by Shae Hutto
Neither Nick nor Amanda was looking forward much to entering the Halloween world. Amanda did continue to feel a sense of adventure and excitement. A lot of it was the joy of the removal of rules. She was reveling in the ability to forsake the normal framework of her life and do things she wouldn’t get a chance to do in the course of her ordinary day to day living. The fact that there might be consequences for her actions, both for her and for others, was starting to impinge on her enjoyment, though. Fear was starting to reassert itself. She was struggling to maintain her devil-may-care attitude and she was winning that struggle. Even if she had to emulate a certain personality most often found in action adventure movies, she was winning. Nick was under no illusions as to the danger of the situation. He knew he was going to have to be vigilant and vicious.
Weenie smelled bacon and it was distracting him. He stopped at a door with a handle that looked run-down and decrepit; like it had been in the weather for several years and might not work. Tarnish and grime were its only decoration, unless you counted what looked like an old, bloody fingerprint. It looked macabre; much like one might expect a Halloween door handle to look. He didn’t stop here because this was the correct door. Rather, this was the spot from whence the tantalizing bacon aroma was emanating. Weenie was salivating. He sniffed all around the door and barked at it. He barked some more in alarm and dismay when the two humans who were accompanying him opened the door and went through. Weenie was smart enough to know that he had just screwed up.
Nick was expecting a cornfield. The three of them trooped out the door in a rundown warehouse onto a rundown street in a rundown town. It was dusk and the setting sun was being replaced by a full moon. There was enough light to see quite well by, but the shadows were thick and the contrast was razor sharp. There was no corn in evidence. Trash blew about in the wind. Cars rusted where they were parked or abandoned in the streets. There was no evidence of life or electricity or any city sounds. They could hear birds chirping and the wind soughing through the buildings, but not much else. There was evidence of violence, but not recent. Burned cars, burned buildings and bullet holes were everywhere. Part of the town had obviously burned to the ground. Blackened buildings were visible just a couple of blocks over.
“This isn’t what I was expecting,” said Nick as he looked around at their ominous surroundings.
“Looks pretty spooky to me,” replied Amanda. “And they did say they burned half the town down. That fits.” Weenie woofed at them and shifted his weight from one paw to the other nervously. They weren’t understanding.
“I think maybe we should go back. This might be the wrong door,” said Nick uncertainly.
“Let’s look around, first,” said Amanda, partly because she did want to look around and partly because she wanted to look cool for the kid. Weenie woofed again. “See, the dog agrees with me,” she said and started walking down the street toward the nearest intersection. She stopped and looked in the nearest derelict car. It was empty. She stepped around a pile of trash that had been paper-mach’d to the concrete by old newspapers and rain. Nick jogged after her and walked beside her as she headed for the intersection. Weenie followed, whining with anxiety because these human friends were either stupid or were ignoring him.
“This place looks deserted,” mused Amanda.
“Looks dangerous,” remarked Nick.
“What makes you say that?” she asked. “We haven’t seen anything the least bit threatening.”
By way of reply, Nick pointed at a sign painted on a shoe store window. APOCAPLYSE SALE. They kept walking. When they reached the intersection, they turned right. Nothing moved, except trash in the breeze. Somewhere nearby an empty can rattled as it rolled down a deserted street. Nick’s hand opened and closed rhythmically as he walked. Every time it opened, that black knife appeared in it and disappeared again when it closed. His face was grim and clearly showed just how uncomfortable this world was making him. He stopped when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He grabbed Amanda by the elbow and she stopped, too.
“What?” she asked, jumping a little and betraying her nervousness.
“Dunno,” he said. “Thought I saw something. In that alley.” He pointed where he meant with the dagger. Weenie growled softly from just behind them as a man, dressed in the ragged remains of a business suit stepped unsteadily from the alleyway and stood swaying gently. The dagger vanished and Nick used that hand to dig a wand out of his pocket. It was the same wand that he had used earlier to shoot at Connix and now he pointed it at the man who stood staring at them with dead, glazed eyes that didn’t blink. The man opened his mouth and the old, dry skin around it cracked and split at the corners. A horrid sound of squelchy rot came from his mouth and he took a step toward them, then another. He began to lurch toward them, gaining speed as he came.
“Run,” said Nick to Amanda. A huge bolt of lightning leapt from the tip of Nick’s wand and blasted the walking corpse back several feet, where it fell and lay on its back, one arm completely severed from its trunk. Smoke rose in tendrils from it and they were close enough to smell both the rot and the stench of burned clothing. The man sat up and began to struggle to his feet again. Acrid, reeking smoke rose from his hair and came out of his nose and mouth. Amanda turned to run and swore when she saw the way behind them blocked by several people in the same condition as the one in front. Weenie leapt at the man in the suit and bore him to the ground. He tore the man’s face off with his teeth and it came away dryly, with little resistance. Weenie backed away as the man tried again to rise, his face nothing but a skull, sparsely covered by desiccated tissue. Smoke still rose in tendrils form the skull’s nasal cavity. Nick tried again with his wand, this time sending a mass of whirling flame at the man, who promptly turned into a drunkenly staggering bonfire and commenced to flamingly lurch toward them.
“You’ve never seen a zombie movie?” asked Amanda, way too calmly.
“No. Why?” replied Nick as he backed away from the flaming suit-wearer and tried to keep an eye on the gaggle of undead coming from the opposite direction.
“Brains, kid. You have to destroy the brains.” She pulled the blaster pistol from the Ramses out of her borrowed backpack and blew the blazing zombie’s head clean off with a blast of plasma. Headless, the zombie turned into a harmless bonfire on the sidewalk.
“Now, that was awesome,” remarked Nick with a huge grin on his face. “Can I have a turn?”
“Get your own blaster, Nick,” she said with a smirk as she spun around and turned the road behind them into a Star Wars vs Night of the Living Dead shooting gallery. The zombies collapsed in smoking, headless piles as the building behind them went from run-down to falling down as the plasma bolts cratered the front of the building and cut through structural steel. Part of the front façade collapsed into the street in a dusty, smoky pile of rubble. Amanda turned and winked at Nick theatrically and struck a pose with one hand on her hip as she blew imaginary smoke from the muzzle of her blaster.
“Show-off,” accused Nick, still smiling.
“We can’t all have cool magic wands, now can we?” she teased.
Nick’s reply was forestalled by Weenie’s insistent barking. The Dalmatian was going back the way they had come, barking his head off as he went.
“Wonder what that’s all about,” said Nick. He started following the dog and motioned for Amanda to come with him.
“I swear,” she said with an annoyed grimace. “That dog is worse than my mother for ruining fun.” She abandoned her showy pose and trotted after Nick who was about to round the corner to head back to the building where the door back to the corridor was. He came to a screeching halt and backpedaled. Weenie likewise, still barking, stopped and backed up. When Amanda caught up to them, she saw why: the entire street was filled with thousands of the zombiefied citizens of whatever town this was. Apparently attracted by all the noise of the recent shoot ‘em-up episode and the resulting partial demolition of a building, the crowd of undea
d was shambling directly toward them. The hundred or so front runners had already spotted the trio and were beginning to speed up hungrily.
“And… we’re screwed,” said Amanda.
“Maybe if you hadn’t blown up half the block, we would be less screwed,” remarked Nick with a dryness that belied his apparent youth.
“Not my fault this future gun thingy doesn’t have a silencer.”
“Suppressor. And that wouldn’t have made the collapsing building any quieter.”
“Whatever.” She pulled out the ‘future gun thingy’ and shot a zombie in the head. The herd, excited by the sound, accelerated as a group.
“Cut that out. Let’s go. Time to run. Weenie! Sniff us out a quiet nook to hide in,” said Nick as he turned and started jogging away from the tide of violent death rising toward them. Weenie appeared to ignore his request and was content to follow behind Nick at a trot. Amanda stuffed the blaster back in her pack and ran after them.
“Can’t you use that wand of yours to stop them?” she asked in between breaths as they jogged down another street after several random turns.
“I don’t know any spells for decapitating zombies. Sorry,” replied Nick as he came to a halt beside a nondescript side-door in another rundown building. He tried to open it but it was locked. He pulled out his wand again. “I do know one for door locks, though.” He grinned and tapped the door handle. He tried it again but it was still locked. Either his spell was defective or this was a magic-proof lock. Or he screwed it up. He groaned in frustration. Weenie barked, alerting them to a zombie that had just turned the corner in pursuit of the tasty trio. Amanda blew its head off with the blaster and smirked in a smug, self-satisfied way.
“You’re no Harry Potter, Nick,” she said, then took a step back, startled, as an irritated Nick used his wand to blast the door off its hinges. The noise was impressive as the steel door folded in half and blew inward, knocking over a rack full of compressed gas cylinders inside the darkened building. “Temper, temper, kid,” she added.
“Harry Potter was a pansy. Help me grab one of these things and pull it out here,” he said as he stepped through the doorway and started trying to move one of the heavy steel cylinders. All the cylinders were different colors and Amanda had no idea what was in them. They had time to pull three of them out of the building. There was a solid green one, a solid yellow one, and a dull grey one with a red stripe around the top.
“What’s in these things?” she asked as she casually shot the head off another zombie as it rounded the corner. Unfortunately, it was only the first of many. Several more came around the corner immediately after it.
“Not a clue,” replied Nick as he stuck his foot on the grey one and rolled it out to the corner where three zombies tripped on it. He used his wand to blast it with roiling flames but accomplished nothing besides setting the struggling zombies on fire. Flaming zombies were even more dangerous in the short term and Nick scowled at the counter productive result. “Shoot it,” he yelled at Amanda who, thinking along the same lines, already had the blaster out and aimed.
Amanda fired three shots in rapid succession, and managed to hit the tank with one, which blasted the gas cylinder in half. The resulting explosion held no fire. In fact, the release of compressed gas blew out the three flaming zombies, and froze everything near it. The violent energy of the release sent rotten zombies and decayed zombie pieces flying in every direction, but did very little damage to the mass of undead as a whole. Amanda gingerly picked frozen flecks of rotting flesh off her blouse with obvious distaste.
“Anti-climactic,” remarked Nick with a frown. He waited until a few more zombies came around the corner and rolled the green one toward them. “Maybe this will be better,” he said. One of the zombies stumbled on the cylinder and his foot turned it end-on toward them. “Wait, don’t shoot-,” Nick started to say but was too late. Amanda shot the cylinder with one blast. Her aim was improving.
This time, the result was not anti-climactic. The bolt of super-heated plasma ripped the end off of the cylinder and released the compressed oxygen inside. In the presence of such a rich oxygen atmosphere and with an ignition source (plasma bolt), the shredded steel of the canister caught fire. Spectacularly. The rapidly expanding gas from the pressure release and the rapidly expanding gas from the combustion turned what was left of the cylinder into a rocket, which sent a scorching column of flame directly back at the three adventurers and propelled the oxygen cylinder into the wall of the building across the street. It ricocheted off the reinforced brick, scattering flaming debris in all directions and vanished into the growing crowd of undead. Nick and Amanda dove away from the searing column of fire, to opposite sides of the alley, attempting to not get burned. They both got burned anyway. So, did the desiccated corpses of the mob of walking dead. At least Weenie wasn’t directly in the line of fire. He escaped injury. Dismayed by the display of stupidity and pyrotechnics, Weenie searched for a hiding spot.
Amanda and Nick both scrambled back to their feet, patting their clothes vigorously, in an attempt to put out the flames they imagined to be there but weren’t. Their clothes were scorched and their faces looked like they had a sunburn but they weren’t on fire. A bit of Amanda’s gorgeous blonde hair was burned and curled into little blackened nubs. The stench of burned hair mingled with the smell of burning metal in a nauseous blend.
“Holy hell,” said Amanda. “What was that?” Instead of responding, he rolled the final cylinder, the red one, toward the intersection where the flaming mob was turning the corner toward them. “I don’t know if I want to shoot that one,” she said timidly, succumbing to an attack of common sense.
Nick shrugged and used his wand again. This time a massive blue-white lightning bolt leapt from the tip of the little wooden stick and blasted into the pavement, melting it in an awesome display of sparks and molten asphalt. He arced his wand toward the rolling cylinder, dragging the jagged tongue of electricity across the pavement. When it touched the steel, the world ended. Not quite, but it seemed that way to them. The electricity melted and ruptured the steel cylinder, releasing and igniting the compressed acetylene within. The resulting explosion blew a crater in the sidewalk five feet in diameter and two feet deep. It also pulverized every zombie within twenty feet of the blast, effectively dismembering over a hundred of them and knocking ten times that number off their feet. Windows shattered all around the intersection from the over pressurization, and the boom was impressive. One lonely car alarm sounded weakly from somewhere nearby.
Nick and Amanda were sent rolling down the street away from the blast. Weenie, who was now hiding behind a Ford Taurus with four flat tires, watched with anxiety as his friends tumbled past him. As soon as they stopped, Weenie ran to Nick and started to lick his red and black face. Nick came around pretty quickly.
“Good boy,” he said as he got to his feet. A glance at the intersection convinced him he had very little time before the remaining zombies were ambulatory and after them again. He stepped over to Amanda, who was sitting in the street, dazed. What was left of her hair was sticking straight back from her face, framing a look of stunned bewilderment. Her blouse was almost completely gone, revealing her bra and several acres of road rash. The coloring of her face in the flickering light of burning people made her look like a portrait done by an untalented Picasso devotee hopped up on cough syrup and ‘shrooms. Blood trickled over her split bottom lip.
“You OK, Amanda?” Nick asked with real concern, one eye on the distracted zombie horde.
“I think I wet my pants,” she replied vacantly. Nick got the impression she might start crying soon.
“No time for tears, ‘Manda,” he chided as he grabbed her hands and tried to coax her off the pavement. “We have to get out of here before those guys get over being blown up. Upsy daisy.” With that last, he helped Amanda up off the pavement. Her eyes were starting to move a bit more and her face was showing some signs of life. She was recovering quickly. Even better,
there were no tears in evidence.
They took off at a stumbling, uncoordinated run that slowly smoothed into something more akin to running as their disrupted vestibular systems recovered. This time they ran with Weenie in the lead. They didn’t go far before he stopped at the side door to a gym. He woofed softly and pawed at the door, making his intentions obvious even for the stunned and bloody pair of stubborn humans. Nick tried it and it was unlocked. They trooped inside and quickly shut the door behind them. Nick and Amanda looked around in the dim light, searching for threats in the gloom. Treadmills and weight machines stood sentry in the dark, symbols of civilization and the struggle against too many calories, detritus in a world that no longer needed cardio training. Murky illumination filtered through a thick layer of dust covering the floor-to-ceiling windows that comprised one wall. Amanda caught some movement with her peripheral vision and tensed, expecting the worst.
“Relax, girl,” admonished Nick. “It’s just our reflection.” He was right. Two of the side walls were lined with mirrors, through which another trio explored a dusty copy of this blighted world. Amanda had the irrational desire to step through the mirror and escape her current predicament like Alice.
“Thanks for keeping your head back there,” she told Nick quietly. “I was pretty shaken up.”
Nick shrugged and looked uncomfortable. They moved farther into the room, dodging a line of stationary bicycles and searching for another exit. Amanda wasn’t going to give up before she got something out of Nick. She punched him in the side.
