A Long Walk

by Traverse Davies

  Naomi was exhausted, her reserves spent. She collapsed, shaking on the floor, her belly was protesting her exertion; nausea flowed over her in waves. She was afraid she was going to shit her pants and puke at the same time. She lay there for a long time, taking gulping breaths and hoping something would change, that the zombies that were left would get distracted and go somewhere else, that someone would come save her, something, anything. Nobody did, and when she calmed down enough to get back up she grabbed a bite to eat and picked up the piece of metal again.

  It took her twelve hours to deal with the six zombies. She took breaks, sometimes hours long, came up with new strategies to get the door open, get one inside, and get it closed again. There was some rope holding one of the bags together, so she used that once she found it, slipping it over a zombies’ neck, ducking behind it, and lashing it to a pillar. That was the last one, and the easiest. Clearing them from her little hut took another few hours. She dragged them out to the middle of the tarmac, then she left them there. The crows started picking at them, ignoring the ones that were still moving outside the fence.

  The airport was starting to get busy. So far the zombies were still outside the fence, but they building up against the chain link. Every once in a while Naomi would try to clear a few away from the fence. Her arms had trouble with the task though, she didn’t have the strength to take out very many. She would stab a few and find her arms trembling with the strain, and the time she spent by the fence would attract more. The chain link wasn’t showing signs of strain yet, but it was leaning heavily. The constant moaning and the sound of the links moving under the zombies were starting to get to her. She was lonely. Sometimes she talked to the zombies, sometimes she cursed at them. They didn't seem to care either way.

  She didn’t want to move yet, there was food here, more than she could carry. The luggage was valuable too. Several luggage vans were parked on the tarmac, and most of them had at least a partial load. The planes were death traps. She could see movement in the small windows when the light was right. They had become giant steel tubes of zombies.

  Naomi set up an exit point. She ran a ramp up to the top of the fence, made of loose boards. If you were inside it was a quick and easy escape, just needed a little bit of co-ordination, but did nothing for you if you were outside. Then she did that three more times, in different spots.

  None of the luggage vans contained a backpack, at least not a decent one. There was a small Dora the Explorer backpack, bigger than what she had, but the quality was low, so she left it. The luggage gave her something to do, more than anything else. Sometimes it was frustrating. There was a gun safe, locked. No doubt it had a handgun inside, prepped for travel. She couldn't get it open, despite trying again and again. She smashed it with her piece of pointy steel, but the steel bent and the safe was barely scratched. She tried dropping cinder blocks on it. They turned to powder and the finish on the safe got slightly less shiny. In the end she gave up on it.

  One day, not far into her stay, the fence finally went. It was at a gate, the padlock failed under the strain. At least she heard the fence scraping the ground, giving her some warning. Suddenly there were hundreds of zombies inside with her. They were still a few hundred meters away, so she grabbed her little backpack and started to run. The exit point worked as planned, she dropped the boards behind her, closing off the way over the fence. The zombies followed her, slamming into the fence and piling up against it, snarling and moaning, mouths hungry, always hungry. She gave them the finger and walked into the forest.

  Meet me behind the wood pile

  After a week of journeying Mona and Jasper finally saw another living person. They were coming up on a lumber yard, stacks of wood piled up to the sky. It was remote, a small office and the mill building the only structures in sight. A young black woman was crouched behind a stack of lumber, a piece of scrap steel in her hand, hiding from a group of a dozen or so zombies. A dozen was a lot to deal with, and there were no clear choke points in the lumber yard, just stacks and stacks of wood with wide spaces between them. Jasper moved in to help the stranger out. He didn't think Mona was going to be much use, she was exhausted, and as she didn’t have a weapon he expected her to stay back. Instead she grabbed his crowbar as he headed down and following close behind. Snow could be counted on to disable at least one of them.

  One of the creatures spotted Jasper as he closed, a big man dressed like a lumberjack, it started in his direction. He couldn’t see the woman anymore, but some of the zombies were still focused on her. About half of them followed the lumberjack. Coming for him. He tried to make it to a lumber pile so he could have his back to something, but they reached him well before he got there. The first one grabbed for him. Jasper swung his sword up in an underhand blow that took one of the zombies’ arms just at the elbow. Jasper followed it up with a push kick to its stomach. The zombie was too big, too heavy. It barely moved. Jasper managed to push it back just a little bit, enough to get the sword in position for a head shot. The blade cut deep, and the creature dropped. That left five and they were in between him and the lumber pile… but he realized that the commotion had dragged the rest in. Meant he had to deal with all eleven.

  Mona closed on one of the trailing zombies and spiked the back of its skull with a single efficient motion. The creature dropped like a stone. She moved on to the next and smashed it across the temple. Another hit, another kill. She had four down before one of them noticed her. As soon it turned in her direction she ran the other way, moving fast for once. A couple peeled off to chase her. She moved in the direction of the lumber pile the black woman was hiding behind, keeping just ahead of them.

  Snow grabbed one of them by the leg and wrestled it to the ground, jaws clamped around dead flesh. It started trying to bite him, but he was good at avoiding teeth, and the zombies weren’t smart. He had it locked up in seconds, lying on its stomach with his teeth in the back of its neck. Snow never let the zombie teeth get near him.

  Jasper wished he had some kind of armour. Four zombies were enough that if he couldn't pick the ground it was hard, almost too much for him. They moved slowly, they were weak, but numbers are hard to account for. He started swinging the sword, normally that would make an opponent back up. This wasn't a normal situation though. The zombies didn't care if they took damage. His sword sliced through the zombies’ stomach, the creature didn't even flinch. The zombies kept closing on him, not giving him room to move, to breathe. He managed to punch his sword straight up through one of the creature’s jaws and into its brain, but that meant his sword was trapped, pulling down out of his hand. He dropped it because he couldn’t get it free fast enough and slammed a slim girl in the chest. Luckily alive she hadn’t weighed very much, and dead weighed even less. She flew back and fell on her back, trying to stumble to her feet. He push kicked another one and it went back and down. The last one that was on him was pushing hard, but he was able to get his knife free from his belt. He swung a haymaker with the knife to the temple and felt the blade bite deep. The creature fell and he moved on to the small girl. He could just see Mona at the edge of the wood pile, moving fast. A piece of sharp metal flew into view, hitting one of the pursuing zombies square in the face. The zombie dropped like a stone, its own momentum adding force to the hit, destroying its head. Mona stopped and spun, swinging the pry bar at the end of her arm. It hit the zombie in the shoulder, a minor miscalculation of position. The creature was thrown off balance and hit the ground hard. The other woman slammed the big piece of metal down on the creature, hitting both arms at once. If it had been human that would have ended things, both arms broken, bones sticking through its forearms.

  Jasper had to keep focus, stop being distracted by the other skirmish. He had enough to deal with. He moved to the small girl, kicked her down as she tried to get up. He didn’t feel safe taking the knife to her, so he just kicked down on her head, again and again. Finally, her skull cracked, and he kept going. The last one started to close on him. It
looked like it had been one of the lumberyard employees. A big man in a hard hat and an orange vest. Jasper moved in on it, meeting it half way. He swung a low roundhouse kick to the creatures leading leg. It fell, leg knocked off the ground, and Jasper dropped on it, knife straight out. His blade bit into its jaw, breaking through the roof of its mouth and up into its brain. Mona smashed her pry bar down on her zombies’ head. Finally, it stopped. She moved over to where Snow was holding the last one down. She used the straight end of the pry bar to catch the final zombie in the temple. It went limp and Snow let go.

  The black woman was younger than she had looked from a distance. She was dirty, clothes torn and stained from life on the road, scratched up and bleeding from dozens of tiny cuts, but no visible bites and her clothing hadn’t been the most practical to start with, so it didn't leave a whole lot of her body hidden. Her shoes were the most reasonable part, but they looked too big for her so he was pretty sure the original shoes had matched the outfit, a pair of short shorts and a crop top, both very tight. Her hair was cut short, kind of a pixie cut.

  “I’m Jasper. Nice to meet you.”

  “Naomi, charmed. Lovely day what?” she replied in a very obviously fake, very chipper British accent. When she spoke she seemed even younger. Jasper thought she was probably still in her teens.

  Mona piped in, “Mona. Hi.” in her usual rapid mumbled monotone.

  “We should probably get moving. That much noise might have attracted some attention,” Jasper said.

  “Just let me grab my shit”. She walked between the lumber piles and grabbed a small backpack.

  “Hey, you know where we are?” Jasper asked. He had a vague idea, but it was very vague.

  “I was staying at a building by the airport last few days, had to book out of there. Headed west. We should be close to Elmsdale right now. Easier to tell once night hits.”

  “Elmsdale is good. I buy archery gear from a place near there… would be good to see if it’s accessible. They have guns too, ammo, all of it. The town’s pretty small too, might not have that many zombies”.

  “Okay, more or less north from here”.

  Naomi had a watch on, she held her arm up and lined up the sun, then started walking. "You coming? Fuck. Keep up."

  Jasper liked her right away.

  As they got into deeper brush they relaxed a bit, talking as they went. "What do you do for a living Naomi? I'm a programmer, or I guess I was."

  "Waitress, at a Caribbean place. Auntie ran it. I was going back to school in the fall."

  Mona said, "Didn't work. Stayed home. Mostly got stoned. Surprise, zombies."

  "None of us are badass commandos then. I'm trained in survival, at least a bit. Did a bunch of martial arts too, so I'm not completely useless. Either of you any good with a bow? If we rely on my aim we spend most of our time trying to find the arrows I fire deep into the woods, far, far away from anything I'm trying to hit."

  "No, never shot no bow. I look like a white girl? Where I gonna shoot arrows at?"

  "Yes. Compound,” Mona said, “That one’s too big for me. I'm a good shot. Those arrows are no good."

  Mona and Naomi kept giving each other sideways looks, staying a bit away from each other. The tension between them was thick, almost palpable. Jasper had revamped his initial appraisal of Mona. He had assumed that she started hiding when the zombies hit, and that her survival was down to blind luck. Clearly though she could fight. Maybe he would have to find out more about her skills, not assume so much.

  After talking for a while he started to get a picture of each of them. Mona was still reticent to talk about herself, and it was hard to understand her when she did speak. The quiet mumble that was her standard mode of speech was difficult to make out. From what he could guess she had been in a trailer with a few other people. One of them had started to come down, but Mona was still flying and far from sleep. The sleeping girl had turned and then got up to start munching on Mona’s boyfriend. Mona smashed her into a pulp with an ashtray. By then her boyfriend had turned and another one of the tweakers had turned as well, she didn’t see him get bitten or anything. He was biting the last girl who was with them, so Mona grabbed all the meth that was left and lit the curtains on fire. Then she took off and slammed the door behind her. Way, way tougher than Jasper had thought.

  Naomi was heading for either Cape Breton or PEI. She was only 17. Jasper was impressed by Naomi. Her clear intelligence and quick thinking at odds with her youth.

  The light was starting to fade, pink tinges showing on the horizon, twilight stealing in, like a thief, taking their time from them. They needed to find secure shelter, the area was too exposed. Mona pointed out a small cluster of houses, barely visible through the trees. A group of McMansions, part of the recent urban sprawl. "Good call, probably not too many people," Jasper said.

  "Crazy houses. Never been anywhere that big"

  "I spent the first day after the zombies in a place like that, empty. It was alright, but not great. Ugly as hell though, for some reason they had parts of it painted bright pink. They aren't all they are cracked up to be. Give me a house with some personality any day."

  "Better than a trailer."

  "Yeah, I guess."

  They staked out the closest house, a huge boxy place with no architectural features, covered in brick facade. The kind of place Jasper's neighbourhood was full of, on a larger scale. A quick look through all the ground floor windows didn’t reveal any movement inside, living or dead, and there was no vehicle in the driveway. The place wasn’t new construction though, just empty. There was a swimming pool, currently full of leaves and random bits of detritus. A small stream ran behind the property. The front door was unlocked.

  They decided to chance it. The house still seemed to be empty. There was a dog dish with food still in it just inside the door, Snow went right to it. The water dish next to it was half full, but the water was covered in a layer of scum. The sound of buzzing flies filled the house, and the smell permeated their senses, drowning out everything else. Not the smell of the dead, but the smell of rotting food, left long in the heat. They drew their weapons and entered the kitchen. The table had 4 places set. All the places had food, half eaten, covered in mould. The plates were writhing, layers of maggots wriggling and crawling under thick green fuzz.

  "Let's check the place," Jasper said, "stick together, none of that horror movie shit. It'll take way longer if one of use gets killed."

  One of the upstairs rooms had the door closed, and there was a steady thumping on the door. Jasper drew his sword while Naomi handled the door. It pushed inward, creaking slowly on dusty hinges. She opened it and then jumped back. A small figure shambled out towards them, A little girl, around four or five years old. They couldn't see any wounds on her. Other than the grey skin and blank eyes she could have been just getting ready for pre-school. Too bright clothes, although stained now… there was some crusted blood around her mouth, but no apparent wound to account for it, it wasn’t hers.

  Jasper took her head off in one swing. The angle was bad thanks to her height, so half her shoulder came off with it. Her small bones barely slowed the blade, leaving her arm attached by a small strip of muscle and flesh after the blade was through. They went into the room, clearly a child’s room and stripped the bright pink sheets off the bed. They covered the little girl with her sheets and put her back in her bed.

  The rest of the house was clear, warm and stinky, but clear. In the basement they found a generator with a full gas tank, power for the night. They needed to cover the windows, use as little light as possible, the water would work though; they could take a shower, wash their clothes - unparalleled luxury. The house had some things they could use as well, a pop up five person tent, four sleeping bags, although only two of them were adult size… which was okay because Mona already had one, and two large camping packs. Various other camping gear was in the basement as well, high end yuppie stuff. It wasn’t what Jasper would have purchased for hims
elf, but that was mostly because he couldn’t afford it. It was all portable, the kind of gear you would take if you had to trek into the camp site, perfect for what they needed.

  "Well, glad we picked this place," Jasper said, "It's funny, the next house down the road might have had none of this stuff, choosing this place might mean the difference between life and death. So, which rooms do you guys want?"

  "Let's stick together. The big bedroom. The bed looks amazing. So comfy." Naomi said.

  None of them was willing to sleep away from the group, just in case, but Naomi wasn’t used to snuggling close overnight, something Mona and Jasper had started doing out of necessity. The king size bed meant they could have some space and all be comfortable. The next morning they packed up the camping gear as best they could. There was even a small bit of trail food. Freeze dried meals and vacuum packed trail mix. Enough to last them several days with proper rationing. So far hunger had been a minor problem, and water had been easy. Shelter was their biggest issue, one that was now solved.