All Together Now: A Zombie Story (5 page)

Michelle scoffed. "There isn't any cure."

"There has to be." I was looking at Chuck as I said this.

His skin was gray, but his hair was sticking out in places like he'd just woken up and had the same bed-head I'd seen on him for years.

He was dressed in the same bright red T-shirt and jean shorts he'd been wearing when he turned. If he weren't moaning and staggering, he might only be lost and looking for me or our parents.

I walked back to Michelle. "Dad said they were close to a cure at your father's plant. If we can get there—"

"How would he know?" she said. "They wouldn't make a cure at the plant anyway. They'd make it at the CDC or at least a hospital, not a soda plant."

I didn't bother to point out they'd made the disease that was responsible for the end of the world at a soda plant.

"And even if they did," Michelle continued, "what good is a cure going to do him?"

She motioned to a dead man in the street missing both arms. Two jagged ribs protruded from his chest and poked through his shirt.

"Or how 'bout her?"

Michelle pointed to a woman whose entire bottom half was gone below the waist. She crawled through the street, bits of intestine streaming behind.

"Suppose a cure would fix her right up?"

I nodded. A cure couldn't help them, but a six-year-old boy whose body was still intact might be different. It had to be.

"Or what about
him
?" She pointed to Levi.

It hurt to look at him.

Levi was pacing just far enough from the awning to see us, to snarl at us, to long to rip our flesh from our bones with his teeth with never a thought of how'd we'd been friends less than an hour ago.

He couldn't walk entirely upright. Too much of his stomach was missing to support his upper half, so he stooped, bits of matter dripping from his abdomen with each step.

I looked away and saw Michelle had tears streaming down her cheeks.

I put my hand on her shoulder and she tensed, but I turned her toward me and then her arms were around me and her face was buried in my chest and the front of my shirt dampened with her tears.

"Shhhh," I said and kissed the top of her head the way my mother used to do for me long before Gerald Kirkman. "There's a cure and we'll find it."

"There isn't." She sobbed. "How can there be?"

I held her tighter and we didn't say anything else.

The dead surrounded Ernie's, some snarling, some moaning, all raising their hands toward the roof.

17

GERALD KIRKMAN OPENED THE HARRINGTON Kirkman Soda plant ten years ago. My dad was one of the first men he hired.

When it started, Kirkman Soda nearly went bankrupt. Their only line was Kirkman's Original. It tasted like root beer, except it was blue.

But Gerald Kirkman is a man who doesn't take no for an answer—just ask my mother.

His second year, he introduced Grape, Cherry, Banana (sounds gross, but it's pretty good), Lime, and Lemon flavors. The next year, he added Pumpkin (actually gross), Orange, and Strawberry.

It was four years before Kirkman Soda was distributed in all 50 states, and five years before it went international. Now there probably isn't a break room in the country that doesn't have a Kirkman Soda machine next to the Pepsi and Coke dispensers.

Not long ago, I was looking at one of my mother's photo albums. She put them together, but when she left she didn't take them with her.

Anyway, I noticed there were only a few pictures of me and Chuck in which we weren't drinking Kirkman Soda:

Me at 11, Chuck at four, standing in front of a roller coaster and each holding a half-finished Kirkman's Grape.

Me at six on Christmas morning opening a big box and grinning my head off, a mostly-full bottle of Kirkman's Strawberry on the ledge of the fireplace behind me.

Chuck at two in our backyard carrying a sippy cup that's solid pink so you can't see what's inside it, but I'll bet you a trillion dollars it's Kirkman Soda.

Dad was always bringing home soda from work. They sold it to him cheap, but more often he brought home deformed cans and bottles with messed-up labels he got free.

We were a Kirkman Soda house and we weren't allowed to drink any other brand. We wore Kirkman Soda T-shirts and caps, we had Kirkman Soda shower curtains, and when I was eight I had Kirkman Soda bed-sheets.

Dad couldn't go to college. Grandpa died when Dad was 15, so he started working at the Java Jive to help Grandma Lacey with rent.

He was managing the Java Jive by 17. He met my mother at 19, had me at 20, and started working as a manager at Kirkman Soda at 23.

Dad worked long weeks so my mother could stay home with Chuck and me. Sixty-five hours was his usual, but he did a few 70- and 80-hour weeks.

During the day, my mother would read to Chuck and me and take us to the park and do all that stuff you do with little kids. In the evenings, we'd make Dad dinner and go to the plant to meet him on his lunch break.

I knew all his employees by name, and my mother started making dinner for them—not every night, but most nights.

After a while, Gerald Kirkman himself started joining us for dinner, which made Dad proud as could be. He used to brag his boss loved his wife's cooking.

Sucker.

After the meals, Dad and his employees had to go back to work, but Gerald Kirkman didn't
have
to do anything. He'd sit at a picnic table and talk with my mother while Chuck and I played tag with the other employees' kids.

My mother was lonely.

That's what she told me over and over, and I guess I believe her.

Doesn't make it right, but I can see how having no one to talk to most days except two little boys would make a grown person lonely. I guess that's why she made such a big deal about getting all dressed up just to take dinner to Dad.

Lucky for my mother, there was tall, dark, and handsome Gerald Kirkman to talk to in the evenings.

My mother had never been out of Harrington, and Gerald Kirkman was a successful businessman who'd been most everywhere. And so the two of them would sit together picking at the food Dad was working himself half to death to provide.

It was during one of these visits I met Michelle for the first time. Chuck and I were playing Frisbee and we asked Michelle to play with us, but of course she wouldn't.

We knew she was a snob right off. Michelle had video games she wouldn't let any other kids play. Instead, she sat at a picnic table by herself, her father chatting up our mother behind her.

When I was in fourth grade, I got off the bus from school to find Gerald Kirkman's Cadillac in our driveway. He was coming out the front door as I was coming in.

He asked me how school was and he was smiling like he was just so happy to see me (he wasn't whistling, but his grin was so big you could tell he wanted to). Then he got in his rich man's car and drove away.

My mother told me he'd been looking for Dad, and even then I knew that didn't make sense. After all, Dad was at work and surely his boss knew that.

My mother had to go to the store, and while we were there, she bought me the new
Mario Kart
game I wanted. Chuck and I played it all night.

We played it instead of talking to Dad.

I didn't think about that then, but I've wasted a lot of time thinking about it since.

18

ONE GOOD THING ABOUT BEING trapped on the roof of a gas station surrounded by the walking dead is it's given me plenty of time to write. But my hand is sore and I think I'm going to stop soon.

Michelle and I are keeping to the center of the roof. That's Michelle's rule. She figures if we stay away from the sides where the zombies can see us, they'll eventually lose interest and stumble away.

Hasn't worked so far, and I don't think it's going to.

I haven't bothered to count how many zombies are crowded around Ernie's lot or inside Ernie's. Screwed is screwed, whether we're surrounded by 102 zombies or 134.

We have two pistols now and Michelle has already checked Ernie's—luckily it takes the same kind of bullets as the gun we took from Brownsborough. But that's not going to help us much.

Even if we fired every round directly into the brain of a zombie, every shot a kill shot (eat your heart out, Lee Harvey Oswald), Michelle only packed two boxes of ammunition, each containing 50 rounds. The first box is less than half full.

We don't have enough bullets to kill the zombies surrounding us, let alone the zombies the shots would attract.

So we wait. What else is there?

One bit of luck in all this is we had our packs on when the horde attacked. Between us, we have 8 bottles of water (but absolutely no soda), 6 bags of crackers, 21 strips of beef jerky, 19 cans of tuna, 4 cupcakes, 2 bags of cookies, 2 cans of Pringles, 13 candy bars, and 8 bags of trail mix.

I doubt this diet is recommended by the Surgeon General, but the food means we can last up here for a few days if we need to, so long as we ration. Not that half a can of tuna and five crackers has ever been anyone's idea of a satisfying meal.

I wish we'd brought toilet paper, but we weren't packing to get trapped on a roof. We've had to designate one corner for that business. I don't watch when Michelle goes and she doesn't watch when I go.

I won't tell you how we handle clean-up, but its good we're not eating much. With Ernie's corpse rotting beside the hatch and the corpses below baking in the May sun, there isn't much we can do to make this place smell worse.

The dead aren't snarling anymore the way they do when they see food. They've gone back to moaning in unison. I can feel the sound reverberating in the roof.

Since they aren't leaving, I don't think it matters whether they snarl, moan, or sing.

Michelle has her phone, for all the good that does us. The network's been down for days. If you try to place a call, all you get is that annoying emergency message: "This is not a test. Repeat: not a test..."

Going down the hatch is out of the question.

I've been checking it regularly and there are always at least five zombies in Ernie's office. None of them have remembered how to climb a ladder so far, but when I look over the side of the hatch, they snarl and reach for me.

The roof is one and a half stories up. If we dangled over the edge, we could drop to the ground without breaking anything. If it came to it, we could jump, so long as we aimed for the grass and remembered to roll when we landed.

But the problem isn't getting down.

It's getting down without being swarmed and bitten. Seeing as how there are at least 20 to 30 zombies on all sides of Ernie's, neither of us can figure out a way to do that.

Michelle is lying on her side. I think she was sleeping while I was writing, but she's not now.

This is what she said to me earlier: "We have two guns."

"That's true," I said.

"There's two of us."

"Also true."

"So if it comes to it, we can press them to each other's heads, count to three, and pull the triggers."

She said it lightly, as if she were merely stating we could eat jerky and trail mix or crackers and tuna.

"It won't come to that," I said.

Michelle hasn't said much since.

It won't come to that.

19

I WAS JOLTED AWAKE BY the sound of gunshots before the sun had done more than peek over the eastern horizon.

I was on my feet, Ernie's gun in hand, before my eyes were all the way open.

The hatch was mostly closed, propped open on Ernie's shoe the way I'd left it. There were no dead on Ernie's roof aside from Ernie.

But a chorus of zombies was snarling in attack mode.

I felt blind, stupid, animal panic building until I saw Michelle.

She was crouched at the rear corner of the roof where the dead could see her. She'd set her revolver aside so she could wipe the tears from her eyes with both hands.

I lowered my gun. "What's wrong?"

Michelle shook her head. "It's fine."

"If it's fine, why are you shooting?"

"I— I couldn't—" Michelle pointed at the ground.

I stepped closer to the edge of the roof and peered over it.

The snarling below intensified and more dead hands reached in the air like the crowd at a concert.

There were at least 25 corpses below. They stood close together, but there was an opening on the left side.

In it a zombie lay face down, a burnt hole in the back of his head oozing dark blood and other fluid.

I didn't need to see his face. I knew from the white lettering on the back of his royal purple T-shirt reading "New Life Christian Church" it was Levi.

"I couldn't leave him like that," Michelle said.

I closed my eyes and counted backward from ten the way Dad used to do when Chuck and I were little and we'd messed something up.

"Were you worried you didn't bring every zombie in Harrington to us yesterday?" I asked. "Afraid there were a few in the distance who didn't know we're up here and you wanted to ring the dinner bell?"

"He would've done it for me," Michelle said, crossing her arms like maybe she was justified in doing something so colossally dumb. "If it were me down there as one of those... things. He wouldn't have left me like that."

I moved back to the center of the roof. "Get over here where they can't see you, at least."

Michelle didn't move. "Chuck's in front today. I saw him this morning. I could—"

"Don't you dare!" I shouted. "Don't even think about it."

I took two steps toward her. "I mean it. If you so much as point a gun—"

"There isn't any cure, Ricky."

"You don't know that! You don't! You can't."

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

"What if there is?" I asked. "Then you just killed Levi. Maybe he could've been cured, but now he can't because you shot him in the head."

"There. Is. No. Cure."

I sat down.

"What about the ones you've killed? Could they have been
cured
?" She said the last word like a distasteful food being spit out.