Zombie Road Trip

by Miller, T. Alex

  And Tim wondered if he’d ever lie in a bed again.

  Chapter 8. The Scrum

  With full bellies, Tim and Marilyn sat under the big tree and watched their incredibly fucked-up world go by. Most of the leaves had already fallen, the ground was cold and sodden and Marilyn had gore all down her chest — but it was still nice to sit under a tree with a girl. Tim, for his part, would be damned if he was going to spend all his time either standing or shuffling about like the other Zees; Marilyn seemed inclined to take his lead. As they sat, they watched the activity at the little house ebb and flow (or Tim watched; Marilyn was fixedly studying the bark patterns on the tree). Occasionally, another interested Zee would loom into view, grunting and scuffling past like someone late to the ballgame. Tim imagined there wasn’t much left of Thong and Belly, and he tried to grasp in his mind what that meant; why it mattered — or if it even did. Technically, in the old world at least, it was a double murder — and a particularly gruesome one at that. In these times, it was simply the way things were, and there weren’t any cops or courts around to say otherwise. What was the big deal about murder? Someone has a reason for another person to be dead, and someone stops living — and caring about whether they were alive or dead. The problem, as Tim saw it now, was before the murder occurred; afterwards, the issues of concern to the victim were rendered moot. And no amount of punishment would change what was essentially the ultimate verdict.

  But surely Tim’s own survival mattered to him, and for whatever reason he’d decided Marilyn’s fate was important as well. The meaning of life floated to the surface of his mind, like a plastic bottle suddenly released from the bottom of a lake. As a card-carrying member of the flesh-eating undead, existence — such as it was — generally and simply meant finding the next meal. And that was just to gain power to seek out the next meal. And was that so much different than anyone or anything else on the planet? It was just their choice of diet and lack of table manners that made the Zees so reprehensible.

  That got Tim thinking about volume, and he had another instance of a random fact from the past popping onto his path – like finding sand dollars on the beach: An African elephant forages for 400 pounds of stuff a day to keep going. He didn’t know how accurate that might be, but there it was: a kernel of knowledge, a latent shard of information from his squealer days. So the question for him was how much human flesh did the average Zee need to keep going?

  He truly was a special zombie, and perhaps growing more special by the day. Could it be, he wondered, that he was getting “better” — less Zee-like? If so, would eating more or less squealer help him progress? There, sitting under the bare tree in the rain with his zombie girlfirne, Tim the zombie decided to try to lay off eating live humans so much.

  Just enough to get by, no mas.

  It was not necessary to have breakfast, lunch and dinner (or snacks); one decent draught of blood and a few hunks of flesh every other day or so seemed to suffice. Kept them going. Tim had also discovered that it was a good idea to consume water when it could be found. Why, that very morning, he and Marilyn had stretched out supine in front of an algae-filled pond and slaked what had turned out to be a tremendous thirst. (Marilyn still had a trail of dried pond scum on her chin, mixed in with the gore from Belly.) Other Zees walked right by as they drank, and upon further observation Tim noted that he’d only occasionally seen another of their kind drink. He had, however, begun to look more closely at fallen Zees, trying to get a handle on what had killed them, eventually.

  Sure, some had been whacked by squealers, and it was easy to see their handiwork: the small entry wound and gaping exit; the occasional de-cap; the burned remnant; the stove-in cranium. (Squealers out of ammo were having to resort to close work with bats, pieces of rebar and even small household appliances. Tim had seen one squealer take out half a dozen Zees with a blender, which he wielded as a sort of nunchaku and used to great effectiveness … until the cord broke and he was torn to pieces in less time than it would take to whip up a fruit smoothie.)

  But by far the most frequent example of Zee downfall Tim observed was simple expiration: They would fall in their tracks, their sunken frames belying starvation while their pinched, desiccated faces and drawn-back lips confirmed Tim’s theory: The average Zee was too stupid to know to drink; they only knew about eating.

  Silly Zees.

  It was raining harder now, and Tim looked over at Marilyn as if to say “Wanna get a room?” She looked bad – quite bad indeed. Although she’d eaten, the rain had caused all the leftover zombie makeup from the party to streak down her face. And this was on top of her natural zombie pallor. Far from the almost-hot Zee he’d first encountered at the farmhouse, Marilyn was now one of the scarier looking ones around. It was hanging out with him, he imagined, that had made her face more complex, more human, than it’d been before. Although still dumb as a post, doing things like drinking and relaxing had perhaps reignited some part of her ruined gray matter – enough to make her think, if ever so slightly, that there was a world beyond this, or that pulling the balls off a live man and eating them in front of him was, maybe, bad. Wrong. A sin of the first order.

  The sun, wherever it was behind the rain clouds, eventually went down, but Tim and Marilyn continued to sit under their tree. The rain tapered off and the gloom descended, and Marilyn finally stopped looking at the tree bark and settled her gaze on something in the distance. Tim had noticed Marilyn – and other Zees – were capable of a sort of “pause” mode, where they rested until something — usually hunger or squealers approaching — drove them into motion again. He’d been able to do the same thing earlier, but now the trick evaded Tim, as did sleep. His “rest” periods were ones where he closed his eyes and stood by helplessly as his mind left the station, freely wandering over the wrecked landscape both physical and emotional – an unmoored, rudderless vessel as terrifying as it was fascinating.

  Under the tree, he conjured back what he’d been seeing in the girl’s room. Those people, ones who’d probably meant something to him and, perhaps, would again if he were actually on the road to recovery. She had long, darker hair, it was revealed to him finally, and two smaller people with him – children, girls. And there were several other people; people with demands they were making of him, even as he sat under this tree not knowing who they were. Were they behind the “south” thing – that goal he had in mind? He felt they were. And he also felt that, with more time, these pieces would coalesce into a more recognizable picture, something tangible enough that he could act upon them. Find these people, go south, do the thing, whatever it was.

  The other part of his rest periods now was a measure of anxiety that was growing daily. Just days ago, he’d still thought of the world full of flesh-eating zombies in which he lived as a curious but familiar place where he had an established niche. Now, as he peered into the mist-shrouded pre-dawn landscape – occasionally punctuated by far-off cries and moans or by undead chunking past – he felt just a little bit frightened. It was, he was sure, the latent squealer in him that feared this place, and he did his best to beat it down. Employing the voice and tone of a Marine drill sergeant, Tim instructed his brain to tell him this:

  Stick to the facts, soldier! You are a fucking zombie with one fucking mission: to chase down and eat live humans! Do not let other shit get in the way of that goal.

  In the morning, Marilyn’s ass was frozen to the ground.

  The rain had finally stopped, but dawn still revealed no sun, the world wrapped in a cloud. Tim had allowed himself to sit still for so long that his eyelids were actually frozen shut, and it took some doing to activate them again. As he struggled to his feet, the thin scrim of ice that covered his entire body fell off in tiny tinkles, and he stood over Marilyn as she tried to get up. Even holding onto his hand, Tim pulling with his meager strength, wasn’t enough to free her, so he stood off to the side, placed his foot on her shoulder and gave her a good shove. She fell over, got on all fours and barfed up s
ome of yesterday’s dinner. Tim looked away, annoyed. Now she was going to be all hungry again.

  Still partly frozen, Tim knew the best thing for them was to move. South, if possible, if he could find some indication of what that might be. There were no other Zees about, or people that he could see. Part of him recognized the utter creepiness of the scene while his practical side recognized that the shroud of fog kept them invisible from any snipers looking for an early-morning kill.

  It was quiet, only the sound of their shuffling feet breaking the silence. They appeared to be in a field or a meadow, with waist-high grass or crops of some kind to wade through. Marilyn shuffled with her head down, her limp more pronounced from the cold and, perhaps, yesterday’s activity. Her ass had to hurt, Tim knew, not just from being chewed off but being frozen as well. But he also knew Zee pain was more of a deadened distraction than a sharp feeling. As he walked, he thought about his own wounds: his partially shot-off ear, the gunshot wounds in his chest and neck, the slug he’d taken in the shoulder and the sliced-open cheek from one of the My Little Pony plates hurled at him by Thong & Belly. The bullet in the shoulder must’ve lodged in flesh; he didn’t feel like he had a broken bone or anything serious going on in there. “Serious,” he knew, being a relative term: He should be dead. Or more dead, at any rate. The ear, he could live without. Some old Hemingway line floated into his here-and-now, and he tried some tough love on himself.

  You lose an ear, you lose an ear. There’s worse things than lose an ear.

  Hell, look at Marilyn – ass totally chewed off, face all fucked up from getting hit by a truck. She ain’t complaining. Buck up, fuckface.

  As the sun started to burn off the morning fog, Tim saw more houses coming into view, and he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to head toward them or away from them. If they went toward them, there was always the chance of fresh meat (and fresh danger), not to mention the opportunity to look for “south” clues. Steering clear had its appeal, though: Ambling along with just Marilyn and no other distractions held its charm.

  He looked over at Marilyn to see what she “thought.” Noticing his gaze, she looked up at him and he couldn’t help but think she could use a rest. Maybe they could even get inside a home, sit on a couch or something. He moved slightly ahead of her and set a course for another small house, this one at the end of a row of houses that looked more or less the same. As they got closer, the usual signs of Zee-squealer encounters were evident everywhere, although the lack of much in the way of leftovers told Tim the Team 4 Zees had already been through here and cleared the kill zones of anything edible.

  “Quiet,” Tim said, aloud and in a slurred voice that instantly reminded him of the retarded kid Charlie from the neighborhood where he grew up.

  Marilyn turned slowly and looked at him as Tim stood, shocked, his hand reaching up to his mouth, fingers touching his lips – amazed at what he’d just done. Trying to downplay his feat (and suddenly wary of Marilyn as the gulf between them widened), he moved forward, gesturing with his hands for her to follow.

  The neighborhood, it turned out, was not as quiet as he’d thought. Turning the corner of the house, they heard the unmistakable sounds of a feeding frenzy coming from up the street somewhere. Marilyn didn’t hesitate, breaking instantly into what for her was high gear: a spastic shuffling that caused her remaining fake tit to break free and flop around her neck like the scarf of a WWI flying ace. Tim followed reluctantly as she passed through the gates of a small park with a set of brightly colored plastic playground equipment. Under a thing meant to look like some kind of ship was a gaggle of Zees and what looked to be five or six separate, fresh kills. Another group was massing in and around a school bus parked nearby.

  Marilyn worked the periphery of the scrum for scraps while Tim looked for answers. What were these squealers doing out here, in a neighborhood that’d already been wiped out? In a moment, he saw it: A flung-open basement door about 200 feet from the park with another couple of kills between it and the playground. The squealers were in touch with the people on the bus and thought they had their ride out of this place. But a couple of torched vehicles had blocked off the road, so the closest the bus could get was … there. Tim could play it back easily enough from here: The door unbarred after weeks of defense, the mad dash across the road and playground to the sanctuary of the bus – and the fucking Zees coming out of nowhere, en masse, to nip the escape in the bud.

  Tim was mildly impressed. Yes, the Zees were fatally and aggressively stupid on many things, but when it come to waiting out squealers and being in the right place at the right time, they had some kind of sixth sense. He couldn’t help but wonder, though, if any of them – like him – were smart and getting smarter. He felt a twinge of jealousy – the one-eyed man in a land of the blind afraid to discover … another one-eyed man.

  But who was it? And did he (or, OK, she) even exist? He peered into the feeding scrum and saw no stand-outs, no superior-looking Zee hanging back from the crowd, perhaps casually munching on a kidney as he enjoyed the fruits of his planning.

  There was Marilyn, sitting at the end of a plastic slide with what looked like a bit of foot. The sight of it all made Tim feel hungry, despite the previous day’s gorge-fest.

  Maybe I could have a little something …

  Tim knew from experience the best way to penetrate a scrum was just barge in, all sharp elbows, hissing and gnashing teeth. He definitely had a late-to-the-party feel, though, and this group of Zees was so quiet, he felt the need to approach more cautiously. Getting close, he could see the kill had advanced to its later stages. The bodies were no longer recognizable, just various pieces disappearing into the slavering maws of the killers. As casually as he could, he sidled up and reached an arm in, grabbing in the general direction of the kill through the mass of stinking Zee bodies. First, his fingers closed around a handful of wood chips, but moving to the left, his fingers found something hard and slick: maybe a bit of bone with, hopefully, some flesh still attached.

  As he started to pull his prize to him, one of the Zees suddenly turned, grabbed his arm and looked at him with a strange expression of recognition. If he could’ve talked, Tim imagined he might have said, “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  Instead, the Zee — an angry-looking teenager in a tattered football jersey — brought Tim’s arm to his mouth and took a bite out of his forearm.

  Tim jumped back, dropped his prize and stared as the teen Zee thoughtfully chewed the piece off Tim’s arm. He looked like a guy at a wine tasting, swirling the taste in his mouth and about to make some ridiculous pronouncement — like “nice finish.”

  Tim suddenly felt every wound, every piece of lead, every fucked-up part of his body surging outward — a manifestation of some primal anxiety he couldn’t name. If this Zee found his flesh palatable, it could spell a lot of trouble. If not, then Tim could continue to move about in the world of Zees.

  With a grunt, the teen zombie spat out his bit of Tim after a few chews and went back to the pile. Confused and disgusted and even slightly hurt at the rejection, Tim lurched over to Marilyn and nudged her with his foot.

  Let’s go honey. Party’s over.

  Tim didn’t know how much time he had left.

  Chapter 9. Rain

  Marilyn gave a perfunctory hiss and yielded to Tim’s urge to leave. She just took her meal to go, gnawing at the ankle with grating teeth-on-bone sounds. They were only a few hundred feet away from the playground scrum when the first shots rang out. Tim and Marilyn stopped and, from the safety of a clump of trees, watched the party they were just attending be decimated by a group of guys in yet another Dodge Ram. They blasted onto the playground and dispatched the feasting Zees in a matter of seconds with automatic weapons. Tim watched as the teen who’d sampled his arm had his head separated from his body by a burst of machine-gun fire.

  Impressive.

  These guys weren’t military, but they looked like old hands: professional zombie whackers
with plenty of firepower and nothing but time on their hands. Marilyn fretted at the Zee carnage, wavering from side to side with plaintive moans and, consequently, drawing attention their way. The Zee killers were double-tapping the forms on the ground; putting one last round in each head to ensure the job was done.

  But one of them was now looking in their direction — and pointing. Saying something in Portuguese. With a grunt and a shoulder bump, Tim let Marilyn know they had to leave, and with Tim in the lead they lurch-staggered as fast as they could in between two houses. Tim held up his hand in front of Marilyn to stop, and looked around for somewhere to hide. No open doors beckoned. No, wait: There was one across the street. A screen door held partially open by something dead.

  The sound of the Zee killers’ truck grew now louder as Tim and Marilyn made their way across the street toward the house. Up the stairs, over the dead Zee in the doorway and into a living room just as the truck roars up the street.

  They’ll either come in here and find us … or not.

  Tim plopped on the couch, pulling Marilyn down with him. They sat still and listened as the truck went up and down the street, some of the men walking, shooting randomly, kicking at doors. Yelling. Tim listens to see if he can understand anything; to see if he’s learned Portuguese. A few things sound familiar, although he can’t place their meaning. Again that gap: He could form words in his mind, but somewhere between there and his ears, the mechanism for understanding speech was gone. Then how did he manage to utter that one word earlier? Did that mean it was growing back, that he just needed more time? Or was it just mouthing something he’d heard or remembered, like a mynah bird?

  As the sounds of the Zee killers faded, Tim closed his eyes and leaned into Marilyn. Safe for now, whatever that meant. The idea of self-preservation seemed vaguely ludicrous. What, indeed, was there to live for? Or to go around like this for? How, though, were Tim and Marilyn any different — better or worse — than those hunting them? Whatever the cause of all this, it certainly wasn’t their fault. Was it too much to ask the squealers for a little help, some understanding, possibly even a cure? Maybe the Zees could be rounded up, put in a zoo-like place and observed as curiosities. In cages. But what could they be fed to keep them alive if not live humans?