by JE Gurley
“Why don’t they attack?” Mateo asked after several minutes had passed.
Vince had been asking himself the same question. Most packs were overly eager for the kill, rushing blindly into a hail of bullets. After the initial charge, these zombies had stayed out of rifle range. He laid his pistol on the bed of the ATV within reach and checked his ammunition – two full clips for each plus twenty rounds.
“I don’t know. This is something new. Old One Eye there is pretty cagey.”
“Maybe they’re afraid.”
By the tone of Mateo’s voice, Vince knew his companion was indulging in a forlorn hope. He hated to burst Mateo’s bubble. Zombies weren’t afraid of anything. He glanced at the sun. Already the shadows of the mountains were reaching out for them. In an hour, the entire valley would be in darkness.
“No. They’re waiting for sunset. They can see in the dark. We can’t.”
“We can build a fire.”
“Then we won’t be able to see them.”
Mateo sighed. “Do we wait or run?”
The ATV was faster than a zombie could run in the open, but they would have to dodge wrecked vehicles, slowing them down. The zombies could clamber over automobiles as nimbly as monkeys and leap farther.
“We won’t get fifty yards before they’re on us, but we can’t sit here.” He pointed to a building two hundred feet away, a garage with an open bay door. “That building has small windows and thick walls. If we can reach it, we can last until morning. In daylight, we might stand a chance. Not at night in the open.”
Vince picked up the pack with their food and water, stuffed the pistol in his belt and the extra ammunition in his pockets. When he stood, one zombie showed itself. He fired and watched the zombie’s head explode, scattering blood and brain matter over the hood of a Honda Accord.
“Now!” he yelled.
He and Mateo began a race for their lives for the garage, a race neither could afford to lose. Their sudden sprint placed them ahead of the zombie pack for all of fifteen seconds. Then, the members of the pack emerged from behind buildings and began pursuing them, leaping over obstacles and jumping from car to car. They were strangely quiet. Vince had heard zombie moans and howls coming from their mutated throats, but he had never seen a hunting pack go silent as they pursued prey. He found it unnerving.
Both men turned to fire twice. Each killed a zombie, but that still left more than enough. By a quick count, Vince tallied twelve chasing them. The open garage doorway loomed ahead. They would have to fend off the zombies while lowering the door by hand. The climb up the ridge had tired them both. Mateo was younger and stronger than Vince was, but he was breathing hard and showing signs of faltering. Relief spread over his face as he cleared the door. Vince was on his heels, firing blindly behind him hoping to drop a zombie and maybe trip another.
While Mateo struggled with the rusty chain to lower the door, Vince picked his targets and fired. When his second clip emptied, he pulled out his .45 and kept firing. When the door dropped below his knees, he fell on his stomach and fired under it. With only inches to go, one zombie threw itself under the door, wedging it open. Mateo kicked at the zombie’s head, slipped and stepped too close. The zombie’s teeth clamped down on his booted ankle.
“Bastard!” he yelled and shot the zombie pointblank, splattering himself with blood. He kicked the zombie’s body back, allowing the door to close fully. He looked over at Vince, chest heaving for breath and his face covered in dark zombie blood and said, “That was damn close.”
The concerned look on Vince’s face told Mateo something was wrong.
“What?” he asked almost in a panic.
“Your hand,” Vince replied.
During the struggle to lower the door, the handkerchief with which Mateo had bound his cut had come away, exposing the open wound to the zombie blood. Frantically, he dug in the pack, found a water bottle and poured it over the cut.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” he cursed, dancing from foot to foot in frightened agitation. He looked at Vince. “The Blue Juice... will it work against infection?”
With every fiber in his being, Vince wanted to reassure Mateo, but the truth was necessary. “I don’t know,” he answered. “From what I understand, the Blue Juice works against airborne infection – something to do with the way our lungs work. Bites or wounds” He shook his head. “I just don’t know.”
Outside, the zombies began pounding on the metal door, rattling the hinges. Vince hoped the door held. He slid shut the metal bar locking the door in place. He left Mateo moaning in fear and went to one of the windows. Each window was set high in the fifteen foot-high wall. He climbed atop a workbench to peek out. One Eye stood well out of rifle range, grunting to the others. The windows were too high for the zombies to reach. Unless, he mused, they know how to use ladders.
Two zombies looked up at him. One of them let out a deep, throaty growl. It was the last sound it made as Vince put a neat .308 hole in its forehead. The second zombie turned to stare at its falling companion, but soon joined him as Vince fired again. He could see more zombies approaching in the distance from either a second pack or individuals drawn by the commotion. Several zombies, led by One Eye, circled the building looking for another way in, but the rear door was metal and solidly hung. They were in a secure building, but they were going nowhere soon.
2
A group of three men and two women moved silently through the rubble of a fallen cinder block wall to avoid attracting unwanted attention. The Children of God were nearby and did not discriminate between Angels and Apostles. The early morning wind kicked up clouds of dust. The five huddled in the lee of a burned out building that once might have sold clothing or groceries. The blackened shelving units poking through the piles of wind-blown sand dotted with grass and weeds made it difficult to tell. Whatever purpose the building might have once served, it was now the home of coyotes and javelinas, whose tracks were visible even in the poor light. Long-nosed bats roosted among the crevices of the steel roof struts. Their leathery wings rustled slightly at the intruders.
Brother Malachi offered a short prayer for the two acolytes who had chosen to become Angels. His voice was deep and sonorous, able to reach the rear of the Cathedral of the New Apostles, but today his prayer was quiet meant only for a few ears.
“Oh, Heavenly Father, we beseech thee to accept this sacrifice so that Your new children, those you deem worthy to supplant the wicked and the deceitful, will look upon us with kindness and gratitude, to see that we, the unworthy, are trying to redeem ourselves for our sins. Amen.”
He turned to the two acolytes, now known as Angels, who had volunteered for the sacrifice, a young man and an elderly woman. “Brother Adam, Sister Ruth, your selfless actions will earn you a place by God’s side and go far toward redeeming those of us that God has chosen to offer this second chance.” With one long-fingered, calloused hand tipped with immaculately manicured nails, he made the sign of the cross in the air before them. “Go with God.”
The two Angels smiled at Brother Malachi and strode slowly but confidently down the street, hand-in-hand, looking neither to their left nor to their right into the deep shadows surrounding them. The wan moon caught their white robes, painting the pair with an aura of saintly light. Brother Malachi deemed it a good omen, a sign from God. As the Children of God, lurking half-awake in the shadows caught scent of the two Angels, the shadows stirred. Within minutes, grunts and howls split the night air. In spite of himself, Brother Malachi shivered and then quickly crossed himself for his lack of faith. God works in mysterious ways unfathomable to mankind. Though they seemed no more than animals, he knew the new Children of God, the zombies, were much more. They were the future.
The two Angels were nearly three blocks away, stepping over piles of rubble, some of which in the shadows looked ominously like discarded human bones. They moved around the rusting hulks of long dead automobiles – tombstones to the past. Suddenly, a silhouette detached from a wall s
o quickly that Brother Malachi could barely follow, and the male Angel was gone, vanished as if raptured heavenward by God. The old woman screamed and turned to flee, but managed only two steps before four dark figures seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth and surrounded her, crouching and moving around her in a tight circle. She spun slowly, desperately seeking escape, her hand to her mouth to stifle more screams. Forgotten was her original offer of sacrifice, replaced now by a deep, primal human emotion – fear.
All five figures froze in place for several long heartbeats. Then the four shadows leaped upon the woman, dragging her screaming to the ground. Her struggles ended mercifully quickly, but the gory sounds of feeding reaching Brother Malachi’s ears made his stomach churn. He watched for a few seconds longer in morbid fascination before turning and leading his fellow brothers and sisters back to the refuge of the Cathedral.
Brother Malachi had not always been a self-appointed priest. Before Judgment Day, or the Redeeming, as his Apostles called it, before the worldwide Avian flu epidemic had begun killing people and resurrecting them as carnivorous zombies, he had been Albert Sooks, a plumber from Apache Junction, Arizona. While suffering through his own bout of the flu, as the world burned around him, God had whispered in Sooks’ ear, revealing to him that the end had come and that mankind had failed in its fulfillment of God’s plan. He had created a new race, the Children of God, to supplant man’s dominion over the earth. Upon recovering, Sooks had immediately set about gathering his flock and spreading the message of God’s word.
The New Apostles had grown from a handful of faithful followers to over fifty in the eight months since Judgment Day. A dozen Angels had given themselves to the new Children of God, offering up their blood and their flesh as Jesus had offered his to his Apostles. The New Apostles lived and worshipped in the former Marriot Twin Buttes Resort just outside of Phoenix. The military had commandeered the breathtaking resort during the early days of the Redeeming, using nearby Diablo Stadium first as a FEMA center and later as a funeral pyre for the disposal of tens of thousands of bodies. When they had first arrived, the New Apostles had methodically removed the bodies in a dump truck to the Twin Buttes Cemetery. When the task of burial became too burdensome for the small number of Apostles, they began dumping the dead in the Salt River a few miles away to await the summer monsoon rains. Unusual spring flooding swept the bodies away into the desert. To Brother Malachi, the spring flood was one of God’s miracles.
The military had erected a heavy, ten-foot, chain link fence topped by razor wire around the resort, securing it against zombies and against the mobs of frightened people who had tried desperately to seek shelter there. The warehouse of stored rations was a providential find and would last the Apostles for years. Brother Malachi hoped to begin farming the football field, the blood of the dead offering up its essence to new growth. The resort’s lofty position between two buttes offered the New Apostles a commanding view of the ruins of Phoenix, which unlike its mythical namesake, Brother Malachi feared would never again rise from the ashes. The resort was one of the few places in the city that still had electricity. Brother Malachi deemed this too an act of God. The Cathedral, the resort’s four-star restaurant, became the center for worship, while the resort now served as a dormitory for the New Apostles of God, a safe refuge from the wickedness of the world.
Guards patrolled the fenced perimeter and manned the gates, but carried only nonlethal weapons, such as nets and snare poles. Killing God’s Children was a sin. Brother Ezekiel, Malachi’s second in command, waited dutifully just inside the fence for Brother Malachi as he ascended the long, winding road to the Cathedral. Ezekiel, almost six-feet tall with long blond hair, a thin mustache and goatee, still had to look up to meet Brother Malachi’s blue in blue eyes. At a gangly six-foot, five inches tall, Brother Malachi with his gaunt cheeks and permanently pensive expression reminded some people of Abraham Lincoln, a figure he greatly admired.
“The power was off for two hours,” Ezekiel announced without preamble and waited for Brother Malachi to reply.
Brother Malachi smiled and reached out to touch Brother Ezekiel’s sleeve in assurance. In a deep voice, he replied, “I’m sure the authorities at the nuclear plant are doing all they can, Brother. You must have patience.”
“Some people feared it would not return.”
“Fear is an insidious, odious beast,” he intoned carefully. He knew of Brother Ezekiel’s dread of the dark. “We must dispel it from our midst. I will speak to the others later.”
Brother Ezekiel nodded. “The Ascension went well?”
Brother Malachi stopped walking and stared into the sky for a moment before replying. “Both were consumed,” he answered with a sigh. “Neither was accepted as one of God’s Children.”
“It was not to be.”
Brother Malachi turned on him, allowing just a little of the ire of which he was capable to show. “Others have been accepted. Our faith is not sufficient. I will speak on that as well.” His voice softened. “Is there hot water? I feel the need for a bath.”
“There is. A fresh robe and towel has been laid out for you.”
“You anticipate my needs, Brother. That is what a good second in command does.”
Nodding his head slightly, Brother Ezekiel said, “I serve God by serving you.”
“We all serve God as we can.”
As they passed members of the flock in the halls, each Apostle offered him a quick bow. Brother Malachi tolerated such minor signs of respect from his followers, but forbade anyone to kneel before him. He was a simple messenger, not a prophet or a priest.
His rooms were once a suite with a private bath, the one luxury he allowed himself. Electricity was plentiful but water was not. The New Apostles had run a two-inch pipe to the resort from a water storage tank half a mile away atop another butte east of the interstate. A diesel generator powered a pump to refill the tank, but diesel, too, was scarce. Food came first, then sanitation. Weekly showers were the norm. Brother Malachi’s needs were simple, his quarters austere. He had removed the king-sized bed and splendid furniture, replacing them with a simple cot, a nightstand with a reading lamp and a comfortable chair. The suite’s living room had become his office, a place for staff meetings, for fellowship, and for prayer vigils. The pitcher of cold milk and glass that one of the acolytes had placed on the desk for him brought a smile to his lips. The small herd of cattle and the flock of chickens the Angels of God maintained were for milk and eggs, not meat. The New Apostles of God ate no meat. Meat was for God’s Children.
As much as he desired a bath after the dusty journey, the milk made his mouth water. Giving in to his thirst, he sat down, weary after his long walk, filled the glass, and downed its contents in one long gulp. The ice-cold milk cooled his parched throat and reminded him of his youth when his mother always set out milk and a slice of apple pie for him after school. He sighed. Those days and the world before were gone.
Glancing at the overhead lights, he remembered the dark nights when flashlights or candles failed. It was during such a night that he had stumbled upon Brother Ezekiel, Danny Platt at that time, huddling in a dark corner of a building whimpering. “Arise and walk with me brother,” he had commanded and Brother Ezekiel had followed him since. What a blessing electricity has become. The military had secured the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant in Tonopah forty miles west of Phoenix just after the Redeeming. He frowned at the thought of their killing so many of the Children of God in the process, but electricity had allowed him to gather his flock. They tried to use the electricity sparingly so that the military would have no reason to shut off the power.
Once, in early February, an army jeep with four soldiers had arrived. He met them at the fence and had spoken to the officer in charge, a young lieutenant, and explained the purpose of the New Apostles. The lieutenant had been openly skeptical, but had promised to leave them in peace as long as they supplied information using the radio he had left for that purpose. Brother Malach
i deemed any contact with the military as unhealthy, but reluctantly agreed. Only twice since, had he used the radio, now sitting idle in a storage closet, when several mercenary Hunters had tried to breech the gates seeking munies, as they called those immune from the plague. After one of their number spoke with an officer at the military base in San Diego, they had left and had not returned.
The only other time they had occasion to contact the military was when a small band of people had sought refuge among the Apostles. Their refusal to convert had damned them. Unfit to become Angels, the Apostles had held them for the military and had received much-needed medical supplies in return. Malachi shuddered to think of what had become of them, but he had his own small flock to consider. God did not tolerate unbelievers.
After finishing his second glass of milk, Brother Malachi filled the tub with hot water, leaning over it to allow the rising steam to rehydrate his desiccated body. Stripping off his robe, he lowered himself in to the hot water slowly and sat there for several minutes before picking up the bar of scented soap and lathering his body. His long legs pressed against his chest in the tight confines of the small tub. The dirt and dust came off easily, but the guilt remained. He urged no followers to offer themselves as Angels; Ascension was a personal decision, a matter of faith, but each failure ate into his soul. A few Angels, a precious few, feeling the first signs of the plague upon them, had walked among the Children unharmed, becoming Children themselves. Some, like the two Angels today, had misjudged their symptoms in their zeal and had paid the ultimate price.
He raised his face toward the ceiling. “Oh God, Why do you burden me with this task, yet you fail to remove my remorse? Make me stronger, oh Lord.”
