The Dead Rise

by David Thompson

  Once the last of the creatures at the foot of the stairs fell to the ground, she ushered the remaining members of their group towards the nearest emergency exit. Horror gripped Tanya as she witnessed two of the zombies that she had been unable to destroy on the stairs descend upon the rear of the group of students; before she could even call out a warning, the students had been caught in the zombies' grip. The zombies ripped and tore at the students' necks, silencing them before they could cry out for help.

  By the time the group reached the school's fire exit, only Tanya, Adam, Jason, Jeremy, and Chris remained. When he saw the doors of the school swing open through the haze of partial consciousness, Jeremy half-expected to be greeted by another rampaging mob of zombies ready to tear them apart. He was pleasantly surprised when the crisp fall air greeted them with nothing but silence and peace. He staggered to his feet, relieving Chris and Adam of the burden of carrying him, and Chris wasted no time in grabbing the pipe that Tanya was carrying slipping it through the handles of the emergency exit, preventing it from being pushed open by any pursuers.

  "Come on," Chris said, nodding in the direction of the nearby parking lot. "My truck is down there. We should all be able to fit into it. It'll get us away from here, somewhere safe."

  "If there's anywhere safe that we can go," Jeremy said, suppressing a cough that rose unbidden with the exertion of speaking.

  Chapter 3

  Day 2 - 13:30 CST

  Estevan, Saskatchewan, Canada

  After a great deal of animated discussion about what to do next, the group found themselves driving further into town. Jeremy had argued against this course of action, telling the others that based upon the evidence they had available, it was clear that the zombies which had descended upon their high school were part of a larger uprising; it clearly explained the declaration of martial law in large cities all over the continent, and was obviously spreading quickly. He argued that the safest thing they could do was drive north on the gravel-covered grid roads that intersected the province, find themselves an easily defensible farmhouse, and stay there until they'd had a chance to plan a careful incursion into the town. His three companions had all disagreed. None were willing to just leave their friends and family to suffer at the hands of the undead horde that occupied the school, and possibly the entire town. Chris was the one who ultimately made the decision to accept the risk and venture into town - in his words, "the one with the keys makes the rules". Jeremy had protested, but only weakly. He knew all too well that his companions were driven by fear for their families, and that the only way they would see reason was if they endangered themselves first.

  I just hope that I can keep them safe, he thought. Fortunately, between the mobility afforded by the truck, Tanya's incredible strength, and my own mental prowess, we should be able to make a quick escape if the worst has happened.

  “Nobody’s answering!” Jason was frantically dialing number after number from his cellular phone’s address book in an attempt to reach anybody that he could.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” Adam said, holding up his phone so that they could read the display. “I’ve got no signal. I’m guessing at least a few towers are down right now.”

  The rest of the ride into town was eerily quiet, broken only by Jason’s repeated dialing attempts. Estevan Comprehensive School was on the edge of the town limits, but the all-too-long drive south past the athletic fields was far too long. Not a single vehicle could be seen on the road, but that was hardly unusual for a town as small as Estevan during a workday. As they drove past the shopping mall which stood a kilometer south of the school, Chris pulled to a stop in the middle of the road. Everyone stared at the mall's parking lot, which was not entirely empty. The empty vehicles in the parking lot, however, betrayed no sign of movement or life (or undeath).Jeremy breathed a quiet sigh of relief as Chris slowly accelerated away from the silent mall. Their first stop was several kilometers away, past abandoned residential neighbourhoods. The truck's windows were down, and Jeremy and Adam remained crouched at the ready in the cargo box, listening and desperately hoping for any sound, any sign of human life. There was nothing.

  The truck pulled to a stop at a red light across from the small, squat office complex that they were headed towards. The stop was entirely unconscious; Chris was driving entirely on instinct, too preoccupied with searching for any sign of danger to care about the fact that obeying traffic laws was probably not the safest course of action given the circumstances. While they waited for the light to change, all eyes were on a convenience store to the left of the truck. The large plate glass windows in the front revealed that the store was empty; there was no sign of a cashier or any customers. Even for Estevan, that was unusual.

  "I don't like this," Jeremy's voice broke the silence as the traffic light turned green and they coasted through the intersection. The truck pulled in to the office complex's parking lot, and stopped. On all sides, they were surrounded by squat, ugly buildings. Directly in front of them was a hotel bar; to their left was an insurance building, and on their right was an apartment building. Although he wasn't normally claustrophobic, Jeremy tried to suppress the sudden closed-in feeling that threatened to overwhelm him. He could already feel his pulse quickening, his breath becoming short and ragged, and a steady pounding building behind his temples. “Why is this city so quiet? Shouldn’t there be police cars racing back and forth, and zombies shambling after us wherever we go?”

  "Hang on," Tanya said as she leaped out of the passenger side of the truck. She left the door wide open, apparently ready for a quick escape. "I'll just check on my mom, and be right back."

  "Are you sure you want to go alone?" Chris' tone didn't seem to be one of chivalrous concern, but a shared fear of what might by lurking behind the dirty brick facade of the insurance offices.

  "I'll be fine," Tanya said with a happy-go-lucky smile. "Those things are far behind us, and you guys should stay with the truck and keep an eye out. You need to be ready to roll if they're following us. Besides, I think I can take care of myself. If I have to go all kung-fu on some zombies, I don't want you guys to be getting in the way."

  Nobody disagreed, and Tanya hurried to the door of the office. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she slowly pushed the door open and glanced around. She looked back at her companions and shrugged her shoulders, as if to say that the path looked clear. She disappeared inside the building as the door slid shut behind her. All three boys kept a careful lookout as the seconds agonizingly crawled by. Jeremy's head continued to pound harder and harder, until his vision blurred. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, hoping to clear out the rhythmic pulsing. When he opened his eyes, his entire body shook spasmodically, and suddenly his field of vision shifted; he was no longer outside the office building, but rather inside. He had only been inside the building once before, but he recognized the faded blue carpet, the cheap mass-produced abstract art hanging on the walls, and the dusty plastic plants that lined the hallways. Tanya was in the same hallway that he could see, walking towards him. He called her name, but his voice sounded hollow and distant. The distorted and confused reply, as hollow and distant as his own voice, came not from Tanya, but rather sounded more like Adam. Jeremy's confused utterance of her name rose to a scream as he saw a walking corpse shamble out of a door behind her. Tanya did not seem to notice it, but whirled around as he screamed.

  With all the physical force of a punch to the head, Jeremy's field of vision flipped, twisted, and was suddenly back in the cargo bucket of Chris' truck. Chris and Adam were both staring at him, puzzled.

  "Damnit!" Jeremy shouted as he leaped from the truck to the pavement. He meant to land gracefully and dash towards the office door. His intentions, however, were defeated by his own clumsiness as he landed awkwardly, twisted to try to regain his balance, and fell flat on his face. His ill-fated but noble effort was ultimately in vain - as he struggled to get back on his feet, Tanya charged through the closed door of the office
building. It exploded outwards with terrific force, knocking the door off its hinges without even slowing her down. With the grace of an athlete, she bent down and picked up Jeremy with one hand, then leaped into the back of the truck.

  "Go!" She shouted. A groaning zombie of a man, still dressed in stylish business-casual attire, stumbled into sight in the doorway. The telltale moans of more undead could be heard from behind him. Like moths drawn to a flame, more undead appeared, as if from nowhere. They slowly poured in from the lanes between the office buildings, and the group was surrounded by dozens of walking corpses before they even knew what was happening.

  “Go!” Adam shouted.

  Chris gunned the engine and the truck roared into gear. He plowed through a crowd of nearly a dozen undead; their fists clunked hollowly against the side panels of the truck as it roared through them, and the vehicle bounced and jostled as several of the creatures were knocked to the ground under the truck's wheels. All three of the passengers in the back of the truck crouched down and held tight to the side of the vehicle. After a tense moment, the truck cleared the crowd of zombies, tires squealing as it tore into the northbound lane of a street heading away from the cluster of office buildings. Jeremy looked up to see the creatures giving chase as best they could, given their slow movement and limited mobility.

  He scanned the nearby area, looking for anything that could be used as a weapon to slow or stop the oncoming mob. Parked in the bar's parking lot was a gasoline tanker; he presumed that its driver was amongst the crowd which gave chase to them. He reached into his pockets, desperate for anything he could find to fulfill the devious plan that burst into his mind. He pulled a pair of dimes out of the pocket and smiled.

  "Stop the truck," he shouted at Chris. Although he hadn't expected Chris to comply, the truck dutifully screeched to a stop only a hundred meters from the tanker truck. "Hold on," he muttered to everyone.

  As the zombies shambled closer to the tanker truck, Jeremy concentrated on the pair of dimes. Both rose out of his hand and hovered; the first streaked away with incredible speed, propelled towards the tanker truck with all of the mental might that Jeremy could summon. The coin struck the truck's massive fuel tank, tearing through it as if it was made of paper. A large stream of gasoline poured out of the hole and onto the ground. By this point, most of the zombies had reached the tanker truck and were headed towards the pickup in the middle of the road. The second dime streaked through the air, striking the pavement with terrific force. The strike caused a spark to jump from the pavement which immediately ignited the rapidly growing puddle of gasoline that was forming beside the tanker. This was followed by a powerful shock wave and incredible roar as the flame reached into the tank of gasoline and ignited its contents. The explosion was like nothing Jeremy had ever seen before - he was knocked to his back by its sheer force, and the sound of the shock wave shattering windows filled the air. In the wake of his shock at the explosion, Chris slammed his foot onto the accelerator. The truck tore away from the scene as the remnants of the shock wave tore through the crowded office buildings. Wood and stone flew through the air, whizzing past the speeding truck, and although smoke from the blast obscured the air, the sound of a building crashing down could be heard. For the first time in his life, Jeremy cried out in true celebration. The rising flames and smoke, the acrid smell in the air, and the tiny pieces of zombie flesh and bone that flew everywhere were emotionally freeing in a way that he couldn't even pretend to understand in the heat of the moment. As Chris finally realized just what had happened, the truck screeched to a halt again. There was no sign of any movement from the distant cloud of smoke and flames. Chris' door swung open and he stepped out of the truck so that he could face the chaos behind them. The passengers in the back of the truck all leaped out, and everyone stood staring quietly at the destruction they had wrought.

  "That was..." Tanya's voice trailed off. She didn't quite know what to say.

  "Beautiful," Jeremy finished her sentence, although the awkward look on her face indicated that she didn't quite agree with his assessment of the situation.

  "It was something, that's for sure," Adam said. He sounded bewildered and astonished, but thrilled to have seen what he'd seen. “If this was a movie, I’d be making fun of the direction right now for trying to pull off something so absurd.”

  “Fortunately,” Jeremy said, “this isn’t a movie. That truck wasn’t a prop, and those zombies weren’t extras. Let's not start getting overconfident.”

  "It was effective," Chris said, unable to think of anything more profound to say. "But what do we do now?"

  "As much as I didn't want to come this way," Jeremy said, "I think it may be just what we needed." He gestured to a store at the side of the road. Jack's Hunting and Sporting Goods, the sign read. It was a popular place for hunters to pick up any supplies they needed for hunting season, from rifles to ammunition to camping supplies. Jack Osler, the proprietor, was also notorious for being slightly off balance mentally. In particular, the “Sporting Goods” portion of his store name was a running joke in the town - aside from a token few baseball gloves tossed in a corner to maintain his licensing as a sporting goods store, the entire shop was always packed with guns and ammunition. The rumours of his "special stock", hidden boxes of exotic and not-entirely-legal merchandise which were always kept just out of sight, were legendary. Jack's paranoia often lead to rants about doomsday, and his plans for surviving the inevitable. Although Jeremy didn't think that this was quite what Jack had in mind, if anyone was likely to have survived to help them, it was him.

  "I don't think that's a good place to go," Tanya said. She sounded nervous, as if repeating a parental caution that had been ground into her head over and over until it was repeated by rote instinct.

  "I don't think there's anywhere else we can go," Jeremy replied. "At best, old Jack has hidden himself away in there with a stack of guns at can help protect us. At worst, he's been killed and we can help ourselves his merchandise. I don't think anyone could disagree that regardless of how widespread they actually are, the dead have risen and are hunting us down. You and I seem to have developed some kind of superpowers - I don't know how, and I don't know why. All I know is that whatever the reason, it won't hurt for us to be carrying a little extra protection."

  "Do any of you even know how to use a gun?" Chris chimed in.

  "How hard can it be?" Adam asked. "Just point and click, right?"

  "Point and click? It's not a damn computer game," Chris said with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. He paused to reflect upon their situation, then continued. "I don't think I trust any of you with anything more dangerous than a pointy stick. However, since some of you seem to be goddamned superhumans now, I don't think I really have a choice in the matter. Jeremy's right - if we're going to stand the best possible chance of keeping ourselves alive, this is the way to do it."

  "Let's go," Jeremy said, jumping up onto the median between lanes on the road. "And be careful - if he is alive, it wouldn't surprise me if he's set up some traps to take care of anything that gets too close. Move slow, and keep your eyes peeled."

  ***

  The door of the hunting supply store swung open slowly, and the four teenagers carefully stepped into the cool, dark sales floor. Their approach had been slow and painstaking, and to their surprise (and mild disappointment), they had not encountered any sort of dangerous traps. It looked like nobody had stepped foot inside the shop all day - the lights were off, the door was locked, and the normally full coffee pot set on a table beside the door was empty. The lock had been a trivial matter to deal with - as nervous as she was about entering the shop, Tanya had no qualms about giving the door a stern whack with an open palm - the sheer force of her blow cracked the wooden door and pulverized the lock.

  While their eyes adjusted to the darkness of the quiet store, Adam instinctively reached out and flipped the light switch on. The lights were so bright that they nearly blinded everyone; all of the group st
aggered around disoriented while they tried to adjust to the brilliant light. When their eyes finally adjusted to the light, they beheld the store in wonder. It was apparently untouched by the hordes of the undead outside, and offered some semblance of hope against the onslaught. The walls of the store were lined with weapons of all imaginable sizes and types; massive hunting rifles stood alongside tiny pistols and swords. Shelves filled the sales floor area, loaded up with tents, hunting vests, camping stoves, and more. They spread out, each picking various weapons off the wall racks and getting a feel for them. Chris settled on a hunting rifle with a massive scope attached. Adam lifted a pump-action shotgun from the wall of weapons, hefting it with a barely-suppressed grin. Jason settled on a small revolver, while Tanya found a pair of collapsible metal batons that she seemed to like. Jeremy was less decisive, pacing back and forth in front of one wall of guns until he finally picked up a massive semiautomatic pistol from the wall. He hefted it, squinted down its sights, and seemed satisfied. He set the pistol down on a shelf, and did the same thing with five other pisols.

  "You going a little overboard there?" Chris seemed confused at the sheer amount of hardware which Jeremy was picking out. Jeremy didn't need to reply; he set his last pistol down on the shelf and closed his eyes. He concentrated, and the half-dozen pistols lifted into the air, forming a protective line in front of their master. Understanding dawned in his eyes, and Chris nodded his approval. "Carry on, then."