Jack Zombie (Book 3): Dead Nation

by Flint Maxwell

  My legs pump, brain-slick heels slide on the concrete as I plow my way past reaching limbs and gnarled hands. Grady’s gun lets out two more shots, the sounds echoing off the looming buildings. He pulls a long blade free and swings, but then he’s gone, swallowed up by the masses.

  I hit the zombie with the turned around head full force, my hands digging into his soft chest. Cold, wet guts splatter the front of my shirt. They chill me to my very core, and it’s not just a physical feeling. The zombie utters a cry. It sounds confused by my counterattack. I bet in this thing’s lifespan (deathspan) as a zombie it’s never seen a human rush it like I have done, but what choice do I have? There’s an opening at the foot of the steps, past a crookedly parked Mercedes Benz now riddled with bullet holes. What it comes down to in this fucked-up world is not having a choice. Only then will we do the things we need to do to survive.

  Just like I’m doing, as this bastard’s cold guts jiggle against me. He’s my inhuman shield, and I’m laughing manically — mainly out of fear — as I push him through the crowd. Zombies snarl and reach and claw, but they do it to him. I’m grunting, feeling like a football player going up against weighted sleds in practice. With one final push, giving it my all and possibly throwing my back out in the process, I break free from the pack. My M16 is slimy with blood. I swing it anyway. Grady is to my left, just beyond the Mercedes. He hacks and hacks as zombie after zombie rush him, but he’s pressed up against the hood of a delivery truck. Slicing faces. Spraying blood. I can hear his ragged breathing from twenty feet away.

  I crawl over the Mercedes, run across the roof, slipping in the process.

  Grady cries out. He has his blade horizontal, blocking four biters, their jaws unhinged. With a great leap, I take off. The empty M16 is cocked behind my head. As I’m in the air, I realize two things: one, this is probably a really fucking bad idea, and two, it’s too late.

  I come down like I’m swinging Thor’s Hammer. I manage to bash one zombie’s head in, but at the same time, my heart bottoms out because the feeling of weightlessness overtakes me and I hit the concrete hard. Breath whooshes. Vision blacks out. There’s a moment where I think I’ve died, ears ringing, arms and legs tingling. If I’m not dead, I might be paralyzed.

  Then my vision rushes back in all its HD glory. Blood spurts from the zombie’s accordion’d head. Grady gives his best war cry and slashes the others zombies’ heads off with the little daylight my aerial assault has given him. It takes about three seconds before I hear a growl from behind. I turn to see a big motherfucker tottering over me. It’s yellow eyes bore into my soul, lips twitch, teeth gnash. The bastard doesn’t reach as much as he throws all his weight toward me. A scream is building up in my throat —

  Gunshot.

  The scream never escapes my mouth because my jaw clamps shut. Light shines through the big zombie’s head as a smoking hole suddenly appears out of thin air. He lands on his knees, lips still twitching. And now through the hole I see a figure the same shape as the one I’d seen on the rooftop opposite the greenhouse. It’s Jacob and it’s about fucking time.

  The muzzle of his rifle lights up his face. The gray beard confirms who it is. Another zombie drops nearby. Jacob puts up a fist. I return the favor, a distant and silent thank you. Then I stumble back up, fill my hands with the slimy M16, and take to chopping another path clear.

  Five zombies smash to smithereens and then my hand grips Grady’s arm. It’s slick with blood. He is trembling. We are both scared. The adrenaline coursing through my veins doesn’t do much to quell the fear.

  “To Jacob!” I shout.

  As we stand in a sea of twisted and mangled limbs, blood, brains, bashed skulls, Grady looks dazed. He doesn’t respond, so I have to grab him again and pull. We run, our boots squishing and crunching, blood spraying from beneath our soles, dotting hubcaps. Jacob takes aim with his rifle and from our vantage point, me in the lead, it looks as if he’s going to gun us down. The muzzle lights up. Delayed thunder from the barrel. The whooshing snap of a bullet whizzing by us. The wet thwap of it hitting a zombie much too close. We are running and running and Jacob is getting bigger. The shadows are disappearing from his pain. I’m seeing the stern look of concentration and equal disgust. But as the shadows on his face disappear, more emerge from around the corner. Tall, black giants projected on the walls of the bank behind him. I stop on a dime, another scream caught in my throat. Grady hits me hard, but I don’t move.

  Zombies. More zombies. It’s always more.

  “Jacob — ”

  But it’s too late. They’re on him like rabid dogs on a scrap of meat. His rifle blasts off two more time. Shot hits nothing but the open, darkening sky. He screams. He gurgles. They crawl over him. They claw. He is bucking and kicking and I can’t do anything but stand there with my mouth open.

  No. This isn’t happening. Not again. No —

  Grady’s voice in my ear: “Jack! We have to go, Jack! We have to go now!” I barely hear him. I feel like I’m falling. Like darkness is enveloping me. I like Jacob, he’s so nice. I like him —

  Grady tugs on my blood and brain soaked shirt, trying to pull me to the right where a thin alley stretches for what seems like miles. I’m thinking about Jacob’s wife Margie, about how if we make it back alive I’ll have to tell her I couldn’t save her husband, how I had to watch him die.

  The zombies tear his arm off. Another plunges their hands into his gut. A volcanic eruption of blood. Screams. The snapping and stretching of innards.

  Now, I’m moving, but not toward the alley. No. Now I’m moving toward the chaos.

  When will I learn?

  46

  I shrug Grady off. Dead traffic lights move gently with a cold breeze. It hits my hair, sends it off of my forehead. The smell of Jacob’s innards blasts my nostrils. It’s like a wall of stench, but I plunge right into it.

  “No!” I’m shouting. “No!”

  The zombies don’t pay me the smallest bit of attention. They are too busy ripping Jacob apart, smearing blood and guts all over their faces and necks. One armless zombie dives headfirst into the open chest cavity, not needing to come up for air. Jacob screams and screams.

  I’m about ten feet from this gruesome scene when I realize I can’t save him. Through a crack in the flailing limbs and huddled shoulders, Jacob and I catch eyes. His face is twisted up in pain, his beard streaked with blood, but you couldn’t tell any of this if you just saw his eyes. His eyes are calm. Wise. They are saying, ‘Don’t be stupid, Jack. Get the hell out of here.’

  But I keep walking. The duffel bag he’d had sitting by him as he scalped a few zombie heads and saved Grady and I’s lives is away from it all. I see the bag is half-open and it’s filled with white-capped antibiotic bottles. Medicines they scavenged from the hospital. Medicines that could keep Abby’s wound from getting infected, that could save lives. I have to get it. And maybe his gun, but I don’t think I can get that. It’s in the thick of it.

  My pace picks up as I break farther away from Grady.

  The zombies don’t notice me behind them, inches away. Jacob has stopped screaming. I can see over the hunched dead that he is staring up into the dark sky with glassy eyes and as I’m seeing this the armless zombie takes a bite from his cheek, tearing away flesh and hair with a sickening snap. Blood floods the grayness of his beard. My stomach clenches and I quickly turn away.

  More zombies are coming toward the group, their yellow eyes not focused on me or Grady, but on the man who saved my friend’s life, the man whose life I couldn’t do the same. With the duffel bag slung over my shoulder and the M16 in my hand, I take off toward the alleyway. Grady peeks around the corner as the dead slowly amble by. Despite the bag’s weight, I’m quick.

  Grady looks at me with tears running down his face, slicing the bloodstains in two long streaks. “Jacob,” he says.

  And all I can say is, “I know.”

  But I won’t cry. Now’s not the time to cry. We got the medicine a
nd we’re still alive, that’s all we can ask for. This whole mission was a suicide mission to begin with. We’ve tempted our luck on more than one occasion and it’s time to go.

  If Doctor Klein is out there, I hope he’s safe and I hope he figures out a way to save the world without me. The sounds of the snarling zombies, the tearing of the flesh, and Jacob’s dead screams still hang in the air behind us.

  And we move on.

  47

  We are on a street I can’t remember if we’ve been on before. With the sun gone it’s pitch black. I can hear our breathing, ragged, pained. We need to get to the Hummer. We need to get out. Our boots crunch broken glass and the sound is almost defeating. We have avoided the zombie block party for the time being…just barely.

  As we walk up the sidewalk, clouds move overhead. A white moon glares down at us, lighting the glass like stars. The glass once belonged to a pair of cars. A black Dodge and a pickup truck. Now they are bent at odd angles, the metal crumpled and ripped. There’s a flipped ambulance not far from the crash. Two skeletons lay crushed beneath it. It’s been about six months since the fall of mankind, so I doubt those corpses have decomposed. Their arms are outstretched as if they’re reaching for the sidewalk, as if that would’ve saved their lives. My stomach roils again as I think about what happened to them and so many other people in this great city. They were devoured, ripped apart, eaten.

  We move as close to the buildings as we can, heading toward the bridge and the highway that started this all.

  “We had him, you know?” Grady says quietly.

  He has stopped walking and stands beneath a ripped awning that belonged to a bakery of some sort. The plate glass windows are gone and so is about everything else in the store, but the faint scent of baking dough is there. I catch a whiff. It makes my stomach grumble and sour, knowing the days of fresh baked bread are long gone.

  “We had him,” Grady says. He holds up two fingers. “Twice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Klein.”

  “You had him?” My voice is a whiplash. I advance on Grady. He holds his ground. “Where is he?”

  “He was with Jacob. You should’ve seen him. Those…those cannibals fucked him up really good,” he taps his forehead, “up here. He was near the hospital. He asked me for my gun and kept saying, ‘I can’t do it! I can’t do it! I’ve failed.’ But I wouldn’t give him the gun. His eyes said what his mouth wouldn’t. He wanted to die. He wanted to put a bullet in his brain.”

  I know the look. I’ve seen it many times in the last half-year. But my mind is running a million miles an hour with confusion and betrayal. “Where is he now?” I demand.

  Grady meets my eyes. He turns and heads into the bakery through the broken window. I follow him. The smell is engulfing us now. Tall glass cases stand vigil next to the counter. They are empty, one of them is shattered, the skeletal remains of the structure almost demoralizing. A cash register sits on its side, drawer open. There is no money. I imagine people rioted and looted. I think of the crushed skeletons outside. Look how far it got them. I imagine the dead eating Jacob now. From cookies and pastries to brains and flesh.

  Grady finds a rag and begins to towel his face off, wiping dark blood away in streaky smears. We are quiet. I am letting the smell wash over me. I need a moment.

  There’s a bang from the back room. It causes me to jump, my stomach to bottom out. Grady turns to the noise. The swinging door with a circular glass window opens. Not surprisingly, a zombie waddles out from beyond the door. It’s wearing a crooked chef’s hat. The only reason the hat hasn’t fallen off is because the flesh around the zombie’s scalp is so rotted and wet that the hat has almost been glued on. It wears an apron. Its face so emaciated, I can’t tell if it’s a woman or man. I see it’s waddling because its beige pants stained with dried icing and black bile have fallen from its waist. The flesh around its middle is gone. Chewed up or just rotted. I’m surprisingly not scared. After what happened one street over, I don’t think I’ll ever be scared again.

  “The bag, Jack,” Grady says. He doesn’t sound scared, either. “Hand me the bag.”

  I do. Slowly, he unzips it and pulls a handgun free. Something shiny and chrome. I hate to say it reminds me of Butch Hazard’s, but it does. Grady’s eyes never leave the zombie’s. He advances over the counter, kicks it in the knee so it falls, and bashes its head in over and over again. Blood squirts. Brains fly.

  I am sickened.

  But the zombie is dead, no longer a threat.

  Grady keeps going, grunting and grunting.

  “Grady,” I say, “it’s okay, it’s dead.”

  He’s breathing fast and heavy. “I hate these things as much as anyone else. They killed so many of my friends, Jack. So many people I cared about. Believe me,” he says, wiping his forehead — which is now bloodier than it was before — with the back of his forearm, “if there was a way — a real way — to kill them all, I’d be all for it.”

  He gets off his knees, the gun dripping in his hand.

  “There is,” I say. I don’t know this for sure, but I have hope. You have to have hope. “The doctor. He knows a way. Trust me.”

  Grady shakes his head. “No, he doesn’t, Jack. He’s crazy. You’ve never even met him. I have. He’s even crazier than he was before.”

  “My friends knew him,” I say. But my voice is shaky. He’s right, I never met Doc Klein. I don’t know if he’s truly crazy or not. But hope. I have to have hope. Without it, there is no Darlene, no Abby, no Norm, no Herb.

  No future.

  “Jack, he attacked us. Jacob and I. He attacked us and ran off with my emergency kit. If the zombies didn’t get him…”

  “No,” I say, “I’m not giving up.” But my voice sounds alien. The back of my mind is laughing at me, telling me I’m stupid to keep holding on to that hope. I look at the floor, at the flipped chairs and splintered pieces of wood. The moans of the zombies almost a block away reach us. Either they’re moving or the city really is that quiet.

  “Listen, Jack — ”

  A fizzling explosion.

  I snap my head around and look out the glassless windows. The sky lights up with orange fire. It’s a flare from Grady’s emergency kit.

  “Look!” I shout. “Look! It’s him. It’s the doctor.” I turn back to Grady. His dark pupils are filled with the same orange as the sky.

  He shrugs. “Yeah, with my flare. It doesn’t matter. That’s not our mission. Our mission is to get the medicine back to camp. Our mission is to help the people we can, not the people who are crazy.”

  I move toward the window and the street beyond. “I’m going,” I say. “I’m going to help him.”

  Because the only way to help the people back at the village — the true way — is to save the world. So we can stop living in fear.

  “You can’t,” Grady says. All good nature and cheer is gone from his voice. Now, it’s venomous. Demanding. A tyrannical leader yelling at the citizens of a country that is on the brink of overthrowing him.

  “Grady,” I say, “he’s a person. We can help him. We may not be able to help the entire world, but we can help him.” I point to the flare which is on its descent. “It came from near the Hummer. C’mon,” I say.

  I’m halfway out of the window when I hear it. That dramatic click-click, you know, the kind you’d hear in the movies before the bad guy shoots the good guy or vice versa. It doesn’t sound nearly as cool in real life as it does in those films. In real life, it sounds like the sound of betrayal, of a man I could’ve called a friend just one click-click ago. And here I am, weaponless, an empty M16, and a gun pointed at the back of my head. The sounds of zombies ambling up and down the street drift through the empty buildings via the wind tunnel effect. Slowly, I turn.

  I can almost tell you what Grady is going to say before he says it. I see his lips part and in my head, I’m thinking I can’t let you do that, Jack.

  On cue, he says: “I can’
t let you go, Jack.”

  Almost.

  Maybe he knows what I’m going to say, too. Something like, What are you going to do, kill me? Or, you can’t kill me. My group’ll be expecting me back. So I go against all that common wisdom and dialogue you’d hear at the final, climatic scene in some cookie cutter action movie, and I say, “Fuck you, Grady. This is all your fault anyway. Sean died because you wanted to be fucking Tom Cruise and repel off the overpass. We could’ve walked and got by the zombies. It wouldn’t have been hard if we all stuck together. It all started with you, man.”

  He looks like I’ve slapped him. Eyes wide, whites glowing in the dark. But that look passes as fast as a rolling, black cloud and translates to a bursting thunderstorm of rage. “Take it back,” he says. The metal in his hand shakes, glints orange for a split-second before the flare disappears.

  “You want me to take back the truth? What would Mother think of your stupidity?” It’s still weird calling her Mother and not thinking of my own.

  “Shut up, Jack! Shut your mouth!” he shouts.

  Zombies growl. They’ve gotten a taste of meat and they want more. The alley way echoes with their cries. My skin is crawling, heart pounding, arms shaking.

  “You grabbed me when I went for Jacob. I was gonna try to save him, I was gonna pull him free, but you grabbed me and slowed me down. And when I got there, it was too late!” I shout.

  “No!” he shouts. “No!”

  They are closer now. Through the open window, I hear the scraping of the shoes they died in coming up the alleyway. The gurgles. The moans. My body is slowly icing over. If I don’t move now, it’ll be too late.