Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (17 page)

"We might have to, but let's just check and see first."

It was even worse there. Tractor-trailers were jackknifed in the intersection. Sedans and hatchbacks were crumpled into each other like lovers embracing in their final moments. Four-wheel drive trucks and SUVs were abandoned in the fields around the gigantic intersection. A recreational vehicle was upended onto its rear end, the front windshield pointed to the sky, its tires all blown out, a pair of police cruisers crunched nearby.

And everywhere, bodies.

"Jesus Christ, the world is ending," Jessica said. She looked up into the sky at the scud clouds moving quickly beneath the high gray overcast.

There was an explosion of glass behind her and the Land Cruiser was suddenly catapulted forward, the tires squealing for a brief moment against the pavement before Jessica's body jerked against the seatbelt and her foot slipped off the brake pedal. The world moved in slow motion, and Jessica watched as an abandoned mini-van spun across her windshield and T-boned the nose of her truck, the quick pop of the airbag suddenly cushioning her as the truck settled into the mini-van.

For a moment, she was confused, the punch of the airbag having knocked the sense out of her. But as the air seeped out of the fabric she found the brake pedal and moved the gear lever into park. She looked over at Belle, a bead of blood forming at the base of her left nostril, her eyes focused on infinity.

"Belle, are you okay?"

Belle's head lolled for a moment and she rubbed her palm over her forehead, blinking reality into place, trying to recognize the world around her.

"Belle?"

Belle nodded slowly. "I'm okay, Mom."

Jessica looked quickly through the rear window of the Land Cruiser and saw a smashed up yellow Ford Mustang near the spot she had just been in, a thin line of white smoke oozing from the beneath the bent-up hood. She slipped out of the truck and stood in the intersection and regarded the damaged car: how had the driver hit her? She was sitting in the middle of the road in plain sight. She walked toward it and the driver's side door creaked open, a twenty-ish man with long thin blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail and a wispy mustache staggered out of the vehicle. He was pale, ghostly, and his eyes turned uncertainly in his head, as if they were not capable of fixing on reality. He moaned and turned his head to look up into the sky, his head wobbly as if he were drunk.

"Are you okay?" Jessica said, taking a few small steps in the man's direction, just enough to make sure her voice traveled the distance between them.

Her voice caught his attention and his head lowered, wavering on his shoulders as he tried to concentrate on her. His eyelids kept dipping down, heavy with sleep. He took a step and nearly fell over.

"Help me," he said softly, his voice thick as if his tongue were swollen.

He tried another step and bent down to the ground, holding himself steady with a palm on the asphalt. He made a desperate little pitchy noise in his throat, a gasp of accepting his fate, and curled onto the ground. Jessica turned in place, staring at the tableaux of devastation around her: this is how the world ends?

Belle popped out of the truck and stared at the mash of vehicles in the lanes of the intersection, then looked to Jessica with a bewildered expression. "Now what do we do?"

Jessica wanted to shrug, wanted someone else to tell her what the next step was, but the world provided only an approaching green Subaru that slowed to a stop a hundred yards shy of the intersection and turned around, driving away.

"We gotta get a new car," Jessica said, eyeing the Enterprise Rent-A-Car sign in a parking lot on the north side of the interchange. She looked at the Land Cruiser and thought of the supplies in it and shook her head. "Get your backpack, honey."

They walked off the highway and into the parking lot of the rental agency. Everything appeared in place, as if in the final moments of order and clarity in the world, nobody had thought about needing to rent a car. Where would you return it to after the apocalypse ended, Jessica thought, and smiled. The door to the office was locked, but Jessica smashed the glass pane with a rock and undid the bolt from the inside, unafraid there might be an armed employee of some sort waiting inside. Everyone had abandoned their posts and fled in the last few days, but judging from the major roadways, few had made it far.

"Try and find the keys," Jessica said. "I don't care to what; we'll drive anything."

After several minutes, Belle pulled open a cabinet door and stared at a collection of keys on pegs, each with a small laminated paper tag attached.

"Found 'em, Mom."

"Grab one."

"We really don't care?"

"No, honey," Jessica said, "just grab a set and we'll walk through the lot clicking the clicker until we hear a horn. We don't have time to find anything specific; we need to get out of here."

Walking through the parking lot, Jessica felt relief. Soon, they'd have a new set of wheels and a new plan to drive on the back roads as much as possible, at least until out of the urban network. And they'd retrieved a half-case of bottled water from a back room in the rental agency, a boon to replace some of what they'd had to abandon in the Land Cruiser. Not that they'd need much for the two hour drive to Lake Bridgeport, but it was nice to have. Ken would be proud of her situational awareness. Jessica clicked the button in her palm again and a horn sounded two short blasts off to her right. She turned her head and saw the parking lights blinking on a Nissan Altima. She smiled at her daughter.

And then frowned at what she saw in the background. The sound of the horn had alerted a pair of overweight, jeans-and-flannel shirts-clad bearded truckers that she and Belle were there. At least, what else could have caused them to suddenly stand up from behind a row of cars and turn around until their glazed-over eyes pointed at her and her daughter? The two men began shuffling toward her, a relentlessness to their motion. They were nowhere near as fast as the crowd in the intersection a while earlier, but they were no less fixated on her.

She pulled her backpack off and rustled the pistol out of the front pocket. The two walkers were still 40 yards away, way outside her shooting ability. Shit, she thought, if only she'd let Ken take her to the range any of the times he'd tried.  But she'd lost interest in Ken by the time he'd given her the pistol, and spending "quality time" with him - shooting pistols, Scrabble-playing or drunken fucking - had become something she'd avoided. Now, when a monthly trip to the range would've come in useful, she found herself staring through the sight of the pistol trying to remember what Ken had told her about shooting and wondering what Bob Crighton had ever brought to her life. Orgasms, but she'd had those off-and-on, depending on the guy, since losing her virginity to Walter Stubbs at a party in her junior year of high school. She had never understood why orgasms were so important to men.

She squeezed the trigger at what she figured was just inside twenty-five yards. Missed. Shit. The two truckers lurched forward drunkenly, assuredly. She put the sight on the middle of the left-one's chest, remembering something Ken had told her about “center mass,” breathed in, paused, exhaled slowly and pulled the trigger. The zombie staggered back, coughed up some blood, and shook its head as if it had been poorly insulted at a cocktail party. And then came toward her. She sighted on the zombie’s head and fired again, missing. They were now inside twenty yards. She fired again and missed.

“Shit,” she said, holding the pistol at full arms length and sighting again on the undead man’s head.

She pulled the trigger back again and heard a click.

Empty.

Fuck.

She'd forgotten to reload the magazine. She rummaged through the bag and quickly realized she had forgotten to bring the spare magazine or the box of bullets. She stared at the gun in disbelief, a lump of metal, now. Useless.

"Mom, we gotta go," said Belle from behind her, her voice chock-full of fear.

Jessica nodded and stood up, dropping the gun into the bag and zippering it quickly. "Let's get to the car, quick."

She turned to look for the Altima as Belle started walking when Jessica heard a weird slapping off to her left: a skip-hopping rage-faced twenty-something man in a torn-apart blue business suit, a yellow tie cinched way too tightly against his neck at an angle that suggested it had been wrenched by someone. Fifty yards behind him a gaggle of slow-moving shufflers were moving toward her. She dropped the bag and sprinted a dozen steps directly into a rental agency clerk covered with blood, mucus oozing from his mouth. She bounced off of him and the key clicker went skittering across the asphalt as she spun her arms wildly to regain her balance and remain upright.

Jessica could see Belle turn at just that moment. The look on her daughter's face was pure horror, her eyes wide, her mouth forming an O.

"The key," Jessica shouted, and saw the movement of her daughter's eyes as Belle caught sight of it sliding on the asphalt toward her, but nowhere near her.

The rental agent groaned something and stepped toward Jessica when she was hit from behind and wrapped up like a Dallas Cowboys quarterback getting tackled in the backfield by a Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker who had correctly gauged the snap count. The air burst from Jessica with a gasp and she could feel the bite of teeth on the back of her neck as she was pushed into the side of a gray sedan.

"Mom! No!" were the last words she ever heard as her face was pressed against the driver's side window and she stared into the car at the steering wheel and dashboard, her left arm suddenly pulled out of its socket as another pair of teeth tore into her.

She felt warm wetness spreading over her shoulders and down her chest and back, could hear the grunted rage of her attackers as they bit into her again. A moment later her legs were lifted up and her jeans were being shredded from her body. She knew she was moments from death and something in her made her stop struggling and wait for it. She thought of Belle for a moment, a flash of an instant really, praying Belle had gotten the key and was driving away, then momentarily remembering holding Belle on her chest moments after she was born, how happy that day had been. Then she remembered meeting Ken for the very first time at a tailgate party before an OU-Texas football game, drinking beer and laughing with him. He seemed so easy-natured then, so full of confidence and optimism that she spent the entire day with him. And then most of the rest of her life.

Those were a good memories.

The War o
n Horror

Atlanta, Georgia - Day 274

Chief Petty Officer Daryl “Sandman” Grecich floated down beneath his parachute, his eyes scanning the ground of the Druid Hills Golf Club below him. He'd seen the video footage, read the intelligence reports, knew everything there was to know about what to expect when he and his team hit the ground, but still didn't believe it. On the other hand, he was glad to not still be in Afghanistan, where it had suddenly seemed that the war on terror had lost its meaning. The jihadis he had been killing had given up fighting months earlier, retreating into their compounds and caves shortly after the United States closed its borders to everything.

It had taken Grecich and most everyone else in the military in Afghanistan by surprise when the US government announced it was closing its borders, and that included to them, too. Higher command had assured the troops there was plenty of food, ammunition and other supplies to stay without worry for many months, but Grecich figured that’s exactly what the higher-ups would say. Thousands of miles from home, surrounded by Islamist radicals, no reinforcements and no recall to home port. Grecich figured he and his men were as good as dead. But then the local jihadis gave up on fighting them, retreating to their caves or melting into the civilian population, ending their guerrilla warfare. Another SEAL team captured a jihadi a few weeks later and it turned out the Islamists thought Allah was finally punishing the West for its sins, so they were content to wait it out and see what God's Plague made of the infidels.

The men in Fire Base Coldstream did nothing for months. Patrolling yielded no actionable intelligence, and there was precious little information filtered down from above. According to the news, a highly infectious contagion was spreading the globe through every means available and turning people into something that resembled zombies, although most news reports simply called them “the infected.” Grecich’s commander figured they were probably in as good spot as any to wait it out, seeing as Afghanistan was still stuck in pre-history and infected people weren’t likely to travel there.

But after many weeks of inactivity, a helicopter had arrived from the USS Dwight D Eisenhower with orders for all of the SEALs on base to board it for evacuation. Once aboard ship, they had been briefed in full about what was going on in America and across the world. Almost every major population center in the world had been hit with the contagion, and much of the United States’ military had been rendered combat ineffective, the exception being most of the Navy’s ships that had been at sea at the start of the pandemic. The president was apparently on board the USS Ronald Reagan in the waters off the coast of Maryland.

“Well, D, it seems like the war on terror has been supplanted by the war on horror,” said teammate Petty Officer First Class Herman “Quacker” Werksman after they had exited their first briefing on the state of the world.

Grecich shrugged nonchalantly. “Taliban ... zombies ... I dunno, it seems like either way we’ve got a lot of killing to do.”

And now Grecich found himself floating down through the Autumn air above suburban Atlanta, his mission to determine if there was anyone working on a cure for what the Navy was officially calling the Zombie Plague. It was the first time in Grecich's fourteen years in the Navy anybody had bothered to name anything what it was, and Grecich was sure it was zombies after watching the video.

His feet touched the ground and he yanked on the control cords to his chute, braking to a halt and running a few feet to slow his momentum. He unclipped from the harness and let it drop to the ground, unslung his rifle and took a knee, quickly scanning the area while the rest of his team hit the deck behind him. A few seconds later, they reported in to him over his radio headset.

"Garbo, able."

"King, able."

"Quacker, able."

All were down and in position. He keyed his mic and spoke to mission control, "Motherlode, this is Kellogg, we're a go."

"Roger, Kellogg, proceed to objective."

Grecich made the smallest hand gesture and the team dispersed into a well-rehearsed formation, moving forward as naturally as cogs in a machine. They all knew they were in a new environment, a different threat envelope, and they knew they had no idea what the threat was capable of doing. It was a known unknown. Out there, everywhere, were infected humans - zombies - that intel said would attack them on sight. There were no known tactics to counter or prepare for.

The golf course hadn't been mowed in months and was overgrown and riddled with weeds. A yellow flag rippled in the breeze a hundred yards ahead of him, an easy nine-iron shot, Grecich figured. It was surreal.

"Contact left, 100 meters," Quacker's voice sounded in his headset and Grecich turned his head until he saw a teenage girl swaying on a street corner, drained of color and her chest covered in mucus. He lifted his rifle and looked at her through the 4X Day Scope.

"Weapons tight," Grecich said, watching the girl, her mouth deformed with what looked to be sharper, longer teeth. Her hair was a tangled mess and her skin was mottled gray.

She was someone's daughter. Had been someone's daughter. He had a daughter, somewhere in North Carolina with his wife and son. He hoped, still. The girl in his sights was maybe eighteen and acted as if strung out on drugs, just standing still, swaying, her sorority sweatshirt covered in grime. Grecich made a hand gesture and the team moved off away from the girl.

They moved cautiously into the street networks of Emory University, bounding in small moves and covering each other as they progressed. The college was deserted. There were car crashes in some of the intersections, evidence of a mad dash to get out of the area that had failed, utterly. Decomposed bodies filled the quadrangle as the team moved alongside it and past the Candler Library. Grecich paused the team and surveyed the dead: they were laid out as if awaiting removal, some still covered with blankets or weighted-down plastic sheeting. Most were bones covered with remnants of dried-out flesh and tattered clothing.

"Yo, Sandman, what the fuck happened here?" whispered into his headset.

Grecich looked over at Garbo and drew a slash across his neck. Garbo shrugged and nodded. Grecich stepped toward a row of the dead and looked down at them. College kids, he guessed. Probably penned up on campus to keep them safe and in one place while somebody somewhere figured out how to get them home.

And then one of the bodies ten yards to his right sat up and turned its head at him. Grecich almost startled. Almost. He took a half step back, training his M4 rifle on the figure. It was a young man, maybe twenty, covered in sputum and devoid of color, his body dehydrated to the point it reminded Grecich of photos he'd seen of World War Two German death camp victims. It stood up.

Grecich raised his rifle and sighted down on the ... creature. Grecich wasn't nervous, he was certain every man on his team also had the shot.

"Keep your eyes out, I've got this one," Grecich whispered into his microphone.

Grecich flitted his eyes around the area quickly, checking for other suddenly re-animated corpses. Nothing. He watched the young man stagger toward him, murmuring something under his breath.

And then a crossbow bolt pierced the man's skull and the zombie collapsed to the ground. Grecich dropped to a knee and turned toward the point from where the arrow had been shot, looking for the archer.

"We've got armed locals, be aware," Grecich said into his mic.

Just then a man in gray urban camouflage cargo pants and a black T-shirt  dropped out of a tree at the edge of the quad and waved at Grecich to come toward him. Grecich pointed his weapon at him, but the man only waved at him and looked around the area nervously. Grecich figured he was a twentyish Asian man, probably Japanese, armed with a crossbow and a quiver of bolts.

"Keep frosty, I've got a civvy to deal with," Grecich said, standing and making his way quickly to the archer.

"I’m guessing you're not here to save us, so what are you here for?" the man said, pulling a bolt from his quiver and readying it in his crossbow.

"Not here to save you?" Grecich kept his rifle at the ready, but pointed downward. "Why do you say that?"

“You’re the third team of military I’ve seen come in and try to get to the CDC, and not one of them has tried to help any of us,” the man said. “So, you’re probably just another team trying to get something from inside the building.”

Grecich was irritated that he hadn’t been briefed about previous attempts, although it was possible command was unaware of what the people stateside had been doing while they had been at sea.

“Well, I’m not here to rescue you,” Grecich said, “you’re right about that. What happened to the other two teams you saw?”

The man shrugged. “No idea. But if they sent you guys here, they must’ve been killed by zombies before they got what they were looking for.”

Or after, Grecich thought, which pissed him off. Whatever intel he was supposed to get could now be anywhere.

“What the hell was that about?” Grecich said, nodding at the body with the quiver in its head.

"Saving you," the man said. "Wasn't sure if you guys knew what was out here and what to do about it."

Grecich glanced at his rifle.

"Not a good idea, man, gunshots are like dinner bells for zombies,” the man said, and stuck out his hand, “I’m Hideo Watanabe.”

Grecich looked at the hand for a second and back up at Hideo.

“You can call me ‘Sandman’,” Grecich said.

Hideo let out a short laugh. “Hey, just like-“

“Yeah, just like it,” Grecich said. “So, what can you tell me about these zombies?”

Hideo looked at the mass of corpses. “The fuckin’ zombies pull that one all the time. They put themselves somewhere where there's lots of real dead people hoping you won't notice, and then they get you when you're not paying attention. I was afraid you were going to shoot it, so you gave me no choice. I still gotta live here, so dealing with a couple of hundred extra undead in the area would’ve made that kinda difficult.

“And for whatever reason, the undead seem to know there’s something important around here, so they haven’t gone and joined the super-group that’s downtown.”

Grecich nodded.

"We get lots of people coming in looking for the CDC," Hideo said. "They mostly get eaten by the zombies."

"Really? What's lots of people?"

Hideo shrugged. "Hard to say. I've seen a couple of dozen people in different-sized groups come in over the last few months. I guess they figure there must be someone working on a cure in there, but nobody can get in and nobody ever comes out."

It  took some effort for Grecich to keep his composure to ask the next question. "What's the zombie situation like between here and there?"

Hideo shrugged. "There's thousands of them spread out across campus and in the nearby neighborhoods. Lots of 'em act dead like this dude was, but there's groups of twenty-to-a-hundred of them in pockets. You gotta be careful, the slow ones are real quiet and can sneak up on you. But the fast ones can come at you at a pretty good clip and get you before you know it if you don't have somewhere to get to pretty quickly. And you gotta pay attention to what they’re doing, because sometimes the slow walkers are trying to distract you from the fast ones, and sometimes it’s the other-way-around. You’ll figure it out after you’ve seen it a couple of times."

Grecich regarded Hideo for a moment and was impressed by the young man’s ability to suss out what appeared to be zombie tactics, such as they might be. "Anything else I should know?"

“You know you have to shoot them in the head, right? That’s the only thing that kills them,” Hideo asked.

Grecich nodded and patted Hideo on the shoulder. "Thanks for the help. Now, you get to wherever's safe and leave the rest to us."

Hideo's face clouded over. "You don't want my help?"

Grecich smiled in the most practiced, friendly way he knew. "You've already given it, Hideo. But we need to be just us."

Grecich moved away from Hideo and called his team in with a hand gesture.

"What's up?" Quacker asked.

Grecich told them what Hideo had told him, and they screwed suppressors onto their weapons. Grecich wondered how loud the sound had to be to attract attention and hoped he wouldn’t find out.

They moved slowly through the campus of Emory University, silent as ghosts, steering around the pockets of undead. The undead were everywhere, swaying in intersections or standing near the entrances to buildings. The team passed Sorority Village and crossed over Facilities Management Drive and halted in a copse of trees, each man assuming a well-rehearsed position. Grecich stared across the railroad tracks at an abandoned protective cordon set up by the Army.  Up and down the railroad tracks were thousands of bodies reduced mostly to bone and dried flesh.

Grecich whispered into his mic, reminding the team about zombies hiding among the real dead, and sent Garbo and Quacker out to examine the checkpoint on the other side of the railway. Ten minutes later, the team was outside the headquarters for the Centers for Disease Control, a carpet of bodies spread across the streets and a nearby parking lot, evidence of a massive firefight at some point months ago.