Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (22 page)

Gannon smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Thank god we don’t have any nukes.”

Duncan walked over to his bicycle and turned to the others, "Let's just ride. We need to find somewhere to stay before nightfall."

The road out of the city was littered with car crashes, evidence of mad dashes from civilization to a hoped-for zombie-free wilderness. Where there were few people, it stood to reason, there should be few zombies. By mid-afternoon they were walking alongside their bicycles, none of them conditioned for long terms sitting on narrow, gel-padded seats. Gannon had been the first to complain about the discomfort he felt, but when he had made mention of it, Duncan had braked to a stop and gotten off his bicycle and made a series of weird, goose-steps trying to restore the sensation to the area of his body that had been pressed against the most narrow part of the bicycle saddle.

“Shit, I think my nuts are numb,” he said, reaching into his pants and re-adjusting his private parts. “How the fuck does anybody do the Tour de France? No wonder that Armstrong guy got dick cancer. This ain’t how you’re supposed to sit for any length of time.”

Duncan looked at Katrina for a moment and bobbed his head. “Sorry, Kat, but it’s the truth, and I had to say it.”

She laughed. “What? I’m supposed to be offended because you were talking about how your penis is sore from sitting on a bike seat for a couple of hours? Please. My ass hurts something fierce.”

So they alternately walked and biked until late afternoon, when they came upon a make-shift barrier of cars pushed together in a line to form a wall blocking the road. It was obvious the placement of the vehicles was intentional, to keep anyone moving down the road from going any further. The cars extended off to either side of the road to points where no automobile could drive around.

The insides of the cars were stuffed with a variety of things, but mostly pillows and blankets. Atop the cars were anything and everything that could be set upon them to make a barrier: lawn chairs, charcoal grills, garden gnomes, sand bags, assorted pieces of masonry and uprooted shrubbery. Whoever had built it didn’t want anyone looking through or over the barrier, or going over it. Around, on foot, was the only option.

Gannon looked at the other two, slipped his pistol out of his belt, and said, “Well, there’s either living people or undead on the other side of this, and methinks neither kind are likely to welcome us.”

Duncan pulled his pistol out.

Katrina looked at the two of them. “What? Are you going to just shoot them?”

Gannon smiled. “Only if they’re already dead.”

“Stay here with the bicycles,” Duncan said, shrugging out of his backpack. “There’s probably nothing on the other side, but you don’t even have your hoe anymore, so, you’re better off being here and riding in the opposite direction if anything goes wrong.”

Duncan and Gannon walked around the right edge of the barrier, weapons at the ready. A dozen bloated bodies lay on the ground, melting into goo or mostly bones in clothing. On the opposite side of the road from them, a zombie with the flesh burned from its legs scrabbled against the ground with its hands, its eyes fixed on the two of them. Duncan and Gannon glanced at each other, unsure of what to make of the scenario: there was a second row of cars twenty feet beyond and identical to the first row, built up with the flotsam of suburbia to reinforce it.

“What the fuck, Dunc?” Gannon asked.

“Dunno, mate, but it’s most definitely weird,” Duncan said, stepping forward and examining the corpses near him. “Clearly, we aren’t the first ones to try to get through here. Somebody doesn’t want us to get past, at least not on the road. But going around seems easy enough.” Duncan walked up to the next row of vehicles and started walking the down the length to the end.

“Who builds a double-fence out of cars and spare backyard objects? It’s almost a mockery of being spooky,” Gannon said, stopping by one car and looking through the windows. “This one is three-quarters filled with water and has a layer of footballs and tennis balls floating on top. Uh, why?”

Duncan turned and raised his pistol, stepping quickly to his left and aiming. “Duck!”

Gannon spun and dropped to one knee, bringing his pistol up just as Duncan’s shot echoed inside the canyon of cars. The zombie’s neck tore open at the Adam’s apple and the middle-aged man in pajamas staggered backward a half-step.

Gannon pulled the trigger of his pistol and the top of the undead man’s head popped into the air with spurt of blood. The zombie collapsed to the ground atop another body.

“Head shots, Dunc,” Gannon said, “head shots.”

“Shit, we’ve gotta see what’s on the other side of this wall of cars right now,” Duncan said, hustling to the end and turning the corner. Shuffling toward him down the road were hundreds of zombies, all now attracted to the sound of two gunshots. Gannon came up quickly behind him and paused.

“Well, we ain’t going that way,” Gannon said. “Let’s go.”

They ran around the first row of cars toward the bikes and a bug-eyed Katrina, who stared at them in anticipation of terror.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Zombies. Lots of them about a half-click down the road, and coming this way,” Duncan said as he got on his bike.

“Out here on the edge of the desert?”

Gannon was on his bike and made a quick circle around the other two. “Come on, let’s get back to that town we just passed through and hunker down for the night.

They biked back into the little Shire of Brookton an hour before sunset. They rode through the small town for a short while, scouting it out, looking for the undead, before deciding that the entire place had been abandoned. The shops they had passed were boarded up, and the three figured there hadn’t been any of the looting that had gone on in Perth in the mad frenzy after the authorities had lost control of the city. These people had vanished, perhaps with a plan to come back once the contagion had been contained.

“Crikey, I can’t believe the entire town is deserted,” Gannon said as they pedaled around the streets, looking for a house to break into.

“It’s not a big town, Gannon,” Duncan said. “Probably only a coupla hundred people lived here. I can see ‘em bugging out of town if they thought it wasn’t going to be safe.”

Katrina made a dismissive laugh. “Really? A little town without an airport or any reason for someone to visit evacuates everyone, but a major city like Perth tries to quarantine us all in under shoot-to-kill orders? If there was anywhere this plague would hit, it’d be Perth, not here. These people should’ve been the ones to sit tight and wait it out. The Army could’ve probably saved them, here.”

“Bingo, Kat, which is why they tried to keep us all penned in: they couldn’t possibly get us anywhere safe ‘cause there were just too many of us, and they couldn’t just let us all leave willy nilly because here’s where we’d come, and here we are,” Gannon said. “Only, where are they?”

Duncan shrugged. “Maybe they knew something we don’t?”

Gannon paused for a moment. “Yeah, but what? There aren’t any bodies, no signs of looting, it’s just as if they all packed up and left before anything happened.”

“But where?” Katrina asked.

“Maybe they’ve all got family in Esperance like Gannon?” Duncan said with a laugh.

“Once you’ve tasted the clams from Pink Lake, you’ll understand why I want to go there,” Gannon said with a wink.

Duncan smiled and thumbed at a house. “Let’s break in to this one. It’s far enough from the main road that we shouldn’t have to worry too much about any of the undead making their way this far into town, if they’re still coming.”

That night, Duncan took first watch, sitting up in the living room of the house and wondering if the light from the two votive candles was enough to alert the undead that he was alive, inside the house. The world outside was quiet. Too quiet. He heard noises in the breeze that brushed against the outside of the house, imagining them to be the palms of hands testing for weaknesses in the exterior wall. He swore he could hear trash cans being bumbled into, a shuffle of feet en masse moving down the sidewalk outside. And, for a moment, he thought he could hear a chorus of voices on the wind in a minor key, murmuring “brains.”

There was a stir in the house and he tensed. The sounds of footsteps softly indenting carpet nearly roared through the house, and he turned his head and gripped his pistol.

“You’re still awake, nice,” Gannon said as he turned the corner into the room. “I was trying to be quiet so as to give you a start when I touched your shoulder.”

Duncan smiled. “I heard you a mile away.”

“Heard anything outside?”

“Not a sound.”

“I wonder if that’s a good thing,” Gannon said, walking to the windows and pulling a curtain aside an inch. Duncan’s eyes widened and his gut tensed. “Nothing out there.”

“So, whaddya think we should do? Continue the plan to ride until we find a safe haven, or maybe hunker down here and see if we can ride things out?”

Gannon shrugged. “The people who lived here didn’t see a future in staying here, and there’s a couple-hundred of undead just a mile or two outside of here on the other side of a double wall of parked cars blocking the main road.

“Somebody tried something to keep the town safe, but nobody stayed. I’m guessing there’s a good reason for that.”

“So we keep riding for Esperance?”

“That was our plan.”

“Then we have to spend tomorrow finding a four-wheeler and then find all the gas we can and mod out a vehicle,” Duncan said. “This biking shit is going to get us killed.”

It took most of the next day going house-to-house before they found the keys to a car that was acceptable to them: a 1979 Toyota LandCruiser

“You really want to risk our lives in this?” Duncan said. “It’s almost a half-century old.”

“Believe me, Dunc, this is what you want in the end times, not some fancy shmancy Beemer four-wheeler made last year for the tennis set,” Gannon said, starting it up and listening to the rumble of the engine. “This was made for the wilderness, not for tooling around town with a bunch of kids in the back so you’re not embarrassed to be driving a mini-van.”

“Yeah, but if it breaks down, we’re screwed.”

Gannon shook his head. “No way, mate. If a modern car breaks down, now that we’re in the apocalypse of zombies, then you’re screwed. You can’t fix a modern car on your own because of the way they’re made: the engine’s a square bit of plastic with wires coming out of it. You need a computer and a rocket scientist to fix ‘em. But this you can fix with a wire hanger and electrical tape, and you can make spare parts out of metal cans, plastic tubing and spare coins.”

Duncan raised his eyebrows querulously.

Gannon grinned. “But why the worry? Whoever owned this has kept it up. Ignore the mileage and it might as well be brand new.”

Katrina came out the front door of the house next-door with a canvas bag and smiled.

“More food,” she said.

“This town is a gold mine,” Gannon said, getting out of the car and closing the door.

Katrina walked up to them and dropped the bag on the ground. “I figure we got a week or two’s worth of food and water now, so we should be good.”

“For a week or two, sure,” Duncan said. “And then what?”

Gannon shrugged. “Well, hopefully everything will be peachy in Esperance. If not, we do like we just done here, stock up and move on. There’s gotta be a safe haven somewhere.”

Highway 40 southeast out of Brookton was mostly open roadway, with a few broken-down cars pulled off to the side. They had all expected zombie infestations, but each of the small towns they had passed through had been empty, as if the inhabitants had left in an orderly manner. Gannon slowed the LandCruiser down as they passed through them, hoping a living person would emerge with news, but nobody had, and they had goosed the speed back up exiting each place. They were all dead. Or undead. Or hiding.

Gannon lifted his foot off the gas pedal as they neared the intersection with the South Coast Highway, letting the vehicle coast the last kilometer with the engine idling. The three of them scanned the countryside. Duncan picked up the binoculars from the seat and looked through them at the intersection.

“Holy shit.”

“What?” Katrina asked.

Duncan pulled the binoculars away from his eyes and handed them to her. She looked through them for several long seconds before gasping. “My god.”

“Alright, enough with this, what is it?” Gannon asked.

Erected across the intersection, barring easy driving access to the highway toward Ravensthorpe was a make-shift barricade straight out of the Middle Ages. It was fifteen feet high, constructed of hewn trees lashed and nailed together in five large Xs and braced with concrete barriers at the base to withstand attempts to ram through it. Tied to the Xs were undead, splayed out, alive in their undead state, moaning.

“I don’t know what’s scarier, this barrier or the thought of the mates who went to the trouble to construct it,” Gannon said, hefting his weapon and walking around to the back of the gate, examining it. “It’s not meant to be rolled aside, neither.”

Duncan laughed.

“What”