LZR-1143: Evolution

by Bryan James

  The car was a state police cruiser, complete with the crumpled form of a policeman leaning against the steering wheel, head down. I circled to the side, looking into the driver’s window for signs of movement. I noticed the locked doors, and the pistol in the corpse’s hand splayed out on the passenger seat. Confident that this indicated suicide, I swaddled my own pistol in my sleeve and broke the window.

  Safety glass rained down on the ground as Kate and Ky rounded the hedge. I looked up to watch them approach, and their faces grew animated as I met their eyes.

  “Watch out!” said Ky, while Kate simply yelled.

  “Shit!” she screamed, as she raised her rifle.

  I jumped back instinctively as the head inside lunged for my arm, barely missing me as I stumbled onto the dead grass next to the dumpster.

  “Mother crapper,” I gasped, breathing hard. The thing inside the car was barely recognizable; heavily decomposed from weeks inside the cruiser, a large chunk of face was dangling from its rotting head. Sunken eyes swiveled from me to Ky to Kate, then back to me, sizing up each of us as the food that we were.

  I stood up as Kate approached, followed by Ky.

  “Thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “I got lazy. He had the gun in his hand, his head was down ... Anyway, thanks.”

  Ky smiled big as Kate squeezed my arm. “No problem,” she said.

  The creature was strapped into the car, and its arms moved stiffly as it pulled against the restraint of the seat belt. A low, breathy groan escaped its mouth as it opened and closed its jaws.

  “These things are gross,” said Ky, stepping up and leaning in closer than I was comfortable with. I grabbed her gently by the shoulders and pulled her back.

  “Yeah, and it’s even grosser if you become one of them,” I said.

  “Nah, won’t happen,” she said. Before I could say another word, she raised her right hand and the small crossbow twanged softly. A black arrow shot through the creature’s left eye, snapping the head back and pinning it to the seat. The arms dropped to its side and it lay still.

  I looked from the zombie to the girl and back again.

  “Nice shot, kiddo,” I said, as Kate reached her hand in the door and unlatched it from the inside. I looked at the ignition, and groaned. The keys weren’t there.

  The body was limp against the restraints and I grimaced as the full smell hit me. Leaning in, I depressed the seat belt latch and let the corpse fall to the ground. Holding my breath, I searched the dead man’s pockets for the keys, coming up empty. The Glock pistol that had been clenched in his hand clattered to the ground and I scooped it up, careful to snag the clips from his belt as well. We didn’t have so much ammunition that we could afford to pass up extra.

  I dragged the body to the dumpster, leaning it against the side wall and moving away from the smell as quickly as possible. The wrists were slick with decomposition, and I cursed as I wiped the thick puss and shed skin from my hands on the dead grass.

  God, these things were nasty.

  My kingdom for a goddamned biohazard suit or a frickin’ air freshener, for Christ’s sake.

  “You gonna check the trunk for guns?” I asked Kate as she circled the front of the car. She nodded as I saw Ky slide into the driver’s side.

  “What are you doing?” I asked as she settled herself in.

  “Looking for keys,” she responded as I popped the latch next to the driver’s seat, opening the trunk.

  “Well, just be careful,” I cautioned, moving to the trunk to help Kate. “There are a lot of extra buttons up there.”

  “Shotgun,” shouted Kate, as I saw the barrel of a standard police-issue shotgun emerge from the cover of the opened trunk.

  Suddenly, my ears exploded as a piercing wail split the quiet air. Bright red and blue lights swirled in front of my eyes and I staggered, falling against the car.

  Ky had hit the sirens, and was shouting loudly in surprise. Kate cursed and tossed two more packs on the ground before slamming the trunk closed.

  I turned to the front seat and shoved my face into the shattered window.

  “What the fuck?” I yelled, hand moving over the knobs and controls inside the cabin.

  “I don’t know!” she shrieked back. “I must have hit something! I didn’t think anything would work with the car turned off!”

  I pulled the door open and grabbed her arm, acutely aware of the fact that somewhere in the fields outside of this small town, a large group of creatures was wandering the countryside, searching for food.

  And we were ringing the damn dinner bell for them.

  Kate appeared in the passenger door, her anxious face framed by wisps of her long hair as she looked around, worried.

  “Turn it off, Mike ...” her voice trailing away as she drew in a sharp breath and looked over her shoulder.

  I looked up briefly, in time to see a creature appear from a cluster of trees fifty yards down the road, and shamble into the street. My hand flew across the dials and knobs, and abruptly the shrieking stopped, but not before Kate’s rifle spoke once.

  The zombie’s head snapped back and it crumpled to the ground. Behind it, three more appeared from the woods.

  Ky shrieked and clambered on top of the police car as I pulled the slide back on the M-16 and took careful aim. My first shot took the lead creature in the chest, pushing it back and to its knees.

  The second corpse, shambling slightly quicker than the other two, was a teenager dressed in a baseball uniform, one cleated foot dragging behind, slightly cockeyed baseball cap filthy with blood and other debris. Kate’s shot took it in the arm.

  “Mike, Kate, look!” she yelled, and her arm snapped up, pointing toward the corn fields less than a mile away.

  We jumped onto the hood of the car, shading our eyes from the bright sunlight. In the East, the corn was moving.

  I felt the air. There was no wind.

  Shit.

  A large swath of corn was being displaced, roughly fifty yards wide, and the patch of uneven movement extended back more than five hundred yards.

  How many people could you fit in a patch of ground fifty by five hundred yards large?

  Too fucking many, that’s how many.

  We needed to find shelter before those things saw us, and to hide effectively, we had to kill these three bastards now, and quick, or they’d bird-dog our location.

  Cursing in frustration, I started toward the creatures, even as Kate’s next shot scored home, taking the baseball player in the head.

  If you want something done right, you do it up close and personal, not this bullshit sniper crap. Besides, the closer I got to these things, the higher the adrenalin rush, right?

  That’s the theory.

  The zombie I shot in the chest had risen again to its feet, and was ten yards ahead of its companion. I was close enough to smell the fetid rot of its open mouth, and watched as its eyes locked on to mine and its arms reached out in hunger.

  Grinning, I stopped as it approached, and drew my pistol. My blood was racing and my head pounding, but I felt wonderful. Alive and in control.

  These bastards were going to die.

  The second creature was gaining on the first, and I quickly grabbed the first zombie by the lapel of its dusty suede jacket. The face of what used to be a man with a thick beard and bald head was contorted in rage and hunger, and its arms waved in front of my head. Annoyed, I batted the arms down, feeling the increased strength as the bone in the creature’s left hand snapped at the wrist on impact with the metal barrel of the gun I held in my right hand.

  Behind me, I heard Kate shouting in anger and fear, but I ignored it. I was in the rush of the moment, and blood was pounding in my skull. I felt alive. I felt strong.

  Honestly, I felt just a little crazy.

  I pushed the man back until his back was against the chest of the creature behind. The second creature, a woman in a long, plain dress and still wearing thick glasses on her rotten face, stumbled back, but extend
ed her arms out in front of her clumsily, until they came around the back of the first creature and I was slapping away four grasping hands with my gun hand.

  I gave the two creatures a massive push, sending them to the ground in a pile. I kneeled quickly, putting one knee squarely in the chest of the large man, and jamming my pistol into the open maw. Broken teeth clamped down on the black metal, and chips of bone sprayed out of the mouth as the creature bore down on the steel.

  Behind me, I heard Kate scream and the sound of a single rifle shot.

  I slammed the creature’s head back, using the gun as a lever, and squeezed the trigger of the pistol. The bullet passed through the skull of the first and into the eye socket of the zombie below, killing both with one shot. I jumped up, wiping the creature’s red saliva and blood from the barrel of the pistol before turning and almost tripping on the corpse of a toddler, whose small, overall-clad form was crumpled nearly three feet from my back. I looked up at Kate as I jogged back, and she made a horrified face.

  “It came out of the trees behind you,” she said, shaking her head. “I took the shot, since you were berserk.”

  She looked at me, clearly annoyed and stunned. “You really have to cut out the Rambo-WWF thing you’ve got going on.”

  I ignored the dig, my blood still racing.

  “Let’s get inside before the rest of the party gets here,” I said shortly, moving toward the large house.

  “Hell yes,” said Ky, scampering down from the roof of the car and grabbing my discarded rifle.

  “Why the house?” Kate asked, glancing toward the gas station and convenience store.

  “Because when they get here, if they find out where we are, I’d rather be in a house with four walls than a convenience store with a glass front, even if the house is a little battered,” I answered testily, crossing the grass of the house and moving up the front steps.

  “Just so it’s noted that this castle didn’t work out too well for the last defenders,” she said, joining me at the front door. I turned and looked over her shoulder and past the road.

  The pack in the corn was closer, and we could hear the dead plants crackling under the onrush of shambling feet. The wind kicked up briefly once more, and this time, it brought with it the smell of rot and death.

  We went inside the empty house, and lifted the unhinged front door into the bullet-riddled and splintered frame, hoping that it would provide some level of protection from the approaching undead.

  Chapter 27

  Our footsteps were loud on the ancient wooden floor. Every step sounded like a firework or a gunshot. We quickly shut all the open doors, and closed the blinds left on the windows to hide our presence as thoroughly as possible.

  Gaping wounds in the plywood and door frames were a testament to how little defense the home would offer when assaulted by a horde of zombies, but at least some of the doors still latched, and some of the windows were still functioning. Only three were utterly useless, and we quickly covered the openings with an upturned sofa and a dinner table. While the damaged doors and windows wouldn’t stop a concerted effort to break in, they would delay someone briefly and, more importantly, obscure our movements or sounds from the inside.

  We quickly decided to check out the second story and, if possible, try to watch the creatures from above. If they found us, we didn’t have enough ammunition to hold them off downstairs, and the only possibility for survival would be climbing higher, potentially to a roof or attic. It was a grim prospect, but one that was going to be forced on us if we weren’t careful.

  I reached the top of the stairs and quickly scanned the bedrooms. Finding nothing but ruffled bedsheets and a pool of dried blood in the master bathroom—a scene that was not unusual anymore—we upended a dresser and moved it in front of the stairs leading to the bottom story.

  Then we settled in to wait.

  I moved a chair to the window of one of the smaller guest rooms overlooking the crossroads as Kate and Ky closed the door, locking it from the inside as an additional, albeit potentially useless, precaution. The room was musty, but well kept, with a small mirror over the nightstand, and an ironing board propped neatly behind the open closet door. Inside the closet, several shirts and jackets, as well as a large bowling bag, were neatly arranged.

  I slowly pulled back the thin fabric at the window, raising the window by an inch, and pulled in a sharp breath.

  How many could fit in that swath of corn?

  A fuck ton.

  There were hundreds, if not thousands, of zombies. They were in the corn, and on the roads. They covered the small crossroads and swarmed the grass and the concrete, their shambling, shuffling feet scraping against the pavement and the dirt, their moans distinct and eerie as they filled the small room. Ky whimpered softly and I was vaguely aware of Kate extending her arm and comforting her.

  The early afternoon sun was bright in my eyes as I watched, stone still, from the window. They were everywhere, and they moved with a slow, deliberate purpose, eyes searching for prey. I started to pay attention to the individual creatures, and noticed an odd inconsistency; we had been traveling through rural Delaware, and maybe into Maryland by now, and should be surrounded by farmers and rural folk. But a great many of the creatures below wore suits, or business attire; some even wore the remnants of beach wear or casual tourist apparel. This herd, or pack, or whatever you called these damn groups of hell-bags, was composed of a wide cross-section of society and geography.

  While this was an interesting sociological study, it was also an ominous sign about their grouping tendencies. They drew together from a distance.

  The tourists in the group had to have come from the beaches, and those were more than sixty miles away. The business suits and work clothes had to have come from travelers or folks closer to cities—maybe on their way to the beach from work—but if they were still in their suits, they were probably victims on the highways en route, which could have been anywhere in a sixty to seventy mile circle from where we stood.

  It was an unwelcome discovery, but one that posed interesting possibilities as well. Captain Allred on the Enterprise mentioned something about it when we first met; if they were grouping together, it made them harder to escape, but it also made them easier to kill with fewer weapons. Spread out, they were everywhere and everyone. In a group, they were like a living, breathing leviathan. One cruise missile could destroy thousands.

  A sudden and abrupt impact from below jolted me from my thoughts, and I jerked my head up. Ky twitched and Kate shot me a worried look from the bed, where she and Ky were sitting together. I held my hand up slowly, indicating that we should wait and listen.

  Another impact, and a slow, dragging sound, as if something had tried to go through a door or window, and then moved along the wall clumsily and ineffectually. Then, silence.

  I sighed and returned to my perch, watching the dead walk.

  The sounds repeated at fairly regular intervals during the afternoon, but there were no indications that the creatures had entered the house or, worse, discovered that we were inside. But they weren’t leaving.

  They wandered the streets and the surrounding fields and woods, seemingly determined to locate the genesis of the sound that had drawn them in. The sun moved down toward the horizon, and the afternoon shadows grew long.

  Ky and Kate slept as the day progressed, and I stood watch, mesmerized by the shambling, haphazard, but completely effective siege being unknowingly laid upon us. They moved randomly and without purpose, but they achieved their unintended goal. We were hemmed in, and had no way to leave.

  Kate awoke before the sun set, and offered to take the watch. I gave up my seat willingly, but without hope that I’d be able to sleep. Ky was rooting through the closet, quietly looking for anything interesting or useful, with the short attention span of a twelve year old. I closed my eyes briefly, expecting sleep to elude me.

  Her eyes are open and staring above a face that I had known and loved.

>   She cocks her head slightly to the side, waiting.

  I acknowledged her presence from the bed, nodding once. I shifted, not nervously but warily. This was comfortable, but somehow not quite right.

  Sunken eye sockets and reddened rims surrounded white irises; irises that used to be a pleasant color—a color that I woke up with and to for years.

  “So, you finally got it, huh hero?” she asks, never blinking, never moving. Nothing but her lips and her tongue. Her voice is dry, as if talking through dust or dirt. Gravelly, like she has been smoking for years.

  I nod.

  “I should have known better, but I was so confused.”

  She simply stares.

  I speak again, to relieve the quiet.

  “I know you meant the best—that you couldn’t have stolen the virus. I know that you were trying to protect me from something much worse. You couldn’t have known what would happen to me. Or to you.”

  I knew this as truth.

  She continues to stare, eyes wide and unblinking. Her mouth forms a shape, as if to make words. But she is silent.

  My curiosity is intense. There are so many questions. I tried to remain calm, but the situation felt urgent.

  “You found out about Kopland’s plan, but why didn’t you tell anyone? If it ... if he was so dangerous, you could have reported him. Why stay silent?”

  But as I asked, I knew the answer.

  She stares. Dead, withered hands come up from where they are clasped on her lap, revealing an empty syringe—the syringe that had saved my life, after condemning me to prison.

  “You know this, Michael. He was not alone. He had—he has—friends. In power.”

  The syringe drops to the floor, needle burying itself into the hardwood planks and vibrating slightly as it settles in place.

  I nod.

  “I tried. I did what I could.”

  I knew this.