Beyond the Barriers (3 page)

The blazing sun tore into the Walmart with a blast of heat, as the door opened for a guy covered in blood. A woman in a sweat suit was trying to get away from his grasping hand. The man was dressed in shorts and had on one flip-flop, but his shirt hung in tatters. He was missing an ear, and a gaping wound, probably made by a large-caliber gun, opened his middle. I should have been able to see the remains of his heart through the broken ribcage.

The woman stumbled on a pair of sandals that looked to be a full three inches tall. This put her height near mine. She had a tight body that a pink sweat shirt treated well. I took my focus off her chest and set it on the thing after her. It was one of them, that much was certain. I was shocked they were here already.

The guard reacted first by pulling his mace, running the twenty or so feet to the dead guy, and hosing him down with a full blast of pepper spray. The room started to reek of the stuff, and people coming in shied away from the smell as much as from the dead man.

Make that undead. I guess that is the proper term, after all. This guy clearly met a bad end then came back for more. He lurched forward, ignoring the mace, and struck out at the guard who had tried to stop me.

The man batted his hand aside, but the dead guy stumbled forward, and his momentum sent them both crashing to the ground. The guard let out a whoosh of air as he fought for his life. On top, the undead tried to bite him, but the guard struck the corpse a couple of times. No real strength to the blows—just fear and adrenaline forcing him to fight for his life.

Shock froze me in place. I had been about to fight the guard for the right to leave the store, maybe start a riot, when all of this went down. A couple of people screamed, and one man ran over to help. He grabbed the wriggling corpse by the pant waist and pulled. He was trying not to touch any blood, and I didn’t blame him. What if the disease spread that way?

He didn’t move the dead man very far, but the guard got a leg up, wedged between him and the dead guy, and pushed. The zombie rose into the air and fell to the side.

Rolling the other way, the guard coughed as he tried to stand. A girl helped him up; she was young and very brave. She had a splash of freckles across her face, and she smiled at me like we were old friends. I grabbed the zombie by the scruff of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. After marching to the door, I threw him into the road. He hit pretty hard, but rolled over and got to his feet.

Grabbing my cart of goodies, I pushed it ahead of me to keep the thing back. He grabbed hold of the front like he was going to leap over it.

A big pickup truck slid to a halt, and a guy in cowboy boots and a big brown hat stepped out.

“That one of the dead fuckers?” His voice carried a hint of Southern, but I was used to hearing that from some of the folks on the outskirts of Portland. Seemed like a clan of them moved from Texas and set up shop here a few decades ago.

“Yep. Dead as a doornail,” I replied as I pushed the thing back with the cart. Tired of the game, I let go of the cart. The zombie stumbled back, nearly fell over, and lurched into motion once again with me in his sights. I took a full stride and launched one foot in a full thrust kick that nailed the dead guy in the chest, just below the wound. The sound was sickening, as compressed guts and foul air shifted around in the walking corpse.

It had been a while since I had thrown one of those, but it was something I had done a thousand times. Good muscle memory, or just plain luck, was with me, as the creature flew back a few feet. It landed flat on its back and lay there for a few seconds, as if in a daze.

The cowboy moved around the dead guy and stared at the hole in his chest.

“Ain’t no damn way that guy can be alive. No way. His heart is gone!”

A couple of bystanders came over to look at the guy wriggling on the ground. They stood around as more joined us. One started talking in a cold, clinical voice about the wounds sustained and why he should be dead. He was a tall man, with a gray, receding hairline that rounded his head like a halo. Looked and spoke just like a doctor. All the while, the thing tried to find the motor skills to get back up. It snarled at the bystanders, and one of them, perhaps feeling brave, showed his teeth and snarled back. The others moved away with shocked looks on their faces. The guy held his hands out to placate the crowd and told them that he was just joking around, that he wasn’t some damn dead thing.

There was a scream behind me, and I spun around, expecting to see someone looking at the wounded man. It was a young woman, about twenty. Her face was etched with fear, lips peeled back as she let loose another howl for help. She ran, flat out on some sensible-looking sneakers, from another of the dead.

The man behind her was dressed in a biking outfit. He had on those shoes that lock into the pedals, spandex shorts, and a tight shirt. His helmet was askew, half-cocked on one side of his head, and the left side of his face was missing, like he had a really bad case of road rash. One arm hung limply at his side, and the opposite foot was broken at the ankle. He dragged it with each shambling step. His side was caved in, and, though it didn’t show, the damage was almost worse than the guy with the gaping wound. While we were distracted, the dead guy I had kicked managed to get to his feet and fall on one of the bystanders.

She screamed as he bit into her shoulder, pulling back a huge chunk of skin. His mouth darted back to the wound, like an animal going at a fresh kill. I stared in horror, just like the rest of the onlookers. There were five or six of us standing around like we had just been having some sort of community meeting when, absurdly, a woman was being eaten in front of our eyes.

I snapped out of it, stepped quickly to the dead man, and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck for the second time, yanking him off the woman. As he turned around, I pushed him down, not knowing what else to do. The axe was in the bottom of my cart, and could I really dispatch this guy with so many people watching?

“We need to kill him,” someone said in a high voice, and I wondered if they had the balls to back up the words.

“Someone call an ambulance,” the bleeding woman’s companion yelled.

“No ambulance can help that man,” another yelled back.

“Not him—my wife!”

“MOVE!” someone yelled, and I spun to watch the guy from the big pickup truck come out with a tire iron in hand. He shoved his way through the thin fence of onlookers, raised the curved hunk of metal in the air, and brought it down on the dead guy’s head. The undead had been in the process of standing up when the bar struck. It sounded like a bowling ball being dropped on a wood floor. A spray of blood struck many of the people who watched in horror. I backed up, wondering again about the substance. If it carried the disease, I wanted nothing to do with it.

That was enough for me. I grabbed my cart with its treasures, gun barrels sticking out but not reassuring me. My car came into view, and, brother, was it ever an inviting sight. I keyed the button and the locks clicked. When the back slid up, I tossed things in as fast as possible.

Glancing behind me, I spotted the man with the wounded wife pressing his shirt against her shoulder to stop the blood. He walked her to the car, one hand around her waist to help her along. Her head hung limply, and she moved as if in shock. He opened the door on a red compact and helped her in. Then he got in the other side, fumbled for his keys, and started the car.

I kept watching as I worked, because I hoped she was okay. I also hoped he got her to the hospital, and they were able to treat her. There was movement in the car; it looked like he was leaning over to hug her. No, it was the other way around. She was leaning in to … oh God no!

She tore into his neck, and blood sprayed out, striking the window on the passenger side. Oh holy hell - that was it. Time to go.

I had half a mind to go home and board the place up, but how long could I live there without enough food to get through more than a month? I could stretch the rice, and I did have some dried beans. I detested the things, but Allison liked them, so we had a few bags. That would extend anything I made by providing extra protein. Not to mention extra filler.

In the garage, I had a box of expired Meals Ready to Eat that I got from work. Some brainiac in the safety department wanted them in case we had an earthquake, but they went ‘bad’ in two years, and since I was formerly in the military, she asked me if I knew what to do with them. Now I was glad I took them off her hands. At the time, I thought I would donate them to a homeless shelter, but every call came up with a curt “No thank you.” The label might say ‘expired,’ but I knew that stuff would last a hell of a lot longer.

I drove around a minor accident, where two stressed-out drivers were arguing. A large SUV had backed into an old Toyota. Probably both in a hurry to get home. I slipped through the space, shot out into the opposite lane, and hung a hard right.

I slid my shades on, because the sun was drawing low and starting to obscure my view. A pair of clouds lazed across the sky like they had nothing better to do, but they weren’t the dark gray ones that brought rain. These were just plain old cumulus that cast a shadow on the land as they passed.

The main drag was just ahead, and I saw a pair of zombies stumbling into the street. The old highway didn’t allow for many shenanigans like that, and the first one was picked off by a silver BMW that was doing at least 60. Another car swerved to avoid the beamer as it slammed on its brakes. The woman got out and ran to the body that was tossed onto the side of the road like a rag doll. Even through my car window, I swear I heard the sound of a couple thousand pounds of metal slamming into its flesh.

The second undead swerved around, somehow avoided being hit by a bright yellow Hummer, and stumbled to the girl who talked into her cell phone while staring down at the body on the street. Her free hand moved all over the place as she reported the accident. I could drive across the parking lot, to the little hill that separated the road from Walmart, and help her. But before I could plan how to maneuver there, the walking dead man latched onto her neck with one arm and drove her to the ground.

I hit the window button and screamed out the side at the thing. I pulled alongside the little road, but I knew there was nothing I could do for her. She squirmed beneath him, even got a backward looping elbow to the side of his face, but he grabbed the arm and took a chunk out.

She screamed and thrashed under him, and I felt helpless to stop the assault. The dead guy leaned over and grabbed the back of her neck, pulling the flesh up so that I could see it hanging bloody and raw in his mouth. He chewed as she started to shake, the fight clearly draining out of her.

Where were they coming from? The dead seemed content with the taste he got, and stumbled up the hill toward my car.

I dragged the 20-gauge shotgun out from the back seat and dug around until I found a box of shells. One went in the breach, because it was all I would need.

Cars stopped and pulled over to stare at the carnage. Two people down, one an attractive older woman near an expensive Swedish car. This was newsworthy stuff—the kind of thing you went home and talked about at the dinner table. “You won’t believe what I saw today, honey.”

I pumped the shell into the chamber, stepped up to the small rise, and aimed down the barrel. Someone shouted at me not to do it. I opened my other eye for a moment to see that the cry had come from a van filled with commuters on their way home from work.

I pulled the trigger, and the gun hammered against my shoulder. The zombie’s head disappeared … the left half at least. He took one more stumbling step, then fell, lifeless again.

Welcome home, folks.

I got back in my SUV like I was out for a Sunday drive, and calmly drove home without looking back once. The shakes started about a minute later.

* * *

I clicked on the radio as soon as I pulled away. They were going on about the disease or whatever it was. Lots of speculation, but no answers. “Fix the problem,” I wanted to yell at the radio. Who cares how it started? I wanted to know what was being done to combat it.

It came on so fast. When the swine flu was being hyped as the next black plague, we were assured over and over again that the problem was being looked after with plenty of vaccines. Now no one wanted to talk about solutions. Maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe there was no other way except for the one I came up with that day—a full load of buckshot to the brainpan.

My hand started to shake on the steering wheel as I drove. I felt it start as a tremble, and within a few seconds, it was a full shake. I clamped my other hand over it, but it was no use. I felt my lip tremble, and then I had to take some deep breaths.

My temper always did get me in trouble.

I had shot that guy in anger. I didn’t really think about the repercussions at the time; that I could be considered a cold-blooded murderer. I would have loved to have seen the case, though, hauled into court. Have the judge ask why I killed. What would happen when I countered with, “How do you kill the dead, exactly?”

The vision of the man’s head disappearing in a puff of blood and gore played over and over like an old film stuck in the projector at school. Why wouldn’t it melt away?

I pulled into my side street and slowed down in case kids were in the street. But there was no one there, and I got that eerie feeling of aloneness once again. I pulled into my driveway and noticed that my neighbor Hector Edwards was in his back yard. I could only make out the top of his head, so I waved a silent greeting and went inside without waiting for a response.