Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel

by Jay Wilburn

  They both reached the face of the door side by side. They looked around and then placed their cut and deeply pitted palms flat against the door. The others slowly approached the sound too.

  The garage door bucked out slightly. Christmas tree sweater backed up two steps. Leaning zombie tilted his head a little further as his hands were pushed into his own chest.

  The door exploded out at the bottom and collapsed in folded sections from the top. One rail twisted as it tore loose from the ceiling and came halfway out the doorway before the garage door broke loose from the rolling wheels in the rail grooves.

  Leaning zombie was pitched backward and slammed the back of his skull against the dusty asphalt. The skin on the back of the skull spilt open and the skull was fractured to expose the dead, black brain, but he was still moving.

  Christmas tree sweater looked up just in time to see a heavy pile of folded metal slam into his face. His head was torn off backward after the brain inside was obliterated. The body and bones were broken down on to themselves under the weight.

  Walkers farther up the street were all reeling around to the clamorous noises of crashing metal. A couple of them were abrupt enough to see the curved door crumple into a small pile on top of the first dozen bodies.

  Arms waved and clawed out from under the edges of the door as the grey and black truck shot forward through the opening. Part of the garage door covered the front of the truck for a moment, but was soon pulled forward and down under the front wheels. The truck shot up in the air briefly as the back wheels ramped over the door. The truck angled back down as it drove off the door onto the street outside. As the back wheels passed over the fallen door, the arms underneath clinched and then fell limp.

  The truck bucked a couple times as it accelerated. It turned sharply one way and then the other as it lost its grip on the thick dirt in the road. It straightened out and sped away more steadily.

  The zombies began plodding after us as we moved away from the doorway. One in a tan trench coat, jeans, and black boots, lifted his feet with great effort following the others. He paused and turned toward the opening. He looked at us retreating away and then back into the open darkness.

  I saw all this as I looked between the fuel canisters. I was afraid they would be broken open and spill, but they didn’t. I tried to see if trench coat or the others went inside, but they vanished in the rising dust and the distance.

  Chef was driving with one hand and struggling with the cheap, plastic windshield with the other. It had popped out of place and had fallen in on him and Short Order. They both made three tries to force it back into place before it finally blocked out the cold wind sweeping through the cab and rustling some of the bags in the back. The grill across the front was dented and twisted into severe contours. It had been that way to some degree before we plowed through the cargo door. The driver’s side top corner of the plastic shield was popped out and whistling louder than normal. Short was clearly bothered by the wind as he pulled his collar up over his ear on that side, but he left the plastic alone until we stopped for the night.

  “That’s why I didn’t want to be up front,” Doc called from next to me.

  We clipped a plump zombie walking alone in the road. He had turned as we approached and angled into our path. Chef was veering to the right as we approached him. The truck got a little too close to the curb and debris along the edge of the road for my comfort. The zombie was jarred off the front driver’s corner of the crash bars.

  I whipped my head around to see what happened to him.

  He stumbled back seven steps and bounced off the side of a fallen billboard on the opposite side of the road. I was surprised to see him keep his feet after being hit and was disgusted to see his intestines spill out of his broken belly under the shirt that read, Pluck My Clover, Baby.

  Oh no, I thought, as I watched him limp after us dragging his guts beside and behind him in the street.

  “If popping back the windshield is our biggest issue, I would call this a roaring success,” Chef called back over his shoulder.

  I pointed back at the zombie we had hit. I tapped Doc and pointed some more. He checked the fuel canisters and finally waved me off as I kept pointing. The “Pluck My Intestines” zombie had fallen back out of sight.

  ***

  We made it a little over a mile up the road before we rolled to a stop by the fences to the animal stocks. The outer, chain link fence was collapsed in two sections on one side of the leaning, locked gate.

  No one said anything.

  Chef turned the wheel sharply and clanged over the fallen fence and then bounded up the grassy field before we reengaged the twin, dirt ruts leading up the hill. The path seemed rougher than the grass to me as we climbed the slope.

  We topped the hill and looked on the barns and houses without stepping out like we had planned.

  The cows were on their sides and still bloated with gas even with the zombies tearing them open and nearly crawling inside.

  Pigs were stripped to the bone. A few hungry corpses were trying to bite through the tough ears and faces. A few left their teeth embedded in them as they pulled them out of their jaws at the roots with the effort.

  Others were chewing up the sheep as they ripped out the wool by the handfuls to get to the meat underneath.

  The doors to the long, chicken house were splintered in and broken apart. Feathers covered the ground over the thick layer of chicken feces. A few zombies walked around aimlessly as they carried the dead chickens away from the other walkers. They pulled pieces to their mouths or put their whole face into the birds. I knew they did the same thing with small humans, but I tried not to think about it.

  It seemed each zombie had its own taste when it came to meat.

  A bell rang somewhere in the yard. We looked around and saw a small goat bounding frantically between grasping hands. It changed direction frequently as it ran. The zombies had no strategy and simply followed it in a long trail of walking bodies. The goat was clearly exhausted, so their lack of strategy was working perfectly as usual. Its bell clanked each time it turned to run another way.

  “Should we bother saving it?” Short Order asked.

  The goat ran right at us with horns down and facing us. I expected him to butt us as punishment for leaving him and the others to this fate. He turned again at the last moment and staggered on his back leg. Several hunks were bitten out of the flesh down to the bone.

  “That would be a no,” Doc said peering up over the dashboard.

  The zombies actually paused instead of following the goat’s latest turn. They stood back up straight with an effort and began charging toward us with arms outstretched. The little goat’s strategy worked well. He would die a painful, fevered death if he avoided being eaten now the same as any other creature bitten. He would not rise back up like a bitten human would. That was probably small consolation for the goat.

  Other zombies rose up and out of their animal feasts when they heard our pursuers moaning. They began tripping over bodies and each other trying to get to us. Clearly, all zombies had a favorite variety of meat and they had finally found it.

  Chef put the truck in reverse and made the engine whine as he propelled us backward through the flat yard along the side of the dead chicken house to put some distance between us and the zombies.

  “Let’s go before we get swarmed,” Short Order said calmly.

  “Oh, God, were there men posted here?” Chef asked. “How the hell did we not think about that before now?”

  I pointed through the windshield at the edge of the crowd coming after our truck like we were a giant, metal goat. One of the zombies had several tears through his overalls and one cheek had been torn away revealing a bloody, skeletal grin. Mr. Josh had been one of ours and had clearly not survived this invasion. If he had dreamed of dying quietly in his sleep without rising back up bitten and infected, he had traded that dream for a hunger for human flesh.

  Doc pointed the other way. One of t
he zombies was wearing grey coveralls. Part of his scalp had been peeled back to bare skull bone. Much of the rest of him had been chewed away. Alan still managed to walk after us and had his rifle slung over his head and shoulder like he was guarding the farm for the rest of eternity.

  There would be another guard too. He potentially could have still been alive, but the evidence seemed stacked against it. All the vehicles were still parked in the lot. If he was locked in a closet, all the zombies would be crowded around it. If he had run, they would have all followed.

  “Should we do something? Put them down?” Short Order asked quietly.

  “No time,” Doc said, “and we’ll need the ammo later.”

  It was time to go.

  Once Chef got the distance he wanted, he wheeled around the side of the mob and back down the trail bounding toward the locked gate again.

  “Do you think it would have made a difference, if we had come a couple days sooner?” Chef asked.

  Short Order said, “They would have come back to the Complex themselves if they could have. This must have happened soon after we were attacked.”

  I wasn’t so sure. There seemed to be a lot of animal meat left.

  “Yeah, they were gone by the time we came out,” Doc agreed. “There was nothing we could do.”

  “What happened here?” Chef asked. “Why weren’t the fences cleared before they collapsed?”

  “The Riding Dead may have hit here too,” Short Order suggested.

  There weren’t tire tracks besides ours. The animals and vehicles hadn’t been taken. The fuel tanks were still closed.

  “I guess so,” Chef said.

  We rounded the gatepost and clanged over the fallen fence again. The tires screeched as we connected with the road and headed along.

  No one spoke for several miles.

  ***

  We reached a fork in the road and Chef coasted to a stop.

  “Forks in the road should really have four prongs,” Doc said. “This is really a meat skewer in the road.”

  “That’s called a fork too, Doc,” Short Order said as he flipped through the worn pages of an atlas.

  He ran his finger along a line of road through meaningless colors that marked counties and useless numbers that denoted the roads. He flipped two more pages and picked up the line again.

  Finally, he said, “There is nothing here that would indicate one way being better odds than another. We just need to decide whether we want to head mostly north or mostly south.”

  “Preferences?” Chef called back to us.

  The truck engine idled. Fumes seeped through the gaps in the plastic windows.

  Doc said, “I prefer we go before the zombies find us sitting here.”

  “We’ll only go about ten or twenty miles before we need to think about setting up camp and getting food ready before dark catches up with us,” Chef said.

  “We don’t know how far we’ll get until we see what’s in the way,” Doc said.

  Short said, “I probably know the northern routes better. I used to live up that way before the dead rose.”

  “I thought you came in from the west,” Chef said.

  “I did,” Short said looking back that way as if he could see it across the miles of land behind the trees, “but I had migrated that way and came back when things got … I came back that way later.”

  “I lived up that way too,” Chef said.

  “That was a long time ago,” Short said. “I’m not sure how useful my memory and the surviving landmarks are going to be.”

  “It sounds like north is the answer,” Doc said, “Unless you have some ex-wives or creditors that might still be looking for you.”

  The engine changed tone as it continued to idle.

  Doc added, “If you see New Portown on that map, I’d avoid that at least until the Riding Dead move out.”

  “I looked,” Short Order said. “I can’t find anything called Portown on any map we had in the Complex or this atlas in this state or any other state.”

  Chef and Short both stared down the right fork like they were expecting something to jump out at them.

  Doc asked, “Would you rather go south?”

  One of the zombies slammed into the driver’s side of the truck. He growled from behind the plastic and clawed at the metal grating. He had pine needles in his hair that was slightly less grey than his liver spotted skin and empty eye socket. The one remaining eye turned rapidly from side to side sizing us up as he tried to bite through the metal door. I heard his teeth and felt the vibration as they ran across the surface. It made my skin crawl.

  More were stepping through the vines and between the trees toward the road.

  Chef turned the wheel to the right and punched the gas taking us up the meat fork prong that would lead us mostly north into the land of Short Order’s bad memory.

  The grey, one-eyed zombie rolled off the side, but hooked his fingers in my window grate. He held on too long. I knew he was going to break off fingers into the cab right next to me. Finally, his hand let go without leaving any digits behind. He didn’t keep his feet as he bounced and skidded on the mostly north road behind us well ahead of the other zombie just emerging from the woods at the spot where our decision got made for us.

  As he rose up, I saw a road rash on his dead belly that was the worst scarring I had ever seen up until the point we got to the farmhouse.

  ***

  Most of the wrecks we passed had turned into planters with grass growing up along the sides and various trees and bushes sprouting out of empty windows from accumulated dirt and leaves piled inside. I wondered if zombies were still buried inside pinned down in the roots. I wondered if plants would even grow with zombies as their poisonous fertilizer.

  We made it about fifteen miles over the road that was sick with potholes, fissures, and a couple, near total washouts before we started looking for a place to stop. We had gone three more miles including two detours into the trees around two debris piles before we found something promising.

  We pulled several yards off the road over a neglected trail. We parked in the cover behind a series of cars. There were pieces of nylon peeking through the dirt where tents had been washed flat over the years and nearly buried. Several cars were parked in a sporadic circle. They were mostly rusted through hulks, but they hadn’t taken seed like the other abandoned vehicles we had passed under the trees. There were stones still fashioned into a fire pit in the middle. The ancient, forgotten camp was on high ground that gave several yards worth of sightline in every direction.

  “Don’t unpack everything,” Chef said as he turned off the engine. “We’ll sleep inside the truck tonight. Just take out the implements we really need. It looks like we’re doing a very late lunch or an early dinner.”

  “Is there a challenge tonight, Chef?” Doc asked as he stepped out of the truck.

  Chef laughed. “Yes, finish dinner and put out the fire before it gets dark and we get spotted.”

  I went with Doc to the back of the truck to unload the stakes and the flat, camping grill wrapped in a blanket.

  “Hold up a moment, Doc,” Short Order said. “I have a challenge, if you guys are up for it.”

  Doc tapped me on the shoulder to stop me and leaned against the open door waiting. Chef turned from looking over the cars with binoculars back toward Short Order. He set the rifle he was holding down on the hood of the truck as he spoke.

  Chef said, “I don’t know, Shaw. I really just want to get us fed and back inside as quickly as possible.”

  Doc said, “Come on now, Head Chef David Sharp, that doesn’t sound like your old self at all. You’ve been eating from cans for too long. Let’s hear him out and then we can dash his dreams.”

  Chef said, “Okay, Short, challenge us.”

  Short Order explained, “I did a lot of cooking in the open on the way across the state. I wasn’t carrying cooking or camping gear obviously. I found ways to cook on metal hub caps and even in bird feed
ers a couple times.”

  “I’m regretting talking Chef into listening, Short,” Doc said.

  Short kept talking. “The Mongols used to cook in their shields while they were on the march. They would use whatever meat they killed and cook it up right there. That led to the curved bowls in Mongolian buffet style we use today … well, used before the zombies started eating us. Anyway, I found that the metal off an old car door or hood would heat up nicely and you could cook anything in there mixing up the flavors. If you guys are up for it, I bet we could find something suitable in these old cars. I also bet I can find some frogs like I used to cook on the road.”

  “The Kermit the Hun challenge?” Doc looked at Chef.

  Chef took a deep breath. “I’m game. I’ve had frog a few times since the dead rose and I know I can cook it better than you two, so let’s play.”

  “The jackass said yes,” Doc slapped the truck before he closed the door.

  Chef said, “One of us should top off the tank while the other two find us a proper cooking shield.”

  I helped Chef fill the tank using a siphon hose through the window grating. It was a tricky process when we couldn’t afford to spill any. We managed somehow.

  Doc took his pole with him and Short Order carried one of the machetes. Doc carried a bag of tools in the other hand.

  Short set the machete down and began checking through his pockets while we were refueling. He pulled out a leather pouch and slid out a hand rolled cigarette. He took out a match from the tin case and struck it on top of the car.

  “Where did you find smokes?” Doc asked.

  “They were on the shelf in the garage with the matches. I found them when we first started packing,” Short Order explained as he took a long drag and picked up the machete again.

  “Are they Mary Jane specials?” Doc asked.

  “No,” Short said, “Just tobacco. Someone in the garage knew someone that was growing and curing it outside somewhere, I guess.”