Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  “Get him off,” Charles sobbed. “Get… him… off, please.”

  Nilla got her shoulder into the narrow gap between the dead man’s chest and Charles’ back and heaved, pushed and pushed, tried to brace her feet against the asphalt for leverage. The armless corpse shifted but not enough—his teeth were chewing at Charles’ skin, digging in deep. Nilla grunted and heaved one last time with all her strength and somehow dislodged the ghoul. She wasted no time yanking Charles up to his feet. With her shoulder in his armpit she hurried him back toward the Toyota. Behind them the corpse staggered up to its knees.

  “Just a little further,” Nilla told Charles, her arms around his waist. He clamped both hands against his throat. His legs shook violently and she dragged him for a second until he could get under his own power again. “Just get to the car,” she told him. They were barely moving forward, inching along, Nilla’s slight frame no good at carrying Charles’ weight.

  The dead man got one foot up and started rising, only to lose his balance and tumble backwards. Nilla’s mind surged with hope. Just a little further. Just a little…

  Charles’ hand fell away from his neck and a pencil-thin jet of blood shot out ahead of him. He wheezed and choked and Nilla shoved one of her own hands against his wound. Her hand was soaked with blood instantly. It started to run down her forearm, into her shirt sleeve. She felt a visceral desire to lick the blood off her hand but she fought it down. She would not let Charles die, not now.

  The armless corpse rolled back against the pickup truck and levered himself upward on its bumper. This time he ended up on his feet. He began staggering toward them. They had a head start but the dead man stumbled forward faster than Nilla’s dragging pace.

  Nilla looked forward again—and nearly collided with the Toyota as it came screeching up to her. It bounced on its wheels as it braked to a halt. In the driver’s seat Shar looked stunned, paralyzed, her fingers white on the wheel, her face narrow and wrinkled with fear.

  Behind them the corpse had nearly closed the gap. In a few seconds he would be on them. Nilla let Charles fall across the side of the car and wrenched open the back door. She pushed him inside and jumped in on top of him. She grabbed a bundle of fast food restaurant napkins off the floor of the car—they were filthy and probably covered in germs but it didn’t matter—and stuffed them into the crook of Charles’ neck. She yanked the door closed behind her.

  The dead man stumbled up to the side of the car and lurched forward, his face slamming against the window only inches from Nilla’s nose. She fell backwards in terror as the corpse stumbled back for another strike.

  “Shar!” Nilla screamed. “Shar! Drive!”

  The teenaged girl threw the car into drive just as the armless guy slapped his face against the window a second time. Glass erupted into the car in a green cascade, tiny cubes of safety glass spilling down across Nilla and Charles, bouncing off the car’s upholstery. Nilla spun around as the car lurched forward and saw the corpse standing in the road, his face a blurred distortion of human features. As the car raced away from him he stumbled after it, unable to stop coming for them even though it was hopeless—he would never catch them now.

  There are too many of them, Archie. No, I don’t mean… there are more of them than we thought, than our, our models showed. I’m talking about your computer model, the one you… it’s like they’re multiplying, reproducing but… Yeah. That’s exactly what I mean. It’s time for Warlock Green to come out of the closet. [Telephone conversation between the Adjutant General of the Colorado National Guard and an undisclosed second party, 4/4/05]

  A hazy cobweb of vapor trails filled the big sky over Cherry Creek, scar tissue on the blue sky left behind by planes and helicopters full of refugees headed in every possible direction. The aircraft were all gone but they left their tracks behind.

  There were more infected coming up Third Avenue from the country club. Maybe two dozen. Clark gestured for the nearest squad to handle them, then spun around when someone behind him shouted “Target spotted, in that window!”

  “Somebody kill that motherfucker for me already!” Horrocks screamed, his eyes huge and white. A squad of soldiers carrying M4s broke off to assault the entrance to a copy shop with wide windows overlooking Fillmore Street. A young man in a blue apron was in there pressed up against the glass, his hands white blobs against the window, the muscles of his face completely slack. Like something stuck to the wall of an aquarium. One of his cheeks was dark with torn skin and dried blood.

  Clark backed up against the side of the HEMTT and reloaded his sidearm. It had been a long, haunting night and it just kept getting worse. He thought about countermanding the order—the infected boy wasn’t a danger to anybody stuck inside that store. It would demoralize the troops though to leave even one of the cannibals standing.

  Keeping morale alive was pretty much all Clark could hope to accomplish. For every one of the infected they cut down ten more seemed to appear out of thin air. They were making no progress at all toward their stated objectives.

  “Come on, come on, let’s not lose our operational tempo here,” Horrocks insisted.

  The soldiers were still crisp, still professional. Maybe it was only Clark who was wilting after a night of violence and cold food and no sleep. They kicked the boy away from the window and butchered him and were back to the HEMTT inside of sixty seconds. On the roof of the big truck a crew-served M249 kept them covered the whole time.

  The HEMTT was full of scared survivors, people they’d picked up along the way. Every time one of the troops discharged a weapon a collective moan of shock billowed out of the back. The sound got on Clark’s nerves—he felt guilty enough already. He didn’t need the infernal howling of the survivors to remind him he was slaughtering innocent civilians.

  “Comms,” Clark called out and a specialist with a satellite cell phone came duck-walking up to him. Keeping low, just like she’d been trained—it made it less easy for a sniper to hit her. Nobody was shooting at them in Denver but she’d had proper cover procedure drilled into her so hard it stuck. She knelt down by the side of the truck with Clark and threw him a salute. “What do we have?” he asked. “Did you get through to the Adjutant General?”

  “Sir, no, sir, nothing since the last transmission.” That had been half an hour before. A column of light armor (Hum-Vees with mounted weaponry) was supposed to come down Speer Boulevard any minute and relieve the platoon. Clark wasn’t holding his breath. The AG wasn’t responding to his calls, which couldn’t mean anything good. “Alright, get back to the vehicle,” he told her. He called for Horrocks and the sergeant appeared instantly. “It’s time to break contact. We’re holding our ground here but that’s not exactly the same as making progress. I want squad three on rear security.”

  The sergeant set about making it happen while Clark hauled himself up into the cab of the HEMTT. A laptop on the dashboard showed a GPS map of the neighborhood. It showed the country club and the Cherry Creek shopping center tinged in red. That made it denied territory, a place deemed too unsafe for soldiers. Blue was for places being actively held against the infected. Clark had to zoom out on the map to see any blue at all. The closest was a Stryker group sitting tight on a stretch of Federal Boulevard. “How old is this product?” he asked.

  “Sir, about thirty minutes,” the comms specialist replied. She was blushing under her helmet. The best data she had must have come in with the last download from command.

  “Alright,” he said, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “What is CNN saying?”

  She played with the laptop for a while, collating text reports from the news channel’s website with the map’s imaging software. When she showed it to him again the Strykers were missing and whole new districts of the city had turned red. The Epidemic was spreading, far faster than any infectious disease had a right to. And where did those Strykers go? He couldn’t find them anywhere on the map at all. Had they retreated?

  The HEMTT started up wi
th a roar and got under way. The driver kept it to a crawl—the cargo unit in back was stuffed full of survivors so the soldiers had to run alongside carrying all their equipment with them.

  The infected seemed to sense that Clark was withdrawing. The soccer fields of Congress Park were crawling with them and they stretched out bloody arms to try to grab the truck as it went past. They came out of every street the HEMTT passed, streamed out of half the buildings. The soldiers wanted to aggress on the enemy but Horrocks kept a tight rein on them—fighting would just slow them down. Clark wanted to get back to command and find out what the hell was going on before he committed to another combat effort.

  On Colfax somebody had opened up a dumpster and spread trash across half the street. It looked like some of the bags had been torn open by animals. Clark buckled and unbuckled the holster of his sidearm for something to do with his hands.

  The driver took them straight up the Esplanade, crushing the grass and bushes there in the interest of speed. “Try the AG again,” Clark told the comms specialist and she dutifully called home but got no response. Maybe the Joint Tactical Radio System was down again—it had a bad reputation. As the driver brought them into the school’s parking lot Clark leapt down from the cabin before the vehicle had even stopped.

  There was no one around.

  Nobody guarded the rear entrance. Nobody staffed the motor pool. The big TROJAN SPIRIT II signal vans on the playing fields were standing vacated and alone. Clark told Horrocks to send two squads into the school and report back at once but he already knew what they would find, and he was pretty sure he knew where the Stryker group went, too.

  They would have turned into more red dots on the screen. There was no way to save Denver, Clark realized. It just couldn’t be done. There were too many infected, and not enough bullets.

  The Pentagon is dispatching troops to help us right now—units of the 82nd Airborne Division, ah, you may have heard of them and also the 10th Mountain Division, they’re trained in high altitude work. Whether they can get here in time we don’t know… wait, what? No, we’ll stay on the air until we’re ordered to leave. Well, I don’t care, Marty. I don’t care, you can go, that’s fine. Just leave the camera running. [Denver’s 7, Emergency Bulletin 4/4/05]

  Nilla wanted to laugh, to whoop for joy at their escape. Except that in her hand the bundle of napkins was already soaking through, a spreading red stain growing in the center of the makeshift bandage.

  “Shar,” she said. The girl kept staring straight ahead. The car jounced through a pothole and Nilla’s hand flew free. Blood sloshed out of Charles’ neck. “Shar,” she said again. “Look, we need to get Charles some help now or he’s going to die.”

  Shar sped up, the mountains falling away on either side, dead and barren desert consuming the view through the windshield. The Toyota screamed with heat prostration and stripped gears. Through the broken window a gritty wind battered Nilla’s face and ruffled the napkins in her hand. There was glass everywhere but she couldn’t spare a hand to brush it away—her free hand was needed just for holding on.

  “If he dies—I know you don’t want to hear this—but if he dies on us he’s going to come back. He’s going to come back hungry.”

  WELCOME TO DEATH VALLEY. The sign whipped past them, almost too fast to read. Through the rear window Nilla saw nothing but their own plume of dust.

  “You have to accept this, Shar. There may be no way to save him. I know what I’m talking about. Would you just say something, please? Shar—if he dies, and comes back, he’ll be as dangerous as the armless guy back there. He won’t hesitate to, to attack you. Shar, can you even hear me?”

  The girl stepped on the brake and the car shuddered as it decelerated, throwing Nilla against the seat back. When it came to a complete stop dust surrounded them like a brownish fog. It came in through the shattered window and filled Nilla’s already dry mouth, making her gag.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Shar’s voice was tiny in the car, almost lost in the sound of the engine pinging and the chiming cascade of glass spilling off the backseat.

  “What was that? I don’t understand,” Nilla said.

  “I’ll take care of him. Look, I am so, so sorry.” Shar was weeping. She reached up and smeared the back of one hand across her nose. “Please, Nilla. You were really nice to me. I want you to know I feel bad about this. But I can’t—I can’t take you any further.”

  Nilla stared at the back of the girl’s head as it shook with emotion. She made no attempt to start the car back up again. Nilla understood, of course. She pushed the napkins into Charles’ wound as best she could and fastened the seat belt across both of his arms, just in case. Then she pushed open the door and stepped out onto the fractured surface of the desert. The car pulled away from her as soon as she had closed the door, Charles and Shar heading east without her. In a minute they were lost to the heat shimmers coming off the burning sand.

  Part 3

  TonguesOfFire92: I read you can send care packages of clothes, and foodstuffs if they’re in cans, or dry foods like soda crackers, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, beef jerky, you know. I’ll try to find the link, those poor starving Californians really need our help. [Christian Love: Singles Chat Room Transcript, 4/8/05]

  Ears flicking back and forth, nose up and into the night breezes, the kit fox trotted to the back of a creosote bush and pawed at the ground. Something didn’t smell right but she was hungry after a long day curled up in her den and she needed to hunt. She looked up, around, her black eyes drinking in the tattered dribs and drabs of starlight available. Far, far away from city lights this night, this moonless desert, was one of the darkest places on the surface of the earth.

  The vixen dipped her head and sniffed at the ground, at a narrow pit in the sandy soil. Grains of mica and dust spilled down into the hole as she nosed it. In an instant, far too fast for human eyes to discern, her forepaws were inside the hole, her claws sunk into the tiny body of a shrew. She hauled the animal up to her mouth and set out for the safety of her own den where she could feast at her leisure.

  Without bothering to make herself visible again Nilla reached down and scooped up the fox with her numb, chapped hands and shoved her face deep into the animal’s throat. She had bitten through the jugular vein and consumed the fox’s slight flicker of golden life before the animal could even begin to fight.

  She made a point of destroying the fox’s skull before she threw away its remains. She felt guilty enough about the bear she had consigned to a life of wandering undeath. There was no need to spread her disease any further. When she was done with her meal she sat down hard on the sand and let her brain relax, let herself become visible again. Every time in the past she had used her trick Mael Mag Och had appeared to tease her with riddles but not this time. She waited an hour but he never showed. That saddened her—she would have been glad for his company. Loneliness gnawed at Nilla, though she was hardly alone.

  For one thing she had the desert all around her. Death Valley had failed to live up to its name. It might be a dangerous place for unprepared campers but it was hardly dead: in fact it crawled with life, with animals in startling abundance. They didn’t exactly announce themselves and with normal human eyes she rarely caught sight of them. With her eyes closed, though, the desert sparkled with their energy, like a vast field of stars but far more active and mobile. She would sit and watch for hours sometimes, especially at night as the life-lights of the desert played out their endless game, chasing each other, devouring each other. Predators were big bright blotches of light that flowed toward and absorbed the smaller, dimmer sparks of prey animals. The shrubs and cacti around her flickered dimly but under the ground their massive root systems, ten times as large as the parts they showed above the ground, made a tapestry of interwoven bright radial lines and curves, a fabric with a radiant warp and a luminous weft. It was the most beautiful thing Nilla had ever seen.

  For another thing she couldn’t say she was alon
e because she was being followed. Followed and watched by the armless dead thing that had killed Charles. She had become aware of his continued presence during her first torturous afternoon in the valley, when she had walked so far and so hard she wore holes in the fabric of her too-tight jeans and her lips had split open with dehydration. The sun had started playing tricks on her early and had never let up—she saw heat shimmers in every direction that looked like pools of water rippling on the horizon, felt the shadow of every wisp of cloud on her back like a blast of icy breath.

  He stood at the top of a rise, his face distorted by glare, his ravaged body full of dark, smoky energy. She would have liked to write him off as yet another hallucination but she couldn’t. She knew he was there. She was pretty sure he had instructions to follow her, though how anyone could make a dead man do their bidding was an open question.

  He dogged her footsteps no matter how far or how fast she moved. On foot she was slightly more mobile, more agile, and with better balance, but he had longer legs. He never got any closer than five hundred feet from her but he never receded over the horizon either. As she headed east, walking night and day, stopping only to feed her body or to give her mind a momentary rest, he was never too far behind.

  She stopped looking back, eventually. His presence became a fixed thing, a necessary piece of the environment. If he had stopped or turned away she would have felt it, she knew. She ignored him the best she could and kept trudging.

  More of the same. Bushes no higher than her knee, some as low as her ankle. Soil cracked and broken by evaporation gave way to sharp-edged sand dunes gave way to rock scoured as smooth as a billiard ball by trillions of individual grains of sand, each of them rolling, tumbling, microscopic jagged edges catching on the tiny defiles in the stone, tearing and breaking, wearing the rock face smooth a nanometer at a time over eons. The world had plenty of time to rot away in quiet. She begrudged it that serenity, that quietude. It seemed she was destined to never rest again.