They lived in a bi-level and the garage was adjacent to his room. If they didn’t have the classic rock station cranked up too loud, he could hear them talking. Late at night when he should have been asleep long ago and he knew they were a whole bunch of beers into it, he would hear them telling stories. About shooting people, about getting shot. About friends who had died. When they didn’t think anyone but themselves could hear, they talked about some really horrible stuff. Jessie had heard them talk about killing women. About a guy who got killed by a little kid asking for candy. About killing people you thought were going to kill you and then finding out they were just farmers carrying shovels.
Sometimes he had heard men crying, apologizing to long dead people for the things they’d done or things they hadn’t done but should have. Once he thought it was his dad sobbing, talking about getting everyone on his team killed but he’d been half dozing. It must’ve been one of the other guys because his dad didn’t cry. It was a little ironic, these guys riding Harleys and wearing leathers and looking like they’d kill your mamma for a quarter were some of the nicest guys he’d met.
Even when he was little and was probably pestering them to death, they never yelled at him to go play and leave them alone. Those guys were serious badasses. It was almost like they had done so much violence in their lives, they went out of their way to avoid it now.
But they weren’t sheep. They hid their inner monsters well but they were there there, just below the surface ready to come back out if needed. Now he had to decide if he was like them and would do whatever it took to survive. If he had a monster inside. A lot of them had nightmares and regrets later but they were alive to have them. He glanced down over the branch, at the mass below him. There was no second guessing required.
He wouldn’t be mistakenly killing someone who just happened to get in the way. Every one of them was trying to kill him. To rip him limb from limb with their bare hands. Did he have it in him? Could he kill them?
Yes, he thought he could. No problem.
Would it give him nightmares?
Maybe. But at least he’d be alive to have them.
He had an idea.
When he looked up again, Sheila was hissing at him. “Hello! Hey! Did you fall asleep? Doug’s getting ready to go!”
He shook his head and watched Doug as he started his final climb to the top, leaned over towards the lake and held on. Gary and Sheila tried yelling the best they could, maybe distract the creatures around his tree, but they only had eyes for him. When he started on the downward rush, picking up speed as he plummeted towards the water, they splashed into the lake after him, ignoring everything else.
Doug had been near the very top of the tree, swaying dangerously on the tiny branches that far up. He had hoped to ride it gracefully to the water but when he was still a good thirty feet in the air, it snapped off and he flailed the rest of the way down, trying not to land on his back and hoping the water was deep enough he didn’t bury himself in the mud.
Aside from the drawn out “Ohhhhh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!” that was cut off abruptly when he hit the surface with a resounding splash, it was an uneventful fall from the top of a giant tree. They waited anxiously for him to pop back up, not knowing if he’d been grabbed underwater. The dozens of undead that ran out after the meal falling from the sky were gone from view, none of them floating but they could see dark swirls of muddy water bubbling to the surface that made their path clear.
When he came back up, sucking air, he was a long way from where he went in and stroking furiously towards the floating dock.
He made it. It took him two tries to pull himself onto it and once he did, he just lay there panting, one arm raised with a thumb up in the air.
They all cheered. The prospects of surviving this had just gotten better. Jessie looked up his tree until he saw what he needed then started climbing. He would do what it took. He would be a survivor. He would not be one of the sheep. Even if Doug came back with a boat, he’d never get near enough to shore without being swamped by those things. He should have thought of this two days ago, he chastised himself. Maybe he wasn’t ready then. His inner monster had still been sleeping.
Maybe he wasn’t desperate enough then and his mind just wouldn’t even allow the thoughts to form. But he was now. He was tired, thirsty, ate up with mosquitoes and getting pissed off. He let the anger build as he snapped off a half dozen dead branches a little smaller than his forearm and five or six feet long. He tried to get them to snap to a point, like a spear. They wanted to play? He was going to teach them a new game. Poke a hole in the zombie's head until it was dead. Step right up, Ladies and Gentlemen. Everyone can play. Winner gets to live, loser gets to die.
He made his way back down to a big branch just a few feet out of their reach and lay out on it, making sure his feet could curl around something solid to help hold him in place. He wove the extra spears into leafy branches so they wouldn’t fall then readied himself, still feeding the anger to get into a killing frame of mind.
He heard Sheila and Gary hoarsely yelling at him, asking him what he was doing, but he ignored them. Gary couldn’t. Sheila wouldn’t. It was up to him. He looked down, straight into Porsche’s black eyes. She was three days dead, her skin gone grayish, old blood around her mouth and chin, her hair matted and tangled. She was wearing that Hello Kitty shirt he liked, the one that was about three sizes too small and showed off her lovely assets. It was torn and dirty. Blood stained. Her assets were sagging, looking empty somehow and not so lovely anymore.
She was a mess, gnashing her teeth and jumping for him, broken fingernails clawing just feet below where he lay. He wondered if there was any of HER left inside of the monster trying to kill him. Did she know what she was doing and couldn’t help herself? Did she care that it was him? Did she remember those stolen kisses and all the times they’d shared lunch? If he tried, could he bring her back from what she is to what she was?
He closed his eyes, another one his old man’s stupid sayings coming into his head. “A wolf doesn’t concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.”
When he opened his eyes, it wasn’t to see friends and acquaintances. He wasn’t looking through the glass, darkly. He was seeing clearly, through the eyes of a wolf. His inner monster was awake and angry. The wolf in his head was pacing, wanting to be freed. He drove the spear down hard, through her eye and directly into her squirming brain. She fell in a heap and was quickly replaced by his 4th-period teacher.
He used her fallen body to get another foot closer, leaping and clawing for flesh. Jessie shoved the spear into his open mouth and through his spine then jerked it back to drive it into the next screaming zombie to reach for him. He plunged it in and out, blood and brains making it slick. They kept coming and he kept stabbing. The bodies piled higher. He thrust his homemade spear into eyes, hearing them squelch.
Through soft noses hearing the cartilage break as he drove it deep into their brains. When the stick snapped, he reached for the next one and kept on killing. When it was so coated with his classmate’s blood that it pulled out of his hands, he grabbed a third. He was a machine. Thrust. Kill. Repeat. Thrust. Kill. Repeat. Thrust. Kill. Repeat.
It became a mantra and the monster inside screamed at the monsters below. His arms were covered in blood. Gore splattered his face. He raged at them with uncontained fury. Punished them for making him become something less than human. He climbed a branch higher as they got closer, standing on the scores of dead.
He didn’t think beyond the immediate, didn’t see the piles of corpses stacking up and the undead faces looming ever closer to his. Didn’t see the horrified looks of Sheila and Gary as he lay waste to the undead. Didn’t hear his own snarls and guttural curses. Didn’t feel his seared and parched throat, the blood trickling down his face from cracked and bleeding lips.
This had to be done. They died or he died. He couldn’t spend another day trapped in a tree. He stabbed and swung until his arms were exhausted and
trembling then stabbed and swung some more. He cursed and spat at them. He let the bodies pile up and the things get closer so he wouldn’t have to reach so far to kill them. He hated them with every fiber of his being.
Every time he thought he was nearly done with the butchery, more would run over from Gary or Sheila’s tree. How many had he killed? Forty? Fifty? He couldn’t keep it up. If he only had something to drink, his mind kept telling him. Then he could carry on for a few more minutes. His throat was raw from sucking in air through the dry passageway to his lungs and he kept spitting out blood.
It felt like his tongue was so swollen it would cut off his windpipe but he kept swinging and stabbing. Always the face. Sometimes clean thrusts into the brain, sometimes glancing blows that shattered teeth and ripped off cheeks or lips. The pile of bodies got so high, they were using it to scrabble up into his tree and leap for him. They didn’t have the coordination to hang on to a branch or watch where they were stepping and as soon as they managed to get near him, he would swing and they would slip and tumble back down.
Sometimes not moving again as they landed on their heads, sometimes never being able to climb again with their broken legs and arms.
Jessie kept stabbing. A berserker frenzy driving him beyond caring about exhaustion and pain. A Crusader swinging his sword at unending masses of heathens. A Viking striking ceaselessly with his battle axe.
A Knight slaying his way through the armies of his enemy. His hands were raw and blistered and bleeding from the constant shoving motions on the rough spears. His face was on fire from a deep gash spouting blood. He had to stop, to climb a little farther up and rest but they wouldn’t let him. They kept coming and the pyre kept getting higher. Their screams never stopped and he answered them with a hoarse roar, blood spraying from his raw throat. They thought they were so close to having him, they could taste his blood as it splashed from his snarling mouth and down on their faces.
He stabbed and stabbed and stabbed, the pointed end of his stick brutal in its simplicity. Impale. Withdraw. Find another face. Impale. Withdraw. Find another face. He continued until he couldn’t anymore then continued anyway. They threw themselves at him and he stacked their bodies on a gory alter of death.
When the horde finally stopped coming at him he was surprised and disappointed that there was nothing left to kill. He let his last stick be pulled out of his bleeding hands and it fell to the ground some twenty feet below, stuck in the eye socket of Cody from 3rd period. He was done. His chest heaved. His heart raced. Sweat poured from him and blood dripped from his flayed open cheek. He stared listlessly at the few that remained as they tried to climb the pile of bodies and get to him.
They were all broken. All had made multiple attempts to lunge at him and had fallen flailing to the ground. Legs were dragging at odd angles, shattered arms refused to pull them up the pyramid of dead.
Jessie leaned back against the trunk, balanced on a wide branch. The monster in him was retreating, its taste for destruction had been sated. If one of them made it up to him now, he didn’t think he would even have the strength to open his eyes, let alone try to fight it off. He was through. Maybe if he could get his arms to stop shaking, get a little feeling back in his legs, he might try to run down the mound and into the water.
But then what? He knew he didn’t have enough left in him to make it to the swimming dock. It was too far. He wasn’t thinking clearly, his brain in a fog. He needed to take a short breather.
He rested. His ravaged hands throbbed with every heartbeat. His face hurt from where it had been torn open. He didn’t even know how it happened. One of them rake him with their claws? Caught it on a branch? Stabbed himself in the frenzy? He was too weary to care. Too weary to move.
Jessie
Day 3
Home at last
Jessie awoke with a start. Had he really dozed off? He looked down towards the ground, at the thunking sound he was hearing and was surprised to see Doug with a baseball bat crushing heads of the all the broken zombies that were clawing their way towards him. He couldn’t believe it. Doug was back and he had a Jon boat pulled up on the shore. He was cleaning up the mess that Jessie had started. When had all this happened? He thought he’d only closed his eyes for a few seconds.
Jessie half tumbled, half climbed down the tree and slid down the bloody pile of his classmates and headed directly into the water, splashing out a few feet then diving in head first, trying to drink the whole lake. He drank until he came up for air and then vomited it all back out again. He didn’t care, he dove back under, swam a few yards and started drinking again. Dirty pond water never tasted so good.
Then he remembered the zeds that had followed Doug into the lake and disappeared under its murky surface. Crap. Did something just brush his ankle? He sprinted for shore as fast as he could in the waist deep water only to meet Doug and Sheila settling Gary in the boat and staring at him. They all had bottles of water and were drinking greedily from them.
Doug had blood splatters on his face from the gruesome task he had just finished. They all looked a little freaked out at what had just happened. And they wouldn’t stop staring at him. Jessie’s ripped cheek and hands were still bleeding, dripping on the churned up earth. He reached over to the water and tried to rinse them off but they remained bloody and dripping.
“We need to go,” Gary said, finally looking away from Jessie and at the huge pyramid of undead that towered ten or fifteen feet tall.
They started pushing the boat back out into deeper water.
Jessie hustled over and climbed in, grabbing one of the paddles and getting some distance between them and the shoreline. When they were far enough away, he grabbed one of the bottles of mountain spring water from the half dozen still floating in the warm water of the cooler. He chugged it down, still trying to hydrate himself, not caring that it smelled of fish. Everyone was quiet, still sneaking glances at him and each other. Doug lowered the trolling motor down into the water and flipped it on. “Which house is yours?” he asked, spinning the little boat away from the bloody carnage of what used to be their friends and teachers and classmates.
Jessie pointed across the lake at a bi-level house about a half mile away, set a few hundred yards up a hillside from the lakeshore.
As they got closer, the problems defending the house against a horde of the undead became apparent. The whole top floor was all glass fronted, affording a view of the lake. The deck was easily accessible with the wide stairs leading up to it from the dock area.
“I don’t know, Jester,” Gary said, finally breaking the uncomfortable silence. “If those things get up on the deck, not much stopping them from busting through the windows.”
“Yeah, but if we knock the deck down, they can’t get up to them,” Jessie said. “And on the other side of the house, it’s all garage and there’s only one window in the kitchen. We can nail some plywood or something up over it. The entry door is pretty stout so it should hold if we brace it.”
“You have any wood there?” Sheila asked. She was also trying to forget what she had just seen. For a minute, she had been more afraid of Jessie than she had of the zombies. He had been a complete maniac. Screaming and hurtling ugly curses like a man possessed. Coated in blood and brains and he just kept stabbing and killing and snarling like a rabid animal. He had killed about a hundred people just now. Not people. Zombies, she corrected herself.
“I know there are some sheets of plywood in the garage, up in the rafters,” Jessie said, joining in with the chatter and trying to put the last three days behind him. “The old man had me help him put some up there a while back so he could store car parts. Fenders and stuff for that old rust bucket he’s working on.”
“I am soooo hungry,” Sheila said, rubbing her stomach and bringing all their minds back around to their bellies. They were already forgetting the nightmare, or at least pretending to. “I hope there’s loads of food that hasn’t gone bad.”
Jessie finished his water an
d started scanning the shore for danger.
“No worries there,” he said. “There’s a ton of canned stuff in the basement. My parents weren’t exactly survivalist types, but the old man would always go to Sam’s Club and buy everything by the case.”
As they neared the dock, Jessie told them all to wait while he went up the hill and got the house unlocked. He grabbed the baseball bat with his bleeding hands, wincing a little but ignoring it. He patted his pocket, making sure the keyring was still there.
It was.
“I’ll give you an all clear if I don’t run into any trouble.”
He didn’t.
Within five minutes, they were all locked inside the house raiding the cupboards and eating everything from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to cold cans of soup. Jessie wrapped his hands in dishtowels so he would quit splattering blood everywhere and Sheila taped his cheek back together with duct tape. They would fix it better after they ate, they said.
They talked about proper ways to secure the house as they stuffed themselves and had every intention of doing it but once they started washing days of sweat and blood and dirt off of themselves and sat down on the comfortable recliners and couches, they were through. Within minutes they were asleep, the last three days of panic, terror and pain sliding off of them as they each dropped off into a heavy and much-needed slumber.
Lacy
10th Floor
Day 4
Morning found Lacy in her office, using the small paring knife from the kitchen to cut the carpet into strips. She brought a bunch of them into the break area as everyone was nervously drinking what may be their last cups of coffee.
Zombie Road (Book 1): Convoy of Carnage Page 25
