Sawkill [Omnibus]

by Matt Fitzgerald

  I spun and dropped the bag off my shoulder. It hit the floor and I swung Cora off my hip and down onto the bag. The zombie was six feet away. I pulled my Glock from my belt and fired from the hip. The bullet took the thing on the right shoulder and spun it around. That was all the time I needed to take a breath and aim with two hands like my daddy taught me. The second shot was dead between its eyes. At four feet there was no way I could have missed.

  Cora was screaming and all I wanted was to be back on the road. I scooped up the baby and the bag and went out the front door towards the open door of the Bronco. The keys were still in the ignition. I buckled Cora into the front seat and took off north on Main Street and didn’t stop until almost dawn the next morning.

  There were lots of stops and lots of stolen cars and lots of dead people after Shoyo. We stayed underground for ten days just outside of Little Rock as the bombs dropped. We were all huddled in this farm’s tornado cellar, too afraid of what the world might look like up above. When the water started running out we got brave and went up. Little Rock looked like a giant bonfire on the horizon, but we could breathe, so we got moving. We found the tan Explorer in Shawnee, Oklahoma and managed to hold on to it. We went wide around Oklahoma City to the south. Judging from the burnt horizon there was no reason to go near it. Sorry brother.

  There wasn’t much in the way of people between the burnt city and Amarillo, Texas. I guess Amarillo wasn’t big enough to blow up, or they ran out of bombs or something. They should have blown it up. There were plenty of those dead things walking around. We stayed on the outskirts of town and found a two story motel. The office was unlocked and there weren’t many of those things around. I took the keys for rooms 201, 202 and 203 of the peg board behind the counter. I got Cora into room 202 and put the bag of toys I had collected on the floor for her to play with. I closed and locked the door behind me and went into the other rooms one by one. I took the mattresses, the chairs, the sofas and the night stands and used them to block the staircase leading to the second floor. I kept checking on Cora as I did the moving. She was fine to play with her Sesame Street pop up toy. You know, the one that you turn a dial and flip a switch. When I was done and satisfied with the barrier, I closed and locked our door and moved the sofa in front of it. The windows were barred, so I didn’t have to worry about that. I gave Cora a bath and took a shower myself after she fell asleep. I set the alarm for four AM. We had to get some diapers and water and supplies before we started the day’s long hot drive.

  This morning I got the baby dressed, packed our stuff and drove to the Wal-Mart we had driven past on our way in. I did what I had done a dozen goddamn times. I parked the truck in the first spot closest to the door. I gave Cora her teddy and gave her a kiss on the forehead. I told her I’d be back in five minutes.

  She just smiled and started chewing on her teddy bear’s nose. I got out of the truck and locked it with the remote.

  The first time I went shopping I brought Cora in with me, but there were zombies in the store. I didn’t know they were there until we were half way to the pharmacy. They almost got behind us, but I ran wide to the right and got out before they could trap us. They were the slow ones. If there was a fast one we would have been fucked. After that I thought it would be better to lock her safe in the car and make it fast in the store. I could be in and out with what I needed and we would be on our way.

  I had a sledge hammer I picked up somewhere along the way, Little Rock maybe. I would use it to smash the window or glass door to get in. I’d leave the hammer on the walk outside the store and use my Glock in the store. I’d been lucky in the last few. No zombies to kill before I got the diapers and wipes.

  I did this same thing here at Wal-Mart. There were a few zombies in the street and one I could see at the far end of the lot, but he was looking out towards the field. It didn’t even here the truck pull in. I kissed Cora and smashed the store’s front window. The alarm’s whale filled my ears and I cursed under my breath. I slipped through the hole I made and pulled the gun. I stood still in the gloom watching for movement. I saw none and started running for the baby aisle. I knew the alarm would attract more of those things and I had to hurry. It was still ten of five when I broke in. The sun was just starting to rise on the eastern sky.

  I turned down aisle five in a jog starting to worry about the alarm. Diapers, wipes and water. Five minutes. I never saw the puddle on the floor. My feet went out from under me like the tall goofy looking burglar from Home Alone. The back of my head bounced of the cement floor and I said one word before I faded to black.

  “Cora.”

  As soon as I woke up I knew it was too bright in the store. I knew I had fallen and I knew I had passed out. I sprung to my feet with the insanely primal urge to get to my child. My knees didn’t share that particular urge and I stumbled after two steps. I was in aisle five of a Wal-Mart in Armarillo, Texas on my hands and knees while my daughter has been locked in the car for how long? I caught my breath and looked at my watch. Panic and adrenaline exploded through my body when I saw it was nine AM. I leaped to my feet and started running. My knees did not betray me this time. I made it to the front of the store and came to a slow stop looking out the front window into the parking lot. I felt dizzy and thought I was going to pass out again. Instead I wretched and puked all over the broken glass from the window I had broken.

  Outside there were no less than two hundred shambling undead creatures in the lot, most of them between me and my Cora. The truck was surrounded. It was that fucking alarm that drew them here. It was still going off, but I just seemed to be noticing it now. I looked out past the truck and saw there were more of them coming from the street and some coming across the field off to the right.

  I had to fight the impulse to sprint out into the hoard and fight my way through. I had to be smart. The truck looked intact, but the sun had been up for hours and my baby girl was in the truck with the windows all up. I saw that episode of CSI. I realized I was crying and thinking about irrational things. I had to get myself under control. I had to be smart. Getting myself killed while trying to get to her would just get her killed too, if she wasn’t already dead.

  “Fuck.” I mumbled. I tried to put my head close to the broken window to see if I could hear her crying, but the sound of the feet scraping on pavement and the low moans these things were emitting and that fucking alarm it impossible to hear.

  I am in the store and my baby is in the truck. Ninety feet away and I can’t reach her. What kind of father am I to leave her alone like that? How fucking stupid could I have been. If she is dead in that car, cooked to death I will lose my sanity. I will feed myself to these undead motherfuckers and pray they eat me for eternity. I have to stop thinking about that. I have to figure out how I am going to get to her. I jam my hand it my pocked and pull out the truck’s keys. I look at the fob to see if there is a remote starter. The air must be on, and if there is a remote it will buy me some time. But there is no start button. Just lock, unlock and the trunk releases.

  I need to distract them. I need to draw them away from the truck and then I can get my Cora. Should I draw them in here? How? Will yelling and waving my arms do it? How long will it take them all to follow? Can I draw enough of them away before I have to get away myself? What the fuck am I going to do?

  A sudden calm comes over me. I have this moment where I see myself from above, like a tracking camera in the movies. I feel like I’m watching myself on television, although I’m in control of my actions. I run to the sporting goods department and scoop up one of the forty pound dumbbells and bring it back to the front of the store. I hurl it through the plate glass window at eye level creating a second hole. I pull my gun from my belt and aim it at the passenger side window. I aim as close to the front of the vehicle as I dare. I take a deep breath and squeeze the trigger. I see the bullet twang off the truck’s fender and the slide locks open.

  “No, no.” I say. My extra ammo is in the truck on the passenger side seat
.

  A few of the zombies turn and look at me, drawn by my shot. I duck out of the window and run back to the sporting goods department. I don’t see any hand guns or hand gun ammo and all the rifles and shotguns are chained together in their display stands. I leave sporting goods for the tool department and come back with a bolt cutter. It does the job on the chain.

  “Jesus Christ!” I scream as I realize all the triggers have guards on them. I look around behind the counter and assume the keys to the trigger guards are in the big safe beside the register. I try to manipulate the bolt cutter on the trigger guard, but I get no purchase. I sprint back to the tool department again and come back with a big twenty two ounce roofing hammer and a hacksaw. Neither work. I pick up the rifle and smash the living shit out of the display cases and throw the gun into the rack of orange hunting caps. The rack topples and the gun clacks to the floor. I go back to the display and make sure every gun has a trigger guard. They all do, why wouldn’t they?

  I hear a crunch and a crash from the front of the store. Those things have started coming in. I can hear them trundling and dragging their fucking feet. If they are up front I’m going to have to find a new firing spot if I ever find a goddamn gun. Maybe I can throw a baseball. But that’s fucking stupid. I would have to be Nolan Ryan to get a baseball through a truck window at ninety feet. Then another one of those calms comes over me, like I’m being directed. I go to the end of the smashed display and pick up the hunting bow. I had used one of these a lifetime ago when I spent two weeks at the Cape Cod Sea Camps in Brewster, Massachusetts as a teenager. This one looked a bit more fancy, but I was able to figure it out. There were a hundred loose arrows in a stand beside the display. I looked around the store and picked out a purple Barney the Dinosaur bicycle helmet and pulled back the bowstring. I loosed the arrow and it missed Barney five feet to the left. I finally hit the purple fucker on the eighth shot. I looked at my watch. It was nine fifty. I still had to find a place to shoot from and I still had to find a way to get those things away from my possibly dead daughter.

  One of them came around the corner out of the bicycle isle. It groaned when it saw me. Half its neck was gone along with most of its right shoulder. It has no shirt on and its entire chest and stomach was covered in bites, scratches, and blood. I notched another arrow, pulled and released. It caught the thing in its left shoulder and spun it around. The second shot hit it in the lower back, but the third took it in the head, just below its right ear. The thing twitched and fell and did not get back up. I heard another one somewhere close in the store. I knew I didn’t have the time to take them out with my terrible aim. I scooped a backpack from the end cap and stuffed it full with arrows. I took it and the bow with me into the stock room in the back. I found what I was looking for in the far right corner of the big room. I got half way up the ladder before I saw the goddamn padlock. Back down the ladder and back into the store to get the bold cutters. There were four zombies within ten feet of me, but the smashed display cases were between us. I grabbed the cutters and ran back to the ladder. I snipped the lock after a lengthy process of figuring out how to balance on the ladder while getting enough pressure on the cutters to get through the lock. Another trip down the ladder to get the bow and the bag and then I was back up and on the roof. I was startled at how hot it was already. I went to the edge of the roof and had a clear shot of the truck. Some of the creatures were filing into the building through my smashed window, but there were still hundreds coming from all around drawn be the ever present sound of the whaling alarm. I would have to do something about that next.

  I notched an arrow and took aim at the front window. I missed and the arrow thwacked into the chest of a zombie standing ten feet in front of my truck. On the fifth arrow I hit the front fender and on the eleventh I got the passenger window. It didn’t shatter. The arrow just made a hole and disappeared into the truck. But that was alright. I was letting air in. Very little I know, but air none the less. Twenty three arrows later there were five such holes and cracks running between most of them. When I missed, I missed towards the front of the car. I was very careful to stay away from that back window where my daughter might be dead or dying, strapped into her car seat.

  “Cora.” I yelled as loud as I could. “Cora, baby its Daddy. I’m going to come get you real soon. Please be brave for me.”

  I strained to listen for scream or a cry, but it was impossible to hear anything. I walked all the way right to end of the building’s roof to see if I could get the angle to in through the windshield, but I was too high and she was too far back. I looked at my watch again. It was five past ten. She had been alone in the truck for five hours. Those things were still gathering. I needed to get the alarm off.

  I went back down the ladder into the stock room. I didn’t see any zombies back there yet, but I knew the store itself had to be full of them by now. I found a pair of work gloves on the fork lift and a hammer on a tool bench next to the broken fork lifts and hand dollies. I peeked through the little square window and saw I had a relatively clear route towards the tool department. I sprinted through the door and ran back to the tool department for the last time. There was a zombie in the aisle I needed. I was twenty feet from the item I wanted and he was five. I broke in a run and he started to shamble. The humor of the situation wasn’t lost on me. I was paying a half-assed game of chicken with a zombie in the tool department of a Wal-Mart in butt fuck Texas. Anyway, I reached the axe first and swung it up at the creature as soon as my hand was around its handle. I caught the thing hard in the neck. I didn’t so much decapitate the thing; rather I turned it into a kind of undead Pez dispenser. I let the ax go and it stayed planted in the thing’s throat until the it fell down and the axe came free. I picked up two more axes, one in each hand, and went back towards the stock room. I found the six big electrical boxes and threw the big red switches on each one. None of them shut off the alarm. I smashed the first axe through the thick cable that came out the bottom of each of them. The alarm persisted. I looked around some more and found a keypad on the inside of the exit door nearest the employee parking lot. I followed the encased wiring up the wall, then back down the wall towards a room with a red door. I used the ax to ram the locked door in and found myself in the security room.

  I smashed every piece of equipment, unplugged everything that had a cord, and finally found the gray circuit box hidden behind a server tower. I pulled that big red lever and there was silence. Beautiful silence.

  I picked up the other axe and headed back through the stock room and into the sporting goods department. I picked up another of the backpacks from the end cap and made my way towards the seasonal section. There were dozens of zombies in the store now, but I could avoid them by zigging and zagging down the aisles. I found the things I was looking for and made my way back up to the roof. I managed to avoid all the creatures.

  I set up all the way down on far right of the roof. There was an alley big enough to fit a delivery truck between the Wal-Mart and the BBQ place next door. I emptied by bag on the tar roof. I was a good three hundred feet away from the front door and my truck with my baby in it. I wish I could have gone further, but the alley made it impossible to make it to the next building. I surveyed what I had. I had the bow, a grill lighter, forty one arrows, and four red and white checkered picnic table cloths. They were made from cheap material, some kind of cloth underneath with a slick plastic like top coat. I also had thirteen fifty-four ounce cans of lighter fluid. I tore the table cloths into two foot strips and tied them to the ends of twenty arrows. The first arrow was a test to see what kind of range I had. I shot it in a medium arc towards a black Ford Taurus five rows away. To my absolute shock I hit the thing smack in the middle of its goddamn roof. The car’s alarm went off and the sound filled the world. I smiled. Not many, but some of the zombies took notice and went towards the sound. I watched and waited and was discouraged at how few took the bait. I would have to make a much bigger ruckus if this was going to work, bu
t that was alright. I planned for it.

  My next arrow shattered the plate glass window of the BBQ joint next door. It had looked out over the alley and I had a good sight line on two leather booths and two wooden tables. I would, however, save those shots for later. They were easy targets because they were so close, but that also made them bad choices and a last resort. I notched an arrow and took aim at the big Chevy Silverado a row closer than the Taurus. It took me three arrows to hit it and I wasn’t even rewarded with a second alarm. I picked up one of the arrows with the strips of cloth tied to it. I opened the first can of lighter fluid and soaked the strip. I lit it with the grill lighter and hurried to take aim. I hit the Silverado again. I’m not sure what I was expecting to happen. I guess I thought it would explode on impact, but I guess I watch too many movies. What happened in real life was the cloth of the table cloth burned, then the arrow itself burned and there was a dark smudge on the side of the truck. I lit another arrow and aimed for the truck’s tire. I missed. I missed with the second and third also. The fourth one actually hit the tire and the air went out of it with a woosh that blew out the flame and the truck sagged to one side.

  “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” I said out loud.

  I looked around for a better target and found the pretty red woodchips around the base of the trees on the island just beyond the Taurus. I took a practice shot with a regular arrow, adjusting my arc to get the longer distance. I landed in the woodchips on the second shot. I lit another strip, pulled and fired. I got the island and it caught. I lit, notched and released again and a second one landed in the wood chips and they caught. A few minutes later the island and the trees were burning. I yelled and screamed in delight. I was oh so proud of myself. When I turned to watch the zombies march towards the new burning spectacle I was let down again. More were moving in that direction, but still not enough. I waited to see if the movement of the few would attract the many, but it didn’t and the fires itself was almost burnt out. There were only three trees on that little island and a very thin coating of woodchips. Five minutes later the fire was out and there were still three hundred zombies between me and my daughter. I almost set the BBQ place on fire then, but I was afraid it was too close. I was afraid the hoard would shift, but it would still be cutting me off from my daughter.