For the purpose of getting through that corridor again, to the relative safety of the front desk, I only ended up needing Suprbat to push one body out of my way long enough to make a run for it and get that bulletproof door behind me. My reasons for not making sure that door latched afterward are definitely on the list of things so stupid they’d have no place in history if I were to sink so far as to change it.
The cool, half-true reason is that with the fresh, comforting, new-toy sturdiness of Suprbat in my hands, and that nice, narrow, Thermopylae-esque doorway at my disposal, who could blame me for wanting to hang around for a few practice swings before making my escape?
The whole truth is that I needed to make sure that I could.
Yes, I was, for all intents and purposes, the first zombie slayer. I’d already won that title. I’d done it before. But that first time had been so sudden, so impulsive, and as sure as I was that the memory was real, the best adjectives I could attach to it by that time were “blurry” and “uncomfortable,” sort of like my first time riding a real rollercoaster, or my first kiss when Kyle Alderson from algebra study group had stuck his tongue so far down my throat that I thought I might puke on him.
In fact, “blurry” and “uncomfortable” ended up fitting a whole lot of the firsts in my life, now that I think about it, even the best ones.
The point is that, even though it was real, it was also so far removed from reality that I simply couldn’t wrap my head around re-creating it.
In order to do that, well, I just had to do it.
That’s the real reason I kicked the door back open, took a step backward, and shouted, “Batter up!” though, to be honest, I don’t actually know what that means.
It turned out for the best, anyway. They didn’t overwhelm me, and who knows? If I’d had to feel the exact resonance of the crack of wood and bone for the first time outside where they could surprise or surround me, without having the chance to teach myself to minimize that reflexive closing of the eyes, the results could have been disastrous.
As it was, after I finished bludgeoning what had been left of Aleman’s head when she reanimated, I was able, finally, to step out into the cold, faint light of the slowly rising sun, armed not only with Suprbat and the rest of my loot but with a heavy, completely unwarranted, but very, very helpful dose of confidence.
The windows of the family room had only overlooked a piece of dry, scrub-covered hillside, so this was the first look I got at the apocalyptic vista below. I couldn’t possibly do it justice in description, so I won’t.
I was a bit more concerned anyway with figuring out which one of the dozen-odd identical squad cars parked outside fit either one of Easton’s car-shaped keys, without turning my back to any one side for too long at a time. I was alone for the present, but I could hear rustling and shrieks at an undetermined distance.
It turned out to be the very last car, tucked away in one corner of the lot. Isn’t it always? I locked the door behind me, fastened my seatbelt, took a moment to savor the protective casing of steel around me, then several more to figure out that the way I was leaning on the steering wheel was stopping the key from turning, and then, okay, okay, I’ll do my best to explain the state the valley was in because it sort of affects this next part.
The day’s first light made it possible to see the few small columns of smoke rising from the houses that were burning unchecked, without interfering with the starkly perfect outlines of the patchwork power outages.
It reminded me a little of the mornings after bad earthquakes or storms, with one important difference. All of those mornings had been the calm after when the damage is assessed and rebuilding begins.
This was what you would get if you took one of those mornings, shrank it down, and sprinkled it with monster insect larvae. The whole valley still wriggled, not with normal, productive human activity, but with continuing disaster.
From the mountain police station’s height, I couldn’t see every detail of the walls and windows and gardens that had been torn apart in the single-minded attempts to reach the live people barricaded beyond. I could see the movement of the bodies that were doing the tearing. It was that same determined, methodical destruction from the broadcasts, heedless of the rule that said bad things were supposed to be gone when the sun came out.
The police presence was still visible, too, but it was sort of like a spider web in the path of a garden spigot, impressive only in its optimistic persistence. The little clusters of blue lights stood out against the sea of red because, oh yeah, here’s the important part: The streets were completely, bumper-to-bumper, Super Bowl stacked parking lot packed.
I’ve been late for school more than once because just one traffic light was out, or one road was blocked with accident debris, or someone was getting busted on too public a sidewalk, begging everyone to slow down to stare.
All of those things were happening fifty times over at once in the valley that morning, and that’s why, even though the car’s aging GPS might theoretically have been able to lead me home, I turned back onto the road leading back up the mountain, back in the direction of the campgrounds and resort.
Well, “turn” is actually an excessively graceful word for what I did. It doesn’t quite conjure up the grinding sound of the few seconds between finding the reverse and noticing the parking break, or the screeching flash of sparks when the bumper clipped a metal gate on the way out, but the end result was mostly the same.
My chosen route wasn’t completely abandoned, but most of the other cars I passed were headed down instead of up, or pulled over to the sides, either with their hoods open or with their occupants simply staring at the bleak scene below. I passed them with the siren on, trying to look taller, wishing I’d taken a uniform shirt to cover my stained, grey tank top, but no one looked at me closely enough for it to matter. A sight that might have raised eyebrows on any other day was just part of the chaotic background noise now, a minute scrap of help already claimed by someone else.
Really, considering the fact that this was:
My first time driving alone
My first time driving practically at night
My first time driving mountain roads
My first time driving during a state of emergency
My first time driving on roads full of human-sized walking obstacles that don’t try to stay out of your way, and
My first time driving, ever,
I think I did a pretty good job.
In a way, my lack of conditioning actually seemed to be an advantage. I’m pretty sure most of the other people out driving had figured out what the zombies were, but some old, irrevocably instilled instinct made it really hard to run them down. One guy coming down the other lane in front of me swerved so hard to avoid one that he drove headlong into the face of the mountain. I didn’t mind accelerating when it ran out in front of me and ripped off one of my windshield wipers, but I couldn’t help muttering under my breath as I did so, “Seventeen.”
Seventeen murders, if people wouldn’t admit that these things weren’t alive in the first place, or just one instance of manslaughter if they would, I counted off in my head, plus escaping police custody, grand theft auto, driving without a license, oh, and plain old grand theft if you counted Suprbat and the rest of the stuff on the passenger seat. And I was pretty sure that precisely not a single one of those things would end up mattering.
One way or another, life was definitely never going to be the same.
But like I always do when annoyingly big, smothering thoughts like that one start creeping into my head, I looked extra hard at the moment right in front of me, and I was getting all ready to pat myself on the back for finding the resort safely, with all four tires intact and two hubcaps still in place, angled neatly between the white lines and everything, when I gave the brake an extra tap, only it turned out not to be the brake, and the world disappeared into darkness and stars as the airbag claimed the space I’d been sitting in.
CHAPTER FIVE
&nb
sp; We’re All Going to Die
I came around pretty quickly, I think. The level and color of the light outside hadn’t changed much. By then, I kind of liked the idea of unconsciousness. I knew, without really thinking about it, that I was going to have to do something dangerous and difficult when I came out of it.
I could tell by the screams. And the hammering.
The sound of the crash must have drawn a lot of attention because sure enough, when I blinked and coughed the gunpowder-y residue off my face and sat up straight enough to see over the puffy, white, well-meaning cushion that had knocked me out, at least ten or twelve zombies, probably all that had been within earshot, were gathered around the car, screaming, hammering, and searching for any possible weakness in my protection. They were finding it, too. The passenger window was already webbed with cracks.
There was no strong strategic position this time, not like the police station’s front office. The moment a door or window opened, they would be on top of me. I’d never have the chance to get on my feet.
I reached instead for the gear shift. The engine was still running, still trying to idle its way further into the low concrete wall I had mashed it into at the edge of the lot. Reverse came easily this time, but movement didn’t. The front bumper dragged along the asphalt, and something in the car’s inner workings—the gears? The axles?—fought me for every inch I pushed it with a very broken scraping noise, and I knew that, in the long run, it was going to win.
I backed up far enough to turn the wheels in the direction of the welcome building’s front door and stomped on the gas, on purpose this time, thinking that maybe I could get close enough to safety and far enough ahead of the horde at the same time to run across the gap, but the car’s new top speed hardly made them break walking stride to keep up with me. Something in the metal allowed a moment’s give, and with an extra, desperate engine rev, I rammed the building’s front wall, pinning the quickest zombie against it, snapping its back. Its lungs were too crushed to continue screaming, but its mouth kept snarling just the same, its arms flailing forward to reach for me.
If I’d broken its arms, too, I probably would have shifted gears and tried the same thing again, and again, until I’d taken out as many of them as that poor car could handle before they broke through. But the flail of that arm caught the dawning light just right, or just wrong, just the way it had to, anyway, to reflect the distinctive red-green alexandrite color of its wedding ring.
I hadn’t recognized her with the bite on her face, or the dirt and gashes on her clothes, which were always perfect, even on vacation. I hadn’t wanted to.
“Mom?”
Even then, I knew it was a stupid question. She couldn’t answer it, plus I knew the answer in advance. Yes and no. Mostly no.
As little good as the sight of her was doing me, I couldn’t help looking around for the one that would make it twice as bad.
In the rare moments completely away from work, they were never apart. If one of them had risen within shouting distance of the lot, so had the other.
I spotted my dad by the silly deerstalker hat he always wore on days off. He was the one right behind me, for the few seconds that any of them were right behind me, before they all piled onto the hood with the collective focus of a latchkey kid who’s just realized which end the can of Spaghetti-Os opens from.
The windshield had cracked by then, too.
I haven’t forgotten my whole truth promise, really, but it’s not like you need a decoder ring to figure out why I couldn’t quite get my head around a brilliant new escape plan at that particular moment. If you want to toss on some tight jeans and black eyeliner and describe the moments I spent in that driver’s seat, petulantly beating up on the airbag, waiting for the hands to reach inside and get me, wondering if the first ones would be the same hands that had tucked me into bed and put Band-Aids on my scraped knees not too many years ago, be my guest. You’ll probably do a fine job of it.
But if you’re more interested in the second time that morning that I had the daylights knocked out of me by something really, really heavy, keep reading.
The overhang on that wall of the welcome building was a concrete slab, artfully trimmed with hardwood, so when it fell, if the airbag hadn’t already deployed, it soon would have. The fractured windshield shattered inward as its frame ceased to exist. The roof caved in against my head, which already hurt a lot. At least this time it only sent me loopy for a couple of seconds, not enough to stop me from realizing that I’d probably survived the impact thanks to the cushioning of all the zombies on my hood, zombies that also wouldn’t be able to give chase in the immediate future.
The door wouldn’t open.
Here’s where I’d make a joke about the engineering standards of some former country or other, only I didn’t actually take the time to check the car’s brand name while I was grabbing Suprbat, slinging the evil bunny bag over my shoulder, and wriggling out through where the driver’s side window had been.
“Eighteen!” I shouted as I clobbered the recovering zombie on the very left, which had only had its right shoulder and the right side of its jaw crumpled by the overhang.
I wasn’t counting the ones under the slab, because I hadn’t meant to bring it down, and I couldn’t be sure how many of them were down for good.
I saw the next one out of the corner of my eye, a blur of color. My brain put together the costume of that clown who was always making balloon animals in the kiddie section of the arcade as I was already swinging around to meet it. It raised an arm at the last moment with a self-preservation instinct I’d never seen from one of them before. I didn’t dwell on it.
“Nineteen!”
“Ouch!” it answered.
Then I stopped.
Zombies didn’t use consonants, certainly not in that familiar, freshly broken voice that had never dropped quite as deep as its owner would have liked.
“Norman?” I gasped.
“Yes!” he matched my tone, reminding me that this was apparently my morning for stupid questions, then grabbed my free hand and pulled.
“Why are you dressed like that?”
“Why aren’t you running?”
Two more of them had wriggled free of the rubble, and the throat screams were beginning to rise again as they started after us with that dogged speedwalk they used, so I let Norman lead me at a sprint around the side of the building.
There was one in our way in a net hanging from a tree. Norman batted it aside automatically, drawing my attention to the heavy wrench in his other hand.
“Did you drop the roof on them?” I asked.
“Yeah, lucky it only had two bolts left to take out.”
“How the hell did you know to set that up?”
“I didn’t,” he panted, stopping to tap on one of the back windows in rapid Morse code. M-E-L-L-O-N. “The bolts make good checker pieces.”
An industrial A-frame ladder hit the ground next to us with a thud, and Norman pushed me onto it, turning to keep an eye on our pursuers’ progress.
I climbed onto the roof, or what there was of it around a sizeable hole in the chosen section, in as little time as I could, but by the time Norman had room to join me, one of the zombies had reached the base of the ladder, and he had to lean back over to swing at it with the wrench. He missed the first time, and it made its way up a few rungs, twisting its limbs awkwardly between them, like it had absolutely no knowledge of how a ladder was meant to be used but was determined to figure it out.
The second swing bloodied the side of its head. I joined in with the longer range of Suprbat, and after a few nervous seconds, we knocked it loose for long enough to drag the ladder up after us. Norman gave me the “after you” gesture, and I lowered myself carefully through the hole. The fall was broken by a strategically placed pool table. I had just a few seconds to absorb which room I was in, as well as who had been there to hoist the ladder out of it in the first place, before Norman landed and made the bruises on my head
throb with a hug that would have taken me off my feet if I’d bothered to find them yet.
“You made it!” he said. “I’m so sorry. I swear I didn’t think you were a total basket case for more than a few minutes. An hour tops.”
“Either you’re lying,” I choke-laughed through his grip, “or you’re the basket case.”
He laughed, too, not because I was at the top of my comedic game, but out of pure, obvious relief, and let go to allow Hector to hug me, too. Hector was there, he was alive, Norman was alive, and I was alive, and for a moment, those facts were enough to make me glow.
Hector retrieved one duffle bag from a pile in the corner and handed it to me. “We saved it when it looked like no one was going to come pick it up,” he explained.
I unzipped it and held it to my chest for a moment. I’d never thought beef jerky and clean socks could look so much like heaven.
“What happened to you?” he asked, looking me over. I could practically hear his brain filing my condition under “shaken but unharmed.”
“You guys first,” I said, shoving a handful of jerky in my mouth. It wasn’t quite fried chicken, but it was food, and I didn’t feel like diverting the efforts of my jaw from it for long enough to explain. “What happened here?”
“Mountain View Rest Home happened,” Norman answered, piling the pool balls into the triangular rack.
“Where everyone who’s anyone goes to die?” I continued for him. Our tagline for the old folks’ home next to Whitetail Village is one of those things you just have to say whenever it comes up.
“Yeah,” said Norman, “well, one of them did die. Around the time you were getting carted off, we’re guessing. And from there it was like head lice.”
“They made it up to the campground from there?” I asked.
He made a “pshaw” sound as he chalked his cue. “Nah, but after Kim waited ‘a reasonable length of time’ for as many of the parents to come for pickup as possible, the Kent clan piled us all in the vans and tried to bring us down here.”
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 4
