Until you are in the desert, sitting in a broken car with abandoned, dusty wooden buildings looking down on you while a legion of zombies get closer and closer to devouring your flesh, then you’d know what I’m feeling. It’s what I’d equate to drowning. Being stuck between a rock and a hard place. And when you see your big brother, who is normally cool and calm, freaking out and jerking the key in the ignition almost hopelessly, you know things are fucked.
“Norm,” I say. It’s time for me to step up. It’s time for me to lead us back to safety, dead Jeep or not. “Stop. We have to fight.”
The lake isn’t too far. We can run there. We can get the high ground. We can save Darlene. We can stop Central.
Norm looks at me, his eyes wide and a touch of wetness to them.
“It’s okay,” I say, reaching down to my pistol, drawing it and pulling the slide back. “We can do this.”
Realization washes over his features. The haunting of Eden still gets him from time to time. It takes a moment for him to come back to his old self, but he does. He narrows his eyes and looks through the fractured windshield. Then he melts again and he’s back to jimmying the key in the ignition, stomping on the gas.
I don’t have time for this. I get out, sucking in the hot, dusty air. The zombie’s stench hits me like a ton of bricks. I raise my gun and fire into the crowd. Abby crawls out next, begins pulling the trigger, dropping zombie after zombie. She’s still got it. One look at her face, the sheer will of determination written on it, and you could see she has a personal vendetta against these pus-bags. She shoots until her gun jams and all that you hear besides the rolling shots over the distant mountains is click-click-click. She pulls a clip free from her pocket while holding her gun against her chest with her left hand stump. Locks and loads. Quick, too. I’m honestly impressed. I shoot until I hear the same clicking. The zombies fall one after the other, but the density of the packed meat doesn’t seem to thin.
I’m reloading, breathing hard, biting my tongue with intensity.
“On your left!” Abby shouts out and before I can turn to see the steady stream of zombies, she lifts her gun and aims right at my head. As I turn, I’m frozen by the sights of these monsters. These aren’t the fat, wet, and runny zombies from D.C., zombies plump on the millions of citizens.
No. They’re like mummies. With each step they take, dust cascades off of them. I think it’s probably their bone dust. Their jaws are frozen in a perpetual snarl. Teeth yellowed by rot and the beaming sunshine but still as sharp as ever. Three of them come for me and Abby pulls the trigger. The lead zombie’s head explodes like a piñata, except instead of candy, it’s powdered brains that come out.
I drop the remaining two, but by this time, as I’m turning back to the group coming down the road, I see they’ve advanced much too quickly. Or time has moved way differently out here in the Mojave than it did on the East Coast.
Gritting my teeth, I unload the rest of the clip into the moving mass of bodies. Zombies drop until my gun clicks again. I reach into my pocket for more ammunition and my heart plummets. My pockets are empty. I’m out of bullets and there’s about thirty more of the fuckers coming toward us.
“Norm!” I shout.
He dutifully ignores me, focused on the Jeep’s steering column. His head is ducked under it and he’s messing with wires. Herb is in the front with his eyes jammed closed and his voice high as he hums the beat to some tune I’ve never heard in my life. It’s out of place in this graveyard.
“Norm! Give me your gun!” I shout again over the roar of Abby’s shots and the death rattles, moans, and groans from the crowd of zombies.
Abby answers for him, tossing me her gun.
The closest zombie is about ten feet from me. I blow half of his leathery face away, revealing a powdery pale pink like an un-chewed piece of gum beneath the rotten flesh. The smell is almost choking me out now. I wish I could smell the water of the lake or the even the old wood of the buildings. Anything but the sickening sweet yet somehow scorching-hot smell of death. I aim at the crowd again. Their arms outstretched toward us, lips peeled back in a snarl. They don’t bleed or drip. There’s no gunk. Nothing runny. They’re dry and somehow I think that’s worse. It makes it seem less real, like I’m stuck in a movie or one of my own books. I shoot until my hand vibrates and my lungs burn from screaming, until I feel the condensed heat in the palm of my hands.
But it seems they never stop coming. Now I can’t see the road beyond the mass of bodies. The sun seems to get dimmer than before. I look from Abby to the gun. She shakes her head. There is no more ammo. We might as well be on a lifeboat surrounded by sharks.
“Norm!” I shout because I know he still has shots left. But I look at the crowd of zombies again, how they’re getting closer and closer and my lungs seem to shrink with each step they take toward us and I realize twelve or fifteen bullets won’t make a difference at this point. It’ll scratch the surface, but in the end, we’ll be outnumbered. We always are.
Now, we have to retreat. I head toward the Jeep to get him and Herb out, but Norm is still messing with the ignition. He’s dripping with sweat. Veins bulge from his forehead and his arms.
“C’mon…you…fuckin…bitch!” he says.
“Norm! We have to run. Let’s go!” I say.
Of course, he doesn’t listen to me. When has he ever?
Just as I reach in to grab him from the open driver’s side, a sound comes from down the street…from where we were going to run. It’s the sound of tires eating dirt, squealing. A glint of sunlight off a tinted windshield. A cloud of dust.
Fuck.
Central has caught up to us, but should I be surprised? It was only a matter of time. And should I be surprised that things are only getting worse? No. It seems to always be the case, I think.
Then, I hear another sound. One that catches me completely off guard. The engine purrs to life. The body of the Jeep vibrates beneath my touch. Norm laughs like a maniac.
“Oh, baby, I love you so much,” he says while he pets the steering wheel. But by this time, the first zombie has made it to the other side of the ride — Herb’s side. The glowing yellow orbs focus on him. He sees this and scrambles to the back, sticking out like a sofa.
I reach in and grab him, give a yank on his sweat-soaked shirt. The stench of body odor hits me and it’s so much better than rotten corpses. Herb goes easily enough. He’s like a rag doll and his body slides across the leather until I pull him out of the Jeep completely.
“Go, Jack!” Norm says. “Go get Darlene and save the fucking world. I’ll lead them away.”
“What?”
He doesn’t answer. I’m left standing in a cloud of dust as he takes off, leaving us behind. Bodies bump off the Jeep. The tires crunch bone and squash rotted heads. Some of them are thrown into the air. It’s like a sandstorm, except replace sand with old bones and congealed, powdery blood and you’ll see what I’m seeing.
Shit. This isn’t good.
I pull Herb up out of the dirt and Abby helps me, but we don’t have time to linger. The car coming at us turns the corner and a zombie lunges. I kick out, catching it in the knee. The knee and most of the leg crumble almost instantly. More are coming. If they all vaporize as easily as that, I’m not worried. What am worried about are the agents from Central with the bullets and the guns and the fucking stupid-ass Men in Black sunglasses.
So I make a decision here that I’m not proud of because I’m sick of doing this, but it’s the smartest option right now. I run toward a squat building to the left. Not forward or backward, but to the side. Abby follows me, dragging Herb by his collar as he screams out in fear. I can barely hear him over the revving engine. I’m hoping to God they don’t see, that they think we are just more zombies. They’re far enough away that I think it’s possible. We go around a building nearly knocking over a barrel filled with dirt and sand. There’s a door on the side that breaks easily enough under my boot — almost as easily as the zombie�
��s knees. We take refuge inside. I close the door, grabbing a chair and wedging it under the broken doorknob. It’s pitch-black, but the outside can be seen through a murky window, blazing bright in the Mojave desert sunlight.
Central’s cars burst through the crowd of zombies. I hear glass shattering. The cars gallop over bodies like hitting a speed bump at fifty miles per hour. Death rattles are cut off. A path is cleared. Another car zooms through in the first two’s wake.
Then, the streets are quiet. The streets are dead.
50
Not only do I have to worry about Darlene, but now I have to worry about Norm. God, it just keeps getting worse.
My fiancé is in the clutches of a madman, my brother has left us stranded, we have no ammo. I shake my head, feeling like I’m about to collapse.
But I can’t. I can’t because Darlene is depending on me. The world is depending on me. I’m going to save her. I’m going to be successful, ammo or not.
The room we are in is something like a bank. There’s a long counter that stretches the length of the room, rusty iron bars stretching from the counter to the ceiling, a small square big enough to for hands to fit through for the passing of monies. Yeah, it’s a bank, or it was a bank. Herb’s teeth are chattering. I see the whites of his eyes in the darkness.
“It’s okay, big guy,” I say, saying this to myself more than to him.
He doesn’t answer.
Abby paces back and forth. Her feet creaking the floor boards. The smell is old and musty. Motes of dust float through a bar of sunlight streaming into the bank. I scan the room, my eyes adjusting. There’s not much in the way of weapons. But I’ve been worse off, I think. In Washington I was empty handed for much of the journey and there was a hell of a lot more zombies there. The zombies’ numbers outside have been vastly reduced. Those that still walk look confused more than anything. We can get past them. We can head to the lake and beyond the lake we can head to where Klein is and where Central is and we can save Darlene and the fucking world.
Right?
51
“We need a minute,” Abby says as I’m heading out the door again, the dry air blasting me and filling the cool climate of the abandoned bank. Abby has since stopped pacing. Now she’s hunched over, her whole hand on Herb’s back. Herb hyperventilates and I feel like an ass being so self-absorbed into the heat of the moment, I didn’t even take into consideration how they felt. I know I can’t go on without them, but if they’re not one hundred percent behind the idea of heading to the lake after what just happened, then we can’t go. But we also can’t sit around all day. Darlene needs me. And there’s no telling what adversary will come up these streets next.
So I go over to Herb and I put my hand on his back. He’s breathing fast and he’s about a million degrees. I feel the heat through his shirt. He’s shaking.
“Herb, are you all right?” I ask him and instantly think of what a stupid question that is. Of course he’s not all right. No one is all right anymore.
He shakes his head back and forth.
“What can I do to make it better?” I ask.
Abby gives me a weird look. My voice must sound as weak aloud as it does in my head.
“Herbie?” I say because he doesn’t answer me immediately and the clock is ticking. It’s funny, really, I say I don’t believe in time, especially now, but time is the only thing keeping us alive, in a sense. “Is it the zombies? Is it Darlene?”
“No,” he says, drawing out the o. “They’ll be okay, I believe it.”
“Well, Herb, what is it then? I need you to be brave and strong for me until we can regroup, okay? So, tell me.”
“It-It’s nothing, Jacky,” he says. He’s so quiet, I barely hear him and the smallest sounds echo loud in this tomb.
“Herb,” I say. “Tell me.” I decide against the soft and sweet tone Darlene is so fond of using because it’s obviously not working. My voice is loud and stern. Abby jolts, not expecting it. I almost instantly regret saying this because I know what the problem is.
“It’s Doc Klein. I-I don’t want you to h-hurt him,” Herb answers. Then he breaks into a sob, falling on his knees and putting his face in his large hands. The hands manage to swallow his features up, but his tears leak out between his fingers.
“Aw, Herb,” I say, really feeling like an asshole. “I won’t hurt him, I told ya. I’ll just talk to him.”
“You’ll hurt him! You will! You hurt everyone. When you left us with Mother, you shoulda seen Darlene. She was always cryin, Jacky! She was moping around like this sad doggy I saw on a Monday one time. It hurt me to see that, Jacky. And she kept saying, ‘I wish he woulda stayed, I just wish he woulda!’ and I ‘greed with her. I didn’t want you to go bye like Doc Klein went bye.”
My heart feels like it’s being stabbed over and over again as Herb talks. Abby has shifted away. I see her wipe her eyes.
“Now, my friends are gonna hurt each other!” Herb says. He jerks up, a wild look in his eyes. “I don’t want you to hurt each other! I don’t!”
“Herb — ” I say, but he cuts me off.
“No! You do! You do!” He’s yelling at the top of his lungs and a person as big as Herb has a voice that can bring buildings down. His face flushes. He jumps up and down, pointing at me. All of a sudden I feel how small I am. I understand that Herb could crush me as easily as a bug. I’ve never been scared of him, but now I am. His teeth are bared and there’s tears in his eyes and he’s jumping and shouting.
“Herb,” Abby says, soothing. “Calm down.”
He doesn’t.
I see movement outside of the window and the zombies that haven’t been mowed down by Central’s cars perk up at the booming sound of Herb’s voice. They shamble toward the building we are currently held up in with no weapons —
Herb advances on me. I want nothing more than to crumble in on myself, fall to the ground and curl up into a ball until this is over. But I can’t. I have to stand my ground. And I do.
I come to Herb’s chest. His shadow engulfs me. He’s so angry and upset that I’m not surprised when he raises his hand like he’s going to hit me. My stomach clenches in preparation, but I don’t scream or run or anything. I stand there with my hands on my hips.
His fist whistles through the air, coming for the top of my head like a judge’s gavel.
“Ah!” Herb screams. He pulls back at the last minute. Then he turns around and he slams his fist into the counter. The metal bars quiver. Splinters fly in every direction. Abby whimpers and jumps back.
Herb hits it over and over again until his breathing is ragged and he falls to his knees and he’s sobbing.
His head lowers, his shoulders slump.
I think it’s okay for me to go over to him. So I do. I put my hand on his back. The muscles beneath his wet skin are dancing. He’s as hot as fire. “Herb,” I say. “It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.”
“No,” he moans. “It’s not, Jacky.” For the moment, he sounds like he’s never been more sure of anything. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want no one to die. I want to be happy and listen to my records and dance. I want to be a family.”
“Uh, Jack?” Abby says.
I glance at her and she cocks a thumb to the window. I don’t have to look through the dirty glass to know the zombies are coming and they’re closer than they were before. It’s just how things work.
“Herb,” I say, hooking my arm under his and helping him to his feet. Again, I’m surprised how light he is despite him weighing close to four-hundred pounds.
He moves quick once he’s up. I don’t even see him do it. But he does it. He hugs me, engulfs me in his large, tree trunk arms. I’m bathed in his sweat and body odor and he squeezes so hard that my head feels like it’s going to explode.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Jacky!” he says.
“It’s…ok-ay, H-Herb,” I manage to reply.
He lets me go, the stale, old air flooding my lungs and my vision coming ba
ck. I lean back and pop my back and neck. “Now, Herb, we gotta go and save Darlene, okay? We gotta help her. Will you help her with me?”
He swallows hard. “Yes,” he says.
“Thank you, Herb,” I say. He smiles back at me. “We gotta be careful, okay? Stay as far away from the zombies as you can. We’ll run, so we don’t have to hurt any of them.”
Or because we don’t have any weapons to defend ourselves and I don’t want to get close enough to these bastards to risk getting bit.
“But I have this,” Herb says. He digs in the back pocket of his jeans, which on him is about as big as a backpack.
The first sign of the zombies knowing where we are happens as the door we busted down rattles. Dead hands claw at it. Dust is knocked loose from the hinges, floating down dreamily. All it takes is one zombie and the rest get their curiosity piqued and follow suit. More hands claw at the door. The desert-dry clicks and rattles come from the back of their throats. It’s unsettling, unnerving, terrifying because it’s not something I’m used to. I’m used to the gurgling wet rattles that come from preserved corpses, the kinds who are well fed and well kept by the chilly climates of the East Coast. Abby stares at the door with a ghostly look on her face. In her hand, she has her empty pistol.
“There it is!” Herb says. He’s loud again and I think about telling him to tone it down, but the damage has been done. The zombies are here. Our backs are against the wall.
I watch him pull the item from his pocket very carefully. When I see it, no zombie knocking at the back door could bring me down. Because it’s a gun. The gun we gave Herb after we left the church. He must’ve kept it on him when we got off the plane. No one was about to pat him down. He’s too big and intimidating.
“I know I’m not ‘sposed to have it after I broke-ed the car window, but I like how shiny it is. Look, Jacky, look how shiny it is!” He turns it in his hands and the filtered sunlight catches the metal like an apocalyptic disco ball. I’m smiling. My hand closes around it. The gun feels warm and moist.
Dead Coast: A Zombie Novel (Jack Zombie Book 4) Page 14
