Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse

by Nicholas Ryan

  There was no warning. The car just stopped in the middle of a wreckage-strewn road.

  Samantha stared down at the dashboard in horror.

  Cutter swore. “Are we out of fuel?”

  Samantha shook her head. “We’ve still got a quarter tank,” she turned to him and her eyes were huge and dark, filled with fear. She thumped the steering wheel, then tried to start the car again. The engine whirred and died. She stomped her foot on the gas pedal and tried again.

  The car sat dead on the road.

  Cutter snatched a glance through the rear window. The distant shapes of shuffling undead were moving towards them, suddenly seeming to be filled with malicious awareness. He saw more dark shapes come from buildings, and he swore again.

  “Get out!” he snapped. “We’ve got to find another car – and we’ve got to do it in a hurry.”

  They tumbled from the Durango. Cutter was seething. There was no time. The dark wall of shuffling undead was drawing closer, their figures seeming to ripple in the morning heat haze that rose off the blacktop. He looked around in frantic desperation.

  There were other abandoned cars scattered on the road. He slapped Samantha on the back.

  “We can outrun them – but not for ever. Not with this bag. They’ll hunt us down eventually. So go and find something that has fuel,” he urged her, and she turned and ran further along the street towards a couple of compact Japanese sedans.

  Father Bob dragged the heavy canvas bag from the Durango and dropped it onto the road. He went down on one knee beside the trunk of the SUV and glanced over his shoulder at Cutter.

  “I’ll hold them off,” the pastor said. The older man looked ill, and between words his face contorted into a grimace of sudden silent pain.

  Cutter nodded. He handed his Glock to the big man and then turned and stared.

  There were houses on either side of the street. They were big brick residences, owned by wealthy locals who could afford to live close to the heart of the city. They had beautifully manicured lawns and ornate decorative windows. Some of them had cars parked in driveways. Cutter ran towards the closest house.

  It was an older-style home: a red-brick two-story building with a gabled roof and lead-light windows on the ground floor. The curtains were drawn tight, and he noticed that two of the west-facing windows had aluminum security shutters to block out the afternoon heat.

  Cutter paused for a split second, and considered making a stand. The home looked secure…

  He glanced back along the road towards the intersection. The zombies were shambling closer. The group was splintering apart as the faster moving ghouls broke away from the rest of the group. They were a hundred yards away from the Durango.

  Cutter ran down the driveway. There was a brick garage at the end of a cobblestoned path, and parked in front was a Volvo wagon. Cutter tried the driver-side door. It was locked. He spun around in wild desperation, looking for a weapon to smash the window.

  He ran into the garage.

  There was a narrow work-bench along the back wall of the structure, and above it was a wide stretch of peg-board filled with tools: hammers, saws and screwdrivers. There were more shelves to his left, and an old wardrobe that had once been a beautiful bedroom piece. Now it was a storage area for paints, brushes and gardening tools. Cutter found a small axe and picked it up.

  He ran back towards the Volvo. He could hear the wail of the zombies out on the street. A dense green hedge of manicured bushes blocked his view of the Durango, but the shrill sound of the undead was rising.

  He carried the axe back to the Volvo and hefted it over his shoulder to strike.

  That was how he saw the open door.

  There was a rear-entrance to the home – a green timber door at the top of three concrete steps. The door was open. Cutter paused. He lowered the axe and went towards the door cautiously.

  He crept up the steps and pushed the door open wide with the head of the axe. Stood in the darkened gloom for long seconds while his eyes adjusted to the light.

  He was standing in a kitchen. There was a table to his left, set with dinner plates and half-eaten meals. Flies filled the air, buzzing in angry swarms like a thick cloud. Seated around the table were a man, a woman and a child. The woman and the child were slumped back in their seats, their eyes wide and staring. The woman had a bullet hole in the center of her forehead. The child was a girl. She was dressed in a school uniform. She had long black hair and an expression of shock on her face. A bullet had smashed through one of her eyes sockets and the back of her head had collapsed.

  Cutter gaped in horror.

  Then the man at the table turned towards him.

  He was middle-aged. He had black hair, quickly turning grey. He had a thin, drawn face, and his eyes were small and very dark. He looked like an accountant, or maybe a lawyer. He stared at Cutter and his mouth fell open, slack.

  “Are you the gardener?” the man asked numbly. His voice croaked. Cutter took a step back. The stench of death in the room hit him. He shook his head.

  The man scraped back his chair and got slowly to his feet. There was a pistol on the table next to a dinner plate that swarmed with flies and wriggling maggots. The man’s trousers were covered in urine and feces.

  He picked up a napkin, moving in a slow dazed trance, and dabbed at the corner of his lips. He smiled at Cutter, and his expression was almost weary. Then he leaned over and kissed the dead woman’s open mouth. A fly crawled across the woman’s cold lips and disappeared into the cavity of her nose. The man didn’t seem to notice. “I’ll be home about six,” he said softly. He turned to his daughter. “Be a good girl at school, okay?”

  He waited for the dead girl to answer, and when she didn’t the man frowned. He turned to Cutter again and shrugged.

  “Kids. She’s a teenager,” the man said as if that explained everything. “She’s got an attitude that’s a mile wide.”

  Cutter backed away towards the door. He raised the axe and held it ready across his chest. The man suddenly seemed to recognize the pistol. He picked it up and placed it carefully under his chin.

  Cutter stumbled out through the door. Nausea scalded the back of his throat and he tripped down the stairs and fell against the wall of the house. He shook his head like a man in a daze.

  He heard the loud roar of the gunshot, and then a second later he heard the man’s body fall to the floor.

  Then he heard more gunshots – these ones coming from the road in a sporadic hail of fire. Cutter turned and ran for the Durango.

  There were four undead ghouls lying on the road, not fifteen feet away from the Durango. Cutter hurdled a low brick wall and ran into the middle of the street. The zombie wave was undulating and writhing – maybe fifty ghouls shambling and reaching out for the pastor. Cutter dropped to his haunches behind the big man and took back the Glock. He snapped off two shots.

  “Where’s Samantha?”

  The pastor shook his head. The closest undead were maybe a dozen feet away from the Durango. Cutter turned and looked for the girl, and then looked for an escape.

  “We’ve got to move,” he urged the pastor.

  Father Bob shook his head. “We won’t get clear of them with the bag,” he said. “It’s too late for that.” He fired off a shot at the face of a woman zombie who was snarling at him. The woman’s wretched eyes were yellow and wide with her frenzy. She took one more convulsive shambling step and collapsed to the ground unmoving.

  “Well we can’t stay here!” Cutter shouted.

  Father Bob turned to Cutter and there was a sudden peace and tranquility in his expression. The big man smiled, and Cutter saw that same sparkle of compassion and faith in the man’s eyes he had recognized the instant they had met.

  “I can, Jack,” Father Bob said calmly. “It’s you who needs to escape. Take the bag. Go and find my baby girl. Get her to safety for me.”

  Cutter stared with sudden incredulous disbelief. “No,” Cutter said. “We go now, and w
e go together.”

  Father Bob reached out and squeezed Cutter’s shoulder. “Please,” he said. “Do this for me. I’m a dead man anyhow, Jack. We both know that. It’s just a matter of time. This way, I get to choose my time. This way I get to do what’s right – not die wasting away as a burden to anyone. It’s right – you know it is.”

  Cutter shook his head. One of the undead staggered against the Durango, so close that Cutter could smell the reeking stench of the decaying corpse. He flung the Glock up and fired a desperate shot that snapped the undead ghoul’s head back. The zombie collapsed to the ground and the others trampled over it.

  “Go now!” Father Bob pleaded. “Before it’s too late for both of us.”

  Cutter shook his head defiantly. “I can’t do that,” he said. He snatched hold of the canvas bag and got to his feet. He reached for the pastor and dragged him back until they were standing at the hood of the Durango.

  The wall of undead pressed closer, like a remorseless, relentless tide of death that could not be stopped: could not be turned back. Father Bob smiled serenely and then placed the revolver in Cutter’s hand.

  “Tell Sam I love her,” he said. Then he turned away and hurled himself into the clamoring wall of wretched dead. Cutter cried out – but it was too late. The zombies attacked and mutilated the pastor in an instant of frenzied maddened rage as the ghouls gouged and shredded his body. Cutter heard the pastor scream – but it was not a cry of pain or terror.

  Somehow – to Cutter’s ears – it was the sound of freedom.

  Cutter staggered backwards. Turned his head away. There were tears welling up in his eyes and he blinked them away. He picked up the bag and began to run, but his legs were leaden. He heard the sound of a revving engine and turned blindly. Samantha was behind the wheel of a silver Honda hatchback. She hammered her fist on the horn and leaned out through the open window.

  “Come on!” she screamed. Cutter ran. He hurled the heavy bag into the car and dived into the passenger seat.

  “Where is my father?” Samantha asked with a dull sense of premonition. Her voice was suddenly hollow – empty of all emotion.

  Cutter stared ahead, and for an instant the sound of the terrible wailing and the imminent sense of danger and panic seemed to dissolve away.

  “He’s not coming with us,” Cutter said.

  Samantha turned to Cutter, and then looked back over her shoulder at the undead ghouls that filled the street. Many were covered with fresh blood. It dripped from their chins and left fresh stains on their ragged clothes.

  Samantha nodded. She eased her foot down on the gas pedal and the little car nosed past a wrecked station wagon. Ahead of them the road opened into four lanes of empty highway.

  Samantha drove away in stoic sobbing anguish – heading for the Garden of Eden.

  Five.

  The highway.

  Samantha drove with exaggerated caution. The car crawled along the blacktop, gradually leaving the smoldering ruined city behind until it was just a dark burning shape in the rear view mirror.

  The highway ahead stretched like an undulating ribbon into the distance, littered with the debris of mangled and abandoned vehicles. Everywhere they looked was death and destruction.

  They cruised past a school bus that had been abandoned, with its front wheels slewed across two lanes. The rear of the bus had crashed into a steel guardrail. The windows on one side of the bus had been shattered so that glass was sprayed across the road. Cutter saw limp, lifeless young bodies still in their seats and blood dripped down the side of the bus to puddle on the gravel. The driver had been thrown head-first through the windshield and lay on the hood of the bus, his body twisted at an impossible angle, his eyes wide open and staring as though in utter disbelief. A huge black crow was perched on the man’s back. The bird stared at Cutter as the car crept past, and then went back to chewing at the dead bus driver’s body.

  Every hundred yards was a new, chilling horror.

  They saw an overturned car with the dead driver still pinned under the wreckage of the vehicle. It was a young woman. Her legs had been crushed, and she lay on the roadside in a puddle of her own blood. Her hands and fingers were a shocking gored mangle, as though she had died trying to claw herself to safety. Two crows were feeding on her body. One was perched on the back of the woman’s head, nibbling at the soft flesh of her neck. The other was settled on her back, tearing through the blood-soaked remnants of the woman’s blouse. And they saw an old man, sitting on the side of the highway, his back resting against a metal post. The man was staring up at the afternoon sun, his head thrown back in an attitude of bewilderment. Rats had come from the grassy verge and were gnawing at the old man’s legs, lacerating the paper-thin skin and feasting on his feet and toes. Cutter didn’t know if the man was still alive – and they didn’t stop the car to find out.

  Slowly the miles dragged on, and as the afternoon began to darken, the constant horrors beat down upon their senses until they became numb and immune to the carnage so that they slowed less often – gaped and shuddered less frequently.

  “We’re not going to make Eden Gardens before nightfall,” Cutter said at last. Samantha looked at him, her expression sharp with alarm. Cutter glanced through the windshield at the setting sun. Dark storm clouds were boiling on the horizon.

  He had no idea what time it was – maybe four or five o’clock. Long shadows stretched across the highway.

  “And I don’t want to be on this road at night,” he said.

  He hadn’t been this far north of Newbridge for years, but he had a vague recollection of a roadside gas station at the turnoff to Draketown. He told Samantha.

  “It can’t be much further,” Cutter said.

  The highway north of the city had been upgraded and re-aligned in the last decade and he leaned forward in his seat, trying to see past the debris, anticipating the sight of the little general store as each new bend in the road slowly appeared. Twenty minutes later he saw it.

  It was very different to the way he remembered. The old weatherboard building with a couple of weary gas pumps on a half-acre of roadside gravel was gone, and in its place had been built something altogether different.

  The land had been concreted, and marked with painted lines for parking bays. Cutter saw a dozen cars sitting empty in the afternoon light.

  The old building had been torn down and replaced with a diner, set well back from the road. There were long full-length glass windows across the front shaded under an aluminum awning. The walls were brick and covered with Coca Cola signs. Closer to the highway was a bank of four gas pumps. There was a car parked up alongside one of the pumps. The driver’s door was open, and the vehicle was empty.

  Cutter began to feel uneasy. The building he remembered might have been a safe, defendable haven to rest for the night. A glass-fronted diner was not. He felt his hopes begin to slide as the silver hatchback slowly crept closer.

  Cutter looked around carefully, his eyes searching for signs of movement – for any sense of danger.

  He noticed about a dozen houses that had been built just beyond the turnoff to Draketown.

  They were new. They all looked the same: like some small random estate of cookie-cutter homes that had been thrown up quickly by a developer who had been keen to make a fast buck with low cost accommodation. Cutter frowned, and his sense of disquiet started to sound louder in the back of his mind.

  The old gas station had stood alone in the middle of nowhere – just a dot on the map beside a turn in the road. Now he was staring at a small residential development. Cutter wondered about the homes, and what might be waiting for them as the night pressed down and the darkness filled with sounds and fear.

  “Is this the place?” Samantha asked. She sounded scared.

  “I’m not sure anymore,” Cutter admitted. “It’s changed a lot from the way I remembered it.”

  Samantha stopped the car in the middle of the highway, forty yards short of the diner. She left
the motor running and glanced down at the temperature and fuel gauge needles. She bit her lip. “Car’s getting a little hot,” she said softly. They had been driving at such low speed the radiator had begun to hiss under the hood. “And we have a little under half a tank of gas left.”

  Cutter nodded. Half a tank of gas was all they needed – Eden Gardens couldn’t be more than twenty miles ahead. But the radiator was a problem.

  He turned to Samantha. “What do you think?”

  The girl stared through the windscreen, anxiety darkening her expression. “I don’t like it,” she said at last.

  Cutter nodded. “Neither do I. But I don’t see what choice we have. We can’t drive through the night.”

  Samantha nodded. “But maybe there will be somewhere else we can stop,” she offered. “There might be another place further along the road. Maybe a farmhouse, or another general store.”

  “And if there isn’t?”

  Samantha sat back in the driver’s seat. Cutter could see the rise and fall of her chest and the movement of her breasts beneath the fabric of her shirt as she fought to control her breathing. Finally she turned to him with sad, fatalistic eyes. She nodded. “Okay,” she said in a small voice, and Cutter sensed the girl had suddenly remembered that she was alone with him – that her father was no longer there to protect her.

  For the first time in her life she was alone in the world.

  Cutter had re-loaded the revolver and the Glock during the drive. He put the revolver in the glove compartment and racked back the slide on the Glock.

  “Just go in nice and easy,” Cutter said. “Whatever you do, don’t stop the car. Don’t park up anywhere. We want to cruise around the parking bay for a few minutes. If there’s anything waiting for us, we’ll have time to get away.”

  Samantha nodded grimly. She tightened her grip on the wheel. Cutter slid down the passenger-side window and felt a cool breeze on his face. He braced himself in the seat, tensing his body and feeling his nerves suddenly string taut. The car rolled off the blacktop and he heard the tires crunch over loose gravel as it bumped down onto the concrete.