Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (11 page)

“I nailed her in the back of the coatroom twenty minutes later,” Fyodor said. “I keep telling you that the way into a girl’s pants is through misdirection. If you talk about a girl’s underwear with a girl who will talk about her underwear, both of you are talking about fucking, not underwear. You’ve just got to recognize the indicator of interest in you. All women who are interested in you do this, send you a signal that they’re into you, and if you know what you’re doing, you can figure out what they’re about pretty quickly and then it’s just about negotiating the time frame.”

Fyodor paused and stared at Nikita as she walked to the other side of the intersection. “Vasily, all women want to fuck, it’s in their DNA just like it’s in ours, they just want to fuck the right guy at the right time, and you have to know how to make them think you’re that guy and that time is now. It’s not foolproof, but you get to a point where you can tell which girls are fuckable and which aren’t.”

Suddenly Fyodor noticed Nikita jumping up and down, pointing to a hole in a building on the other corner of the street. She turned and waved at him, urging him and Vasily to come to her.

“She’s excited about something,” Vasily said, his voice a monotone.

“Not the size of your dick if her silence this morning means anything.”

Vasily smiled. “I’m going to guess it’s not a bag of dry dog food we can moisten with rain water.”

Fyodor laughed out loud, a belly laugh he hadn’t experienced in many weeks, and he realized that mirth and happiness were not lost in the new world of the zombie apocalypse, that a friend could still make you laugh with a comeback quip. Nikita was jumping off her toe-tips, pointing to her side, the smile on her face wide, a jubilant look. Whatever she had just discovered changed everything in her life, made it somehow better, made it worth telling Fyodor and Vasily about.

And then three runner zombies erupted from around the corner and tackled Nikita to the ground, one of them immediately biting into her shoulder. At the same moment Nikita’s last dying impulse was to squeeze the trigger on her shotgun, the recoil from the blast causing it to jump from her hand and skitter across the sidewalk, the shot pellets briefly pinging off the wall of a nearby building. If she screamed, it was drowned out by the blast of the gun, and, anyway, an instant later she was inert flesh on the sidewalk being torn apart by the undead.

The two men glanced at each other briefly before raising their weapons and firing on the walking dead, a round from the Desert Eagle splintering the head of a middle-aged male zombie while Vasily’s shotgun bursts swept the other two off Nikita’s body and into the gutter along the sidewalk, where the body of a young man twitched for a few moments as the death seeped out of his living corpse. Fyodor walked quickly to Nikita’s body and knelt down, slipping his pistol into his waistband and grabbing the idle shotgun from the ground. He stood up, aimed at the girl’s head, and disintegrated it with a blast from the weapon.

“What a waste,” Fyodor said, looking down the roads connected at the intersection, scanning for the inevitable arrival of a shuffling horde of undead. He had no idea why gunshots attracted them with such intensity, but it was a fact of modern life that they did.

Vasily took a few steps down the road to where Nikita had been pointing and stopped. His shotgun sagged in his hands at what he saw.

“You’re not going to believe this, Fyodor,” Vasily said, “but somebody blew a hole in the side of the bank since we were last through here.”

Fyodor walked up alongside Vasily and stared at the crumble of rubble, the interior of the bank’s vault exposed. Fyodor walked up to the edge of it and looked into the shadowy darkness. Coins and cash were scattered everywhere amid the broken masonry, a small fortune for a person in a modern 21st Century nation. Fyodor turned and looked over his shoulder at Nikita’s body and then glanced at Vasily.

“Probably the most cash she’d ever seen in her life,” Vasily said.

“It’s not even good for toilet paper,” Fyodor said.

“Or eating.”

Fyodor laughed flatly. “We better get out of here before more dead show up.”

Just then they heard the booming of another round of artillery fire, the sky above them rent apart by the projectiles as they burrowed through the air. Several seconds of silence passed before the explosions reverberated back to them. Vasily and Fyodor turned and faced each other.

“The army’s retreating,” Fyodor said, letting the words hang in the air. They both knew what that meant.

“We’re going to need more vodka and another girl,” Vasily said, nodding down the road, his voice flat, the words emitting only facts.

“This world can kiss my ass good-bye, but it’s going to do it on my terms,” Fyodor said, the two of them listening as another round of artillery shells sluiced through the air, “when I’m drunk and laid.”

The Undeath of Rob Zombie

Norman, Oklahoma - Day 199

Robert Sebastian Colfax had been thirty-four-years old the day Marguerite Rosario Del Rio bit him on the calf. She had been undead for almost sixteen weeks at that point, a janitorial team member who cleaned the Catlett Music Hall on the University of Oklahoma campus five days a week. She had been bitten by John Kennedy Creighton, an undergraduate student with an undecided major but a more than a passing interest in the oboe. Marguerite had bled to death after stumbling away from Creighton and hiding in a janitorial supply closet.

Creighton had been killed minutes later by a state trooper. John Creighton’s body had been burned with hundreds of others in a pit dug in the football field. In the confusion of the battle for the campus, nobody had thought to look for the third-generation Mexican woman, and she had undied in the closet and awoken to living death. She had no concept of time in the closet, sitting there against the wall in complete darkness, never making a single move to stand up and explore the oven-hot room she was in.

And then the door opened and Rob Colfax and Claire Benoit shined a flashlight into the room, neither of them concerned there might be an undead third-generation Mexican janitor waiting patiently for the opportunity to taste living flesh. So unconcerned about the prospect of a zombie janitor in the closet were Rob and Claire that Rob stepped into the closet and shined the light up, above the undead body of Marguerite, playing the beam across the shelves of cleaning supplies.

“Shit, nothing,” Rob said.

And then he felt the pair of hands grab his right calf followed quickly by the bite of teeth. He yelled.

“What the fuck!”

He shined the beam down on Marguerite as she shook her head back-and-forth like a thresher shark tearing at a fish, biting flesh, blood trickling down his leg and foaming around Marguerite’s lips. Marguerite’s undead life ended two seconds later, as Rob quickly pulled his Smith & Wesson .357 revolver from its holster and squeezed a round into her skull, splitting it open and spattering brain matter everywhere. The sound of the shot deafened both Rob and Claire.

Rob stumbled backward out of the closet and into Claire, who had her hands up over her ears too late to muffle the sound of the pistol and just in time for her to lose her balance and fall down when Rob bumbled into her. She hit the ground hard, grimacing as she landed on her tailbone. She stared at the bloody bite on Rob’s right calf muscle and then looked past him into the dark closet. Rob looked down at Claire and then turned the beam of the flashlight back into the closet, where the deathless, lifeless corpse of Marguerite Rosario Del Rio lay on its back, a pool of long-since dried blood blackening the floor around her body. Rob worked the beam up to the un-living woman’s body and trained it on her split-open head, one of her eyeballs having been blown out of her skull and hanging by fibers to the socket, the contents of her skull moist.

Rob looked down at Claire, holstered his pistol and extended his arm. “Come on, let me help you up.”

Instead of taking his hand, Claire pointed to the bite indentation on Rob’s calf: it was deep, the flesh torn and seeping blood, but the zombie hadn’t actually bitten anything out of him. Rob eyed the bite for a few seconds before shrugging off his backpack and rustling through it for a bottle of tincture of iodine, which he unscrewed and began dribbling over the wound. There was a rumor making its way through the town that not everyone bitten became infected and that iodine could help. Nobody knew anyone who had tried, but nearly everyone still alive carried some sort of iodine solution or pills.

“What the fuck was she doing in there?” Rob said as he pasted a large square Band-Aid brand bandage to his wound. “I mean, what the fucking fuck was a fucking zombie doing just waiting in a supply closet? That fucking doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

Rob shook his head in total disbelief. He wanted to cry at the unfairness of it all: he was careful when out scavenging and didn’t make “rookie” mistakes. There was no reason for a zombie to be sitting in a closet waiting for someone to open it. None. That’s not what zombies did.

“You okay to walk?” Claire asked.

Rob nodded. “Yeah, it’s not that bad. It looks worse than it feels.”

“I think we should call this a day and head back.”

Rob muttered a small, plaintive laugh.

“What?” Claire asked.

“I can’t go back. Not now, not with this.”

“Sure you can.”

“No. I can’t. They’ll put me in the quarantine yard and wait me out, and if I turn into a zombie, they’ll kill me.”

Claire tucked some strands of hair behind each ear. “Yeah. If you become a zombie. Do you want to become a zombie and have us not kill you?”

Rob laughed a chuckle of genuine mirth at that. He smiled. “I don’t want to become a zombie and I don’t want anyone to kill me either way, to be honest with you.”

“Maybe the iodine will kill the infecting agent?” Claire said unconvincingly.

Rob shrugged. “Maybe. But I’m going to stay here for the next day or two and wait it out. I’ve got a couple of Power Bars and some water, so I’ll be okay. If I turn, well, I won’t turn in the yard, so I’ll be out here and you can hunt me down like free-range zombie. If I don’t turn, I’ll just show up in a couple of days and knock on the door.”

“They’ll still put you in the yard,” Claire said matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, sure, but if I don’t turn dead in the next day or so, I won’t turn dead, then, either, so I won’t be out in the yard wondering about my fate.”

Claire stared at him for a long moment and Rob looked down at the bite wound. Nobody had ever recovered. They’d both heard stories, rumors really, of people who’d been bitten and not transformed, but neither they nor anyone they knew had ever known such a person. In the world of the undead, being bitten meant becoming one of the living dead.

“Go, I’ll be okay,” Rob said. “I’m sure the iodine will help.”

Claire nodded sadly, looked him in the eyes, a look Rob interpreted as farewell, and she backed a few steps away from him, trying to smile confidently. Rob nodded his head and shouldered his backpack, all the while watching as Claire made her way down the hall to the stairwell. He had to watch her, she was armed with a 9 mm Colt Defender and he knew from shooting with her that she’d be able to plug him in the skull from inside 15 yards with ease.

After the door had creaked shut, Rob slid down against the wall and put his head in his hands, tears of disbelief finally welling in his eyes. Fucking zombies. Why the fuck was a zombie chick hiding in a closet in the music hall? What the fuck did her zombie brain think it was doing? It made no sense, and the unfairness of it all bewildered Rob into a teary rage of whimpers, shouts and weeping. He didn’t want to become a zombie. He wanted to go back to the house, open a basement-cold beer and make love to Barbara Zane, his girlfriend of two months since he and Claire had rescued her from the overnight lock-up in the Norman Police Department. She’d been arrested for DUI the night before police had been ordered to the outskirts of town with various fire departments and the nearby National Guard unit to form a skirmish line against a horde of undead coming down North Flood Avenue from Oklahoma City. That was three months ago.

After a while, he got hold of himself, wiped his eyes dry and blew his nose out on the floor, wiping it with the back of his hand and then onto the seat of his shorts. Why hadn’t he worn jeans today? It was only 104 Fahrenheit outside, and a dry heat at that. He shook his head and made his way out of the building and along the sidewalk running parallel to College Avenue, strolling beneath the shade trees and turning absent-mindedly onto West Boyd Street, past a series of cars frozen in a multiple rear-end car crash. He crossed the empty street and almost forgot that he needed to be aware of zombies - this area was frequently overrun with them (former students turned undead, Rob and others figured they came back to campus out of habit) - and walked up to the carcass of The Library, a once-popular bar and restaurant that had been ransacked and looted months ago. It was full of broken glass and overturned tables now, the front doors long-ago pried off, the windows broken. Rob missed the quiet comfort of the place on a weeknight in the summer, when there were fewer students to deal with and it was easier to get a seat at the bar and watch television over a beer.