Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (12 page)

Zombies. Why were there even zombies in the first place? How was that even possible? Why didn’t the re-animated dead bodies continue to deteriorate and become dust in the wind? What made them walk and seek out living humans? And why? Zombies were like mosquitoes in that they seemed to serve no observable purpose in the ecosystem except to feed and spread disease: the world would miss neither if either suddenly blinked out of existence.

“Why?” Rob shouted up into the sky at the cumulus clouds rolling by.

“Why what?” said a voice from behind him, and Rob spun quickly, his hand falling to his holster.

A man in his fifties was standing behind him with a boy of about ten, both of them wearing cowboy hats. The man idly held a Winchester rifle in his hands, more-or-less not-exactly pointed at Rob’s gut, while the boy had a small .22 caliber Ruger pistol in a hip holster. Rob smiled and moved his hand away from his gun.

“Was just asking God why this happened,” Rob said, shrugging, scanning the area for the sudden appearance of the walking dead.

“Get an answer?” the man asked.

“Nope.”

“Need any help?”

Rob shook his head. “Nah, just picking through the bones one more time looking for stuff that might’ve been overlooked. You?”

The man tapped the brim of his hat with his pointer finger and made a brief nod. “Just passing through. You be careful, there’s a horde of about ten-thousand dead-ones out by Westheimer Airport. No idea why, but they’re strung out like they’re waiting for something to come and land.”

“Thanks,” Rob said, watching as the man and boy walked down the street, each of them turning their heads to constantly scan the properties lining the street, looking for the undead. They turned a corner and Rob was alone.

He walked up onto the disheveled patio of The Library and sat down on a chair. He ate a Power Bar, drank some water, and stared around at the world. He wished there were some way to charge his iPod so he could listen to his Life Sux mix, a playlist he had started when his last long-term pre-zombie-apocalypse girlfriend had broken up with him. He’d edited it many times since then, adding two other short term girlfriend specific songs to the mix, but the playlist had long since morphed into a general purpose “bad day” mix: until Barbara Zane had come into his life, he hadn’t had a girlfriend in more than a year. The women who had originally inspired its creation never crossed his mind when he listened to it, and today would have been a perfect day to listen to it while drinking a six-pack of beer, seeing as it would likely be his last chance to drink beer as an alive human.

His calf throbbed with a dull warm pulse, and he looked down at the bandage. Not everybody got zombie-itis that got bit, did they? Someone had to be immune. Someone had to be resistant. Somehow, there had to be at least a natural chance that the disease didn’t get passed on to the bitten, right? Some people could survive an infection, he thought, because not even the plagues in Europe in the Dark Ages killed everyone. Right? Some people survived. Somewhere, someone had to be working on a cure. Right?

“Not in this town,” he said under his breath, looking around for anyone who might be in earshot.

The town was quiet, though. Only bird noises and the sound of the wind. If there was anyone in the country - the world - working on a cure, nobody he knew had any knowledge of it. There was nobody on the roads, nobody roaming the land, nobody with knowledge of anything outside a day’s walk of Norman, Oklahoma.

Nobody but maybe that man and kid in the cowboy hats.

He sat up in his chair and realized he had been crying, and wiped the tear streams from his face. Shit, he thought, two people passing through town and he hadn’t bothered to ask them anything about the outside world, or even if they were from somewhere farther away than a day’s round-trip. He left the bar’s remains and walked in the direction of the cowboy hat duo, feeling a dull ache forming in his calf, as if he were succumbing to a cramp, tightening up, becoming less limber. He shook it for a second and increased his gait.

He turned onto South Flood Street and began walking north, the last point he had seen the cowboy-hat-wearing man and boy. There was nothing on the road aside from abandoned cars and skeletal remains. He walked cautiously on the side of the street until he reached the intersection with Main Street, which was clogged with vehicles, abandoned by owners long-since dead or undead. Nobody who fled lived, so far as he knew. Anybody who had ventured out in search of a safer haven had either been killed by zombies, become zombies, or been killed by the military or law enforcement in the last ditch attempts to enforce curfews and quarantines.

Nothing had worked. Somehow, the zombies always got through, and only those who had hunkered down had survived. And not all of them, either. Rob looked up and down Main Street: the storefronts were all cracked open, long since looted and pillaged for anything and everything. He had been among those doing the pillaging and looting back after it was obvious neither the police nor National Guard were coming back.

He suddenly felt faint, a hot flash coursing through his body, the taste of vomit at the back of his throat. He pulled a water bottle out of his backpack and drank deeply, the luke-warm water doing nothing to cool him down. How long had it been since he’d been bitten? It had been late morning then, and now the sun was setting. Where had the afternoon gone? He looked around Main Street again: this had been a bustling city of more than 100,000 before the zombie plague, and now it was empty. Where were the people?

His fevered mind told him they had gone somewhere, that a hundred-thousand people don’t just vanish or turn into zombies that vanish. And, there weren’t that many corpses in the town, though they were everywhere. Maybe there was an escape?

He stumbled through town for several blocks, increasingly feeling like he was drunk. He was losing his balance and his ability to see clearly. The world was taking on a fog-like shroud. He felt almost good in the same way as a late-afternoon beer buzz at a barbecue cook-out. After a while, he stumbled onto the grassy lawn of Wells Andrews Park. He stared around at the high grass and didn’t realize it hadn’t been mowed in months. But he knew where he was, and for no reason he could know he made his way to the amphitheater. He was burning hot, and he had run out of water on the way. But he wasn’t thirsty. Or hungry. Just ... sleepy.

He made his way into the amphitheater and walked up into the seating area, not looking for anything, no longer aware of anything, just trying to find a spot to sit and sleep it off. He found a spot in the lower left-third of the seating area and plopped down unceremoniously. He wriggled out of his backpack and stared up into the sky, the sun nearly set, the sky filled with a riot of violets and indigos, still waiting for the arrival of the stars. After a moment, he saw the first star and shivered. He could feel the sweat on his body pooling. Nothing was right. He was drunk. Mightily so, and everything in him said “sleep.”

And so he closed his eyes for the last time as a member of the living.

Th
e Third Time is the Harm

Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin - Day 654

Milton Kempf worked his way along the hillside, keeping his eyes on the band of shuffling undead trudging down the road. For months, little groups of zombies had been making their way into Chippewa Falls, slowly forming in the Northern Wisconsin State Fairgrounds into a gaggle that resembled the swaying of tall grass on a windy day. Milton had no way of knowing why that location drew them. At first, he surmised it had to do with the proximity to the Calvary, Hope and Forest Hill cemeteries and all of the potential new recruits in their graves. And then he had made his way around those cemeteries and realized not a single grave had been disturbed. Anyone buried in them was still below ground. Whatever had killed and resurrected the undead had had no effect on the previously dead.

He sighted his compound bow at the trailing zombie and watched it over the tip of his arrow, feeling the gentle breeze and compensating for windage. An arrow through the skull would drop it to the ground and the others wouldn’t know they’d lost a member of their group. On the other hand, if he shot it with the Desert Eagle strapped to his hip, the entire group would turn on him, and every zombie within hearing range of the report would start shuffling his way.

He relaxed the tension on the bow and stowed the arrow into his belt quiver, watching the undead shuffle off around a bend in the road. He picked up the three rabbits he’d bagged earlier in the afternoon, keeping his eyes alert for any errant undead that might have found its way into the backwoods. For whatever reason, the walking dead didn’t often find their way off the beaten path.

“You’re getting pretty good at that, but you messed up and established a rhythm, Eli,” Milton said, turning his head over his right shoulder and smiling at his 14-year old son. “Remember to step carefully when you walk through the forest and to change your step pattern ever-so-slightly as you do so that the noise your feet make always sound like the vagaries of nature, not the patterns of a creature.”

Eli rolled his eyes and quickened his pace to match his. “I so thought you were going to put an arrow in that fat zombie chick’s head, Dad, but then you didn’t. What happened? You had the bow drawn and ready.”

Milton harrumphed low and shrugged. “Just because you can kill something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to kill it.”

“I thought we wanted to kill all the zombies.”

“We do.”

“But you didn’t take the shot.”

“I know.”

“Why not?”

“The situation didn’t warrant it. There’s no reason to risk our lives killing a zombie when we don’t need to. No telling what could’ve happened had I taken the shot. Could’ve missed and let the whole group know we were here. The longer the undead don’t know we’re here, the better it is for us. Just be patient, son, and we’ll get everything sorted out.”

Eli nodded an held up three rabbits.

“Rabbit? Tasty. Good hunting, Eli.”

“I want a hamburger.”

Milton smiled. “Me too. Ain’t any burger shops ‘round any more.”

“There’s those cows we saw the other week on the old dairy farm.”

Milton looked at his son and nodded. “We’re doing just fine on game. No reason to risk that. Not with all the undead moving through the area. Maybe someday, if they’re still alive.”

Their compound was a mile into the woods from the road. It was a former farm that had stopped being a farm sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, judging from the leftover equipment still inside the barn. The house had been boarded up sometime after farming had stopped, and forgotten. Until Milton and his group came across it while living in the woods after escaping the city earlier that first year. Nature had recaptured much of the farmland in the decades since it had been abandoned, but with some effort and creativity, Milton had planted an acre with a variety of crops. There was a chicken coop, two dairy cows and a half-dozen pigs, as well. They hadn’t eaten any of the farm animals, yet, although there was fresh milk and eggs.

“What’d’ja get?” Nancy asked as father and son walked into the kitchen.

Nancy was Milton’s fiancée. They would have been married by now had there been no zombie apocalypse. They wore rings anyway, figuring there might never be any “authority” to marry them, having pledged themselves to each other five months ago in front of his son, longtime friends Roy and Sara Campbell, and their two daughters.

“Six rabbits are out on the stoop, Nance,” Milton said, closing the distance and kissing her. “Undead were all over the streets today, making their way for town, so didn’t want to risk it to get more.”

“Rabbits, huh? Haven’t had those in a couple of weeks,” Nancy said, smiling and rolling her eyes.

He smiled back. “There’s only three of them, so I’m gonna guess we’re gonna have a lot of potatoes and carrots with ‘em.”

“One of these days, we’re gonna find out what the hell happened.”

Milton looked over at Roy. They were sitting in the barn at “the bar,” drinking home brew. Roy’s passion from before the end of times had been making beer in his basement, small batches of whatever recipe entertained his fancy. Milton had always thought Roy’s hobby pre-apocalypse had been too labor-intensive, but now he was glad they had spent those days the previous summer scavenging for the equipment he needed. “Beer is food,” Roy had said then to settle the argument about how to provision their farm.

“I dunno ‘bout that, Roy,” Milton said. “There hasn’t been a government to speak of since the last of the National Guard boys pulled out with the police and that convoy of school buses last year. And it’s not like we get people moving into the area that could tell us anything. Everyone I come across is headed south before winter comes. We might be stuck in this world for a long time.”

Roy nodded. “You know, when I used to think about life with no government, I never really meant zero government. I like to think that we’d have had the kinda government that could actually deliver the mail, fix the streets and do your basic police and fire work,” Roy said. “But, then, I shoulda known that if government couldn’t deliver the mail or fix the streets, it was never goin’ to be worth a shit with dealing with the undead.”