All Together Now: A Zombie Story (14 page)

"We need to find a way to block these windows," I said, and Michelle nodded.

"Ricky?"

Chuck sat up from where he lay on the floor and grinned so big it took up his whole face. I knew he was happy to see me without him needing to say it.

"Hey, buddy. How you doing?"

"You hurt your head," Chuck said.

"I did."

"Is it better?"

"I think so."

Chuck leapt off the floor onto my lap. I grunted.

Chuck hugged me and I hugged him back. "What are we doing today?"

"I'm thinking about having another pill and going back to sleep," I said.

Michelle raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything as I helped myself to a second hydrocodone. After that, I lay back down.

Chuck curled up on top of me and fidgeted for an hour, but eventually fell asleep. So did I.

If I'd gotten up and made good on my thought to block the windows or insisted Michelle do it, all the terrible things that followed might've been avoided.

56

WHEN I WOKE THAT NIGHT, I was alone. And I had two days' pee sloshing around inside me.

There was no light, of course. I took my phone from my back pocket and immediately regretted it. Its display was bright enough for me to see the room, but also plenty bright to be seen from outside the house.

I jammed my phone in my pocket and stood. I wobbled a little, but the weight in my head mostly stayed center. I was hungry again.

"Ricky," Michelle called from the kitchen.

"Not so loud," I whispered back.

I took my first few steps slowly and cautiously. I felt a little dizzy, but I was able to walk to the kitchen where Chuck and Michelle were sitting on the floor, illuminated by the faint green light of Michelle's phone.

"Where's the bathroom?"

"There." Michelle pointed.

She turned back to Chuck, who she'd taken care of while I was asleep, making sure he had food and was kept safe. For the second time in less than 24 hours, I felt for Michelle Kirkman, my rich, spoiled step-sister-to-be, something I never expected to feel in a million years: gratitude.

When the bathroom door was closed behind me, I felt it was safe to take out my phone. It was 2:34 am and I still had no signal.

I peed so good I nearly lost my balance with relief.

Under different circumstances I would've gone to a hospital. I had a concussion for sure, but what if my skull were cracked? What if my brain were bruised?

There was no way of knowing. All I could do was rest and take pain pills and hope for the best. Given the number of infected people who would've gone to the hospital yesterday, any place with a doctor was probably the least safe place in Indiana.

When I returned to the kitchen, I heard the voice of an old white man coming from Michelle's phone:

"Zecharia 14:12. And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will smite all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: their flesh shall rot while they are still on their feet, their eyes shall rot in their sockets, and their tongues shall rot in their mouths."

"What is that?" I asked.

"Pastor Jeremiah Paul Curtis," Michelle said.

"Who?"

She shrugged. "It's the only radio station not playing static."

I sat on the floor. Michelle handed me the box of cookies she and Chuck were sharing.

"Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord!" Pastor Jeremiah Paul Curtis shouted. "And are there any who doubt the Lord's vengeance is upon us? Has not the Lord thy God smote the United States, and has the United States of America not been crying out to be smite-ed?

"With our wicked greed, our gluttony, and our licentiousness. Our sexual immorality! With our tolerance for homosexuality and bestiality and the mixing of the races. With our reliance on science without first consulting the irrefutable word of God."

He pronounced God "gaw-ed."

"We laughed our wicked laughs and fornicated like dogs in the streets, our young girls became harlots, our young men lusted for pornographic images, and all the while we'd forgotten we were sinners in the hands of an angry Gaw-ed."

"Turn that off," I said.

"It's the only thing on," Michelle protested.

"I don't care. Turn it off. He's not saying anything useful."

Michelle fiddled with her phone until Pastor Jeremiah Paul Curtis faded and we sat in silence, passing boxes of cookies and cereal between us.

"You don't believe in God?" Michelle said

"God's got nothing to do with a guy like that," I said.

"I believe in God, Ricky," Chuck said.

I smiled. "Yeah, but you also believe in the tooth fairy."

Chuck pushed my legs apart and slipped into my lap. Usually, he did this with Mom or Dad, but I was the only one there.

"My mother believed," Michelle said. "Right up until the end, she believed." Her eyes were big and damp and I could tell I needed to change the subject fast.

"Do you remember when Chuck kissed that frog?"

Michelle tilted her head and her mouth formed a small 'O'.

"We were at Kirkman's," I said. "Your dad was talking to my mother at the picnic table after she brought everybody dinner. Just innocently chatting while my dad was inside working hard."

Michelle's face fell.

"Anyway, we were talking about that fairy tale where the princess kisses the frog and turns him into a handsome prince. And Chuck said we should go to that creek behind the plant and find you a frog to kiss."

Michelle laughed. "I remember you two dorks chasing me with a frog."

"All he wanted was a kiss. We went to all that trouble of catching a frog for you and you wouldn't even give him an I-like-you-as-a-friend peck. So Chuck had to kiss the frog."

Michelle's phone turned bright green, illuminating the whole room in electronic light, then shut itself off.

"He tasted slimy," Chuck said, and we all laughed.

The window above the sink burst open.

A dead hand reached into the kitchen, its owner snarling.

57

MICHELLE AND CHUCK SCREAMED. THE dead man at the window was dressed in a Java Jive apron and had apparently spent his last day of life serving coffee. He reached through the smashed window and gripped the sink to pull himself in, snarling all the while.

"Run!" I yelled, standing as fast as I could without throwing up.

Michelle leapt to her feet.

The zombie pulled himself through the window, dragging his stomach and arms over the broken glass, not caring it was shredding his forearms.

Behind him I could see a dead woman in an orange dress attempting to push the Java Jive employee's legs aside so she could climb through.

That there were two doors to the house and larger windows to break through apparently didn't occur to her. She saw only what was directly in front of her: us.

Chuck crawled away, but stopped short when the dead man seized his shoe.

"Ricky!" Chuck screamed. "Help!"

The Java Jive employee was now better than halfway through the kitchen window. He let go of the sink and placed his other hand on Chuck's ankle, using my squirming little brother to pull himself the rest of the way in.

Keep him safe, Ricky.

To the left of the sink was a wooden block with black handles protruding from its top. Knives.

The Java Jive zombie pulled Chuck's ankle toward his mouth and opened wide.

I pulled a knife from the block and swung it down, sinking it between the zombie's shoulder blades with a meaty smack.

The zombie snarled at me, then seemed to remember he was about to eat a perfectly good little boy, and moved to plant his teeth in Chuck's calf.

I yanked a second knife from the block.

I thought of the man in the orange vest on television saying, "You have to kill the brain."

I swung the second knife low, so hard it threw me off balance and I fell to my knees, but not before I sunk the blade into the top of the zombie's skull.

His white eyes rolled over and his body went limp, his last snarl diminishing into eternal silence. His hands went lax, and Chuck pulled his leg free.

My little brother scurried over to Michelle and stood.

Dead fingers wrapped themselves in my hair.

I yanked my head away, ripping out hair and making me instantly sick. The woman in the orange dress had climbed part of the way through the kitchen window, pulling herself over the Java Jive employee as though he were part of the counter.

She reached for me again and I scuttled away. Behind her, on the outside of the house, two more dead faces waited their turn to climb in.

"Let's go," I said.

"Where?" Michelle asked.

I didn't know, so I didn't answer. I hurried into the front room and found my bat beside the couch.

The bottle of hydrocodone was on the coffee table. I took two—my head was killing me and if I was going to be eaten alive by corpses, I was going to need them—and put the bottle in my pocket.

Michelle went to the chair to get the gun.

The rear window burst and a dead man in a red polo shirt dove through to the carpet.

I opened the front door wide.

The zombie pushed himself up from the carpet, his black lips curling from his yellow teeth slick with slime as he snarled.

Michelle, Chuck, and I ran out into the night.

58

IT WAS AS DARK OUTSIDE as it gets in the woods at night. Every light was out.

The only illumination came from the moon, and with it I could see the forms of dead people shambling about the streets and yards of the neighborhood.

As the front door shut behind us, rotting heads turned and their collective moaning was punctuated by snarls.

Chuck screamed and more heads turned.

Two zombies came shuffling up the driveway toward us.

"This way!" I yelled and broke left, grabbing Chuck's hand. Michelle took Chuck's other hand and we ran across the yard.

On the sidewalk, a dead man clad in a dirty tank top and dirty white underwear stepped into the yard, reaching for us.

We veered around him into the street and kept running.

Half a football field's distance from us, zombies were walking into the street, forming a line like kids playing red rover.

I don't think they were working together, exactly, only crowding the area where we were most likely to end up given our current trajectory. Forming a blockade was probably not a conscious decision, just the result of a bunch of hungry corpses trying to satisfy themselves.

We turned right and ran around a house to its backyard where there were no zombies, though moans and snarls sounded behind us. We tore through the yard out to a road where we saw neither cars nor corpses.

Good enough for me.

I didn't say anything—no need to make more noise than absolutely necessary. But I pulled Chuck's hand, he pulled Michelle's, and we all turned right.

"Where are we going?" Michelle said, not bothering to whisper.

Not that it mattered. I could hear by the mixed growls building behind us that the zombies hadn't forgotten us whether we were quiet or not.

"That way," I said, pointing forward.

We kept running. When I looked back, I saw a group of 25 or 30 zombies lumbering along the road behind us.

There were houses on either side of us, any one of which we might've hid in if we weren't leading a zombie parade through the neighborhood.

They'd see us enter a house and five minutes later, or however long it took them to catch up, they'd have us surrounded.

The road climbed a hill and just above the curve of pavement ahead I saw white light.

We charged up the hill and the white light rose into our line of sight. It was an electric sign that somehow still had power.

"We're going to Wal-Mart," I said.

59

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE hill, below its electric white sign, was a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

I'm going to try to tell you about it, but I may have to stop soon. Fair warning.

The sky above Ernie's has gone dark and it looks like rain. Michelle's hair is blowing fiercely in the wind and we've already put what few possessions we have in our packs.

In the distance, we can see lightning.

If it starts to rain—when it rains, I should say, as there's almost no chance it won't—I'm going to put this journal in my pack. Then I'm going to tie the pack to the top rung of the ladder beneath the roof's hatch to keep it safe and dry.

But until then, I'm going to write as fast as I can.

60

WE RAN DOWN THE HILL, straight toward the Wal-Mart, Michelle and I going just a little slower so Chuck could keep up, never letting go of his hands.

Keep him safe, Ricky.

There was nothing but empty fields leading up to the shopping center, as though Wal-Mart were the start of civilization. Beyond the Wal-Mart were signs for fast-food places and other stores, but their marquees were too dark to read and there was no other light from town.

Yet through Wal-Mart's windows I could see the lights were all on as though shopping and saving were going on inside.

"They've got a generator," I said, smiling even though I was out of breath.

The lights in the parking lot were out, however, and it wasn't until we got closer that I spotted the corpses milling around the few cars still parked there, illuminated by Wal-Mart's glow.

I stopped running, jerking Chuck's hand. He jerked Michelle and we all stopped.

"What do you want to do?" Michelle asked.

I shook my head.

The zombies in the parking lot weren't all milling around. At the front of the group, zombies were creeping toward the store, paying no attention to the three new arrivals behind them, and I saw why.

There was a purple van parked in front of Wal-Mart's doors with a cross and the words "New Life Christian Church" stenciled in white on its side.