Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of)

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  They had all been there when the manager, the one who had waited for the dead to rise the way ordinary people wait for their lotto numbers to come up, had declared himself the benevolent, unquestioned overlord of Costco East Harlem. They had all taken part in forcing him and his accomplices out through the roof access fire escape at knifepoint, never expecting them to survive to join the siege outside in living form.

  It was a gripping tale, especially the way Maria told it, with all the right gestures and character voices and dramatic pauses. We listened the way we would have listened to the best ghost stories if the Scout camping trip had gone according to plan. Afterward, we spent the day playing glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, all ten of us, in the huge, empty space. Well, Chris only joined in a few rounds, “to see if it’ll stop the shakes,” in his own words. Apparently, it didn’t, but he made a good audience for the rest of us. There was a pack of emergency signal lights that could only flash a little slower than a strobe, not much good for working by, but they were so bright that a few seconds of one could charge the Frisbee for a nice, long round.

  We were together, alive, and even though Chris and Maria hadn’t known any of the people being reunited in their old lives, they seemed so genuinely happy, the way people look when they read Chicken Soup books—so glad just to be reminded that sometimes heartwarming things do actually happen.

  Nothing whatsoever could be wrong in the world.

  Right.

  Well, it was a nice break to feel that way, so we went with it. We waited exactly as long as it took for the little kids to fall asleep between their respective parental figures, and Chris and Maria to spread out to their own space, before Norman and Rory and I gathered our assigned bedding around Lis’s.

  “So how deep a creek are we up here, exactly?” I asked her.

  Lis didn’t stall. “Deep,” she said.

  Please don’t think that, if we’d known, we would have done anything even a little bit differently. We wouldn’t have. And don’t think that we were less than ecstatic to find not only Lis but so much of the family alive and surrounded by such nice company. It was better luck than we’d hoped for.

  But this was not the mythic safe haven we’d all been picturing at the end of the road, whether we’d admitted it or not. We’d been planning for a two-way rescue mission, and the return trip had been cancelled without being replaced by a practical alternative. We weren’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. You don’t get all the way across a post-apocalyptic wasteland the size of North America without learning to notice problems like that.

  “Does anyone have an escape plan?” I asked.

  “Sometimes Dad and Defoe argue about it when they think no one’s listening, but no, not really.”

  A week ago, Rory and Lis would have whispered closer to my ear, or raised their voices to that nasal pitch that guys can’t stand, to shut Norman out of the conversation for being a dork. They would have found some way to shut me out, too, if we didn’t have such a long, tight history together. Not anymore, though. Even without the freshly shared adventure that had broken the wall between Norman and Rory, Lis was already addressing him just as much as Rory and I were.

  This wasn’t Oakwood High where there were enough of us to form whatever factions we liked to fight our own separate battles. It wasn’t Tulsa Zoo, either, where everyone with legs long enough to reach a gas pedal could all fight the same one together. There were adults here, parents, real parents, which is like being around adults squared. It’s such an acute case of adulthood that it actually becomes contagious and infects the surrounding, milder adults like Chris and Maria, the kind who might actually level with you if they met you alone. They were happy enough to tell us the campfire version of the local story, but if one of us asked them a question with more than one arguable answer, we probably wouldn’t get an answer at all.

  I could feel in the ready way Lis answered all my questions how glad she was to have anyone with her at the kiddie table other than actual kiddies.

  “How many scooters?” I asked.

  “Two, including the one you guys left downstairs.”

  “How many people here have driven them?”

  “Just Chris and Maria,” she answered.

  “And Norman and me,” I said. “Fuel level?”

  “About half.”

  “Same,” Norman added.

  “How long do you think the supplies will last?”

  Norman and Rory and I had always been ready to move on before having to make those kinds of calculations, but Lis’s answer was only a little way off from what I’d already estimated.

  “With all of us? Three weeks, maybe, if we’re careful, and lucky, and if the rain keeps coming.”

  “How long do you think those guys can last with fuel and bullets and everything, the way they go through them?”

  Lis shrugged for the first time. “They picked that stuff up after they were kicked out. They have access to . . . well, everywhere. They could be bluffing with the last of what they found already, or they could have a bomb shelter stash or something for all anyone knows. Or more.”

  “If they had the Costco, do you think they’d forget about the rest of us?”

  Lis laughed a little, a much more serious laugh than all the giggles we’d shared in the old world. “For about five minutes, maybe. They want this place, but Steve and Maria . . . it’s seriously personal between them.”

  “How many exits does this place have? The two of them can’t surround us, can they?”

  “No, but so what? They’ve got the zombies to do that for them.”

  “And no one would want to risk moving the kids, right?”

  “Hey, I’m not into taking that risk,” said Lis, and for a moment she looked exactly like the Lis I knew, all soft, fragile sweetness—the kind that can only exist if there’s someone else, someone with a harsh, abrasive edge like Rory’s, perpetually guarding it from being stepped on. Then she swatted a fly on the back of her arm like it was normal, like it wasn’t the sort of thing that usually made her curl into a ball and threaten to puke unless someone could get it away from her, and the flashback was over. “Anyway, where are we going to go with two scooters? Or does someone get stuck driving the forklift?”

  “Four scooters,” I said. “You forgot to count theirs.”

  Lis laughed. For a long time, she laughed at me, and Norman and Rory didn’t look too far away from joining in. And when I say a long time, I don’t mean the way a few awkward moments can feel like eternity. I’m talking about hours going by before we really got back to talking seriously, and even then, Lis started in a humoring tone, but at least we talked, mostly because it was easier than sleeping. Before morning, the four of us had hammered out almost every little detail of a plan.

  Every detail except for the one about getting anyone to listen to it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  At Least Foxes Don’t Eat Grain

  Time for a fast-forward.

  Trust me, if you’d been there, you’d have wanted to fast forward, too.

  You’d have wanted to skip past the awkwardness of slipping as much of the plan as possible into the conversation over breakfast the next morning whenever we were sure Maria and Defoe were both listening, Maria because she wanted to fight, Defoe because he wanted to escape.

  You wouldn’t want to linger on the way they listened with averted eyes, afraid to hear any serious idea that Rory and Lis were involved in without David’s written and notarized permission.

  There was nothing about our desperate efforts worth describing, no brilliant, eloquent motivational speech that brought everyone around.

  It was during lunchtime of the third day. A bullet finally pierced the front door, ricocheted off the far back wall, and came to rest between everyone’s feet, right in the column of sunlight it had cut on its way in.

  That was what started people beyond the four of us seriously considering the idea, and by considering it, I mean openly bickering about it.
>
  Pretty much the same thing.

  Here’s the plan we had:

  Lure the undershirts in through the front door to the outside of the barricade. Yeah, I know they had names, but I’d been calling them the undershirts for long enough that the habit was hard to break. Two scooter drivers would escape out the back, each carrying two of the underage non-scooter-drivers. The two other non-scooter-drivers would wait by the back exits while the two other scooter drivers would hide in the front barricade, close that nice, pulley-operated front door, and then use whatever means necessary to force the undershirts away from their scooters through the barricade’s climbing paths. Those two scooter drivers would then take the scooters, escape out the front, circle around to pick up the non-scooter-drivers before the undershirts could notice them, and then we would all meet up at a designated point far to the north.

  Here’s what people found to argue about:

  “How do we know how far their scooters will get us?”

  “How far are we going to get without them?”

  “Do we really have the right to strand them here?”

  “What right do they have to strand us here?”

  “Why not wait to see if we outlast them?”

  “What if we do outlast them? If they don’t come back, where’s our ride coming from?”

  “How old are you again?”

  That part was Chris. Don’t be too mad at him. He could barely sit still and focus long enough to argue at all by then.

  Norman didn’t cut him much slack for that, though. He ran out of patience for that question after the fourth or fifth time and buried his face in his hands.

  “Oy,” he muttered, then straightened up quickly to make sure he hadn’t rubbed off any of his paints. “Do we need to go over what we had to do to get here again?” he asked.

  “No,” said David. “You put my family back together, and I’m grateful, but I’m done seeing them terrorized. Rory, Lis, and Josh are going to be the first ones out the back, or that front door’s not opening.”

  “So is Chloe,” said Defoe, “but she’s not going anywhere without me.”

  “We don’t have enough drivers,” Chris pointed out, though no one needed him to. “You’ve never driven a scooter, Doc. You don’t even drive a car.”

  Yeah, apparently, in New York, there are actually people other than children and epileptics who lack that skill. Go figure.

  It’s kind of like one of those logic word puzzles, isn’t it? Like the one with the fox, the chicken, and the bag of grain, where you have to get all three of them from one side of the river to the other without them eating each other or sinking the raft? Don’t bother looking for a pencil, though. There’s no right answer to this one that doesn’t involve people sitting on the handlebars.

  Well, except for Rory’s solution.

  “I can do it,” she said.

  I might have contradicted her, or Norman might have, if there weren’t so many people listening.

  “I can drive Lis, and she can carry Josh, and someone else can do the same thing with the doctor and Chloe. Problem solved.”

  It wasn’t going to be easy. Anyone who’d done even Level Three scooter riding would have known that, but she wasn’t going to worry the people who hadn’t, and we weren’t going to blow her story.

  “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” Chris snapped, louder than was necessary.

  “I . . . don’t know,” Rory lied. “But I know how the brakes work and how to balance and everything.”

  I guess that was true enough. I’d spent less time riding than she had before I went solo, and I’d survived.

  “I just, well, I haven’t driven the Vespa before.” That was true, too. “So once we get it upstairs, I just need a few laps to get the feel of it, just to be sure.”

  She caught Norman’s eye, asking him for the quickest and hopefully most figurative of crash courses. He gave her a nod.

  There was a moment then when I swear I could feel the dice rolling. We all could. We could feel the very strong possibility that someone might still veto the whole plan and keep us there in the dark, waiting to starve to death or be hit by a lucky ricochet.

  I was actually glad at that moment when another spear of light punched through the door, the bullet skidding off into the barricade and out of sight.

  Then the dice were off the table, the riders were off to whatever imitation of personal space they had to pack up anything worth taking, and the drivers were on our way downstairs to drag the Vespa up and settle one last little thing.

  “So,” said Chris. “Who’s it going to be?”

  “You’re in no condition to do the stealing,” Maria told him immediately.

  “Are you up for driving the Defoes?” I asked him.

  “Sure, yeah, I can do that,” he said. Then he looked at Norman and me like we hadn’t been right in front of him for days already, like he was noticing our ages all over again. “But shouldn’t one of you get dibs on—”

  “No,” said Norman. “We’re not splitting up. That’s my condition.”

  I tried not to show how relieved I was that he’d been the first to insist on that.

  “I could spend the rest of my life on some rooftop waiting for her to find someone to get directions from,” he added. My sense of direction was a little better than his, and we both knew it, but Chris and Maria didn’t need to know that his reasons were less than a hundred percent practical.

  “Fine,” said Chris. “No one’s gotta twist my arm.”

  “Okay,” I said, “that leaves two of us to steal, and one of us to wait with David.”

  “If we’re going to take those bastards down a peg, I’m taking a front row seat,” Maria declared.

  “Hey,” I said, “it is our second scooter, our fireworks—”

  “Stop that,” said Maria. “Right now. I mean it. I get to be there to tell Steve he got played, or I’m not playing at all.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Norman and I looked at each other for a long moment over the seat of the Vespa while it was lodged in one of the sharp turns of the stairs, knowing that in a few hours, one of us would be helping Maria open the roll-down shutter to face Steve and Rob, the mustache and the stubble, up close and in person, one last time, and the other would be left hiding in the dark with nothing but a signal light, waiting for a ride, safer, but utterly helpless to influence the outcome.

  I started with the best argument I could think of, which wasn’t much of an argument at all.

  “Your leg—”

  “It’s a bruise, Cass. You’ve seen me handle worse.”

  “But where it is, it could affect your range of motion.”

  “Maybe a little,” he agreed. “But I could lose a leg, and an eye, and most of my fingers and drop cheap acid all on the same day, and I’d still be the best rider here.”

  I wasn’t going to claim that he was wrong about that.

  “It was my idea,” I said.

  Cheap shot, I know, but I had to try it. It didn’t work.

  “Flip you for it,” Norman offered in a firm, take-it-or-leave-it tone.

  I nodded, thinking that was the best I was going to get, and he felt automatically for the non-existent pockets of the inside-out costume. We hadn’t had much reason to carry change around recently.

  An idea struck me before he could ask Chris or Maria if they had any coins left.

  “Rock, Paper, Scissors?” I offered, and he agreed.

  Now, out of all the humiliating, incriminating, soul-baring pieces there are of the whole truth, this is the one I came closest to keeping to myself, the one I tried hardest to come up with a reason why it didn’t count, but of course I know it does.

  That’s sort of where the whole “confessions” part of this story comes in, isn’t it?

  This one doesn’t involve stupid excesses of tears or petty jealous feelings or failures of physical accuracy. Those are all proud memories by comparison, shining demonstrations o
f strength and moral fiber.

  The whole truth is that Norman favors Scissors. Heavily. The whole truth is that I knew before I suggested it, before we raised our fists, that I wasn’t going to open mine on the third beat, and that my chances of getting my way were a lot closer to ninety-five percent than fifty.

  I didn’t smile when I won. I didn’t joke or rub it in. I wanted to apologize. Not badly enough that I would have offered him best out of three, not for all the KFC and double-doubles there had ever been in the world.

  Norman did force a chuckle.

  “Hey, it’s okay.” He shook me by the shoulder a little, like he was trying to loosen up my expression by hand. “You win. It’s Rock, Paper, Scissors, not Russian Roulette.”

  I wanted something more. I wasn’t sure what, exactly. I wanted something to make it okay, something more than an agreement to call it okay, before I collected my winnings. Even if there had been a way to do that, we didn’t have the opportunity to find it.

  Once the four of us finally got the Vespa set on its wheels on the main floor, miraculously still in one piece, we didn’t even really get to catch our breaths before jumping into the rest of the preparations.

  Maria and I divided up the remains of my fireworks stash and the open two pack of lighter fluid and tore down some of the front of the barricade to make one of the openings easier and more tempting for the undershirts to climb through. Norman quickly helped me transfer everything heavier than Peter’s journal from my bag to his, and Chris reluctantly agreed to leave us his lighter and pick up another on the road. I knew I’d had two when we left the pharmacy, but if that was the only thing I’d lost in the chaos since then, I figured I’d gotten off pretty easy. The meeting place was set, all knowledge of the area and the possible routes checked and double-checked among all the drivers. Norman and Rory took the Vespa aside for the quietest hour of private coaching they could manage, thankfully during the loudest, most distracted hour of debate over what was really necessary to bring along.