by Jake Bible
“That means we have to turn here and follow the detour,” Stuart said. “We need your help to spread the word. The walkies aren’t working right.”
“You need me as a messenger boy, is that it?” I asked. “The privilege is overwhelming.”
“We’re all helping too,” Stuart said as the haul truck slowly backed up then stopped so he could climb down to the street. “So stop whining.”
“I wasn’t whining-.”
“You were whining,” Elsbeth said behind me.
“Shut up,” I snapped as I looked over my shoulder at her. “You are not helping.”
Elsbeth shrugged. I turned back to the street and nodded at Stuart then eased out from between the dead kids.
“See anything we could use?” I asked as I took one last look about the condo.
“Too much orange,” Elsbeth said.
“Then we’re outta here,” I replied.
We got back out on the street and I could see several people standing about their trucks and SUVs as they chatted with Stuart, John, and Reaper. Critter was still up in the haul truck’s driver’s seat and he gave me a dismissive wave as I looked up at him.
“Tell McCormick she’s drivin’ my baby!” he yelled down at me.
“Will do!” I said.
I walked past the haul truck to Critter’s Jeep and found Dr. McCormick already in the driver’s seat.
“Yeah, I heard him,” McCormick said. “Hard not to.”
“Not arguing with ya there,” I said as I moved on to the Explorer.
“Find anything in that building?” Stella asked.
“Nah,” I said. “Other than the freaky corpse diorama. Some people get into their crafts way too much.”
She laughed and started to reply, but a shout from Buzz got my attention.
“Go see what’s up,” Stella said. “We’ll be here.”
I kissed her quickly, and then jogged down to where Buzz, Melissa, and Reaper all stood around an old Toyota 4Runner. There should have been a family known as the Wilfreds in there, but the vehicle was empty and coated in blood.
“Arterial spray,” Reaper said. “Whoever did this got inside and slit all their throats before taking them with.”
“Awesome,” I said. “Just fucking awesome.”
“We have another!” Stuart yelled from five more vehicles down.
Everyone busted ass to him and all we could do was stare when we got to the four door pickup.
“How many people were in here?” Melissa asked. “That is an insane amount of blood.”
“El,” Stuart said. “Go check the rest of the vehicles. Give a shout if you find any that are empty.”
The woman took off running, her head barely glancing into windows as she sprinted down the convoy.
“Here!” she shouted and kept going. “And here!”
“Son of a bitch,” Stuart snarled. “How the fuck can four vehicles worth of people disappear?”
Folks had started getting out of their cars and decided that shouting at us was a good idea. Soon the street was filled with pissed off survivors and we were no closer to getting any answers.
“We do not follow that sign,” Stuart said. “We go forward as fast as possible and get the fuck out of here.”
“I thought we needed to be careful?” I asked.
“That was before we lost a bunch of people in broad daylight and not a single person saw a thing!” Stuart snapped. He gave a loud whistle, but the convoy didn’t quiet down. “Hey!” Voices seemed to rise and get angrier. “HEY!”
Nothing.
“Ah, fuck it,” Stuart said as he pulled his pistol and fired into the air. “Not like the crazy fucks don’t know we’re already here.”
The gunshot did the trick and everyone shut up fast.
“Listen!” Stuart called. “We need to move the convoy back! I want at least two blocks worth of distance between us and that nightmare up there!”
“Two blocks?” I asked, and then realized what Stuart was going to do. “Oh, you’re not going to dismantle the explosives are you? You’re just going to blow the whole thing up.”
“Seems like the easiest thing to do,” Stuart said. “We blow the billboards then keep rolling through.”
“I like that plan,” John said. “Way better than me trying to disarm each body.”
The members of the convoy took a little more convincing, but we finally got everyone back into their cars, trucks, and SUVs and backed up, after we moved the empty vehicles, which was a pretty gross job since the cars were coated in blood. Joy.
Elsbeth and I stood on the sidewalk as the convoy readjusted its position, giving the haul truck enough room to backup from the billboards. Once there was about two blocks worth of clearance, Stuart and John started working on one of the recently abandoned cars so it could race towards the billboards on its own.
“You sure about this?” I asked Stuart as he walked over to Elsbeth and me. “We have no idea what is going to happen.”
“Shit’s going to blow up,” Stuart said. “We know that much.”
“Yeah, but, what I meant was…”
“Long Pork,” Elsbeth said, her voice cold and deadly. “What’s that?”
When Elsbeth used that voice, you don’t ignore it. Stuart and I turned to look at where Elsbeth was pointing. It was a small side street, way too small for the haul truck to go down since it was choked with old, abandoned cars. The big machine may have had more luck crawling over the useless vehicles than shoving them out of the way like it did on the interstate.
“I’m not seeing anything,” Stuart said.
“Me neither- Oh, wait...what is that?” I asked.
Elsbeth began to walk forward, her eyes focused on a flash of orange in one of the cars. I followed close behind, but Stuart stayed where he was. I glanced at him and he nodded for me to continue while he took his rifle from his shoulder and sighted it down the side street.
“Got ya covered,” he said.
Elsbeth reached the car with the orange and turned to look back at me, her eyes wide and angry.
“Found them,” she said.
I hurried to her and wanted to puke when I saw what was in the car.
It was one of the missing families from the convoy. Someone had dressed them in orange University of Tennessee sweatshirts and hoodies while also jamming Vols flags through their palms so it looked like they were holding them. All of that was the good part. The bad part was that their faces were carved up so they looked like they were smiling and laughing.
I can go on record and say they were not smiling and laughing when that was done to them.
“Scary,” Elsbeth said.
I can also go on record that hearing Elsbeth call something scary made my nuts want to crawl up under my lungs and hide for eternity.
She gave the mutilated bodies one last look before moving on to the next car. It held the same scene, but slightly modified. We went from car to car and the only difference was the make up of the occupants -some were families, some were “college” aged kids, some were couples- and the age of the corpses. I don’t mean how old they were when they died, but how long they had been dead. Just like in the condo, a lot of the people in the cars had been dead for a long time. Yet there wasn’t a single mess left over from decomposition.
The whole thing gave me a headache and I took a step back, took a deep breath, and looked up at the sky. It was a great day for a football game, if these people were actually alive and going to a football game instead of having been posed to look like they were.
“Oh, shit,” I said as I caught sight of several eyes looking down at us. Dead eyes. Lots of dead eyes. “El?”
She knew me well enough that she didn’t even ask, just looked where I was looking.
“That’s scary too,” she said.
Above us, positioned in all of the second and third story windows, were corpses. Every single one was dressed in orange and they all were forced into positions of cheering on the team.
Most of the heads were turned to look down the street towards the campus. I just couldn’t help myself, so I followed their gaze.
“What is that?” I asked. “Do you see banners and shit?”
“I see banners,” Elsbeth said, “but no shit.”
“Funny,” I smirked.
“There is nothing funny about any of this,” Elsbeth said as she drew both of her blades and walked towards the banners that fluttered in the wind.
We had to go a couple of blocks, which meant passing more and more cars filled with rah-rah corpses, so I thought I was ready for anything when we reached the intersection and saw what was on the banners. And what was in the intersection.
Two streets came together, Clinch and 12th, I think, and at the center of the intersection was quite possibly the most messed up thing I had ever seen in my life.
A “mob” of Vols fans was busy executing and dismembering a few unlucky Florida Gators fans. Now, by executing and dismembering, I mean they were positioned to look that way. Not a single person was still actually alive. All of them were like the corpses in the buildings and the cars, preserved and set in poses as if they were sculptures or mannequins.
Again, let me go on record and say they were not sculptures or mannequins. Well, maybe you could call them sculptures if you take a very broad artistic definition and ignore the fact that the medium used was human flesh.
“This took a lot of work,” Elsbeth said as she started to weave in and out of the scene. She covered the whole intersection while I just stood there and gaped. “Someone cared very much about this.”
She reached out and touched one of the corpses, then pulled her hand back fast.
“Sticky,” she said. “They are coated in something.”
I was going to offer a theory on what when the world about us changed in an instant.
The explosion was so huge, and so continuous, that even when I was able to get my shit together and realize I wasn’t dead, despite having been thrown at least ten yards down the street, I couldn’t get to my feet because of the constant concussions.
I curled into a ball and pressed my bruised and battered body against a brick building, hoping and praying that the building didn’t come down on me. I wanted to know where Elsbeth was, but self-preservation was the priority at that moment. It was all I could do not to just scream and scream as explosion after explosion shook me down to my bones.
Then it all ended.
I tried to uncurl, but I was beaten to the punch as several hands grabbed me and yanked me to my feet.
All I saw was orange.
Orange faces, orange hair, orange bodies.
The orange people were yelling and screaming at me as they pulled me out into the street, but I could barely hear them as my ears rang from the explosions. The careful display of Vol pride was a shambles, with corpses strewn here and there. I barely had time to register that one of the corpses was moving and fighting when I felt something go around my neck and tighten. I clawed at my throat and my fingers found a thick rope.
Oh, fuckerty fuck.
One very insistent orange face kept dominating my attention. It was a young woman that probably had been the height of co-ed pretty at one point in her life. Unfortunately, half of her face was a mess of scars that looked like burns, but it was hard to tell with all the orange face paint. She was yelling at me that I was a “fucking Gator and needed to die!” over and over as her hands tightened the noose.
Yep. It was a noose. I knew the deep shit I was in.
But, hey, lucky for me, that fighting corpse wasn’t actually a corpse, but Elsbeth taking on the rest of the psycho Vol boosters from Hell!
“Long Pork!” Elsbeth shouted as she snapped a man’s neck, tossed him aside, elbowed a woman in the throat, kicked her to the ground, then grabbed another woman by her orange painted tits and proceeded to give her a discount mastectomy.
For the record, I would prefer never to see that again.
The woman in my face turned her attention towards Elsbeth’s one person party of violence and blood, leaving the stringing up of me to whomever was standing behind me. And boy, did that person take that job seriously.
My breath was cut off as my body was lifted off the ground. I grabbed at the noose, but it was too tight and I couldn’t get my fingers between the rope and my skin. My legs involuntarily kicked beneath me as I saw black and blue spots fill my vision. I would have preferred not to be kicking, since it hurt like a mother fuck every time I moved, but apparently, a person’s legs have a mind of their own when said person is being lynched. The things you learn in life.
“Long Pork!” Elsbeth yelled.
I could hear her, but I couldn’t see her. The black and blue spots were part of the problem, but the main impediment was that my field of vision drastically changed as the space between my feet and the bloody asphalt grew wider.
Voices were cheering and singing behind me. Was I hearing Rocky Top?
Oh, right, that’s the Vols’ fight song. Or one of them. I think they have like twelve or something.
My windpipe was being crushed, Rocky Top was being sung, and Elsbeth was kicking the shit out of a mob of body painted Vols fans.
Just another afternoon in the zombie apocalypse.
Right...the zombie apocalypse.
The one thing I didn’t pick up on while we were busy checking out cars filled with posed bodies, or studying the corpse calligraphy back on those billboards, was that there were no Zs about.
Yeah, that changed quickly. Them Zs sure do dig some loud noises, and all those explosions fit that bill perfectly. Not to mention the ever sexy lure of Rocky Top being shouted at the top of a mob’s lungs.
Good times.
“Long Pork!” Elsbeth yelled. “Hold on!”
That was a good one.
“JACE!” I heard Stella scream. “JACE!”
Stella? Why did I hear her?
Then the gunfire kicked in and I realized my wife was the cavalry. Yay for spouses to the rescue!
The Rocky Top voices behind and below me quickly turned into screams of pain and anger as shot after shot was fired. I could hear them cursing my wife, and whoever else was shooting, which was great and all, but the cursing and the shooting started to sound a little long distance. It wasn’t because my ears were still totally fuckered by the explosions, but because my pulse had turned into the number one song on the Jace-head radio.
Shut up, you know what I mean.
“JACE!” Stella screamed and I could have sworn she was just below me.
Then the bellow became the right there and my legs slammed into the pavement. Hands grabbed at me and I tried to fight them off, but they wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t until I felt lips against my ear and heard Stella’s voice that I realized I was fighting the wrong hands. I would have looked her in the eyes to thank her, but my vision was still messed up from lack of oxygen and I couldn’t hold my head still long enough to focus since I was busy hacking and coughing as I struggled to get air past my crushed windpipe.
“El, let’s go!” Charlie yelled. “Kill that one and move!”
“Killing!” Elsbeth replied.
“Greta!” Stella shouted. “On the left!”
“Fuck the left!” Greta shouted back. “Look at the right!”
“Shit!”
“I’m guessing we’re boxed in?” I rasped.
“Hush,” Stella said into my ear. “Don’t try to talk and don’t try to help. Just keep your feet moving.”
“I can do that,” I replied, although I doubt she heard me since the world was nothing but screams, moans, and more explosions.
“Up there!” Charlie yelled just before gunfire erupted right by me. If I wasn’t deaf before, I sure as fuck was after that.
My family was shouting and Elsbeth was war crying, but for some reason, through it all, I could hear the Zs. Their constant moans and hisses, as they got closer and closer to us. From the sound of it, that I could hear, there was a whole fuck
ton of them. It had the feel of a herd more than a horde. Fine line once you get into those numbers, I know, but I’d prefer a hundred Zs over a thousand Zs any day.
Although, when I think of it, I’m not sure we’ve ever defined the exact numbers it takes to go from horde to herd. Maybe a horde should be anything in double digits and a herd should be anything above that. Except I wouldn’t call twenty Zs a horde. That’s more like a large group.
Shit like that really should be quantified at some point.
“Drop!” Greta yelled and I felt myself being yanked to the ground. Gunfire exploded over us and I cried out as a hot cartridge singed my neck.
My eyesight had started to clear as Stella got me to my feet and for the first time I could really see the shit creek we’d fallen into.
Zs. So many Zs in front of us.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw the orange crazies fighting off a horde that had fallen on them in the intersection. I think someone was sleeping on the job instead of keeping an eye out for the Away team. Although, more than likely, those Zs were locals, so they probably got to sit in the home section.
“In here,” Elsbeth said as she kicked in a door on our right and pulled Greta and Charlie inside what looked like used to be an old diner.
The kids booked it inside and immediately started scouting the place for Zs and/or orange crazies.
“Clear!” Greta yelled as she came out of a back hallway.
“Clear here too!” Charlie said too as he came through the double doors that led to the kitchen, “and there’s food and water.”
“Good,” Stella said as she helped me take a seat in a booth that was more rips and shredded leather than an actual seat. But fuck if I cared. “Charlie, come sit your ass down by your father.”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Charlie whined, but I could see on his face he wasn’t. I knew the look of pain.
“Sit,” Stella and Elsbeth said at the same time.
“Whatever,” Charlie complained as he plopped into the booth with me. He had a backpack on and he tried to take it off without wincing, but he totally failed.
“Here,” Greta said and handed him her backpack as well as Stella’s.
Greta, Stella and Elsbeth shoved furniture up against the front door, and then slowly, carefully backed towards us as the Zs started lumbering past. Everyone held their breath, which wasn’t hard for me since I could barely catch it, and waited for the last Z to shamble its undead ass out of sight.
