by Zack Archer
Layla was forced to saw the wheel back and forth to avoid the piles of debris and bodies scattered across the road as we motored away from the auto parts store, keeping an eye out for any sign of trouble.
It was evident that the area had been carved into a swamp because on either side of us were swatches of undergrowth that were so thick it was impossible to see through them. Here and there were stands of cypress trees jutting out of soupy water, wreathed by bramble and sticker bushes.
“Anyone wanna go for a walk in the swamp?” Layla asked.
“Yeah, that’s gonna be a hard pass,” Lexie replied.
The road dipped as we drove past what was once a tidy little neighborhood of single-family homes. There were ten or twelve in all and they were positioned around a little spit of grass centered by a gazebo and a small cannon. A sign on a brick wall said, “Revolutionary Heights.” We slowed and scanned the houses, which were in excellent condition. No signs of looting or violence aside from a few strange graffiti images of what appeared to be a snake eating itself tail-first.
“The hell is that?” I asked.
“Graffiti of some kind.”
“I can see that.”
“Ouroboros,” Deb said. “The Lucifer snake. Means the end of the world to some folks.”
Lovely, I thought. Just what I wanted to see.
Beyond the neighborhood was a tidy-looking house complete with a white picket fence and a sign that said, “Tot Spot.” There was a bunch of abandoned playground equipment between the house and a church with a placard that read, “Spiritual Exercise: Walk with the Lord and Run from Satan.”
A half mile later the strip mall came into view. In contrast to the neighborhood, the mall bore the signs of looting: smashed windows, goods littering the parking lot, scorch marks on the brick façades. I was surprised to see that several stores appeared relatively unscathed, including a florist store called The Bloom Room, a Forever 21 clothing store, and a nail salon called Triple X Nails.
“Looks like the looters were men, for sure,” I said.
Lexie elbowed me in the side and we exited the Mustang. Deb stayed behind in case we had to beat a hasty retreat. The rest of us trekked into the Forever 21, where Lexie proceeded to put on a fashion show by taking clothes off the racks and modeling them, preening as we laughed and clapped.
I tossed a frilly blouse to Raven, who scrunched up her nose. “Not my style.”
I ripped the arms off the blouse. “Much improved,” she said with a smile.
Next, we hit the nail salon and the ladies forced me into one of those pedicure chairs. Layla sat next to me and Lexie did her best to give us pedicures.
Once that was done, the four of us waved at Deb and motioned for her to follow us over to the PetSmart store that anchored the mall.
We shoved the front doors open and entered the space that was gloomy and reeked of mildew and moldering pet food.
Lexie set Stevens down on the floor and he sniffed the air before bounding toward the back of the store. There was a large collection of empty cages barely visible near the back, the area where Lexie said local charities usually brought in animals for adoption.
“Maybe he found some food,” Lexie said.
“Yeah, or a girlfriend,” Raven said with a sly smile.
We traipsed back through the aisles, moving past overturned fish tanks and toppled bins filled with chew toys and the like. The walls were tagged with strange symbols, including several images of what appeared to be Halloween ghosts, sheets with holes cut out for the eyes.
I stopped near an overturned bin that had spilled its contents onto the ground. Mostly chew toys and stuff for dogs. Dropping into a crouch, I picked at the rubber balls, chewtoys, and pieces of rawhide, and found a small green bear. It reminded me of the one Hollis had back when I first met her.
I stuffed the bear in a pocket and undid a length of wire I found at the bottom of the bin, wrapping it around my wrist. It reminded me of the wire loop Raven had given me, the one that had ended up probably saving my life with the Madam Secretary and her goons.
Stevens was visible near some of the cages at the back of the store. His head was down and as I approached, I saw that he was licking something on the tile floors.
“Stevens!” Lexie said, wagging a finger. I watched her stroll ahead and grab the cat, placing her finger against his nose. Her face fell.
“What?” I asked.
Lexie was silent and when she turned I saw it.
Saw Stevens’s face.
It was rust colored, smudged by whatever he’d licked off the floor.
Kneeling, I saw that he’d been slurping a thin line of blood.
“Jesus, is that what I think it is?”
“Why the fuck can’t any place be normal,” Raven hissed.
We moved forward, weapons at the ready and that’s when we saw the cages.
They weren’t empty at all.
There were three people inside.
Two men and a woman.
14
To call the three people inside the cages emaciated would be an understatement. They were sticks garbed in soiled clothing, shivering, hollow-eyed, moaning. They looked like inmates at a concentration camp.
I inched forward and they grabbed the bars on the cages and began rocking back and forth, groaning.
The woman opened her mouth and I saw that she didn’t have a tongue, just a black nub that slapped against her gums
Raven whispered something in Spanish and I spun around, expecting an ambush.
“We need to leave right now,” Layla said.
“What about them?” I asked.
Layla shook her head. “Leave ‘em.”
“The hell we are,” Lexie said.
She handed Stevens to me and then used her Mayhem Gun to shoot the locks off the cages. Then she shot the chains off the three people and kicked the cages open. The three began hooting and hollering and we turned and beat our feet back toward the entrance. We were nearly out of the store when the first gunshot echoed from the parking lot and—
WHAM!
A body slammed to the ground in front of us.
We jumped in the air, shocked to see a figure lying in a pool of red. The figure, and it had the outline of a man, was carrying a rifle and wrapped in a white sheet with the eyes cut out. Just like one of the graffiti images I’d seen inside. There was a bullet hole in the middle of the sheet.
“Ghost,” Layla whispered. “He looks like a friggin’ Halloween trick-‘r-treater.”
Looking up, I could tell from the angle that the man in the sheet had been positioned up on the roof. He was likely waiting for us to come out and Deb had shot him down.
“LET’S GO!” Deb screamed, holding up a smoking gun while beeping the horn.
We were five paces from the Mustang when bullets kicked up all around us. Jumping into the Mustang, I covered my head while listening to several rounds slam into the car, which whipped off across the parking lot.
Crawling over to the right, I looked back to see several vehicles appear from around the side of the strip mall, including a pair of souped-up Ford F-150 trucks.
“We’ve got company,” I said.
“Already on ‘em,” Deb replied.
Layla cracked her knuckles. “Want me to drive?”
Deb grinned. “In your dreams.”
She monkeyed the wheel and punched the gas. My head snapped back as Raven positioned her rifle across the back seat and opened fire.
I wrapped the loop of wire around Raven’s wrist.
Raven batted her eyelashes in an exaggerated fashion. “For me? Why, Nick, you shouldn’t have.”
“Don’t say I never got you anything,” I replied.
I crawled over to the front seat.
“Who are those guys?” Deb asked, stealing a look at the rearview mirror.
“Oh, just some cannibals,” I replied.
“Come again?”
“They had people chained up in cages i
nside the pet store.”
“Just what I didn’t want to hear.”
She two-handed the wheel as shooters inside the trucks opened fire. A bullet buzzed past my ear and shattered the rearview mirror.
“Hey!” Layla shouted. “That was an original mirror!”
Raven placed a shot through the grill on one of the trucks, blowing out the engine, but the other truck accelerated.
We were a mile away from the auto parts store, racing to stay ahead of the truck that was coming up fast.
A shooter stood in the bed of the truck, a man in a white sheet with a smiley face painted on it. He was holding a shotgun. Layla put five Yojimbo blades into the man’s chest with her XM-99 gun. The man staggered backward and fell out of the truck.
I focused on the driver, spraying his window with metal darts. One of them struck him under his chin. The man clutched his ruined neck, losing his grip on the steering wheel. The truck veered to the right, clipped a junked car, and went airborne.
We zoomed ahead as it landed hard and rolled several times.
I felt the Mustang slow and looked back, pumping my fist. We’d taken both trucks down. Lexie tugged on my shirt and I saw that she was pointing.
There were figures in the middle of the street out in front of us.
Zombies. Hundreds of them, dragging themselves out of the swampy areas on the left and right of the road. They’d heard the commotion and were coming out to investigate.
We fired on the zombies, but there were too many and there was no way we’d be able to drive through them. Deb reversed the Mustang only to see more of the ghouls appearing, cutting us off from behind. Some of the others dragged the survivors out of the truck and picked them apart.
“Refresh my memory,” Deb said, her jaw working back and forth. “Who was the jackass who wanted to go out and scavenge?”
“Look!” Lexie shouted.
I stood on the front seat to see two forms rising in the distance. Two helicopters! They’d lifted off the roof of the auto parts store and were swinging down the road, low to the ground, headed directly for us.
“Probably wasn’t a good idea to piss Bo off,” I said, offering a smile to Deb that wasn’t returned.
The lead helicopter dipped its nose at an extreme angle so that its rotor blades swept down.
I was scared that we might be pulverized by the blades, but they whipped the air over our heads and instead struck the zombies, churning their bodies, turning them to pulp.
“Hot damn!” Raven said. “That is some fancy flying!”
“Out!” I said. “Get out and run!”
“What about the Mustang?” Layla asked.
“Leave it!”
She kissed the side of it and then we bounded out of the car and ran over what was left of the zombies. The road was slick with the residue of the minced zombies which caused us to slow our headlong run. The first helicopter continued on down the road, but the second one circled overhead before descending near the ground.
We scampered inside as it lifted off.
As we gained altitude, I looked down to see more trucks and other vehicles driving down the road. Figures in sheets exited the machines and began firing at the zombies and us even though we were out of range.
“Sheets,” somebody said.
I turned to see Bo pointing to the figures shooting at us.
“You know who they are?”
“I heard about ‘em,” he said. “Southern gangbangers. Equivalent of that Vrah bunch that was running the show in D.C. Bunch of low-level thugs like the pirates that are running the show down in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.”
“They had people in cages.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Where?”
“Philly. Shitballs in animal masks have taken over most the city and cordoned it off. They’ve taken over everything, rowhouses, hotels, even libraries. They’re using them as a kind of urban farm.”
“To do what?”
“Fatten people up to eat.”
“Jesus.”
“Gives a whole new meaning to farm to table, eh?”
He whipped out a smoke and fired it up as the helicopter leveled off and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
“What were you doing up in Philadelphia?” I asked.
“Looking for my old lady. We lived in Delaware when everything went to hell. We managed to make a go of it for the first few weeks. Then the biters started moving in and the food dried up. My wife, Christa, she just didn’t have it.”
“What do you mean?”
He pointed to his head. “She broke up here when our little boy got bit.”
“Christ. I’m so sorry.”
He waved his hand. “She said there weren’t no reason to go on and she was gonna off herself. I told her not to. I told her we had to stand up and take down as many of the bad guys as we could.”
“What happened?”
“She didn’t agree. And one night when I was sleeping she just left. Her note said she was heading north into Buck’s County to check in on her folks, and that’s the last I saw of her.”
“You were right, man,” I said.
“’Bout what?”
“Giving up.”
“Don’t matter who’s right or who’s wrong. All I know is I need to kill as many of those motherfuckers as I can before the light goes out of my eyes. Somebody has to take a stand. You know what I’m saying.”
I nodded. I knew exactly what he was saying.
“Thanks for saving us back there.”
“Just doing my job,” he said, taking a long drag from his smoke. “After all, you’re supposed to save all of us, aren’t ya?”
“That’s the plan.”
He flicked his smoke away. “No, the plan is we get you and the gals down to Miami and then we haul your asses out, hopefully along with that goddamn cure.”
I nodded.
“That don’t change what I said before,” he added. “The mission is more important than the man, so if any of you muck things up, you’ll answer to me.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, summoning a smile. “Speaking of the mission, what’s the plan?”
“We’ve got a landing spot mapped out.”
“Top of a building?”
Bo nodded. “Only place to land these days. Once we touch down we’ll send out a signal and link up with the good guys.”
“Any idea who they are?”
“A small group led by a woman.”
“What’s her name?”
“Unknown,” Bo said, “but I hear she’s a handful.” He smiled and moved back up to the pilots as I leaned back, staring out over forests of pine trees, wondering how long it would be until we spotted water.
15
I smelled Miami before I saw it.
After snoozing several hours, a salty scent pricked my nose and upon waking, I noticed that it was considerably warmer. Lexie grabbed my arm, pointing, and when I looked out through the open door of the helicopter, I was momentarily blinded by the light reflecting off the water.
It was everywhere, covering roads, fields, huge swaths of forest and swampland. The only things visible were sections of overpasses, raised roads, and buildings that looked taller than six or seven stories.
“That used to be I-95,” Raven said, gesturing to a section of highway that rose out of the murky water.
“How do you know?”
“I spent some time down here,” she replied.
There were signs hanging from buildings or scrawled on roofs in white and black paint that said things like, “SEND HELP!” and “STRANDED!” Out in the distance, I saw structures rising from the water.
“That’s downtown,” Raven said.
The buildings were taller and there were more of them, many more, the water separating everything like a series of endless canals.
“Biscayne Bay just rolled right over everything,” Raven said, her voice audible. She pointed. “Even the Macarthur is nearly gone.”
“What was it?”
She pointed to a hump of concrete that was barely visible in the water below. “A causeway that connected downtown Miami to South Beach. It used to go right over the bay.”
“You been there before?”
“My folks used to live close by. Down on 48th Street.” She stabbed a finger, pointing at what I could see had once been a collection of small houses and apartment buildings. Everything but the tops of the tallest buildings were underwater.
“It’s gone now,” she said, wistful. “All gone.”
“Get frosty!” Bo said. “Get frosty. We are wheels down in five minutes!”
The helicopter climbed, and Lexie smiled. “Looks like somebody’s happy to see us.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re shooting off fireworks.”
I looked out through the bay door and saw a glimmer of light and a trail of smoke. “Missiles,” I said under my breath. “Jesus, they’re firing … missiles!”
Somebody screamed and then the sky was ripped by several explosions. I craned my neck and glimpsed figures running across some of the buildings, firing at us. Heavy weapons fire rang out followed by more explosions. The air was quickly obscured by banners of black smoke.
Somebody screamed for our pilot to take evasive action and the chopper lurched hard to the right. I looked out the opposite door. The other helicopter, the one with the additional security personnel, was visible.
One of the security guards waved a hand and then something, a streak of black, flew out of nowhere and slashed right through the chopper. There was a flash of light, a fireball, and then a blast that gathered into a full-throated BOOM!
The other helicopter broke in two. The men inside were jettisoned into the air and fell from it like seeds from a broken gourd, scattering across the sky.
I didn’t have time to scream because another missile was locked on us. It was visible down below, streaking up from the roof of one of the buildings. I saw the tip of it glowing orange like the end of a lit cigar.
“HOLD ON!” one of the ladies shrieked.
