by Brett Abell
“God, no, I’m not okay. What the flying fuck is going on?”
“Zombies, man. It has to be zombies.”
“Like on TV?”
“Has to be. We need to get to my car and get out of here.”
Bear wiped his mouth on his sleeve and listening to the banging on the door outside the lab. “Those are zombies out there?”
“You saw what happened. We have to go before they get in here.”
Bear looked at the window and back at the doors. “No way. We’re stuck. We need to stay here until help gets here.”
“My sister is in town. So is your mother. We have to go now.”
Bear shook his head. “How?”
Stan held up one of the climbing legs. “You’ve trained for this. You climb down the outside before those things spread across the campus.
Bear thought about the fight outside and his mouth dropped open. “No, I can’t.”
“You can. You’re a climber. We can make it.”
Bear shook his head. “I can’t.”
Stan slapped Bear’s cheek. “You can. You will. You have to.”
Bear opened his eyes and screamed, “I can’t do it.”
Stan swallowed and looked away. “Okay.”
He gathered the legs and put them back in the backpack. Stan lifted the other blade runner.
Bear scooted backward. “What are you doing?”
“I have an idea to get us out of here, but then you’ll have to run.”
“I can’t.”
“I have to go get my sister,” Stan said. “You won’t forgive yourself if you leave your mother out there with this spreading. If it is airborne or spreads by bites, it will get to wherever she is. Do you want to get to her first or not?”
“Yes.”
“Then, this is the play. If we are not climbing out, we are running out. I think I have an idea of how to open the door and get past them, but then we are moving. If you don’t come with me, then you are sitting here when they come crashing in. You’ll be dead and your mother will be alone.”
He pictured his father’s funeral. He pictured waking up in the hospital and his mother crying that she thought he was gone too. He reached in the backpack and pulled out his cell phone. The screen was cracked. He tried to turn it on, but it wouldn’t.
“Do you have yours?”
“In my car. We’ll use it when we get there.”
Bear nodded. “Okay, I’ll try, but I haven’t practiced on these and there are stairs.”
Stan slid the blade over his empty stump and tightened the soft straps. “It won’t be easy, but running is the only option out there. Just don’t fall and hit your head.”
Stan took Bear’s hands and leaned backward. Bear bobbled and slid but came up on the blades. He bounded over the body and the puddle of vomit. “Easy for the guy with legs to say.”
Stan looped the pack of extra legs onto Bear’s shoulder. “You have legs. I built them myself. Come on.”
They made their way across the lab and Stan pulled the rebar out of the handles of the door.
“What are we doing?”
Stan pointed. “Ass to the wall as close to the hinges as you can get. We both have to fit. Once I say go, we get around this door and out to the stairs around them. There may be more, so be ready to dodge and weave. This play has to be all the way to the goal line of my car. If we get tackled, we get eaten. Got it?”
“You would make a shitty coach, Stan.”
“I got your ass off the floor, didn’t I?”
Bear thought he had a point and hugged the wall with his elbow touching the hinge. Stan nodded and unlatched the doors. They both kicked open into his chest. He pulled one around and covered himself and Bear with the door against the wall.
The metal of the hinge pinched the skin on Bear’s arm through his sleeve, but he bit down to stay silent. Through the gap, Bear could see the bodies passing. They were male and female. There were adults and students. He saw bone through skin and torn flesh. He smelled slaughter and feces. They kept coming into the lab without end. He never wanted to leave the hiding place, but knew they would find him eventually.
Stan whispered, “Go.”
Bear shook his head. Bodies were still filtering in.
Stan pulled his arm and Bear followed around the door. The lab was full of dozens of mangled bodies spreading across the room. He wished that he had climbed out the window.
They stepped out on the landing, which was clear, but two more fumbled their way up the steps. One was a girl in a lab coat with her face torn off below the nose. The other was a custodian in a jumpsuit. The suit and his chest were shredded in the front.
Bear looked back. The bodies turned and saw them. They changed course and returned to the doorway of the lab.
Bear said, “Go.”
More turned around at the sound of his voice.
Bear took a step down and the blade slid. He grabbed the railing to keep from tumbling. Stan shoved the girl’s chest, and she tumbled backward down the stairs.
“Oh, Jesus,” Bear said.
The wood railing tore off under Bear’s weight. The creatures approached behind them.
“Get up,” Stan said.
Stan took the railing and swung. He struck the custodian and staggered him onto the wall over the stairs. Bear felt fingers on his back. He lurched himself up and slid on each step as he stumble-stepped down.
The custodian reached for him, but Stan swung again and knocked him over the side with a crash. The girl got to her feet at the base of the stairs in front of the biology lab. Stan poked her in the chest and shoved her backward again.
The mob of zombies rushed the stairs, and the ones in front tumbled down. They rounded the corner as the custodian stood on the stairs below them. Its head leaned back on a broken neck and it clawed blindly at them. Stan swung into its bloody chest and knocked it back into the window, shattering it. The janitor fell on the steps and Bear saw glass in its eye and forehead as it stayed down this time.
Bear bobbled down the stairs behind Stan. He gained his balanced at the bottom.
A professor in a tweed jacket banged on the up button for the elevator. Four more janitors closed in on him.
Bear shook his head. “How many janitors are in this place?”
Three of them turned around at the sound of Bear’s voice. The elevator dinged open and the undead cleaning crew turned back on the professor. The doors parted and a girl with a missing throat fell on the professor from inside and tore off his ear. Blood soaked into the tweed. The custodians took hold of him and brought the professor to the floor with their weight.
Stan and Bear ran past the pile as the professor still screamed underneath. They reached the front doors and stared out at the scattering of bodies. Bear did hear sirens now and saw smoke trailing up into the sky in the distance. He thought that might be the direction where his mother was working today.
He took hold of the crash bar. The bodies stood facing different directions in the sunlight. Some stared up at the sky. Others wavered on their lifeless legs.
Stan said, “We need to slip by them quietly. My car is down the hill in the student lot.”
Bear pushed the door out and the metal edges clanged as it opened. All dead eyes turned toward the door and dead legs carried them toward the boys. Bear and Stan backed away inside as the combined weight of the creatures slammed against the door and shattered the glass in around them. If Bear had legs made of flesh, they would have been cut by a few larger shards that bounced off his metal. A girl in short shorts, missing her shirt and one breast, flipped over the crash bar onto the glass. She reached up for them as other dead piled through the opening.
“Come on,” Stan said.
They ran up a hall in the wrong direction, away from the mob. A few of the janitors rose up from cleaning off the professor’s bones and followed, painted in blood. Stan ran up a short rise of three carpeted steps. He reached back for Bear, but Bear leapt over the steps to
the next level and they kept running.
Another set of double doors led out in the direction of the social science building. They would have to circle around the side to get to the parking lot.
A wave of bodies flowed out from a side hall between them and the doors. They wavered at first, but then spotted the boys and advanced. Bear looked back and saw the others crawling over the three steps.
Stan struggled with the lock on the window beside them, but it was painted shut. Boone would not approve. Bear opened his pack and took out a climbing leg. He slammed into the glass once, twice, and a third time. The window shattered and he swept the glass out of the frame.
“Go,” Bear ordered.
Stan scrambled through. Bear threw out his pack into Stan’s arms. He tossed the leg out and Stan picked it up.
“Come on, Bear.”
Bear hoisted himself up by the top of the frame. He fed his blades through first. His arms shook from the fatigue of his morning workout. Hands balled up the back of his shirt. He ducked out and pumped his legs, but got no traction with the blades. He felt the cold breath on his neck. Stan pulled and Bear jerked free of their grasp before they were able to sink their teeth in.
The zombies poured out the window, sliding through the sharp glass. The boys ran. They passed the doors with bodies still pressing to get inside. The ones in back turned and lumbered after the boys as they passed. More bodies rose up around campus and took up the chase.
They reached the Toyota and Stan fumbled with his keys. A safety officer crawled out from under a pickup and pulled itself along the asphalt toward them. “Come on, Stan.”
The doors opened and Bear climbed in the passenger’s seat. The blades forced Bear’s knees up into his chest, and he couldn’t get his seatbelt. Stan backed up and the car bucked over something behind them.
“What was that?”
Bear grunted. “Just drive.”
Stan shifted into drive and ran over the bump again as more dead poured into the parking lot. Stan swerved around bodies stumbling into his path. A woman rolled along the side and tore off Stan’s side mirror. Bear heard her growl as she clawed past the window.
Bear unstrapped one of his blades and lowered his knee.
“What are you doing?” Stan swerved again. “We’ll need to run again.”
“They’re too big for the car and I almost died from having no tread.”
Stan raced past the guardhouse and out onto the main road. Bear fished out one of his sneaker legs.
“Where’s your cell phone?”
Stan said, “Cup holder.”
Someone ran into the road with their arms out. Stan raced around them. The man called, “Stan. Wait.”
Stan looked in the rearview mirror. “Shit. I think that was Lewis. He’s alive.”
“Look out,” Bear yelled.
They hit a fat man approaching down the middle of the street. His legs snapped and he rolled over the hood. The windshield spider webbed completely white. Stan slammed on the brakes as the man tumbled off. He slid into a parked car and then flipped. All the windows shattered as the car rolled and came to a stop on its roof. The airbags burst and burned their skin from the packing powder.
Bear saw himself tumbling in a different accident that ended his football career. It was happening all over again.
Bear bounced around from not wearing his seatbelt. He pictured Stacy’s headless body on the side of the road still gripping his pecker. Bear crawled out the window with one sneaker leg in his hand and one blade still attached to his left leg.
He leaned against the upside down fender and watched as yet another janitor with blood leaking from his eyes ran toward him from the direction of the campus. He was moving much faster than the other zombies. The fat man rolled to his stomach in the street and pulled himself toward the car with his broken legs twisted behind him.
The fast janitor reached the street and charged up the road toward him with his hands up like claws.
“I was always meant to die next to an overturned car,” Bear whispered. “Just make it quick this time.”
He sat with one blade on, holding the other leg, and thought about sitting in the lab doing the same thing. He failed to step up then. He had sat legless on the side of the road next to a pickup he shouldn’t have been in and wouldn’t have been in, if his father was still alive. Now he sat again waiting on the bloody teeth to lock on and end it because he didn’t feel like moving anymore. Dad would be so proud, he thought.
Stan’s voice filtered out from inside the car. “Bear? Katie. Help me.”
Bear swung the leg in his hands by the sneaker at the last moment. He caught the janitor’s jaw and unhinged it. The creature’s momentum slammed it into the upturned tire, crushing its face. It flung backward and landed on its back on the street.
Bear attached the sneaker to his stump and stood on one sneaker and one blade. The janitor sat up and reached for Bear again. Bear took a climbing leg out of his backpack and jammed the claw through the janitor’s forehead. The body went down and stayed down.
Bear braced his sneaker on the twice-dead janitor’s chest and pulled the claw free. He turned and lifted the blunt end. Bear brought the titanium bar down four times on the back of the fat man’s head before it burst open like a pumpkin.
He walked around to the driver’s side and reached in. Bear unhooked Stan’s seatbelt and guided him out to his feet. Bear saw Lewis still waving from the parking lot of The Climbing Barn.
“This way,” Bear said.
They walked up and Lewis said, “Jesus, are you okay? What’s going on?”
“We need to get to Katie and Bear’s mom,” Stan said. “You have a car?”
Lewis held up the keys and pointed to a black, crew-cab pickup. “We’ll need to get my parents too. And Holly. She went somewhere for lunch.”
Lewis unlocked the passenger’s side and Stan climbed in first.
Charlie Noble slammed into Lewis and tore him away from the door onto the parking lot. Bear swung the titanium bar through the back of Charlie’s head, rolling him off of Lewis. Blood geysered up from Lewis’s neck and Bear backed away to avoid being sprayed. The blood splashed the wall and over the This Business Serves Everyone sign.
Charlie rolled up to his feet and blinked his bloody eyes. Bear leaned down and grabbed the keys out of Lewis’s hand. Charlie charged. Bear swung and connected with Charlie’s temple. The scientist spun away and rolled out into the street.
Bear slammed Stan’s door and ran around the back of the truck. He fished through the keys until Stan unlocked the driver’s door for him. Charlie lunged at him. Bear swung and hit again, driving Charlie face first into The Climbing Barn wall. Charlie’s hair was covered in red and he was not clean anymore.
Bear climbed in the truck and started it. He used his sneaker to press the gas.
“You want me to drive, Bear?”
“After that ride? No. I got this. I’ve done enough flips for one lifetime, thanks.”
Charlie grabbed on the mirror and held onto the door as Bear backed into the street. He shifted into drive and roared forward. Charlie held for a while, but then staggered away.
Bear looked in the mirror. Charlie fell back onto Lewis and sunk his teeth into his face.
***
“I don’t understand,” Bear’s mother said.
“Just come on,” he shouted.
She saw the black pickup with Stan Harper and a blond girl she didn’t know. “Whose truck is that?”
“Mine now, I guess.”
“That’s not funny, Bear.”
“Get in. I’ll explain on the way.”
“I’m not leaving my car.”
Bear pointed at the horizon and the rising smoke. “I can’t explain it. You’ll just have to believe me. Dead people are eating the living. We have to get the fuck out of Middletown.”
“That’s not funny and don’t cuss at me.”
“No, Mom, it’s not funny. It’s life and death. Pl
ease, believe I’m telling the truth, that this is an emergency, and I know what I’m doing today. We have a purpose today and it is to get out of town.”
She stared for a moment and whispered, “Okay.”
He got her in the truck and backed out of the driveway.
“I’m Anna Belle Causey. I’m Bear’s mother.”
“Katie Harper. I’m Stan’s sister.”
“How did you know I was here, Bear?”
He laughed as they left the neighborhood. “This is the only Nova on this side of town.”
He drove around a burning police car.
“What’s happening?” his mother asked.
“Dead people eating living people turning them into dead people.”
She narrowed her eyes at Bear. “Zombies?”
He glanced at her and back at the road as he pulled onto the highway. “How do you know about zombies?”
“I watch TV.”
He drove north for less than a minute before coming across a pileup of cars that crossed the highway and the median. Bodies rose up from the wreckage and approached. One was missing an arm.
His mother whispered, “Bear?”
Bear drove over the median and headed south. Before they got back to where they started, a mass of bodies spread across the road and under the overpass bridge.
“Shit,” Stan said. “Sorry, Mrs. Causey. What do we do now?”
Bear exited the highway before the zombies moved far enough to cut them off.
“There’s a fallout shelter at the high school,” Katie said.
Bear swallowed. “The high school?”
“Yeah,” Katie said. “It’s under the stadium home-side bleachers. It was for when people were afraid of Russian bombs. It’s supposed to be for tornados now, but I think it’s all full of sets from the school plays. It is concrete and secure. If we can’t get out of town, that might be good. There is emergency food down there too, I think.”
Bear kept driving. He knew the spot from the college games. He never went, but he knew where they were held. He dodged accidents and bodies all through town.
The high school parking lot was a mess as well. Cars sat askew and there were wide swatches of spilled blood but no bodies moving or otherwise. Windows in the school were broken, but he saw no movement.
