire at the muzzle point and the trooper fell down, a curlicue of smoke following him to the ground. Sound was returning. A horn was honking somewhere. Amy had her fingers in her ears and her eyes shut.

  “What are you doing?” Danny said.

  “What?” said Amy.

  Danny grabbed Amy’s arm and pulled her finger out of her ear.

  “I said…” Danny couldn’t remember what she had said. The world was falling upward, very slowly. She could stay on her feet, but she was eventually going to fall into the sky. Amy took Danny’s gun.

  “You take the gun,” Danny said. That way she was still in charge. Danny pointed at a zombie. “Shoot that one quick.”

  Amy fumbled around with the weapon. Danny swiped the gun away from Amy, who was obviously not going to manage such a simple task, and shot the zombie. Its teeth shattered on the pavement an inch from Danny’s boot. Lord, were they ever about to get bitten to death, eaten alive. All kinds of zombies coming in. There was a high, gassy lightness to Danny’s state of mind, a shakerful of hysteria and blows to the head.