by Geo Dell
“Cammy... Cammy, it bit her... Bit her... Cammy... Cammy, it's... It's just you and me, Cammy... It bit her... It bit her...”
She let go of Madison and lunged for her rifle. I sat, still cross legged, stupidly, as she grabbed it and leveled it at me.
“Get out,” She said very calmly. Much more calmly than I thought she should have been capable of.
“Cammy... What are you doing... Cammy?”
“GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT!” She screamed. I reared back as the rifle barrel came up and then slashed down across my face. I jumped back, but not fast enough. The steel barrel smashed into my lower lip, through it, and then hit my teeth. I immediately tasted blood and machine oil. My tongue ran across my teeth unconsciously. I was sure she had smashed them out, but the barrel edge had come up short, or I had moved back far enough. One of those things.
The pain was delayed, but it came never-the-less. Hard, heavy, fast, down into my lower jaw and then ricocheted back up into the top of my head. I scrambled backwards, tripped over my own rifle, got it into my hands, and then time did that funny slowing, elastic thing again.
The blood dripped from my chin onto the ground. My rifle was pointed squarely at Cammy, safety off and an empty clip, but Cammy didn't know that. The blood dripped slowly. Cammy's eyes swam in and out of focus, but remained on me. Her rifle barrel dipped and then rose again, leveled on me once more.
She seemed to take a deep breath that went on forever, and then, once more, time sped up. “I'll kill you,” Cammy told me. “If you touch her, I'll kill you... I will,” She started out strong but ended in a doubtful, whining whisper.
I didn't drop my rifle barrel, but held one hand out in front of me in a placating gesture. “Not touching anyone... Not,” I managed through my busted lip and aching jaw. The pain was a live, throbbing thing.
“You will... But... I know you will... You think... You think...” She seemed all at once to realize that she no longer held Madison in her arms. She took a deep shuddering breath and then dropped her rifle to the ground. She collapsed back down to the ground and crawled to Madison’s body.
I stood shocked, not knowing what to do. Time side-slipped again. The bird went back to calling out, if it had ever stopped. The wind came back, blowing cold against my face, pushing the flush of heat that the situation had brought with it away, cooling the sweat on my brow. The bird called. Another picked it up, and soon all the birds were talking as though nothing at all had happened. It became a perfect storm of noise after the deepness of the silence. Time slipped away again, clouds moving across the cold, blue of the sky.
Cammy sat, Madison pulled up into her lap, a large smear of maroon on her forehead, stroking Madison’s black hair. The birds called. The coldness of the wind seemed to bite at my bones. Nipping. Tasting. An un-dead thing of its own.
I can't tell you why I did it, but I am glad I did. I pushed the button on the rifle butt, dropped the empty clip in to my waiting palm, and slid another up into the rifle where it socketed itself home with a solid click. I did it perfectly, like I had been doing it all of my life instead of just the last few months since the UN-dead disease, epidemic, disorder, plague, what-ever-the-fuck it is has happened. She never looked up. The birds didn't stop singing their birdsong. Just in case, I told myself. Just in case.
I stood, my knees screaming, flexed experimentally and then walked a short distance away, leaning up against the cliff face. I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out my pouch and rolled a cigarette. I felt at my lips, busted up, but it would heal. I had been in fights in my old life where I had been busted up much worse. I lit the cigarette, held it carefully between my lips, smoking as I watched the clouds slip across the sky. Letting the urgency of the situation float away on the wind like the smoke.
Cammy's voice had fallen to a barely audible whisper as she stroked Madison's hair and held her. Madison's lips, blue tinged, moved, too quiet to hear her words. A private conversation. A private conversation in the wide open, which, thanks to the UN-dead, was a very private place. No one at all around, alive anyway, and the dead couldn't care less about love, secrets, whispered promises, goodbyes. The UN-dead only cared about the hunger that seemed to drive them. Flesh, and more flesh. The time turned elastic once more and spun out of control for some unknown length. I only know that when I came back to myself the sun had moved across the sky. My thoughts were about darkness, Zombies, staying alive.
~
When I think back on it now, I realize a noise had brought me back. Had to be, otherwise there was no reason for me to come back at all, just stay gone. Let the sun go down and the UN-dead take the night, me, Cammy, Madison and whatever else they wanted. But it didn't go that way.
A noise, a sliding foot, a pebble falling from above... I really don't know. I know that this time I reacted fast. My rifle came up; my mind was clear. I focused; two of them dropping from the cliffs above... like cats... like dead, stinking, feral cats... dragging that stink of death with them. The stench of rotted flesh falling from the sky, enveloping me even as I fired into them.
I had a choice. I couldn't get them both. One falling at me, one falling at Cammy where she sat with Madison cradled in her arms, oblivious to everything around her. My reaction chose for me. The rifle came straight up and spat short, little barks of noise and flame. The Zombie started to come apart before it hit me. A shower of cold, dead blood rained down on me, splattered against my face. The body hit the barrel of the rifle and took me down to the ground, clutching the rifle hard to keep from losing it as the full weight of the Zombie came down on it.
I kept it, but only by sheer determination. The Zombie had impaled herself onto the barrel. Her flesh so rotted that it had simply punched through her breast and out her back. I shoved her off as quickly as I could, one booted foot kicking against her chest, knocking her apart, pulling the barrel back through the soft flesh and hard bone.
I expected to see Cammy done for. I expected to see her dead or dying, but she had somehow ended up about twenty feet from where the Zombie had fallen. She looked herself, as if she had no real idea how that had happened, but when I raised my eyes and they took in the whole scene before them, I saw exactly how it had happened.
Madison must have still been awake. Laying there badly injured but not gone, taking the comfort from Cammy that she offered. When the Zombie fell, she saw it. She saw it and managed to push Cammy away from her and take the attack on herself.
The Zombie was no match for her, wounded though she was. She straddled the Zombie with a rock easily the size of her own head and brought it down hard: Once. Twice, and then I lost count, and the Zombie quit fighting. The undead, dead again. This time for good.
The silence came back hard. Like a curtain on the last act of a play, just when the audience isn't expecting it. It crashed down.
~
Time did its elastic trick and then snapped back before I was ready for it. My senses were shot. At first I could not connect the dots of memory that I needed to connect to make sense of what my eyes were seeing.
Cammy rose to shaky legs and started toward Madison, sobbing once more. Madison’s eyes swiveled to me. A sick look in them, and pain riding there too. She slumped forward, one wrist flapping uselessly, and lunged for the rifle that Cammy had trained on me not so long ago. Time stopped its elastic trickery right around that time. I knew exactly what she intended to do before she did it.
Cammy stopped in mid stride and nearly fell backwards at the effort of stopping so quickly. I think she believed for a second that Madison intended to shoot her. I really believe she thought that. But that was not the plan, and I knew that was not the plan. Because the plan that had resurfaced in her mind was the one we had talked about, half seriously, half jokingly, for as long as we had been traveling together. Before she followed through on that plan, I heard her tell it to me in my mind once again, the way she had a week or so before, when she had been unmolested... whole... not about to join the ranks of the UN-de
ad herself.
“If I ever fuckin' have to, I won't hesitate,” Madison had said, “Once I'm dead, I don't want to come back.” She shuddered and grimaced at the same time.
We had been in an old house over in Harlem. That was before Harlem got crazy too. We'd had gas lanterns for light. The windows were boarded over. The UN-dead scratched and cried and pleaded, but they could not get in. The four of us - John had still been alive then, in fact he had died just two days later. Fell through a rotted section of floor in that same old house. Impaled himself on a pipe in the basement. Madison had shot him in the head nearly as soon as he had stopped his struggles. Cammy had bent double and vomited. I had held it in, but barely - but that night John had been alive, he had still been with us. With us as we listened to the sounds of the UN-dead that were trying to get to us. To kill us. To eat us. To satisfy their ceaseless hunger. In the flickering light from the gas lanterns, she had said it, and he had nodded his head, agreeing immediately with what she had said. And I had not. It had not been a real thing to me, despite what I had already gone through on my own, until two days later when John had died and she had wasted no time. None.
“He would have expected it,” she had said, and nothing more. But that night... that night she had said it straight out, like a mantra, like looking into the future and seeing this day.
“If they come for me, if they get me? I'll put a bullet in my own head. I will. I swear I will. If I ever fuckin' have to, I won't hesitate,” Madison had said, “Once I'm dead, I don't want to come back.”
And Cammy had begun to cry. “Don't say it, Maddy. Don't say it.” And she hadn't said it again, but it didn't matter. She had already spoke it into truth. I had heard it. I had heard it, and I knew she meant it.
And now, time stopped its trick. She jammed the rifle under her chin and squeezed the trigger. Her head exploded in a spray of red and gray. I swear I could hear the sounds of small bits of bone and drops of blood pattering down to the ground. And then the silence was roaring again.
I took a breath, another... And then Cammy began to scream once more.
~
It's been three weeks. I thought Cammy would never talk again. I believed she wouldn't, right up until she did yesterday.
I just kept us moving. Different places in the city, not staying in one place for more than a day. Walking days, seeking refuge at night. The zombies smell us, you know. They can smell us for miles. So at night it's been strong places, strong places where they can't get in, and then hope like hell that these were not some new breed, the ones that don't seem to have a need to avoid the day, and that they would be gone in the morning.
I started carrying a radio the other day. Clips on the belt. FM. Picks up a lot of talk during the day. There's a place that a lot of the people I hear from have heard about, down south somewhere. Nobody seems to know exactly where it is. But others swear they have talked to the people that founded this place. A city somewhere down south. I had heard of something like that when it was Donita and me back in New York, but the word I keep hearing is that it is a safe place, that it is open to everyone.
That is where I had been thinking about getting us to. Three days ago we got a truck. It's still just me and Cammy, but it feels safer.
I have been thinking about this place. I don't know who these people are, if they even exist. I only know the whole world is fucked up. I have come to understand that even if I get us as far south as I can, we won't make it for long. There are only two of us that can fight. The dead are getting smarter, and that is not just my point of view. It's on the radio. They all say it.
L.A. and New York, both are barely hanging on. Both! Barely hanging on! Nearly over run! We're right here. I see it every day. The people talking aren't exaggerating at all. If the big cities are truly falling apart, and people can't make it banded together, how can we make it alone?
No. I'm heading for this place. I'm hoping it's real. Today on the radio I heard someone talking, and it sounded like he was talking about the same place I have heard about. Too far away to hear me. Skip. You can never tell where it's coming from. I'm just hoping it's true, that I didn't just imagine it to assuage my mind.
Meantime, I am trying to keep us alive, find strong places to stay through the nights. There are strong places, places you can find if you give it some thought. Stairwells in high-rises, steel and concrete. They can't get through those doors. Deep freezers in grocery stores. Heavy steel doors. The vehicles if we have to, and we have had to. They can't get in there to get us either. A little fire at night if I can, because they are afraid of fire. It's one constant, so far. The Zombies don't like the smell of smoke.
Canned stuff to eat. Christ, we'll be eating canned shit until we die. Get up the next day and push on. Get moving again. And that is what I've done. Kept us moving. Kept us safe. And she has come willingly, although silently, like a big, semi-animated puppet. And then yesterday she was sitting beside me, silent as she had been since the thing with Madison, and she spoke.
“I don't like beans, Bear. I just don't. Maybe we could find something different tonight?” She had lifted her voice at the end and made it into a question. I was winding my way through the middle of an abandoned car and a wrecked, burned out truck, months old. I looked over at her. She smiled, tentative at first, but then it lit up her face. I had to laugh. I had so much pent up inside me.
“The beans are a bit much then?” I asked.
“A bit,” she agreed.
I brought the truck to a dead stop for a second, not knowing what to say.
“You could say, 'Welcome back',” she said softly.
“Welcome back,” I repeated, every bit as quietly. “Welcome back...”
CHAPTER TWO
Donita's Notebook
March 1st (Night)
Quakes, at least three. Warmed up fast, and all the dirty snow that was piled along the streets has melted. Torrential rains. Thunder and lightening in the snow storm that came after sunset. Didn't last long; turned back to rain. Parts of the projects are burning. Jersey is burning. The sky is red-orange, like everything across the river is on fire. No one has come.
March 2nd (Day)
Rain 'til noon. Destruction widespread. Then horrific quake just before dark. Started to rain again, very heavy, then later at night it turned to snow. Lightening in the snow storm.
Night, no moon, no stars. Storms stopped for a while, still no stars. Then the storms came back harder.
March 3rd (Night)
Rain in the day, but as soon as the sun set, it turned colder. Snow, heavy snow, thunder and lightening throughout the night. No moon or starlight. No stars at all!
March 4th (Day into Night)
Electronics stopped working, wristwatches, battery powered clocks. Bear tried to start a truck. Nothing... Dead. Three more quakes, aftershocks. Planes sprayed blue stuff on us too.
March 5th (Day)
Tremors. Time seems off; days are longer, I feel it. No way to measure it though. No rain or snow.
Harlem ~ March 6th
Donita sat on a stool in the kitchen writing in her little notebook. Something was going on out in the world. Something, and the news was covering it up. The local news had been canceled. First at noon and now again at five. There had been no strange weather today, but the time was still off. Really off. The days were longer, no doubt about it at all.
There were fires burning out of control in the projects. No firemen had come. No cops. Nobody at all. There had been Earthquakes, or at least the ground had shaken. Explosions somewhere? Was it Earthquakes? It seemed like no one knew.
Donita didn't know anyone who owned a phone. A real phone. Real phones were a thing of the past. But a real phone would have been good now, because something had happened to all the cell phones. The bars had dropped to nothing. How could that even be, she had asked Bear. There were towers all over the place! Nevertheless, they had ceased to function, and she now found herself wishing for a real phone.
Bear had rigged up a C.B. radio and they had listened to that for a while. Twice a voice bled through claiming to be from somewhere in Jersey, warning everyone to stay away. The voice claimed the city was on fire. Union City? North Bergen? Edgewater? They didn't say, but it looked like all of Jersey was burning, just like parts of New York. There were gangs fighting for control of what was left here, probably the same there. The voice went on to say the dead were rising and walking the streets.
“Feds?” Donita asked.
“Feds landed and took over the streets?” Bear supplied.
Donita shook her head doubtfully. “I hope so, because it sounded like dead... The dead are walking the streets...” She trailed off and turned her eyes back to the windows; night coming, noise winding up in the projects, low hanging gray clouds that slipped past the windows. “That's crazy, though, right?” she asked. “Crazy?”
“Yeah... Nuts... I think it was Feds, Baby.... Feds... Maybe it means there's some serious shit going on there? We thought that anyhow, right? But dead walking the streets… Can't be,” Bear said in his deep, bass voice. He pulled Donita closer to him.
A few minuets later the C.B. went dead. When it came back a few seconds after that, there was a man identifying himself as Commander Roberts, telling them to keep the channel clear. Donita looked up at Bear. He pulled her closer and watched the night come down outside the windows.
Billy Jingo: L.A.
Billy paced the hallway, trying to think it out. Telling himself it was the right thing to do. The problem was that he was not used to doing the right thing. So unused to it, in fact, that he wasn't sure he wanted to try... should try.
The world had been turned upside down for the last few days. There was no official word that anything was wrong at all, but someone had fucked up. Of that he had no doubt at all.
The police? Gone. Fire department? Ditto. Army? Well, wasn't the National Guard supposed to show up when the shit hit the fan? But so far the army had not raised a finger to do anything for them at all. There was a base right over in Jersey, but there had been no sign of them.
