Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (6 page)

Why, dear God, Remy wanted to know, did Nicholas Cage star in so many movies, so many of which clearly sucked because Nicholas Cage was in them? This was the problem with America writ large: no matter how bad or incompetent or arrogant something from America was, there was no shortage of assholes willing to buy it.

But, of course, now there was no shortage of zombies and no explanation for them and, titfucker of all, the Americans hadn’t been heard from since they had shut down their borders and started shooting airliners bound for North America out of the sky. Some help those motherfuckers had turned out to be. And then his cell phone had died and he’d lost the Internet and nobody had a battery-powered radio and they had all just holed up in the university dorm room and wondered who was in charge and what would happen next. Remy had argued for staying in the dorm. Inside, they were safe from the zombies and the elements. The authorities would come for them as soon as they could; they wouldn’t forget to check a university for students.

Which is when Yvette had heard that Luc and Pierre were planning on getting out of the dorm and looking for help. Yvette convinced Syrah to join her with them. And since Remy and Syrah had been having sex for the previous six weeks, well, it hadn’t been too difficult to talk him into the need to find a better place somewhere outside the dorm even though he had pointed out there was more than enough food and water for another couple of months if they ate sparingly and just waited for help. The government, he argued, would be looking for them here in the dorm, not out on the streets. And besides, the zombies were outside on the streets, even if the neighborhood around the university had seemed deserted of them lately.

But everyone believed Luc’s explanation that the government wasn’t coming because it no longer existed, and those who had been in it were most likely doing whatever they could to save themselves.

Once they were all out on the road as a group, Syrah had stopped having sex with him because of the nature of group living and Remy had finally gotten pissed off enough that he wanted hot food instead of another can of cold ham and pea soup, at which point the zombies had found them and eaten half the group.

The threesome walked down the middle of Rue Maurice Burrus toward Liepvre, heading for Yvette’s father’s house in a suburb of Strasbourg: a destination of last resort now that Luc wasn't in charge. Remy had no idea what to do or where to go, so when Yvette said that her father would know, Remy figured the few days walk was worth the risk. He wished they had never left the dormitory, but he didn’t want to have to go through Nancy again.

Remy stared absently at the landscape as they made their way down the road, the three of them silent, each of them paying some amount of attention to the possibility of zombies, but all of them lost in their heads wondering about the new meaning of life. If this was the future, what, then? Endless zombie wars? A return to what? – the pre-Industrial age? Remy shook his head at the thought of that: no media, no nightclubs, no cocktails, no online pornography, no office job doing whatever it was he had been going to college for five years to figure do for the rest of his life. Would the return of 1820 have any need of a computer savvy graphics designer?

Just then he felt his right forearm get squeezed. He turned and looked down into Syrah’s dark brown eyes. She looked bemused.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked, a small smile.

“You,” he said. “Us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was thinking that I need to make love to you again, soon, to reconnect to some sort of reality that I can understand and make sense of, and not have to constantly be aware of this new incomprehensible world we live in,” Remy said, “but mostly because I miss the tenderness of your kisses, the touch of your fingers on my back, the sound of your soft voice in my ear.”

Syrah’s face had barely had the moment to change from curiosity to bewilderment for Remy’s response when the sound of running suddenly filled the silence. They all turned their heads looking for the source of the footfalls when a crack rang out. And then, a half-second later, several blasts reverberated from the mountains around them, and Remy finally located the sound of the runners, a group of five “sprinter zombies” now all falling to the ground amid an aerosolization of blood straight out of an American war-porn movie.

Before the first of the zombie bodies had fallen to the ground, Syrah had started a shriek of fear and panic and dug her fingernails into Remy’s arm. A micro-second later, Yvette joined Syrah in her death yell, but two seconds later, both young women had been stunned into silence at the motionlessness of the now truly-dead zombies on the pavement meters from them. Remy looked around and saw two men and a woman approaching them, each with a rifle of some sort more-or-less pointed at him and the two girls.

“Just the three of you?” a man with a rifle asked, his hair pulled back in a ponytail, several weeks of beard growth rimming his cheeks.

Remy was a bit stunned, still. Firstly, by the closeness of the now authentically dead undead, but also by the sight of three authentically alive humans with guns. He had never seen a gun before in real life, and stared at the weapon in the man’s hands as if it were some forbidden implement from a mythical time period. And then he realized Yvette and Syrah were staring at him, wondering what he was going to do. Fuck! … He was in charge.

“Uhh, yeah, just the three of us,” Remy said, motioning with his hands and then shrugging, hoping the movements would convince the gun wielders of their non-offensive status.

The other man and the woman split, each of them moving off to either side of Remy and his two companions. The man scanned the intersecting road while the woman kept her eyes on the threesome. The bearded man approached them directly, his rifle held at waist-height in both hands.

“Walking down the middle of the road without any weapons of any kind?” the man said, pausing and scanning the woods lining the north side of the road before turning his attention to the fields on the other, in-between Rue Maurice Burrus and the N59 highway. He raised his left hand in the air and waved it back and forth. “Are you three trying to get eaten or do you want to find out what life as a zombie is like?”

Remy was filled with a sudden twinge of anger at the half-joke. There were no rules about the current zombie apocalypse, no government regulations about how to act or what to do. Hell, he had wanted to stay in the dormitory and wait for help, how was he supposed to know what the proper course of action was outside?

“We’re trying to get to Strasbourg,” Remy said after a moment, turning his head to the fields off the side of the road and noticing several other armed people moving off to the west.

The man tilted his head slightly and furrowed his eyes. “Strasbourg? What the hell for? There’s only zombies there, and tens of thousands of them at that. You wouldn't make it within ten kilometers of the place though, seeing as you're not armed and on foot.”

Remy glanced at Syrah and Yvette. Yvette sagged slightly at the news, enough to let on that she had only ever thought there was an outside chance of hope. The world really was dead. Undead.

“Well, you three can stay with us until you decide what you’re going to do,” the man said. “I’m Thierry. It’ll be dark soon, come with us. You’ll be safe.”

An hour later they passed through a make-shift barricade of felled trees and sandbags. On the side of the road, in what used to be a football pitch, a series of what Remy took to be burial trenches were dug into the field, the first two already topped with dirt, filled to capacity. A makeshift gate was pulled open just as a half-dozen other armed people materialized from the sides of the road and from behind houses and joined them. Inside, Remy stared in awe at the amount of people near the barricade who were armed with rifles and pistols.

“Wow, you guys sure have a lot of guns,” Remy said as he watched a pair of women push the woven-branches gate back into place. “Are they all legal?”

Thierry sniffed out a laugh. “Legal? Are zombies legal? Come on, follow me.”

They walked into the center of town down Rue Clemenceau, passing by houses and closed-up shops, and turned onto Rue de la Gare, walking up it a short way until they heard the sound of children at play. And smelled meat cooking on a fire.

“You’ve got fresh meat?” Remy asked, his mouth watering as his nose filled with the savory smell of grilled game. “What is it?”

Thierry sniffed, shrugged. “What I wouldn’t give for beef.”

“You have children here?” Syrah said.

“Oh, yeah, lots of them,” Thierry said, motioning them off the street and through a parking lot that led into a paved playground area behind a school.

“I haven’t seen children in months,” Syrah said as she turned around the corner of the boys school and saw almost two dozen kids at play on an asphalt court buffered from the roads by several buildings.

She started to cry at the sight of the them, their ages from three to eleven, as they kicked footballs, played escargot or drew on the pavement with chalk. Several parents, each of them armed with a weapon of some sort, stood close watch nearby, their attention focused not on the children and whether any would get bruised from a tumble to the earth, but outward, looking for sudden infiltration by the walking dead.

“I never thought I’d see children again,” Syrah said as she paused to watch them a moment longer.

This was a concern that had never even occurred to Remy. Children? The only reaction he had to the word was a cautionary one, a reminder to constantly ensure that the women he slept with were on the pill or, if they weren’t, that he wear a condom. But, mostly, to make sure the woman was on the pill. Aside from guarding against the accidental creation of a child, children were something that Remy never thought about or noticed. That Syrah was moved to tears by the sight of a group of children at play rankled Remy on some level, redefined her in some way, turned her from a sexual being into a breeder to be wary of. Anyway, who wanted to have children in the pre-zombie world, when the living was fun and children would only ruin things? Now that there were zombies, who in their right mind would want to bring a child into the world?

Suddenly Thierry stirred to life and tilted his head in the air, sniffing on the breeze. Remy stared at him, wondering if these small-town mountain hunting types had figured a way to smell zombies on the wind. Remy hated hunting, though he had never done it, nor even fished. He considered it déclassé, something nobody should have to do and fewer should want to do. Humans hadn’t climbed from the muck of millennia and created skyscrapers and smart phones just so some small percentage of the population could indulge their natural urge to kill wild animals. Wild animals were a part of nature, they served a purpose, and that purpose did not involve hunting and killing them for pleasure.

“Boar!” Thierry said ecstatically, slapping Remy on the back. “Tonight, my new friends, we shall have boar!”

After a dinner of boar, roasted carrots and parsnips with dill, and a salad of wild flowers and lettuces in a balsamic dressing – a meal so good Remy realized he had forgotten what cooked fresh food tasted like – Thierry and the rest of the townsfolk took their empty plates and left the threesome alone with a bottle of Riesling. Remy had done everything he could not to roll his eyes when presented the bottle of German wine, but he was glad for it: it had been weeks since he’d even seen a bottle of alcohol, let alone wine. It was sweet and cool going down, and after a while of passing the bottle between them, Remy could feel the relief ease into his body as the wine diffused throughout it.

Remy leaned back against the trunk of a tree in a buffer scrim between parking areas, the asphalt unyielding beneath his legs but his mind drifting peacefully through the twilight sky. It was good to be alive, again, and he felt the rush of desire for Syrah as he watched her sip from the bottle. His eyes flitted briefly to Yvette and he wondered about her, too, and if the girls would mind if he took turns sleeping with them so long as the three of them were a unit.

And then he felt tired, energy seeping from him as the wine worked its magic on his body and soul. His mind relaxed and his body let down its guard. Every cell inside of him wanted nothing more than to turn off all the alarms and physical requirements of a life in constant fear and submit to sleep. The last time he had gotten any real sleep was when he had fallen asleep in the train station a week earlier, convinced they were safe because they were inside a building.

“I wonder where we can sleep,” Remy said.

“Thierry said there’s a hotel just up the road a hundred or so meters,” Yvette said. “The Two Keys Inn.”

“He also said there are sticks with white strips of fabric tied to them in front of empty houses and apartment buildings with unoccupied units. He said the owners are either dead or undead and won’t mind if we move in,” Syrah said.

Remy and the girls got up and began walking down Rue de Saint Antoine, looking for an open house. None were available. Inside many, the flicker of candlelight could be seen, reminding Remy that once not too long ago, that flicker would have been the blue of a television screen, numbing the occupants with mindless programming and blinding them to the realities of life. Now, finally, people were forced to live life in a genuine manner and in some harmony with nature.

They turned left onto Rue du Chalmont when Remy realized that if they didn’t find a place soon, they’d be walking around in complete darkness. This unnerved him, but not so much because of the possibility of a stray zombie coming across them but rather because of the large amount of people wandering around with firearms. He wondered who had trained any of them to use them?