by Brown, TW
“Billy,” Katrina said with a sniff, “this is what I wiped from your face. You were a crimson mask of horror from whatever you did back there when you took out the guys who were holding those children hostage.”
“You scared the piss out of a few of ‘em…literally,” the man who had been there with me said with a shake of the head. “You killed the second guy and got a good spray of blood across your face. Then, after I took down the girl, you spun on those kids, blade dripping with blood clutched in your hand. Those poor kids thought that the devil himself had come.”
That at least explained the reaction that I had received. I looked around and only saw one of the two would-be hostage takers. He looked like somebody had just taken away his birthday.
“And what the heck happened to him?” I asked.
“When you went kooky, that idiot you were keeping at gunpoint made a move for his gun,” Katrina explained. “The kid over there shot him.”
I glanced over at the young man standing with his wrists zip-tied and cocked my head with the unasked question of why. He met my gaze and blushed.
“BP and his team have the perimeter secured around this place and Darla has snipers on the roof,” a lady that I didn’t recognize reported as she jogged up to us.
That was when I took another look around and realized that I was now in a different part of the store. My guess was that this had been the manager’s office. Hmm, I wondered, how long had I been out?
“Any word about how anybody else is doing?” Katrina asked.
“None yet, but there has been almost no gunfire for the past twenty minutes or so,” the woman answered.
I said a silent prayer that it was because our side had been victorious. Just as I got to my feet, a massive explosion shook the building hard enough to send me back down on my ass.
As I struggled to my feet once more, I saw several figures backing into the store-turned-medical center. It was easy to recognize BP’s figure as he walked backwards, firing his weapon in short bursts. I took that as my answer.
6
Vignettes L
Emily-zombie moved in the midst of the small pack. Their numbers had swollen over the past few weeks. Now there were eleven. There had been fifteen, but they had moved towards a source of noise one morning. Having no concept of balance, three of them had fallen from a slick rocky outcrop and ended up in the waters of a swift moving stream that was gorged from the snow melt.
They moved along the water’s edge, occasionally stopping and becoming confused and distracted whenever they reached a set of rapids. The sound thrummed in their heads and urged them to move towards it, but that little spark that urged caution would prevent them from investigating further; especially since no source of warmth could be found in the area of the sound.
On they moved, each night pausing and waiting until the darkness receded. Sometimes they were drawn by sound, other times by a source of heat that would appear, but then vanish.
When others of their kind, the larger ones that paid them no notice, would pass by, Emily-zombie and her growing pack would sometimes follow. The bigger ones were good at finding those sources of warmth. Even better, they could often bring one down, allowing Emily-zombie and the other zombie children to move in and plunge into the waning warmth before it went cold.
On one such occasion, they were travelling in the midst of over a hundred others. In that time, they added another six to their number. During that period, they could travel at night without that impulse to stop and wait for the bright, warm orb in the sky to rise and pass overhead.
Noise had turned them as a group, and eventually they came upon a cluster of warm figures. Emily and her group melted into the back of the pack as they converged. There was a great increase in noise that begged for Emily-zombie and the others to move forward, but that impulse kept firing and causing them to wait.
Soon, the sounds became less and Emily-zombie tried to move forward only to find her path blocked by the closely condensed group of larger zombies. Her hand discovered something long and she gripped it without really understanding why. Yet again, there was another flash.
Raising her hand, she brought it down on the hood of a long-abandoned car to her right. The sound sent pulses through her and caused all of the zombie children gathered around to shift and orient on this new stimulus. She repeated the effort again and again as the larger ones all began to redirect their own attentions on this new sound.
Dropping the object, Emily-zombie moved against the flow of the sea of legs until she came to something on the ground. The warmth was almost gone, but there was a little and she dropped to it and fed.
Looking up, she saw three more sources, none quite as strong as the one that she was feeding from, but enough to draw the zombie-children that had followed. When the last of that warmth faded, Emily-zombie stood. She resumed her trek.
Once again, she and the others like her were alone. That night, as they stopped in the darkness, a group of nine more zombie children emerged from the shadows of the long structures that surrounded Emily-zombie and her group. Some crawled out from under the trailers, others coming from open doors.
Within three more cycles of darkness, their numbers had grown to over thirty. They arrived on the heels of several sources of warmth. At last, one of those sources faltered, unable to keep up with the rest. Emily-zombie fell on the hobbled deer fawn with no regard for anything except tearing it open. Her mouth closed on the noisy creature and ripped.
A few of the others were able to join in, but more stood in a circle, trying to get closer, but unable to break through the densely packed throng. And again it was done.
One morning, as the darkness peeled away, Emily-zombie found herself on the fringe of a growing number of houses. There was something here. The intermittent pulse in her mind thrummed and her desire to continue walking evaporated.
A source of warmth appeared before her. All she had to do was reach down and grab it for it to be hers. The warmth moved against her and the sudden pulse came, causing her to pause in mid-stoop.
Soft fur moved along the cold, dead skin of Emily-zombie’s legs. She could feel a soft thrumming vibration that reverberated through her. She had no concept of purring cats, but the pulse in her brain jelly stayed her hand and kept her from tearing into the creature.
With absolutely no grace, Emily-zombie collapsed to the ground. She remained motionless as the warm creature shoved itself at her again and again. Eventually, it pushed its way under one limp hand. That hand twitched once…twice…and then began to move back and forth with slow, gentle deliberateness. If a living being would have been present, they would have sworn that they were seeing a little zombie girl petting a large, visibly pregnant tabby cat.
Others from her group gathered around. Many stood, some wandered off, forgetting within seconds about those they’d travelled with, but other flopped to the ground. None moved as that single source of warmth wove its way among them.
The cat stretched out and basked in warmth of its own liking as the sun rose higher in the sky. It did not know fear, and would even drift off to sleep amidst the cold, dead creatures scattered around where it lay. When it woke, it stretched and moved close to one of the zombie children. With needle-like teeth, it would tug free a loose piece of flesh here or there and sate its appetite. It had discovered long ago that this one particular smell meant an abundance of food.
Emily-zombie no longer felt driven to search. The presence of this soft mound of purring fur had filled some emptiness that not even feasting on the sources of living warmth could satisfy. If she had been capable of cognizant thought, she might have just been of the age to understand the power that came from feeling accepted.
Every so often, one of the larger ones would appear. If it spied the warmth that was the cat, then it would turn and come for the creature. Emily-zombie and the others would hiss, mewl, and even growl. Sometimes they would form a cluster and use their bodies as a screening shield. Zombies being wha
t they were, the larger ones would very often forget what they had been in pursuit of and adjust their course to a path of least resistance. But more often than not, the cat would have to scamper to safety, only returning when the larger ones would plod away, no memory of what had drawn them in this direction.
One day, as Emily-zombie stumbled across the path of one of the larger ones that had come seeking to reach and bite into her special warmth, she had pushed away a metal garbage can that was on its side. The large metal bin rolled noisily, and the sound had been enough to send the larger one off on a new direction away from her precious warmth. That tiny kernel of Emily-zombie’s mind that functioned sporadically made a connection. For the first time, that connection did not fizzle and melt away to the sea of forgetfulness.
Emily-zombie now realized that, if she could manufacture sound, then the larger ones would move towards it. Over the next several days, repeating this action ingrained it into her being. It took time, but eventually she showed the others with demonstration after demonstration. She watched as, one by one, the others picked up this particular skill and began to utilize it with regularity.
Using a variety of items that spanned from bottles to fallen tree branches, the zombie children fanned out in a rough perimeter and would create a distraction of sound any time one of the larger ones came near. While members of the group wandered sporadically in and out of the area that they now seemed to have laid claim to as their home, each of them took turns just sitting in a spot in the sun with the tabby. Each one allowed the cat to nibble at loose bits and pieces as he or she sat still. Muscle memory spasmed and the actual act of petting the cat came, slow and awkward at first, but eventually evolving into a gentle caress.
At night, the zombie-children would come together into a tight cluster, standing so close that none of the larger ones would be able to spot the cat through the tiny forest of legs.
The zombie children were learning.
The zombie children were teaching!
***
Vix swatted aside the first zombie and brought her axe down on the next one in a fluid motion made sharper by all the times she had done this in the past year; injury be damned, the adrenaline was kicking in and acting as a natural pain killer for her sore shoulder. Harold was coming up from behind her, and she heard him spit out a string of profanity.
She had thought much the same thing. Gemma must have heard them back there when they were looking down on that aircraft and the condemned souls that were camped on top of it. More than likely, she had heard Harold call out and either decided to reunite with her old travelling mates, or (and this was just as likely) she had decided to run off so that she could sulk some more.
Whatever the case, she was in it deep now. The girl had scrambled up on top of what looked like a moving van that had fallen on its side after slamming into a small passenger vehicle.
In a strange way, Gemma was in a similar-but-different situation to those poor people on the spine of the United Airlines jet. Left to her own, Gemma had nobody to kill and eat, so she would just end up starving to death slowly unless she decided to end it quick by diving into the zombies that were already five deep all the way around the van-turned-island.
Harold pulled up beside Vix and a small cry slipped from his lips. He drew a weapon so that he held one in each hand and took a step forward as if he were prepared to march into battle. Vix grabbed his arm and yanked him back, spinning him to face her.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” she said in a hissing whisper, hoping that she’d not been loud enough to attract the attention of the zombies. “You go down there and you will get torn apart.”
“I have to save Gemma,” the young man pleaded. There was something in his eyes that made Vix tighten her grip.
“This is not your fault.”
“She left because she thought that I was…” Harold’s voice faltered.
“No!” Vix shook the young man and made him look at her. “You did nothing wrong. She was being a silly girl in a world where that gets a person killed. We can’t pretend that things are the same…or that they might ever return to what we knew. The world is dead and we are all on borrowed time.”
Harold’s head dropped and she felt his shoulders tremble. Where were all the supermen with six-pack abs and the ability to fashion a weapon from a candy wrapper and a bar of soap all while making witty comments and clever observations? If she ever ran across one of her favorite horror writers, she would have a few words to say about how ridiculous their books had been. There was nothing fun or clever about a zombie apocalypse.
Turning, she looked at Gemma who still stood atop the wrecked moving van. What would some of her fictional characters do? she wondered. A couple came to mind and she brushed aside the urge to follow what she believed their reaction would be: to walk away. Then a thought hit her so intensely that it was almost physical.
“I am such a dunce!” Vix muttered. She glanced over at Harold who had turned into a huge sack of useless. “Stay put and don’t do a thing until I get back!”
She took off before the questions could commence. She knew that she only had a limited amount of time before either Harold or Gemma did something absolutely stupid. Stupid would get a person killed these days.
Jogging back to the house where she’d seen the cricket bat, Vix steeled her resolve and ducked inside, doing her best to ignore the horrendously evil feeling of cobwebs brushing her skin. She was probably more afraid of spiders than she ever would be of zombies. Spiders were aliens from another world as far as she was concerned. They had been left behind to observe humanity and eventually take over the world…ugly little blighters!
When she emerged from the house, Vix allowed herself to finally take a breath. She had not wanted to risk sucking in a mouthful of that downy demon silk while inside that house…especially if it meant the possibility that an actual spider might be hiding in it, lurking like they do.
Vix shuddered and then scanned the overgrown yard until she found what she was looking for. In a moment, she was back at Harold’s side holding the cricket bat and a rusty metal lid to a rubbish bin.
“What the—?” Harold began, but Vix cut him off when she smacked the bat to the lid with a loud clang.
The heads of almost all the zombies turned to face this new source of distraction. Beating on the lid a few more times, Vix yelled a string of obscenities. They came slowly at first, but before long, almost all of the zombies that had the van surrounded were coming for Vix.
“You go get that idiot girl and meet me back at the house,” Vix paused from her clanging long enough to tell Harold what to do since it appeared as if the boy was just as touched in the head as Gemma.
“What if she won’t come?”
“Then you knock her in the head and carry her over your shoulder.”
And with that, Vix moved away and resumed banging on the lid. Since being quiet was not a current priority, she took the time to yell out a few more choice obscenities. It felt good to get it out of her system, and just maybe, if she yelled her voice raw, she would not rip Gemma a new one when they got back to the house.
Looking around, Vix continued her role as the zombie version of the Pied Piper. As they followed, she wondered how in blazes the whole of humanity had fallen so fast to something so simple-minded. She was basically outwitting a hundred or so of the creatures with a rubbish bin lid and a cricket bat.
She could not help herself as she banged out a rhythm and sing-songed all of the most foul profanities that she could think of, Vix began to caper about. Still, she remained vigilant, it would do no good at all to go and get herself killed in all of this. However, she had to admit that she was feeling quite a bit liberated.
At one point, she climbed up on the hood of a crumpled Mercedes and began to sing and perform “The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats. All the while, she mused if perhaps she had finally lost her mind. Certainly what she was doing had to be at least a little bit insane.
> “Oi!” a voice yelled, snapping her out of her momentary lapse of reason.
Vix turned to see Harold and Gemma jogging up. They were both looking at her like she was six kinds of crazy. Well, if they’d been watching her for any length of time, she could see where they might have some concerns.
Vix jumped down and it was like the flipping of a switch. She laid into Gemma with both barrels.
“What in blazes were you thinking?” Gemma opened her mouth, but Vix was just getting started and held up a hand to silence the girl. “Oh…that’s right. You WEREN’T thinking, you stupid girl!”
Gemma tried once more to speak, but Vix held up both hands. She simply did not want to hear anything that the girl had to say at the moment. With a deep breath, Vix spun on her heel, ready to head back to the house. Now she just had to hope that Amanda and the others would be forgiving.
“Umm…” Harold spoke up and Vix stopped. If he was about to say what she suspected, she might club them both over the head with the cricket bat and leave them for those zombies that were getting closer as the three of them just stood there like fools.
“Maybe we could go help that group on the jet,” Harold said, catching Vix by surprise. While this was a close second to the stupid things the young man could utter, it had not been what she was prepared for; and thus, she had to take a moment to prepare her retort.
“How many of those things you reckon are in that valley around that jet?’ Vix finally asked as she eyed the approaching zombies that she’d led away from Gemma. The leading edge was probably fifty yards or so from where they now stood.
Harold shrugged. Gemma just stood there. Turning, Vix started away. “A few thousand is my guess. And while they are all gathered around that plane and those poor souls, they are not coming after us. Besides…” Vix spun, the look on her face actually one more of pity than of anger, “…you saw them. Those poor souls are already lost.”
