Nights of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

  The weight on his helmet and shoulders shifted, too, and Sam pushed backward, fighting for every inch of new space, letting the weight that was on top of him slide forward and into where he’d been.

  There was a kind of ripple through the mass of bodies and Sam did pause, afraid he was creating an avalanche. But that wasn’t it.

  Something was crawling on him. On his shoulder. He could feel the legs of some huge insect walking through the crevices of jumped body parts and then onto his shoulder, moving with the slow patience of a tarantula. Nothing else could be that big. But this was Pennsylvania. Did they have tarantulas out here? He wasn’t sure. There were wolf spiders out here, some orb-weavers and black widows, but they were small in comparison to the thing that was crawling toward his face. Out in California there were plenty of those big hair monsters. Not here. Not here.

  One slow, questing leg of the spider touched the side of his jaw, in the gap between the plastic visor and the chinstrap. It was soft, probing him, rubbing his skin. Sam gagged and tried to turn away, but there was no room. Then a second fat leg touched him. A third. Walking across his chin toward his panting mouth.

  And that’s when Sam smelled the thing.

  Tarantulas did not have much of a smell. Not unless they were rotting in the desert sun.

  This creature stank. It smelled like roadkill. It smelled like …

  Sam screamed.

  He knew, he understood what it was that crawled across his face. Not the fat legs of some great spider but the clawing, grasping fingers of a human hand. That was the slithering sound, the twitching. One of them was buried with him. Not dead. Not alive. Rotting and filled with a dreadful vitality, reaching past the bodies, reaching through the darkness toward the smell of meat. Of food.

  Clawing at him. He could feel the sharp edges of fingernails now as the fingers pawed at his lips and nose.

  Sam screamed and screamed. He kicked out as hard as he could, shoving, pressing, jamming with knees and feet. Hurting, feeling the improbably heavy corpses press him down, as if they, even in their final death, conspired to hold him prisoner until the thing whose hand had found him could bring teeth and tongue and appetite to what it had discovered.

  Sam wrestled with inhuman strength, feeling muscles bulge and bruise and strain, feeling explosions of pain in his joints and lower back as he tried to move all of that weight of death. The fingers found the corner of his mouth, curled, hooked, tried to take hold of him and rip.

  He dared not bite. The dead were filled with infection, with the damnable diseases that had caused all of this. Maybe he was already infected, he didn’t know, but if he bit one of those grub-like fingers it was as sure as a bullet in the brain. Only much slower.

  “Fuck you!” he roared and spat the fingers out, turning his head, spitting into the darkness to get rid of any trace of blood or loose flesh. He wanted to vomit but there was no time, no room, no luxury even for that.

  And so he went a little crazy.

  A lot crazy.

  All the way.

  – 3 –

  When the mountain of dead collapsed, it fell away from him, dozens of corpses collapsing down and then rolling the way he’d come, propelled by his last kicks, by gravity, by luck. Maybe helped along by the same drunk god who wanted more of the Sam Imura show. He found himself tumbling, too, bumping and thumping down the side of the mound, the jolts amplified by the lumpy body armor he wore. Kevlar stopped penetration of bullets but it did not stop the foot-pounds of impact.

  He tried to get a hand out before he hit the pavement, managed it, but at the wrong part of his fall. He hit shoulder-first and slapped the asphalt a microsecond later. Pain detonated all through him. Everything seemed to hurt. The goddamn armor itself seemed to hurt.

  Sam lay there, gasping, fighting to breathe, staring through the fireworks display in his eyes, trying to see the sky. His feet were above him, one heel hooked over the throat of a teenage girl; the other in a gaping hole that used to be the stomach of a naked fat man. He looked at the dead. Fifty, sixty people at least in the mound. Another hundred scattered around, their bodies torn to pieces by the battle that had happened here. Some clearly crushed by the wheels of those buses. Dead. All of them dead, though not all of them still. A few of the crushed ones tried to pull themselves along even though hips and legs and spines were flattened or torn completely away. A six-year-old kid sat with her back to a chain-link fence. No legs, one hand, no lower jaw. Near her was an Asian woman who looked like she might have been pretty. Nice figure, but her face had been stitched from lower jaw to hairline with eight overlapping bullet holes.

  Like that.

  Every single one of the bodies around him was a person. Each person had a story, a life, details, specifics. Things that made them people instead of nameless corpses. As he lay there Sam felt the weight of who they had been crushing him down as surely as the mound had done minutes ago. He didn’t know any of them, but he was kin to all of them.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and tried not to see anything. But they were there, hiding behind his lids as surely as if they were burned onto his retinas.

  Then he heard a moan.

  A sound from around the curve of the mound. Not a word, not a call for help. A moan. A sound of hunger, a sound of a need so bottomless that no amount of food could ever hope to satisfy it. An impossible and irrational need, too, because why would the dead need to feed? What good would it do them?

  He knew what his employers had said about parasites driving the bodies of the victims, about an old Cold War weapon that slipped its leash, about genetically modified larvae in the bloodstream and clustered around the cerebral cortex and motor cortex and blah blah blah. Fuck that. Fuck science. This wasn’t science, anyway. Not as he saw it right then, having just crawled out of his own grave. This was so much darker and more twisted than that. Sam didn’t know what to call it. Even when he believed in God there was nothing in the Bible or Sunday school that covered this shit. Not even Lazarus or Jesus coming back from the dead. J.C. didn’t start chowing down on the Apostles when he rose. So, what was this?

  The moan was louder. Coming closer.

  Get up, asshole, scolded his inner voice.

  “What, can’t I just lie here and say fuck it?”

  Because you’re in shock, genius, and if you don’t move now you’re going to die.

  Sam thought about that. Shock? Yeah. Maybe. Concussion? Almost certainly. Military helmets stopped shrapnel but the stats on traumatic brain injury were staggering. Sam knew a lot of front-line shooters who’d been benched with TBI. Messed up the head, scrambled thoughts, and …

  A figure lumbered into sight. Not crawling. Walking. One of them. Wearing mechanic’s coveralls. Bites on his face and nothing in his eyes but hunger and hate. Walking. Not shuffling or limping. Not even staggering, like some of them did. Walking, sniffing the air, black and bloody drool running over its lips and chin.

  Sam’s hand immediately slapped his holster, but there was no sidearm. He fumbled for his knife, but that was gone, too.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  He swung his feet off of the mound of dead and immediately felt something like an incendiary device explode in the muscles of his lower back. The pain was instantly intense and he screamed.

  The dead mechanic’s head snapped toward him, the dead eyes focusing. It snarled, showing blooding, broken teeth. And then it came at him. Fast. Faster than he’d seen with any of them. Or maybe it was that he was slowed down, broken. Usually in the heat of combat the world slowed down and Sam seemed to walk through it, taking his time to do everything right, to see everything, to own the moment. Not now.

  With a growl of unbearable hunger, the ghoul flung itself on Sam.

  He got a hand up in time to save his skin, chopping at the thing’s throat, feeling tissue and cartilage crunch as he struck, feeling it do no good at all except to change the moan into a gurgle. The mechanic’s weight crashed down on him, stretching the damaged m
uscles in Sam’s back, ripping a new cry from him, once more smothering him with weight and mass.

  Sam kept his hand in place in the ruined throat and looped his other hand over, punching the thing on the side of the head, once, twice, again and again. Breaking bones, shattering the nose, doing no appreciable good. The pain in his lower back was incredible, sickening him even more than the smell of the thing that clawed at him. The creature snapped its teeth together with a hard porcelain clack, but Sam kept those teeth away from him. Not far enough away, though.

  He braced one foot flat on the floor and used that leg to force his hips and shoulders to turn. It was like grinding broken glass into whatever was wrong with his spine, but he moved, and Sam timed another punch to knock the ghoul over him, letting his hips be the axle of a sloppy wheel. The mechanic went over and down and then Sam was on top of him. He climbed up and dropped a knee onto the creature’s chest, pinning it against the place where the asphalt met the slope of corpses. Then Sam grabbed the snapping jaw in one hand and a fistful of hair at the back of the thing’s head with the other.

  In the movies snapping a neck is nothing. Everyone seemed to be able to do it.

  That’s the movies.

  In the real world, there is muscle and tendon and bone and none of them want to turn that far or that fast. The body isn’t designed to die. Not that easily. And Sam was exhausted, hurt, sick, weak.

  There was no snap.

  What there was … was a slow turn of the head. Inch by inch, fighting against the ghoul’s efforts to turn back and bite him. Sam pulled and pushed, having to lean forward to get from gravity what his damaged body did not want to provide. The torsion was awful. The monster clawed at him, tearing at his clothes, digging at the Kevlar limb pads.

  Even dead, it tried to live.

  Then the degree of rotation passed a point. Not a sudden snap, no abrupt release of pressure. More of a slow, sickening, wet grinding noise as vertebrae turned past their stress point, and the point where the brain stem joined the spinal cord became pinched inside those gears. Pinched, compressed, and then ruptured.

  The clawing hands flopped away. The body beneath him stopped thrashing. The jaws snapped one last time and then sagged open.

  After that Sam had to finish it, to make sure it was a permanent rupture and not a temporary compression. The sounds told him that. And the final release of all internal resistance.

  Sam fell back and rolled off and lay side by side with the mechanic, their bodies touching at shoulder, hip, thigh, foot, Sam’s fingers still entwined in the hair as if they lay spent after some obscene coupling. One breathed, the other did not. Overhead the moon peered above the treetops like a peeping Tom.

  – 4 –

  The moon was completely above the treetops by the time Sam got up.

  His back was a mess. Pulled, strained, torn, or worse, it was impossible to tell. He had a high pain threshold, but this was at his upper limit. And, besides, it was easier to man up and walk it off when there were other soldiers around. He’d seen his old boss, Captain Ledger, brave it out and even crack jokes with a bullet in him.

  Alone, though, it’s easier to be weaker, smaller, to be more intimate with the pain, and be owned by it.

  It took him half an hour to stand. The world tried to do some fancy cartwheels and the vertigo made Sam throw up over and over again until there was nothing left in his belly.

  It took another hour to find a gun, a SIG Sauer, and fifteen more minutes to find one magazine for it. Nine rounds. Then he saw a shape lying partly under three of the dead. Male, big, dressed in the same unmarked black combat gear as Sam wore. He tottered over and knelt very slowly and carefully beside the body. He rolled one of the dead over and off so he could see who it was. He knew it had to be one of his Boy Scouts, but it still hurt him to see the face. DeNeille Shoopman, who ran under the combat callsign of Shortstop. Good kid. Hell of a soldier.

  Dead, with his throat torn away.

  But goddamn it, Shortstop’s eyes were open, and they clicked over to look at him. The man he knew—his friend and fellow soldier—did not look at him through those eyes. Nothing did. Not even the soul of a monster. That was one of the horrors of this thing. The eyes are supposed to be the windows of the soul, but when he looked into Shortstop’s brown eyes it was like looking through the windows of an empty house.

  Shortstop’s arms were pinned, and there was a lot of meat and muscle missing from his chest and shoulders. He probably couldn’t raise his arms even if he was free. Some of the dead were like that. A lot of them were. They were victims of the thing that had killed them, and although they all reanimated, only a fraction of them were whole enough to rise and hunt.

  Sam placed one hand over Shortstop’s heart. It wasn’t beating, of course, but Sam remembered how brave a heart it had been. Noble, too, if that wasn’t a corny thing to think about a guy he’d gotten drunk with and traded dirty jokes with. Shortstop had walked with him through the Valley of the Shadow of Death so many times. It wasn’t right to let him lie here, ruined and helpless and hungry, until he rotted into nothing.

  “No,” said Sam.

  He had nine bullets and needed every single one of them if he was going to survive. But he needed one now really bad.

  The shot blasted a hole in the night.

  Sam sat beside Shortstop for a long time, his hand still there over the quiet heart. He wept for his friend and he wept for the whole goddamn world.

  – 5 –

  Sam spent the night inside the food distribution warehouse.

  There were eleven of the ghouls in there. Sam found the section where they stored the lawn care tools. He found two heavy-bladed machetes and went to work.

  When he was done he was in so much pain that he couldn’t stand it, so he found where they stacked the painkillers. Extra-strength something-or-other. Six of those, and six cans of some shitty local beer. The door was locked and he had the place to himself.

  He slept all through the night.

  – 6 –

  When he woke up he took more painkillers but this time washed them down with some trendy electrolyte water. Then he ate two cans of beef stew he cooked over a camping stove.

  More painkillers, more food, more sleep.

  The day passed and he didn’t die.

  The pain diminished by slow degrees.

  In the morning he found a set of keys to the office. There was a radio in there, a TV, a phone, and a lockbox with a Glock 26 and four empty magazines, plus three boxes of 9mm hollow points. He nearly wept.

  The phone was dead.

  Sam turned on the news and listened as he loaded bullets into the magazines for the Glock and the single mag he had for the SIG Sauer.

  He heard a familiar voice. The guy who had been here with the lady cop. Skinny blond-haired guy who was a reporter for a ninth-rate cable news service.

  “This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse…”

  Trout had a lot of news and none of it was good. His convoy of school buses was in Virginia now and creeping along roads clogged by refugees. There were as many fights among the fleeing survivors as there were between the living and the dead.

  Typical, he thought. We’ve always been our worst enemies.

  At noon Sam felt well enough to travel, though he considered holing up in this place. There was enough food and water here to keep him alive for five years, maybe ten. But that was a sucker’s choice. He’d eat his gun before a week was out. Anyone would. Solitude and a lack of reliable intel would push him into a black hole from which he could never crawl out. No, the smart move was to find people.

  Step one was finding a vehicle.

  This place had trucks.

  Lots of trucks.

  So he spent four hours using a forklift to load pallets of supplies into a semi. He collected anything that could be used as a weapon and took them, too. If he found people, they would need to be armed. He thought about that, then went and loaded sleeping bags, toile
t paper, diapers, and whatever else he thought a group of survivors might need. Sam was a very practical man, and each time he made a smart and thoughtful decision, he could feel himself stepping back from the edge of despair. He was planning for a mission, and that gave him a measure of stability. He had people to find and protect, and that gave him a purpose.

  He gassed up at the fuel pump on the far side of the parking lot. A few new ghouls were beginning to wander in through the open fence, but Sam kept clear of them. When he left, he made sure not to crash into any of them. Even a semi could take damage and he had to make this last.

  Practical.

  Once he reached the crossroads, though, he paused, idling, trying to decide where to go. Following the buses was likely pointless. If they were already heading south, and if Billy Trout was able to broadcast, then they were alive. The last of the Boy Scouts were probably with them.

  So he turned right, heading toward the National Armory in Harrisville, north of Pittsburgh. If it was still intact, that would be a great place to build a rescue camp. If it was overrun, then he’d take it back and secure it.

  It was a plan.

  He drove.

  There was nothing on the radio but bad information and hysteria, but there were CDs in the glove compartment. A lot of country and western stuff. He fucking hated country and western, but it was better than listening to his own thoughts. He slipped in a Brad Paisley CD and listened to the man sing about coal miners in Harlan County. Depressing as shit, but it was okay to listen to.

  It was late when he reached Evans City, a small town on the ass-end of nowhere. All through the day and into the evening he saw the leavings of the world. Burned towns, burned cars, burned farmhouses, burned bodies. The wheels of the semi crunched over spots where thousands of shell casings littered the road. He saw a lot of the dead. At first they were stragglers, wandering in no particular direction until they heard the truck. Then they walked toward him as he drove, and even though Sam didn’t want to hit any of them, there were times where he had no choice. Then he found that by slowing down he could push them out of the way without impact damage to the truck. Some of them fell and he had to set his teeth as the wheels rolled over them, crushing and crunching things that had been people twenty-four hours ago.