“She’s seeing green light wafting in from an opening in the tunnel,” I say. I point into the blackness.
No one speaks again. It’s quiet except for the zombies.
“Okay…” Abby says. “Say there are radioactive ghosts floating in here or something, and say she’s right. Do you really think you can fit through the opening she described?”
“That’s just it,” I say. “She can’t see the opening from here. Her mind is filling in the blanks. She’s taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. Remember? Grounded in truth?”
“Filling in the blanks by completely fabricating all of that bullshit,” Abby says.
Lilly nods. She’s smiling, unsure. “I mean,” she says, “it makes sense.”
“Yes!” I say. All eyes are on me.
Abby says, “Okay, I’ll admit it makes sense. If you wanna bet your life on the odds that a crazy woman gave you, be my guest.”
“There’s also another huge problem,” Roland says. He taps a scrawny finger at the corner of his mouth. There is dirt beneath his too-long nails, and this dirt seems to be glowing as well.
I wonder to myself how this place is affecting my health. Will I develop cancer from my short time here? Will my hair start falling out? Will I sprout a third leg somewhere from my midsection? Will I, at the very least, have nightmares? Well, I have nightmares anyway, when I find the time to sleep, that is.
I shake my head, trying to put these dark thoughts to the back of my mind. I’ve had enough time with dark thoughts; I have to keep moving forward. Life never stands still, so neither can I. We must get out of here.
Now all eyes are on Roland. He subconsciously takes a step backward. I imagine he doesn’t like the spotlight, after being cooped up in that little tin can for half a year.
“What?” Abby asks him. “What’s the other thing?”
He moves the finger away from his mouth and points to his left, over the edge. We turn our heads collectively, the same way the monsters sometimes move.
“Oh, fuck,” Abby says. “He’s right.”
The zombies. We forgot about the zombies. How is that even possible?
I look at their glowing yellow eyes, and a feeling of sinking despair freezes my body.
29
Mandy is the first one who moves. She peers over the edge with squinted eyes. “Maybe a hundred in all,” she says. “Some aren’t threats. Too burned or maimed to get around much. So let’s say about seventy, maybe a sixty if you’re an optimist.”
“Seventy?” Nacho repeats. Mandy nods, and Nacho whistles through his teeth, shaking his head. “That’s a lot.”
“Thanks, Nacho,” I say. “We know.”
“You’re welcome,” he replies.
I see he hasn’t mastered the concept of sarcasm yet. We’ll have to work on that, I guess.
“No way we can take on that many zombies, Jack,” Lilly says.
“This is the part where he says, ‘Well, you don’t know who I am…’ Am I right?” Abby says.
I shake my head with an exasperated look on my face. “We don’t fight them. Obviously, Abby.”
She makes a sound like a cat hissing, and with her good hand, hooks her fingers to mimic claws.
The whole time this is going on, the woman below us is hooting and hollering. Loud. It’s mostly just become background noise, though. Eventually, I think she’ll wear herself out. Well, hopefully.
“All we have to do,” I say, “is distract them.”
“For you?” Nacho says. “Oh, good, amigo. I say no, no for me. I’m not going to see hobgoblins.” He’s shaking his head.
“Thanks, Nacho.”
“Same for me,” Mandy says. “No offense, Jack.”
“None taken.”
“I’m mighty good at distractions,” Roland says. “Worked as a party magician in the nineties.”
“Geez,” Abby says. “That’s one party I wouldn’t want to be at.”
“Hey, I was quite good. Could pull a rabbit out of my hat, the colored handkerchiefs out of my sleeve, a bouquet of flowers out of thin air, you name it. I made good money back then,” Roland says.
“I’m assuming this kind of distraction won’t involve magic,” Lilly says. “Although I do love magic tricks.”
“You got a deck of cards?” Roland asks.
Lilly shakes her head.
“Well, if we get out of here and we find a deck of cards, I’ll show you some really cool stuff.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Lilly says.
“Okay, enough magic talk,” Abby says. “Back to Jack. Let’s say you somehow manage to make it up the tunnel—I know, I’m playing devil’s advocate a lot today, but someone has to. Anyway, you make it into the tunnel. The zombies are catching on to your scent. Our distractions—or magic tricks—aren’t working.” She offers a sly smile to Roland, who is nodding and smiling to himself. “The zombies are closing in. First one, then two, then a dozen, then bam! a freaking hundred of those bad boys. You get to the end of the tunnel, and there’s no opening, or the opening isn’t big enough for you and your big noggin to fit through. What then?”
Roland is no longer smiling. Nacho shakes his head, mumbling some Spanish I don’t understand.
“That’s an easy answer,” I say. I pause for dramatic effect, even though I know we don’t exactly have time for this. “I die.”
Nacho whistles again. I barely hear it over the lady’s moans below us. They’ve at least tapered off some…not much, though.
“All because you trusted the word of a crazy woman,” Abby says. “What would Darlene say?”
And this strikes me harder than I thought it would. Then again, the mention of my dead wife will always strike me in some type of way, no matter how much time passes.
I mull this question over. Abby isn’t trying to be a jerk, She’s honestly wondering about my thoughts. Maybe she thinks I’ve gone crazy, truly gone crazy, and I should be sharing the car with the woman below instead of leading all of them up here.
I say, “Darlene isn’t here, but she’d tell me I’m an idiot.”
“Then what?” Abby asks.
“Then I’d do it anyway.”
30
Do it is what I do.
We split up and go back into the subway cars. Everyone gets something heavy, some sort of blunt object. Roland has a piece of metal handrail, Nacho has the back of a seat, Lilly and Abby both have strips of steel that had fallen in through the hole, Mandy has her massive fists, and I’ve got nothing. I decide it’s best to travel light. I don’t know how long the tunnel stretches, nor where this opening—if there is one—lies, but I know I have to get there fast, before the zombies catch my scent.
On the farthest car now. There is a metal ladder on the outside, something used for servicing the train or maybe it’s an emergency escape, I don’t know. The metal is twisted and charred, bent out of its ladder shape, but I’m standing on the top rung, looking at the rest of the zombies.
Abby hands me a spare piece of steel, and I lean down and jab a zombie who’s strayed to this side of the tracks through the head. The blackened brains don’t ooze out so much as they wheeze, like a puff of dust. The zombie drops and another one ambles over. I do the same to this one. I think it’s a man, but it’s pretty burnt. Shoving the steel through its head reminds me of the papery feel of a bees nest. It lands near the first downed zombie. For the moment, this side of the subway is clear. I nod and say, “All right. Get as loud as you can.”
Abby nods back, all business. Lilly, though, she takes my hand and looks into my eyes like it’s the end of the world.
“Be careful, Jack,” she says, and she puts her hand on my forearm, gives it a squeeze.
“I will,” I say. I look to the rest of the group. “Do it!”
They nod back with fear in their eyes, more fear than in mine, probably. Then the vast cavern fills up with the terrible raucous of metal on metal, of shouts and screams, and Nacho’s high-pitched whistlin
g. The zombies pressing up against the car move like a herd of cattle.
I look behind me, see nothing but fractured ground and the dead bodies of the two stragglers. Quickly, I begin my descent. Abby is turned around, still banging the metal against the top of the car. She’s watching my back.
As my feet touch the gravel and the crooked tracks, this feeling comes over me like I’m stepping in hot lava, like the game Norm and I used to play when we were young. We’d jump from couch to chair to coffee table, trying to throw each other off onto the carpet. In our imaginations, the carpet was lava. Norm always won, him being older and stronger, and we never played it when Mother was home, otherwise she would’ve kicked both of our asses. Even though I always lost, it was a hell of a lot of fun.
I look down at the dead zombies, their toasted corpses, their leaking brains, and I realize I can’t say the same thing about this. This is no fun at all.
The passageway in front of me, aside from a few downed rocks, is clear.
For once, I’m thinking, something is going right for me. Can I luck out two times in a row? Can I find the hobgoblin’s secret doorway? Bad thoughts, bad thoughts. Don’t want to jinx it.
I weave in and out of luggage, crisped by fire, half open, spilling fossilized items out from inside: a hair brush, clothes, running shoes missing their laces.
Just as I’m getting into a groove, moving as fast as an Olympian, I somehow pinpoint a rattling much too close. I don’t know how I hear it over the chaos. But I do. My adrenaline, already spiked to begin with, shoots off the charts. I stumble, but I don’t fall. Not yet, at least.
It’s important to always be aware of your surroundings, especially when running from zombies.
I seek out the threat. Between the broken cars, there is nothing, no zombie, and I’m starting to think I’ve imagined it.
I freeze. That’s almost unheard of. I never freeze.
“Go, Jack!” Abby yells, shocking me back to the present.
She’s right. I need to get going. I take a step.
That’s when a hand grips me around the ankle, cold and harsh.
I stumble backward and trip over a Gucci bag so burned I can hardly decipher the double ‘G’ logo. My ankle makes a terrible snapping sound; for a second, I think I’ve broken it, but I don’t have time for a broken ankle.
On my ass now, I look up, and here’s the upper half of a zombie, a woman. She has long, stringy hair on one half of her scalp. The rest was most likely burned away by the fire that tore into this cave. Her cheek has a large hole in it, and her tongue snakes out like a malignant tumor, bloated and black.
Reinvigorated by the sight of fresh meat, the woman zombie digs her claws into the dirt and pulls herself out from beneath the subway car. She leaves her other half, crooked legs in tight and torn jeans, behind.
I’m reminded of that old party trick, the one where you cross your pointer finger over the thumb of your left hand, bend the first knuckle of your right hand thumb, put the halves of the thumbs together, and pull it away like you’re yanking the top of your thumb off. ‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’
But this isn’t a party trick. This is the real deal. The zombie is coming for me, and for the moment, I’m frozen—unable to get up because my ankle is flaring with white-hot pain.
“Jack!” It’s Abby’s voice, louder than the terrible banging noises, louder than the moans of the dead.
It jars me out of the funk I’m in, and I manage to slide backward. As soon as I put weight on my bad ankle, though, the pain is almost unbearable, and I fall back down again.
Abby stops her banging.
The others are unaware of what’s happening. They’re too invested in distracting the hundred other zombies.
She reaches the ladder. I look up past her and see the old, crazy woman has her face pressed against the glass, smashing her features. Her tongue slides all across the window. She looks like one of those fish that clean algae off the glass. As she’s doing this, she’s still managing to screech and bang the window with her fists.
Thump-thump-thump.
Her knuckles crack and bleed. The skin flaps up and down, up and down. Why I focus on this, I don’t know.
Abby loses her balance. The metal railing of the ladder creaks and moans like her weight is murdering it. Then—
It snaps, and Abby falls. She hits the ground and clocks her head against the bottom part of the car.
This makes the woman shriek all the more. She’s hitting the glass so hard, I think it’s about to break. It won’t, though. It’s lasted this long; it’ll last a little longer.
The whole time this is happening the zombie woman has been making her way toward me. Now she’s just inches away.
Her jaw opens. The rotten teeth she’ll devour me with drip with black spittle and blood and gore and God knows what else.
I reach to my right, into the Gucci bag. My fingers grasp the first hard object they find. I don’t know what it is until I pull it out: it’s a hair straightener.
The only reason I know this is because Darlene had one. She’d forget to turn it off after she used it sometimes, and by the time she realized it, she was already halfway to work, stuck in the Chicago morning rush, and she’d call me and tell me to unplug it, and I’d made the mistake of grabbing it by the business end and burning skin off the tips of my fingers.
So I have this straightener. It’s heavy, well-made, probably cost an arm and a leg, and the cord dangles at the end of it. I grab the cord, wrap it around my knuckles as fast as I can. The trick, when fighting zombies, is to keep a good distance from them. I know this. You know this. Everyone knows this. Since I’ve already failed in that aspect, I have to work with what I’ve got.
I cast the straightener over my shoulder like a fishing rod. As soon as I hear it thump in the gravel and dirt behind me, I swing with all my might. What little abdominal muscles I have clench with the force I put behind the swing. The woman with half a head of hair looks up. I see the purple straightener reflecting in her eyes, and then—
Crunch!
The metal blasts through her skull. Brains and bones and blood spray every which way. It’s the grossest piñata I’ve ever seen.
As gore runs down what’s left of the zombie’s face, she lets out a dying croak before her body goes slack and she hits the dirt, down for the count.
I scramble up now. The pain in my ankle isn’t as bad; I just tweaked it a little. Lord knows I’ve had way worse in my fifteen years of traversing this hellscape.
I hobble over to Abby and give her a shake. She’s dazed, but she opens her eyes.
“What happened?” she asks. Her speech is slightly slurred. “Did I fall?”
“Yeah. C’mon,” I say. “Get up. Get back on the sub.”
“Sub?” she says.
I lift her up. It’s not easy. I struggle so much that I almost bite through my tongue in the process.
That’s when Lilly screams, “It’s not working! They’re coming!” Her footsteps thunder above us on the metal. She leans over the side, cupping her hands so she can shout into the tunnel. “JACK, THEY’RE COMING!” She looks down, sees me, looks up, does a double-take. “Jack? What the hell?”
“We had a little mishap,” I say.
“Shit,” Lilly says.
I have Abby around the waist. I turn, ready to help her up the broken ladder, as Lilly is reaching down.
But it’s too late. The herd of zombies have migrated around the car. Their crisped legs make a crunch-crunch as they come toward us.
“Hurry!” Lilly shouts at me.
The banging and whistling and shouting stops. The others have caught on to what is going on.
Roland says, “Oh shit.”
Zombies pour in from every crevice, every opening. I can’t help but think of moving a piece of bark on a dead tree stump, and seeing a legion of ants crawling there, climbing over each other in sheer madness. Because that’s what is happening. The zombies have smelled me. Those th
at still have eyes have seen me. They stick their arms out and lumber toward us.
I look over my shoulder, toward the dark opening. Already from that way, inside the tunnel, the dead pour from between the cracks and the downed rocks.
The crazy woman is shouting “HOBGOBLINS! HOBGOBLINS! I TOLD YOU! I TOLD YOU!”
“Fuck it,” I say, and I scoop Abby up into my arms.
We can’t go back; there’s no way we’d make it up the ladder before the herd reaches us. Abby isn’t going to get up it by herself, anyway. She’ll move too slow, and then we’ll both be goners.
And the zombies are here.
31
I hear Lilly calling our names as we get deeper and deeper into the tunnel, but we can’t turn back now. The zombies are chasing us, moving in their glacial way. They can’t be stopped when they all group up like that unless you have a tank, and even then, I wouldn’t bet my life on that tank.
Their low, guttural moans echo off the rock walls, amplified a hundred times over. They sound like they’re everywhere, all around us.
Abby is just coming to. She shakes her head. I don’t know how I’m able to carry her and still run on my bad ankle, but I’m doing it.
“Jack? Put me down, Jack,” she says.
“Jesus, I thought you’d never ask.”
“Never mind, keep carrying me,” she says.
I put her down. “Now’s really not the time for fake injuries.”
She brushes off her jeans, reaches, and brings up a sharp piece of broken concrete.
“What’s that for?” I ask.
“In case the door isn’t there,” she says.
“You gotta have hope,” I say, and even I know how this sounds.
All hope is lost. We’re going on the word of a crazy woman, and now we can’t go back. I sigh.
Through the green glow, shadows dance on the walls, the shadows of the shambling dead. Now it’s my turn to drop down. I find the thickest piece of concrete, and fill my hand with it.
“We keep going,” I say. “Until we have no place left to go.”
Dead Judgment Page 13
