“I’m a good — ” Grady begins to say, his teeth bared, upper lip snarled, but he never gets to finish the sentence. The kitchen door bangs open. The circular window shatters. Grady spins around only to be greeted with a bloody mass of reaching arms. Shit. They’ve come in through the back door. They must’ve heard us arguing. I look to the window, seeing dark shadows stretching along the ruined pick-up truck’s passenger door.
They’re coming. They’re always coming.
Grady lets off two shots. The sound is catastrophic to my ears. If I’m not already going deaf, I will be now. But it beats going dead, that’s for damn sure. An explosion of light brightens the ruined bakery. Both shots are kill shots. Blood bursting from skulls. A fat zombie splatters up against the back wall and slides down the plaster, leaving a snail-trail of red. But there’s more. There’s always more.
Pots and pans bang, echoing in my brain. I’m frozen still. Torn. In the middle of this tug of war of morality. Do I help Grady or do I help Doc Klein and help the world?
I don’t have time to weigh my options, but I do it anyway. I can save Grady and perhaps die while doing it, and he literally just pointed a gun at me, or I could save Doc Klein and in turn, perhaps save the world. Or I can do fucking both because I’m Jack Jupiter and I’m not an asshole like the people who always seem to betray me are.
I move toward the door with the M16 pushed out. I feel like a jousting knight.
Grady shoots three more times.
My eardrums burst, but I keep going, swinging the M16 down on a teenaged skater. His backwards ball cap squirts brains and black gunk from the eyelets meant for ventilation. I kick him back into the kitchen. He lands in a heap on huge bags of sugar and flour. A metal rack topples over and almost sounds as loud as the gunshots.
I glance to the left and see more coming. So many that they are plugging up the doorway to the outside alleyway. Now the smell of old bread and baking dough is replaced with rotten guts.
Grady bashes in the brains of a woman, her hair tossing up all around her. He’s screaming.
“Grady, let’s go!” I yell as I vault the counter, grabbing the duffel bag in the process.
He turns to me with the gun aimed high.
Are you kidding me? I just saved his life and he’s still going to try to do this.
“No,” he says.
But I think that’s the last thing he’ll ever say.
48
The arms which grapple him are riddled with holes. Flesh eaten away. Bones and tendons wiggling like wet piano wires. One hand squeezes around his throat, the fingernails long, and at one time, manicured. Grady chokes something else out, but it’s impossible for the human ear to decipher. Maybe he’s practicing his zombie talk. That is, if he gets the chance to turn. I move to glance at the street, seeing the first sign of rotters closing in the front.
The weight of the zombies takes Grady down. The gun slips from his grip. It hits the counter, slides into the unbroken glass case and breaks it.
I’m weaponless so I have to go for it.
As I move, I see Grady’s bulging eyes light up with hope, upside down to me now, the top of his head facing the front doors and his face to the ceiling. He thinks I’m going to save him. I wish, but he is beyond saving. My goal is to get the gun and leave before they start tearing him open —
And there goes his throat. The manicured nails claw at the flesh and the tendons. I see a gleam of bone — his spinal cord. I turn away, my eyes burning, stomach doing more flips than an Olympic diver. My hand fills with warm, bloody steel and I head for the door.
A zombie breaks into my field of vision, spinning from the alleyway like a drunk. I waste no time in raising the gun, aiming, and blowing his top off.
I look back to Grady as I hover in the threshold of the bakery. “I’m sorry,” I say in a hoarse whisper and I leave, trying to ignore his gurgles and screams, trying to ignore the sounds of the zombies gnashing their teeth and ripping his insides out.
49
Not long after I break away from the pack, another flare lights the night sky. Zombies fill the bakery almost to bursting. This place, which I read as HEAVENLY BAKES from the dead neon sign, probably never saw this many people when they were in business. It’s a bad thought, one to get my mind off of the fact that I came here with four other people and I might leave by myself. I imagine the look on Mother’s face, her dark features frowning, her rheumy eyes staring daggers through my very soul. I imagine telling Jacob’s wife of what became of him, trying to tell her how heroic he was in the end, but stumbling over the words. Look at me, a writer who can’t say what he means. The whole village hating me, kicking us out…or worse, hanging us to die, leaving us to be eaten.
I jog up the street, the contents of the duffel bag shifting inside, bumping me on the hip. It is stuffed. The zipper looks as if it’s about to burst. With the sky faintly lit up by the flare’s afterglow, I can see cigarette butts on the concrete, trash fluttering in the wind.
A zombie stumbles out of a car, one golden eye closed. He reaches for me and I raise the weapon fast, then think I better not. The only thing scarier than being attacked by a zombie is running out of ammunition. He lunges, and I move out of the way, giving him a wide berth, gripping a cold iron pole for balance. He misses and is now behind me.
I don’t look back. Never look back.
I release the pistol’s cylinder and count only one more shot. This terrible feeling invades my stomach, this burning sensation. Almost, I imagine, worse than getting ripped apart by dead hands.
It’s guilt.
Guilt for letting them die. Letting them all die. Kevin, Isaiah, Ryan, the Richards’ family, Billy, Jacob, and Grady.
It’s only when the zombie snarls behind me, the lone zombie who’s broken away from the pack to follow me, do I realize that I’ve stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Crumpled newspapers and flyers roll across the abandoned street which once housed bumper to bumper traffic and hit my legs.
I flip the pistol around, hold it by the muzzle, and swing at the bastard, dashing what’s left of its brains against the bricks. Not far away from this new, dark stain is graffiti.
I pick up the pace because Jack Jupiter doesn’t give up, Jack Jupiter holds his head up high and he stands as straight as damn arrow.
Doc Klein, I think. Doc Klein will fix this and I’ll help him.
With a bloody gun in hand, I sprint toward the bridge.
50
My lungs just about bottom out by the time I see the bridge. And it’s not the bridge I immediately zone in on at first. It’s the man standing on an overturned semi truck with a smoking flare gun in hand. He points it at the squirming masses of dead. They move like a rough ocean waves, their heads jerking back and forth. Their arms are all pointed toward the semi truck. The closest zombies bang and smash their fists on the undercarriage. There’s so many of them the only possible way through the mess is a motorboat. Float on top all the way home.
Metal lurches and screams.
In turn, the man on top of the semi’s trailer wobbles, falls to the metal, and shrieks louder. This man doesn’t wear a white lab coat as I originally pictured. He is lightly balding and though his face is screwed up in fear and possibly pain, I can tell he has a gentle way about him. He looks like your friendly, neighborhood doctor. He looks like the man I saw on the Eden ID badge Danny had shown me.
And right now, he looks like a savior.
He doesn’t see me, though, and that’s good. I don’t want him to. There’s no way I can make it to the trailer. Two steps into that mess and I’m some zombie’s midnight snack.
But there is a way.
The ropes we used to repel down the bridge still hang from the overpass minus their harnesses. They rock gently as more zombies stream in from deeper on the highway. If I can get to the bridge, I can pull the rope up and cast it off to Klein. He ties one end around his waist and I use the concrete embankment as leverage to create a pulley system, the
n I can get him up and out of harm’s way. He doesn’t look like he weighs more than a hundred-fifty pounds. I could do it.
I’ve done crazier things.
Well, at least I tell myself that each time I want to do something crazy. So, I guess there’s some truth to it. I know Abby is in need of medicine and Darlene is probably chewing her nails off worrying about me, but I can’t let this man who I came here for in the first place die, not even the old Jack Jupiter would do that.
I have to move fast before the yellow eyes, like dim spotlights on rotted faces, search me out. In front of me is a concrete wall, white-washed by the moon. The way it’s built is like a jigsaw puzzle, and each square of concrete is big and grooved enough for my hands and feet to find purchase. The only problem — the thing that makes the little doubtful voice in my head whisper, You’re fucked, Jack — is the wall is about twenty feet high. There’s no harness around me and I can’t leave the heavy bag full of medicine down on the sloping highway exit. I turn to look back up the gentle rise. The dark shadows of more zombies fill my vision. Now I’m in the middle of a zombie sandwich. Fuck.
For some reason, I think back to a day on the lake with Norm when I was about thirteen and he was closing in on eighteen. It was the summer before he left us. I was deathly afraid of the water. I couldn’t swim. No one taught me. My mother was always working. Dad left. The few friends I had would rather stay inside and play Nintendo or D&D on a pleasant Ohio summer day — which were few and far between. Norm laughed at me when I told him I couldn’t swim. We were standing on the edge of the dock. I was fully clothed, tank-top, tennis shoes, cargo shorts, and the bastard threw me in. “Sink or swim, Jacky!” he shouted. And if I wanted to live to see fourteen, I had no choice.
Sink or swim.
I swam.
The zombies’ eyes bob in the darkness. Dancing, yellow orbs.
Afterward, Norm clapped me on the back and said, “Good job, man. Maybe you’re not as lame as I thought. If you spent half as much time having fun as you did sitting around and reading and writing, you might be cool like me, man.”
Sure, it was a veiled insult, but it meant a lot at the time, and I never forgot it. Sink or swim.
That’s what I have to do, now.
I sling the duffel bag across my chest then dig in. Klein screams on top of the semi’s trailer. The dead ramp up their guttural voices as they bang and slam mushy flesh against the metal. It rocks and creaks. The Doc oddly looks like he’s trying to keep his balance on a surfboard. I glance back to the right. The dead are coming. Thick, now. They see me, their pace picking up.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
The dirt beneath the concrete pieces of this wall press under my fingernails. My boots struggle for purchase, but I find it. I’m thinking Spider-Man, Spider-Man, be fucking Spider-Man. The pistol with one shot left is in the holster. I feel it sliding. I’m halfway up the wall, now. The blood pulses in my head. The dark ground looks so much farther down then fifteen or twenty feet. I think if I fall, not only will I get torn apart by zombies, but I’ll probably splatter the pavement. The zombies will have to slurp at my liquid guts.
I know that won’t happen, not really, but my brain is teetering on the edge of sanity while the fate of my life all rests on my fingers’ and toes’ shoulders…if that makes sense.
“Hey! Hey!” Klein shouts. “Help me!”
I’m trying, but I don’t say that. I need all my oxygen going to my brain, not escaping my lungs. The zombies pass under me. A few stragglers brush against the embankment, reaching their hands up. I’m too high, thank God.
“Please! Please!” Klein is saying.
The zombie growls rev louder.
I keep going, moving slow and deliberate. One wrong move and —
I slip, my right foot going out from beneath me. All the pressure goes to my hands. I feel a nail rip off, warm liquid slip down my knuckle. Not only am I smelling the earth and soil between the concrete slabs, but I’m smelling my own fear. I scream out, the toe of my boot searching for the groove it was just resting on. I can’t look down, either. If I look down I’ll see the jagged, dripping teeth, the sloughed off flesh, and the yellow eyes. If I see that, I’ll panic, I’ll slip.
I’ll die.
“Hey! Hey!”
“Shut up! Or I’ll just leave you there!” I shout at him.
He does.
The dead below grow louder. They might not think much, but they’re thinking I’m going to drop. My boot finds the groove. So sorry, assholes.
Sink or swim, baby.
Darlene. Norm. Abby. Herb. I have to swim for them. Not for myself. Not for Klein. Nobody, but them. So I climb, ignoring the rip-roaring pain in my fingernails, the glass in my lungs, the dead below that might as well be death spikes. In one last great burst of energy, I grab ahold of the edge of the brick wall. Wet grass brushes my dirty skin. My other hand grabs the edge now. I’m breathing ragged. My head is pounding. I spare one last glance over my shoulder at the dead below. They have swallowed the surface. Falling down, I wouldn’t hit the concrete at all. I’d land on a sea of mushy zombie skulls.
I pull my body up and exhale. I take a moment to rest — a very short moment because there are a few stragglers up here. One zombie sees me, or smells me, I’m not sure. She’s quick for a dead person. I’m still on my back as she lunges. I kick up, grunting as she bears her dead weight on me. Her chest squelches like mud beneath the soles of my boots. With a scream, I flip her over my head. Black spittle rains down on my neck and the side of my face. She falls for less than a second, sinking like a stone. The splatter of her body hitting the other zombies below is worse than anything I can remember hearing. It brings me to a gag, and I don’t dare look down at the aftermath. I pick myself up, wiping my face clear of the zombie venom.
The bridge is about twenty feet away to the left. My arms and the insides of my thighs are on fire. Climbing that wall with the dead right below me worked muscles I never even knew I had. I’ll feel it in the morning for sure. And yes, I’ll still be around to see the sun rise with human eyes.
I unholster the gun. One bullet left, not much, but it could save my life if it comes down to it. A zombie missing much of its right shoulder spots me coming toward him. He bumps into the metal guardrail and falls flat on its face. I stomp its head into goo with a scream then I hop the rail. Now, I’m on the road that leads to the bridge. There are three zombies ambling about, clueless.
I see the metal claw of the ropes still burrowed into the concrete. There’s Sean’s messenger bag as well. The spark of hope in my chest turns to a full-fledged wildfire. What could be in the bag? I’m betting weapons.
Thank God.
Ignoring the burning in my legs and arms, I begin to run. Brains and bloody-gunk splishing and splashing off my shoe. A raggedy-clothed zombie doesn’t even see me coming as I barrel into his back, sending him over the bridge.
Splat.
Then the curious groans of the zombies bunched up on the street below. In the struggle, the others turn their yellow eyes to face me, but I’m ready for them. I don’t let them rush me. No, I rush them.
I go for blunt force trauma as opposed to wasting my last bullet.
The butt of the gun smashes across a teenager’s snarling smile. Now he has less teeth. He goes stumbling backward and I help his momentum with a kick to the chest. I feel bones snap and rattle beneath my sole. The zombie’s arms pinwheel all the way over the railing where it finally backflips to its fate.
Zombie, meet road. Road, meet zombie.
The other three don’t wait their turn. They’re hungry, and they attack. A shirtless woman with the skin of her torso completely ripped off shambles to me. Jerky movements. Breastbone and ribs wriggling. Black spittle running from the corner of her mouth. Another closes in on my left side, backing me up to the part of the railing the metal claw is wedged against. This one is quicker, less emaciated than the woman. He was once a biker, I’d put my life on that assumption. A red b
andana is stuck to his head. The handlebar mustache he wears on his upper lip is slick with blood. I swing at him with the butt of the pistol. Crack. His skull opens and putrified brains ooze out from beneath the bandana. Golden eyes flicker, sputter, then die as the thing drops into a lifeless heap at my feet. I’m dazed as I watch this, so dazed, in fact, that I don’t even see the zombie claw swiping at my face until the last possible second. I shift, slipping on my heel which is already slick to begin with, and crash into the concrete barrier.
The zombie woman without a chest pushes up against me like she’s about to give me a kiss — in a way, that’s exactly what she’s going to do. A kiss of death. Before I know it, trying to push her off of me, another zombie is joining in on the fun. I’m flailing my arms, trying to block them from drawing blood, whether it’s by bite or scratch, I’m on the edge here. My legs kick out, hitting nothing but thin air. The smell of their dead breath is like a fog. It dulls all of my senses by sending them into overdrive. My eyes and nostrils burn. My lungs fill with horrid air, feeling like they’re about to spontaneously combust. The zombie pressing on my right wears glasses, much like Doc Klein’s glasses — thin, wiry frames. One lens is cracked in the shape of a jagged lightning bolt. As he presses his face closer to me (I’m able to push the emaciated woman away with my right forearm), snapping his jaws, thin lips stretched over cracked teeth, I block him with my left. Something jingles behind me, something scrapes concrete. I’m dimly aware of it being the hook embedded into the low barrier. With my right hand, I reach for it. I squeeze my eyes shut. I can’t bear to look at this rotted man, his hair standing up in gray tufts, his cheekbones poking through his face, teeth still full of meat chunks.
The claw is cold in my hands, but as my fingers close around it, a warm burst of lightning (hope) surges up my arm. I shout something unintelligible, meaning to sound cool and awesome, but really just sounding like a frightened jackass, and the claw comes down on the zombie’s head. Three of the four hooks embed themselves into his cranium. Blood runs from the new holes and into his eyes, dulling the glowing yellow embers. Then, right before me, his eyes turn white, as if they’ve rolled back to get a peek at his dead brain. He falls slack at my feet. I yank the claw free. Now it’s the woman’s turn. My breathing is raspy. I taste the death and decay and the tangy, slightly rusty tinge of blood in the air. I’m scared out of my mind, I’m pissed and I’m tired, but I have to do this. If I’m going to save the Doc, I have to.
Jack Zombie (Book 3): Dead Nation Page 19
