Zombie Road Trip

by Miller, T. Alex

  Tim had no answer for that. So far as he could tell, nothing satisfied like squealer meat – or blood. At least Tim himself wasn’t tasty enough to appeal to Zees – at least not yet. What was that all about, he wondered, that teen Zee sample bite? If he really was changing, becoming more human, would he start to smell different? Look different, maybe? He wondered at Marilyn, the sweet, hapless little Zee next to him, and whether she’d be onto him soon as well. Sinking her teeth into his neck with an apologetic look …

  It would be nice if just one thing made sense.

  Well, maybe one thing did: The desire of squealers to whack Zees before they got chomped themselves. And they presented, Tim realized, a very real threat.

  The band they’d seen were a new breed. Organized, very well armed and, most importantly, apparently not in the least bit afraid of Zees. They’d been wearing some kind of protective clothing, boots and even helmets. Not easy marks to bite, and Zees were pretty limited in their offensive options. The only way to tackle these guys would be with a much bigger crowd of Zees to overwhelm them.

  Marilyn sighed, and the mangled piece of foot she’d been holding slid from her hand and hit the ground with a clunk. Tim opened his eyes and looked at her. Still alive-ish, her eyes wide open but with that thousand-mile stare: pause mode. It started to rain, growing to a downpour that drummed mercilessly on the roof of the house. The Zee killers were gone, for now, perhaps back to their redoubt from which they would launch fresh assaults against Zees in the morning.

  By then, though, Tim knew they’d be gone. Crossing the street earlier, he’d seen in the distance what looked like a bigger road – the kind of road that might have signs of the kind he was looking for. Signs that would somehow say “south.” They would rest for a time, maybe wait out the rain.

  It took a while, though. With Marilyn in her mini-coma next to him, Tim sat most of the night with his eyes closed and his mind working its dark recesses for memories of before. There were bits that floated by that were almost tangible: childhood scenes — one time when he broke an arm, another a fight between his parents; yelling. A big, black dog with only three legs chasing him, but whether it was his dog he was playing with or a mean dog on the street, he couldn’t tell. At one point, he discovered if he focused too hard on recalling a memory, it would slip away. He could grasp more of it if he moved it to the side but still kept it in the frame while thinking of something else.

  The dog was his. The fight was real; one of many. And yes, he’d broken his collar bone, actually, falling out of a bed that was high up. A bunk bed.

  It’s all in there. You just have to dig it up.

  Nothing from recent memory, though. Nothing to tell him what happened, who we was, what south meant and who those people were he was supposed to go and see. If one of them was indeed a mate of some sort, and the little ones were his children, what good would it do to show up like this?

  “Mommy, mommy! Look, Daddy’s home. Um, sort of.”

  Hiss. Scream. Chomp. Horror.

  Somehow he needed to clean himself up before any such reunion – and curb his human flesh appetite which was, he knew, entirely incompatible with family life. With any life. Zees didn’t have a chance. Nothing they did made sense. The world they inhabited – indeed, the world they created – was as unsustainable as fossil fuel and a lot less short-lived. Sooner or later, the squealers would all be in leather pants, padded jackets and big boots, gloves and helmets. They would systematically exterminate every Zee they found without hesitation or sympathy. They would burn their bodies in big piles and stand around cracking jokes and smoking cigarettes as the smoke rose. TV cameras would cover it for a while, until such point as the exterminations and burnings became mere background activity — like trash collection.

  It bothered Tim that you could be so sick and expect no help from anyone. It was like catching the flu and a death sentence at the same time. He’s got it, so shoot to kill. The desire to get close enough to a squealer to explain his situation was becoming a real possible course of action in Tim’s mind. If only he could speak some more – more than saying “It’s quiet.” Then, he could demonstrate he wasn’t just any dumb zombie. He could feel the squealer growing inside him, even if he still looked like shit and hadn’t yet potty-trained himself.

  But sitting there on the couch next to his zombie girlfriend, trying to commune with his trapped, inner squealer, Tim was becoming more aware of one thing: With his mind’s emergence, so, too, was his body becoming more alive. And with that there was a growing increase in pain: He felt all that lead in his chest more acutely, his ear was starting to throb, the slug in his shoulder burned while a million other cuts, scrapes and abrasions sung out from all corners of his corporeal self. If his brain did regenerate and he was to join the world of the living again, he damn sure was going to need a little time in one of those … expensive places. What was it called?

  Hospital.

  The word galvanized him. Hospital wasn’t just where he needed to get some help; it was where he belonged – some part of his former life. He was sure of it. He stood abruptly (if one can call taking 45 seconds to get to your feet “abrupt”) and moved to the window. Marilyn tipped over sideways on the couch with a groan, but Tim ignored her to look outside.

  The rain was just about done. Most of what dripped in front of the window was coming off the eave, and a tired, heavily masked sun was struggling up over the horizon. Tim watched as the shadows gave way to a dull, gray dawn. There was a corpse in the yard — a woman in a dress with her legs partially devoured, her head twisted at an impossible angle and her face frozen in a terrible scream. Next to her were two dead Zees, both with large-caliber head wounds. A meal interrupted.

  But Tim took in the macabre tableau the same way he noticed the swingset and wheelbarrow in the yard, and his focus moved past the yard and over the mangled chain-link fence to something beyond. This little house was sitting on the periphery of the neighborhood, with its backyard overlooking that larger road he’d seen yesterday. Standing tall right next to the road was a sign with symbols on it. There was a big “9,” which Tim recognized as a number, and five symbols under that: “S-O-U-T-H.”

  He jerked around, walked over and kicked Marilyn in the leg a little harder than he’d meant to. Her eyes switched from glazed to evil (if tired) zombie, and they searched his.

  “It’s quiet,” he said, his voice a rasp of broken glass on concrete. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 10. The Road

  Another day, another miserable dawn. There was something about a pervasive zombie plague, Tim supposed, that brought out the worst in the weather. Fortunately, it hadn’t snowed again, but it was cold enough for frost and, when it rained later in the day, it froze on the blacktop they were walking on. Marilyn was the first to slip and fall, and Tim fell too as he tried to help her up. After several more wipeouts, Tim led them to the scrub grass and weeds on the shoulder, there to walk among the broken glass, discarded coffee cups, trucker bombs and other detritus from the busy, traveling world before. There was a mist, a low layer of fog that made everything extra creepy. Occasionally, they’d see Zees stagger out of the woods and across the road, but no squealers — aggressive or otherwise — appeared at all that first morning on 9 South.

  In places where the weeds grew too high, they were forced back out onto the road — an uncomfortably exposed place many of the Zees seemed to avoid instinctively. As expected, there was an array of crashed and burned-out cars, each with the visual remnants of some awful story: a door flung open, a smear of blood and a scattering of fabric and shoes not far away. Tim had seen many a Zee simply ingest clothing — especially lighter garments like women’s blouses or underwear — as part of the meal deal, so it wasn’t unusual to see only scraps. The shoes were pretty much always left behind, sometimes with the feet still in them (no Team 4 Zees were on hand at the time, he figured; they always took care of that kind of detail).

  Again, if he’d been making a film �
�� this road was a beautiful set. And it wasn’t just crappy old Buicks like you often see filmmakers use to keep the budget down. There were Mercedes, BMWs, Acuras, new-looking Hondas and Toyotas — most of them fucked up, bloody, burnt, crashed, totaled. And then there were some just sitting there with the doors locked, like their owners had just stopped in the middle of the highway, gotten out and walked (or, more likely, ran) away. The fact that they’d thought to click the doors locked while being chased by flesh-crazed Zees amused Tim enough that his mouth twitched and he made a slight grunting noise.

  Marilyn turned and looked at him and gave a little sniff.

  I don’t smell like dinner yet, do I, darlin? Cuz if I do, you’re going to either be on your own or taking a nap with a piece of rebar through your skull. And why do I sound like the evil ex in a bad country song when I talk to you in my mind?

  He felt bad even thinking it, but it was the truth. He may be Sam to her Frodo for now, but if what he thought was happening was really happening, there was going be a reassessment in their relationship. And after all, what good was she? She was moving slower than Tim due to what he suspected was some kind of dislocated hip from her truck accident. She looked and smelled like shit — still. Not that one can expect much in beauty from a Zee, but hell, she’d started out OK. The platinum wig would’ve helped if she still had it, even if the misaligned fake tits had thankfully gone by the boards along the way. Her white dress was so torn, muddy and bloody that it looked like she’d mopped the floor of a slaughterhouse with it. She was, in fact, dangerously close to losing the dress altogether. Most of the top part had fallen down around her waist, revealing a cheap white brassiere and a chest as flat as her pulse. The only plus was that the material from the top was now draped over her chewed ass, hiding, for the moment, the evidence of her last horrific moments as a human.

  He wondered what would happen if he just picked up his pace and started pulling away from Marilyn. Would she make noises, hustle to catch up … or just fall behind, accepting her fate as a walking corpse in a lonely world?

  Hell, he liked Marilyn well enough. She was rather like a pet – something to care for in a place where no one cared about anything. She filled some need in him, and who knows — maybe he could fuck her some day, somehow. Like if they got better and he could be reasonably well assured his dick wouldn’t fall off inside her.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a nice black Mazda, its driver door wide open and the keys still dangling in the ignition.

  It gave him an idea. Holding up his hand to Marilyn, he walked over to the car and sort of fell into the seat (knee bending of any kind was never easy). He must’ve driven these things in the past, and he waited for something to come back to him about the car’s basic operation. The keys were important, he knew, so he reached out and touched them. He jiggled them, making enough noise to cause Marilyn to rock back and forth and mumble like an agitated village idiot. Tim put his hands on the steering wheel and felt the levers at his feet.

  Yes, you push those things and turn this thing and you go.

  The part where you turn the key suddenly occurred to him, and he did it — only to hear a lame clicking from under the hood. He tried again and again and again until the clicking stopped altogether. Which was just as well: Marilyn was going ape-shit over the sound for some reason.

  Maybe she was one of those girls who really likes cars.

  Well, there were plenty of other cars on the road. He signaled to Marilyn and they continued walking. Some stretches of the highway had no cars at all; others had wrecks off to the side, in the trees or right in the middle. It took another hour before they came upon another intact vehicle with unlocked doors. Tim had noticed his hands of concrete had mellowed out some, giving him back the barest modicum of dexterity — enough to open the door of an old, brown Chevy — the kind that should’ve been wrecked — and would have been wrecked in a zombie movie.

  Anyway … door open, ass in seat, turn the key … the thing roars to life. Standing there beside the open door, Marilyn literally pissed herself, the stream running down her leg as she did her little spaz dance. Ignoring her, Tim turned his attention to the next step: making the thing go. He stomped his foot down on one of the pedals and the motor raced so loud it made Marilyn fall to the ground with her hands over her ears, screeching. He stomped the other pedal and nothing happened.

  An hour passed as Tim fiddled with all the different knobs, levers and other controls in the car. Marilyn went from peeing herself to stumbling around in the weeds looking for vertebrae to suck. When Tim finally thought to move the stick thing jutting out from behind the steering wheel and the car lurched forward, she was, of course, standing right there in front of the Chevy. She took the full weight of the vehicle in her midsection as it surged forward.

  The car stalled and Tim got out. No sign of Marilyn. He looked under the car and there she was, her head turned looking at him and the smell of burning flesh becoming pervasive as the muffler and tailpipe roasted her left side.

  “It’s quiet!” Tim said, for no reason — or perhaps as some kind of stab at reassuring her. He got back in the car and managed to start it again and move it off Marilyn. Except he moved it a bit too far: His heavy foot on the gas propelled the old Chevy several hundred yards up and off the road, where it slammed into a copse of trees. No airbags in these old things, Tim took the full windshield shot in the face and smarted as the steering column slammed his chest. It took some doing to climb out of the wrecked car and make his way back to Marilyn, but he did. She’d managed to get upright and was leaning against an overturned 18-wheeler, looking at him as he approached like “Where the hell have you been?”

  If Marilyn looked bad before, she was really up for a makeover now. The tailpipe had sizzled her flesh while also taking care of the rest of her dress, so there she was in her thong and bra, standing there in near-freezing weather as the rain started up again. Tim gestured at her to get moving and was amazed to see she was actually walking a little better than before. Maybe the Chevy blast had reset her hip somehow? Even so, her glacial pace was trying his patience — something he’d only recently discovered he even had. The whole notion of urgency was back, and he just wanted to continue south. He had the car thing almost figured out, and it’d do both of them good to get out of the rain and give their shattered bodies a chance to rest.

  Stumbling forward in what had become a hard, freezing rain, they found another unlocked car — some sort of minivan — and clambered in. Tim got the doors closed as Marilyn collapsed on the back seat, the whole vehicle smelling like a pig roast from her grilled leg.

  Let’s just wait here a bit. Just wait. When the rain dies down … when the rain dies down I’ll try to … try to drive this fucking thing. South.

  Chapter 11. Driving

  Marilyn had found some sort of blanket and had managed to pull it over herself. Interesting, thought Tim, wondering if she was starting to learn and evolve basic skills from being around him. Sitting in the driver’s seat of the minivan, his hands on the steering wheel, Tim tried to remember more details about driving. In a little bit, he’d give it another try, but for now, he just wanted to sit, listen to the rain drumming on the roof and wonder about the world outside the van. With each day, he became filled with more and more questions, where once he was a black hole of incuriousness (the state in which, he was pretty sure, all Zees existed).

  How long would this last? How long could it last before there were no more squealers to eat – or before the squealers really took back the place?

  Was there any way to go from being a Zee back to a human? Like some kind of cure?

  Was it true what he suspected, that if you got Zee-bit you turned into a Zee? In some ways, this was academic, since once a Zee bit you, there were usually another 20 Zees to pile on for a feast — and you didn’t last very long in what might be called a recognizable mammalian form. Sure, the zombie bite was a standard trope in the zombie flick: get bit, become
a zombie. But Tim had yet to witness it in this world. Were it true, it would skew the answer to the first question about how long this could last. And some unused gears in Tim’s mind suddenly started spinning and whirring as he contemplated some kind of equation:

  The length and severity of a Zee outbreak was a factor of population (Zees & Squealers) and their ratio to one another; the rate at which Squealers are turned into Zees as well as the rate at which Zees consume Squealers; the amount of time between when Squealers turn from frightened, defensive to angry, offensive on both a local and a regional and even national level; the geographic scope of the outbreak; and, finally, the ability of Squealers to prevent themselves from being either turned into Zees or eaten by them (conversion rate). Somewhere in there another number had to be accounted for: the availability of food and how long a Zee could go before starving to “death.” Oh, and weather — don’t forget weather. And then this: When Zees froze in the winter, would they thaw out hungry as ever in the spring?

  It was a lot of variables. So far, the only organized squealers they’d seen were those guys at the park. But Tim figured there had to be more like them out there. They’d been lucky the day before, mostly because, Tim figured, the hunters hadn’t taken into account any level of Zee intelligence — the smarts that had allowed Tim and Marilyn to hide, to take cover. The reality was that, in any future matchup, they stood little chance of successfully fighting or outmaneuvering guys like this. Even if he could creep up on one and go after his neck, they were wearing helmets, high leather collars, all that. He’d be whacked before he could even find, much less bite, the jugular or carotid.