Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (14 page)

An instant later an arrow pierced the shoulder of the zombie and it turned quickly to face Eli. He fumbled the next arrow out of his belt quiver and it fell to the ground as he tried to string it, fear seeping quickly through him now that he knew he had missed the first shot at its head. It raced at him, spittle flying from its mouth as it closed the ten yards between it and Eli.

And then the zombie’s head exploded in a mist of blood and skull bits, the creature tumbling forward to the ground at Eli’s feet. Eli looked over at his dad and saw him wielding his Desert Eagle .50 caliber pistol, the sound of the gunshot echoing through the barn.

“You okay, Eli?” Milton asked, stepping toward his son and looking through the open doorway.

“Yeah, it didn’t even touch me,” Eli said, his voice shaky with adrenalin.

Milton turned to Roy. “Let’s get what we can and get the hell out of here.”

Just then the back door to the door to the barn splintered open and a stream of undead staggered into the room, fanning out as they stumble-walked into the main area of the barn floor. Roy picked up his bow and let loose an arrow at the closest zombie, felling it. He reloaded and downed another.

“Well, Milt, the menu just changed from beef to human. Get Eli out, I’ll hold ‘em back for a few more seconds,” Roy said, lacing another arrow into his bow and letting it fly into the skull of a zombie as he stepped slowly away from the undead.

Eli had already run out of the barn and was standing in the dirt parking area readying an arrow in his own bow. Milton glanced at the meat from the two cows, frowned for a micro-second at the loss, grabbed his bow and ran toward his son. As he ran, he saw a shot from his son miss a zombie, the arrow flying through the air into the distance. His son was flustered, frightened, and was quickly becoming combat ineffective. Milton raised his pistol and put a round into the skull of a zombie.

“Run, Eli, run! Get to the vehicles!” Milton shouted at his fear-paralyzed son. “Start moving!”

Milton exited the barn and stopped, bow in one hand, pistol in the other, and surveyed the landscape. Several dozen walkers were moving on either side of the barn, enveloping it. Something inside Milton told him it had been a trap. He looked into the barn and saw Roy backing out steadily, having dropped his bow and changed over to his sidearm, putting rounds into zombie heads. The slow walkers were about to close off the barn door when Milton caught a smear of fast-runners tearing through his peripheral vision toward his son.

“Roy, run!” he shouted, wondering what was making his friend down zombies instead of flee.

He glanced at his son: Eli stood motionless, his eyes wide with fear, watching two fast-movers close on him in their ghoulish skip-hop stride, his bow held at his side. Milton looked back into the barn, at Roy ejecting a clip from his pistol as a runner zombie raced from the back of the barn. He checked Eli, who was shaking trying to lace an arrow into his bow and then Milton flicked his eyes back into the barn and saw the runner almost on a backpedaling Roy, his friend pulling the slide of his pistol. Milton had to make a decision which zombie to shoot

Milton raised his pistol and fired two quick rounds, bringing each runner down just a yard shy of his son. Eli looked at him.

“Run. Get to the ATV, go home. Run!”

Milton turned and looked into the barn and saw only zombies.

“Roy!” he shouted. “Roy!”

There was no shortage of zombies with their attention set on him. He had only three rounds in the pistol and another clip of seven on his belt. Nowhere near enough to do the job, including the five arrows he still had. He looked quickly for any more runners and started backing away from the barn. He kept his pistol up and pointed at the undead, their shuffling gait an irresistible force. A dead man in his forties in a tattered blue business suit made a few steps ahead of the pack coming toward Milton, the undead man’s face mottled-gray, the skin taut across the chin and cheek bones. For a brief second, Milton thought it smiled, a malignant upturn at the corner of its lips, as if it knew what it was doing and knew that its side was winning.

Milton squeezed the trigger of his pistol and the zombie’s skull erupted in the back with a spray of brain matter, the body collapsing to the ground. The rest of the horde paid no attention to the newly dead undead, its group attention solely focused on Milton and the fresh meat he represented. They had been hunting, too.

Milton turned and ran after his son, catching up to him at the ditch where they had hidden their ATVs. The undead coming at them from the barn were far enough away they would never catch up, but they were still coming. Milton looked at his son and thanked god Eli was still alive.

“You never talk about this. I’ll tell Sara and the girls what happened,” Milton said, throwing the branches off the vehicles.

“Dad, I’m sorry, I don’t - “ Eli started.

“Shh,” Milton said, moving and embracing his son in a hug, holding him close. “It’s okay, Eli, it’s not your fault. You did exactly what you were supposed to do.

He turned and looked at the cluster of zombies swarming around the barn and wondered if he were someday going to have to kill his best friend, or if they eaten enough of him that he wouldn’t come back from the dead. He climbed onto his four-wheeler, started the engine, and nodded to the road, “Now, let’s get out of here.”

What are Little Zombies Made of?

Enterprise, Alabama - Day 596

Trace Brewer squinted at the three runners as they skip-hopped toward him, a weird gallop he’d never quite gotten used to. Why they just didn’t outright run made no sense to him, but, then, neither did the fact that they were living corpses. These wretches had been alive humans at some point, capable of actual running, but death had transformed that aspect of them, too. He took a few steps back, spat some tobacco juice in a nice, looping arc, and felt the reassurance of the stock of his Mossberg 500 shotgun against his shoulder.

Trace retreated a few more steps as the undead closed on him. He sighted down the barrel of the shotgun and picked off the middle-aged black lunch-lady-looking woman with a blast to the skull from fifteen yards, her head shattering into a thousand pieces of flesh and bone. He dropped to a knee, swiveled to the other side of the zombie group and pumped a round into the chamber. He raised the shotgun and put the sights on the teen-age skate-rat’s mid-section and blew a hole through him, collapsing him in a heap. And then he chambered another round and watched down the length of the barrel at the fifty-ish fat dude still hop-skipping toward him. Trace waited for the zombie to take three more steps and fall through the camouflaged net that hid the tiger pit, spat out a dollop of tobacco juice and stood up.

A moment later, the weights-and-pulleys attached to the ropes connected to the net yanked the undead man out of the pit and up into the air, where he bobbed and moaned beneath a street lamp while Trace turned circles nearby, waiting for stragglers. There were always straggler zombies with the runners, and a moment later two thirty-something brunettes covered in blood and mucus pushed through some hedges and stared at him. He popped each in the head without giving it much thought, sucked hard on the tobacco in his mouth, and spit onto the ground.

“Fucking zombies are so stupid.”

The fat man in the net above him moaned what almost sounded like “brains,” and Trace shook his head: zombies didn’t have any, so maybe that’s why they always sounded like they were moaning about them. He drove his red Ford F-150 pick-up from its hidey-hole nearby, positioned the bed under the net, and lowered the fat man into the truck, banging the undead man’s head on the metal floor and causing it - him? - to snarl for a few moments.

There was a groan from beside the tiger pit, and Trace walked over and looked down on the teenage skateboarder, a hole blown through his stomach, his backbone broken. His body was little more than a sack of undead flesh, now, but he wasn’t dead in any normal sense of the word. He scraped at the ground with his arms, trying to drag himself somewhere, his legs useless behind him. Trace spat a bullet of tobacco juice onto the zombie’s face: it would live like this for weeks, slowly drying out on the inside and mummifying. Trace had no idea if that killed it or just put the zombie in some sort of suspended animation.

He drove through downtown Enterprise, zig-zagging around the car crashes and ignoring the destroyed business district. The buildings on the west side of Main Street between College and Adams were burnt to their foundations, an attempt the previous year to burn the zombies to death en masse. The zombies had largely left downtown after that incident, but there were still plenty around, and Trace made it his job to find them. He turned onto Highway 27 and headed north out of the town and pulled off into a driveway near Lake Charles. He got out of the truck, opened the gate to pull the truck through, then closed the gate behind him. He had raided a fence supply company several months ago and hauled away a couple thousand feet chain link fence - he had been truly surprised to find the store completely stocked and untouched: every other place of business he’d seen had been looted to the shelving. But, then, you couldn’t eat fence.

Holly and Charles were idling on the front porch to the house and watched with dispassionate interest as he closed in on them. They had been part of the group harvesting the year’s peanut crops from the surrounding farms, and the yard was full of sacks of green peanuts, ready to be roasted or boiled. The farmers wouldn’t mind as they were either dead, fled or zombified.

“What’d jaget?” Charles said after Trace had popped out of the truck.

“Fat white dude. Probably a banker or a teacher before,” Trace said. “Dag still around?”

“Naw, he’n Mark went out a coupla hours ago to look for salt,” Charles said.

The fat white zombie in the bed of the truck began rustling in the net. Charles walked over to the side of the truck and looked at the living corpse. It stank of death.

“Whatcha gonna do with this one?”

Trace smiled. “Gonna bleed it out and see what happens. C’mon, help me get it out to the barn.”

The barn wasn’t a real barn, but a large garage that was painted red and had a black shingled roof. Someone’s idea of an aesthetic joke; probably the rich couple that had lived in the house alongside the over-sized pond called Lake Charles. Molly and Wallace Cheever had fled or died last year like everyone else in the Wiregrass region of Alabama, leaving behind a richly-appointed McMansion that Trace and Dag had turned into a squatters hellhole before saving Holly and Charles from a group of zombies in the spring. Those two had taken to keeping the home in decent order, which would’ve struck Trace as odd for teenager behavior had he ever bothered to think about it. He hadn’t noticed that the house had been falling into squalor nor that it had become neat and tidy on a daily basis since their arrival.

“Alright, now, le’s be careful when I open the net, this one’s a fastie, so he might spring up right quick and try to bite you,” Trace said as he tilted the wheelbarrow onto the concrete floor and the zombie rolled onto it with a thud. It snarled and wriggled inside the net.

Trace grabbed the noose pole from a hook on the wall and readied it for action while Charles slipped his hands into some thick canvas gloves that came well up his forearms to just short of his elbows. Holly hefted the shotgun and made sure a round was chambered and the three of them all quickly looked between each other to ensure they were ready. Charles undid the fastening at the top of the net, pulling it down quickly and creating a large opening, exposing the fat zombie’s head and shoulders. The creature writhed more quickly sensing its freedom was at hand, but it came to naught as Trace quickly slipped the noose down around its neck and tightened it, maneuvering the pole while Charles continued to undo the net.

“Now get the other pole on it right quick afore it gets all stood up,” Trace said.

A moment later, the man and teenager had the fat zombie double-noosed and were fighting him back toward a barbershop chair Trace and Dag had removed from Atkins Barber Shop three days earlier and bolted to the floor of the garage. The zombie was strong and struggled against them. That was the only advantage Trace had yet figured zombies had - they were incredibly strong. And durable. If you didn’t take the head off in some manner, they were more-or-less indestructible.

They were almost to the chair when the zombie stopped fighting against both of them and inexplicably set all its weight and momentum against Charles, pulling Trace off-balance and adding his weight to the maneuver, as if the zombie remembered some Judo training from its life of being alive. Charles had been a skinny kid before the zombie apocalypse, and his diet since then had only made him leaner and weaker, a disadvantage the zombie was now exploiting. Trace could see the fright in Charles’ grimace as he watched the zombie claw the air between them.

“Hold calm, Charles, he can’t get at you even if he pushes you up against the wall. You got five feet a stiff ash pole between you an’ him, so jes keep ahold of yer end and ya’ll be jes fine,” Trace said.

Trace yanked back on his pole and the zombie stumbled, and within a few moments, the two had pushed the zombie into the chair and were pushing him against the seat back. Trace nodded to Holly and she rushed up behind the zombie and whipped a nylon tie-down strap around its chest and biceps, ratcheting the strap tighter until the zombie was cinched to the chair. She then strapped a rubber ball gag into its mouth while it was looking at the strap across its chest. Within a minute, the trio had the zombie completely immobilized.