Sean is sobbing, rocking back and forth violently, kicking his legs. His hands scrabble at the harness.
I shoot now, but not at the rope. I shoot at the zombies hanging over the edge. I blow the scalp off a wrinkled, ragged woman. Blood rains down on us, repainting a gray VW.
Third time’s the charm, I think as Billy aims at the rope again. But it’s swinging. It’s a tough target.
The moaning zombies’ breath engulfs us. They’re are mere feet away.
“Steady!” Billy shouts. His gun goes off the same time mine does.
Except now, I’m shooting under the bridge, pushing them back. Zombies drop in the shadows, making the blood look black. I’m reminded of the old horror movies. Night of the Living Dead is the first one that comes to mind. The stench is — oh, God. Horrid. Putrid. Worst than hot roadkill.
“Hurry — ” I start to say, knowing I’ll have to change magazines soon.
But it’s too late. Another zombie falls from the bridge, three more after it.
One hits Sean, then two, three, four.
The rope snaps, unable to handle all of that dead weight.
He screams.
The fall didn’t kill any of them, and it didn’t kill Sean, either. The mass of rotten flesh that is the accumulation of four zombies writhes and moves like a slimy bug.
Sean screams. Flesh tears.
I plunge into the pile, braining two dead women with the butt of the M16, not killing them, but clearing space.
“Sean!” Billy shouts.
It’s terrible. My God, it’s horrendous. Sean’s arm is twisted into a corkscrew. White bone gleams beneath a sea of scarlet. He coughs and hacks until a spurt of blood escapes his mouth, dousing a zombie’s dingy, pearl colored dress like red paint.
They almost don’t even notice us anymore as they break through the shadowy threshold of the bridge. Billy digs in with his hands. He kicks and flails sending zombies back, their faces and limbs squishing beneath his boots.
“Sean! Sean! SEAN!” he yells at the top of his lungs. I think he yells because he thinks he can drown out the sounds of the teeth gnashing and gnawing on his brother’s flesh, of their tongues lapping at his blood like thirsty mutts.
I can’t bear to look, but I can’t turn away. I am almost frozen in place. I’ve seen it before, seen the dead tear apart the living, and it never gets easier. There is no desensitization in this world. There is only pain and horror and hopelessness.
“NO! NOOOO! Nooo…” Sean says, his arms working like the blades of a dying fan. I pop a couple more rounds into the closest zombies, dropping them and clearing more space for me to plunge myself.
There is no saving Sean, as much as it pains me to admit it, he’s gone. Gone. Not like my brother was gone in Eden, but gone for good.
As I plunge, I see the blood drenching his midsection, grubby and grimy hands pulling out entrails, bringing them up to rotten teeth and pallid faces.
No, I can’t save Sean, but I can save Billy.
And that’s exactly what I do. I put him in a headlock and pull with all of my might. He resists at first, but as we get farther and farther away from the gruesome picture and the reality of the situation settles in, he goes slack.
Billy sobs, crying out for a brother that is no longer his. A brother who belongs to the zombies now.
34
A few stragglers spot us and lumber through the maze of cars. We are far enough for me to not feel an immediate urge to turn tail and run. The meal that was once Sean, a red-haired man with a sly smile, will keep them occupied long enough for us to get clear of the mess.
With Billy still in my grip, his legs barely working on their own, we round the corner of an exit. The sign above has fallen and lays facedown across the road. A few cars under it like unfortunate bugs beneath a boot.
I have my SIG raised, ready to blast whatever awaits for us on this road. But it is empty.
Empty.
That’s not good. I’ve lost Jacob and Grady.
I take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay, I think to myself — A-OKAY.
They might be dead, but I’m not, and right now, that’s all that matters.
“I-I need to go back,” Billy says. His voice is small, barely a whisper.
“No,” I say, my own voice strong and with a sudden finality. “You go back and the same thing is going to happen to you.” I grip his arm and pull him forward, up the steady slope of the freeway exit. He resists me.
“I have to go back. That’s my brother,” he says again. The docility on his face transforms into harsh lines of anarchy. He looks mad. Blood dots his forehead and the skin beneath his eyes. His red hair is pushed up in tufts like a clown.
I don’t know what it’s like to lose a brother, but I’ve been close, and I remember feeling the way Billy probably feels right now. I remember that sense of hopelessness and despair — feelings all too prevalent in this day and age. I remembered thinking of an honorable form of suicide, of storming the gates of Eden by myself. At the time, it seemed like a great idea. Looking back, I know I would’ve failed. I would’ve been cut down before I got within fifty feet of the place.
Billy doesn’t realize that going back is suicide, but if I can keep him alive long enough like Ben Richards did for me then Billy will.
“I’m going,” he says, and he rips his arm out of my grip. “And don’t fucking touch me again.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“I don’t need your help, Jupiter. Maybe you’re the savior from Mother’s dreams, maybe you’re not, but it doesn’t fucking matter. I saw what your help does. I should’ve — ” his voice breaks. He closes his eyes and turns his head down to the fractured concrete. “I should’ve jumped in there and…” he trails off, the fire inside of him going out. He no longer looks like a cocky, Irish asshole. Now, he looks human.
Defeated.
The sobs come like a rolling wave of thunder — slowly at first, but then the cloud bursts. Tears stream down his face. His chest heaves, breath hitches. It breaks my heart to see it. And there’s nothing I can do. Nothing I can really do to make it better.
I walk up to him and he doesn’t turn away from me or back up or anything. I put my arm around his shoulders and say, “C’mon, Billy. C’mon, let’s go!”
“Okay,” he says, stuttering, barely a mumble.
“Let’s get as far away as possible.”
“But Sean — ”
“It’s too late,” I say.
He turns his face up to me, tears pooling in the corners of his eyes, ready to chase the tears that have already fallen and he says, “I know…I know.”
35
It takes about two minutes for the tears to stop and for Billy to wipe his face, clearing wetness and his brother’s blood.
“Tell anyone about this, Jupiter, and I’ll kill you,” he says.
He has nothing to worry about. Any sane person would understand. I mean, Billy just lost his twin, his family.
We walk down a street that was once probably busy and bustling. I can almost sense the ghosts of business women, their heels clattering the sidewalks, saying no to the man who offers them a breakfast hot dog from his vendor cart. I can almost sense the three-piece suits passing by, their eyes glued to smartphones that are now as dead as the world, briefcases swinging.
The air up here smells clean, but I think anywhere would smell clean compared to where we just came from.
We walk in silence, our eyes peeled wide open.
A paper blows across the street and thwaps against a bus stop overhang just ahead. I bend down, pick it up, and read the headline. It almost makes me sick.
WHO’S TO BLAME AS FLU RAGES ACROSS THE EAST COAST?
The Washington Post, dated September 19th, 2016. Just the east coast? This wasn’t before the disease reached other countries and parts of the States. Only a fool would believe that. This was just before the papers and media shut down completely.
“Where are we heading?” Billy asks. �
�How the hell do we even know if Jake and Grady went this way?”
“I’m going to the hospital,” I say.
“The hospital, seriously? Forget the hospital. My brother died, Jack. My brother.”
I nod. I don’t know what else to say.
Billy stops. I am ahead of him, leading the way through the empty street, but I know he’s stopped because his boot heels no longer click against the sidewalk. It’s that quiet in this city. Our nation’s capital — not left to die, but left to the dead.
I turn around and look him square in the face. “I’m no longer messing around,” I say. I don’t care about saving the world. I don’t care about Doc Klein. My world is my family and Abby is apart of that family. She lies in a hospital bed in a village I hardly know anything about. If she dies because her wound is infected and there’s no longer any medicine to fight that infection, then I fail.
I hate failing.
“We need to round the bridge again and get to the cars,” Billy says.
He knows as well as I know that it won’t matter if we get to the cars. We don’t have the keys. He just wants an excuse to go see his brother, and I’m not about to tell him there’s probably nothing left of his brother to see besides a red stain on the blacktop.
I shake my head. “I’m going to the hospital and if I were Jake or Grady, I would do the same thing. We have our weapons and our brains. We can do what we were sent here to do.”
Billy looks at me with contempt. He crosses his arms and shakes his head.
“People die everyday,” I say. “That’s the way it is now.”
I’m not budging. If I budge, I fail, and he wins. He knows he’s dead without me. He can’t shoot worth dick, and I can. There’s too many zombies for two people, let alone one.
“If you want to go then go. You can go back that way, but you won’t find anything you like. You’ll probably find more zombies. And they’re always hungry. You know that as much as I do. One is never satisfied. Think of how millions will be — ravenous, stir-crazy,” I say.
I hate to do this, I hate to scare the poor bastard, but I’m saving his life. His skin goes an ashy shade of gray, eyes slowly widening.
“That way is lost. We might be able to get back to the cars once the horde clears, but it was a big horde and I reckon we got awhile. There’s strength in numbers. It’s best we find the others before worse happens,” I say.
The wind blows, ruffling my hair, cooling my skin, but with the breeze comes the stench of rot.
“Okay, Jupiter, I’ll play it your way,” Billy says. He grips his gun. “But if you try to boss me around again, there’s gonna be hell to pay.”
I give him a nod and turn back, ready to walk, thinking, Yeah, right, Bill. Shoot me if you want, but I’d bet a million bucks you’d miss.
36
We can no longer see the hospital. It is blocked by a large parking deck. We’ve left one desolate street behind only to arrive at another. Each time we turn a corner or cross an intersection, the cold, icy fingers of fear grip my heart, my breath catches, and I think I’ll be face to face with another horde. Frozen. Not enough bullets to get out alive.
That’s not the case.
We have seen a few stragglers as we’ve walked. But before they notice us, we turn the other way or hide behind a stalled car. Mainly, these stragglers walk where they couldn’t seven months ago, where the traffic would’ve flattened them to pancakes in the middle of the road, or where they would’ve at least pissed a lot of people off.
Billy doesn’t see the straggler I see now. He is lost in a pain-induced haze, though he’ll never admit it. I can see it written on his face. It sucks, I know. But he can’t mourn now. One slip up, one second spent looking at your feet, and the next thing you know you’re looking at the turquoise sky while a group of pus-bags rip open your chest and chew on your lungs.
He almost breaks free from the cover of the street corner I am stopped at, but my hand is lightning quick. It grips him on the arm and yanks him back to the shadows. His mouth opens to protest, but I raise a fist like I’m about to strike him. When it comes down to it, Bill is a bully, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time fighting bullies, especially lately. I think he senses this. Sees it in my eyes.
I point to our right with my thumb and with my other hand — no longer holding Billy’s arm — I wiggle my index and middle fingers as if I’m signaling walking. He understands immediately and peeks around the corner.
He opens his mouth and pushes his tongue out as if the air tastes bad. And it kind of does.
“Put this one out of its misery,” he whispers.
“No,” I whisper back. “No sounds, just walk quietly and fast.”
Billy grimaces. He hates listening to me, but I think he knows he has to.
There is a yellow cab parked in the crosswalk, resting on a steady decline with more cars beyond that. In order to get to the next street and to be able to see the gleaming blue sign of Mercy Globe Hospital, we have to get around it. Problem is there’s shards of glass glittering all over the blacktop. Each window of almost every car seems to be punched out. Up ahead, there’s a van on its side, halfway pushed into a storefront, a traffic light lying on top. This particular area of Washington D.C. looks as if it experienced Armageddon in all its glory, but part of me thinks everywhere else is just as bad.
“Mind the glass,” I whisper. “And be quiet.”
Billy rolls his eyes again. “What do you take me for?” he seethes.
Unstable, I want to say but don’t.
So he walks forward, crouched low. He gets to the taxi without causing a sound. I peek around the corner, hearing my pulse in my ears. The zombie stands at the far end of the street in front of a building that looks like it was once an Italian bakery, the bricks charred and covered in soot. I follow after Billy.
“Get down!” he whispers. His voice is rushed.
I spin around to see a group of more dead shambling toward us at the intersection. I don’t think they’ve seen us yet, but they’re closer than I’d like them to be. Billy, now hiding behind the bent door of the cab has nowhere to go. I think about running, just turning tail and taking out the straggler at the end of this street. But I don’t because it wouldn’t get us any closer to the hospital — it would take us out of the way. I dart to the open door.
“C’mon,” Billy whispers.
He crawls into the front seat of the cab, very carefully, and keeps going over the middle console toward the passenger’s side door.
Except he isn’t nimble. One look at this guy and you’d know that. His hip bumps into the car horn. Time freezes as I prepare for the blast, the sound that will ultimately notify the group and the straggler where we are.
Nothing comes.
I exhale a deep breath. Thank God for dead batteries, though where was this luck when we were repelling down the overpass and the alarm went off?
As the great Kurt Vonnegut once said, “So it goes.”
Billy puts his hand on the passenger’s side doorknob. I stop him, and shake my head. From my vantage point in the driver’s seat, I can see the zombies walking.
I point down. We have to hide in case they see us, and right now this old taxi would be the worst place to die. It still smells like a mixture of rotten sub sandwiches and farts forever trapped in the seat cushions. I don’t want to die here. Hell, I don’t want to die anywhere, but definitely not in this cab. We both scramble down to the floor. We are much too big to be hiding here. My back jingles the keys still in the ignition and I’m careful not to move again as my hands settle into caked dirt and old candy wrappers scattered on the rubber floor mat. The plastic makes an electric crackle.
They move by the open door — not as open as when I crawled in — without ever turning their heads. Through the crack, I watch them, and something strikes me as odd. They don’t walk like any zombies I’ve ever seen. No limping, no gait, no gut-dragging, no gnarled look about them. Sure, they’re covered in blood and dirt,
their clothes are raggedy and grungy, hair frazzled and chunky with bits of mud, but they move just like you and me. Smoothly.
Billy must see this, too, because he pokes his head up higher to get a better look out of the dusty back windshield.
Then, as one of the zombies leans in and says something that isn’t a death rattle or a guttural grunt to one of the other zombies, both Billy and I look up, and I all I can think is What the fuck?
37
Now, we glance at each other.
The zombie who was talking whistles toward the straggler at the end of the road by the ruined bakery. This one puts their hands up and says, “Thought you were never gonna make it!” It’s a female’s voice.
I am totally lost.
“Find out who was making all that noise?” one of the (not) zombies closest to us asks.
The woman by the bakery shakes her head.
“Aw, they’ll show up. But the dumbass blocked the highway with a damn horde.”
They talk in regular voices. Seriously, what the fuck? The sounds carry through the dead streets, echoing off empty buildings and hollow cars.
Billy tries to lean over the backseat, pressing his face up against the smudged partition, and as he does, his boots kick backward. One almost hits me in the face and I hiss, “Watch it.”
He doesn’t apologize, just keeps trying to get closer to see what the hell is going on. I don’t blame him.
The other boot kicks out. This time, not hitting me, but hitting the gearshift. The cab lurches.
Oh, shit. I spin around to try to put it back in park, but it’s too late. We are rolling down the steady decline of the hill. The feeling of weightlessness I never wanted to feel again in my life invades my body.
A red Accord gets larger as we barrel into it. This is not a terrible crash by any means, just busted glass and crunching metal. No flames. No airbags. Nothing like that. Just failure.
We don’t need to put the car in park now. Billy looks at me, his face pale under his red beard.
“Idiot,” I whisper and grab the SIG from its holster.
Jack Zombie (Book 3): Dead Nation Page 13
