Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (7 page)

“Hey, here’s one with a flag in front of it,” Yvette said.

They had been walking in silence since leaving the courtyard behind the boys school, and the sudden sound of Yvette’s voice had startled Remy. He had been lost in thoughts about the new order of things to come, how the property of the world would be re-distributed among the living after the undead had been dealt with. Now that there were fewer people, there was more than enough for everyone. Finally, there was a way to make the world fair. They were suddenly doused in a powerful white light, the beam playing across each of their faces as each reflexively lifted an arm to block the ray.

“You’re the living?” a voice asked, gruff and tinged with anger.

“Are we alive?” Remy asked, “is that what you’re asking? Yes, yes, we are very much the living.”

The beam dipped down to their kneecaps, but the damage to Remy’s night vision had been done, and he could make nothing out in the crepuscular gray of twilight.

“Walking around in the dark without any weapons isn’t exactly the smartest thing to do these days,” the voice said, the tone pained obviousness, a bored elementary teacher lecturing a child.

“We’re looking for a house with a white flag in front of it,” Syrah said. “This one has such a tag.”

The beam swerved across the ground and bobbed around the front yard of the house before settling on a small stake with a length of torn white sheet attached to it. The beam lingered a moment, played across the façade of the house, then meandered down and across the ground to a spot in the street between Remy’s group and the speaker.

“Well, you should get inside,” the man’s voice said. “Lock up and take shifts through the night on guard. It’s pretty safe around here, but we still get the occasional zombie that makes it through the perimeter.”

The beam switched off and the sounds of several pairs of boots crunching on gravel receded into the darkness. Remy turned and looked at the girls, who were waiting for him to decide something.

“Works for me. Let’s get inside,” Remy said.

The pounding on the front door at dawn was so sudden and furious that Remy startled awake on the couch in the front room of the house, sliding off it and onto the floor as he sat up and twisted to orient himself on the origin of the banging. Yvette was sitting on a rocking chair on the opposite side of the room, reading a book she must have chosen from the bookshelf in the room, and laughed briefly at the sight of Remy on the floor. The noise had caused her to drop her book in shock, too, but Remy hated being laughed at and scowled for a half-moment before gathering his wits.

Remy pulled the door open and beheld Thierry, smiling broadly and armed with a shotgun held idly at his side. Three other men and a woman – all of them armed in some manner – stood in the background by the edge of the road, chatting amongst themselves.

“Good morning, my new friends, I trust you slept well and safely last night,” Thierry said, “but the day is young and there is much to be done.”

“Done?” Remy said.

“Oh, yes,” Thierry said. “Meals to be made, children to be cared for, fences to be made stronger. Come over to the courtyard behind the boys school in twenty minutes for breakfast and assignment to a work detail. Lots to be done before sunset.”

Thierry turned and walked off with his group down the road, not looking back. Remy stood in the door and watched them until they turned a corner, then slowly turned on his heels and regarded Yvette and Syrah, who were both standing in the middle of the room, watching him.

“Jesus. They want us to start working for a living already,” Remy said, trying to figure out what alternatives there might be. Continue on the road to Strasbourg and risk the zombies? They had no weapons and had probably been incredibly lucky not to have been killed or infected since leaving the dormitory.

Yvette motioned to the kitchen behind her, through an arch from the living room. “Well, there’s no food in there or the basement pantry. My guess is everything was collected from all the houses and stored somewhere else. There’s nothing for mice to nibble.”

After a breakfast of pancakes and home-made berry-syrup, Remy had been assigned to a group heading to the farms around Saint-Hippolyte, a small town about eleven kilometers to the southeast. It would take a little more than two hours to get there on foot, pulling wagons. Remy had protested, not wanting to walk through the wooded hills.

“Why can’t we just drive there?” Remy had asked.

“You brought gasoline with you, did you?” Thierry asked and laughed. “We haven’t had any gasoline for weeks, now. Maybe we can siphon some from an automobile while we’re down there, should we get lucky that way.”

Syrah and Yvette had both been assigned to the kitchen in the boys school, and Remy waved slightly to them as he trooped out of the town with Thierry and seven others – three men, four women. Everyone except Remy was armed, although two of the women carried large knives instead of firearms. The day was spent scavenging through fields and abandoned houses for anything that could be eaten. They saw nobody, neither alive nor dead, which Remy thought both odd and comforting.

At twilight, back in the house, Yvette opened a bottle from a local winery while Syrah lit a candle and set it on the coffee table in the living room. Remy had nothing to show for his day, having turned over his collection of turnips and onions to the boys school before dinner. He did, however, possess a small pike he found in a work shed on one of the farms, which gave him some sense of comfort that he could now, at least, try to defend himself should he need to.

“Another Riesling,” Remy said. “Not bad.”

“It’s from somewhere outside Selestat,” Yvette said. “They’ve got hundreds of bottles of wines stored in the basement of the school.”

“And who-knows-how-much canned food and bulk flour and whatnot larded away in the classrooms,” Syrah added. “After the town closed itself off when the quarantines began, everyone pooled everything together so it wouldn’t be left to spoil in individual homes. Then they divided into teams to spread the workload around. We spent all day washing the morning dishes and then making the beans for dinner.”

Remy gave the girls a look of compassion, indicating that he felt their pain, and took another small swallow of the wine.

“It beats sitting around in the dorm all day playing cards,” Yvette said.

Remy thought about that for a moment, already knowing he’d be doing more scavenging the next morning as his group continued to work through the farmland for food, fuel and other useful items from before the zombies. Fucking zombies. Nobody had any idea where they had come from, how they were made, or why they existed. One day, life had been complex and filled with a million struggles, a constant sense of trying to find dignity and justice in the modern world of nameless, faceless men and the vast machinery of Western life and its total indifference to the individual. Now, most of those people were walking dead, and those that were alive were struggling to figure out what the new rules were.

On the walk back from Saint-Hippolyte, Remy had figured the new rules should be obvious to those that remained alive: kill the undead, redistribute the property equally, limit the amount of new children brought into the world, and ensure everyone understood their part in a harmonious and cooperative society. Only nobody wanted to talk about how to restructure society on the walk back home from the farms, although everyone had agreed that killing the undead should be a top priority.

Remy took another sip of the wine and stared at Yvette for a moment: she had said she was glad for the labor, the security of the town, the opportunity to live rather than survive. So was he, he realized. And, yet, he missed his cell phone, reading blogs on the Internet, picking up girls at the discos for one night stands, sitting at a table on a sidewalk and sipping coffee, listening to his iPod, and all of the other things that had been his life just a few months ago.

Modern life suddenly didn’t seem as oppressive as the new version of life did. There had been so many things to do that deciding among them had been the defining aspect of difficulty, he realized, as he took another sip of wine – the only wine available – and regarded the girls in the candlelight. Now, there were only two girls to choose from – one, really, if that were still a going concern. Maybe there had been too much choice for the average person in the world before the zombies. Maybe that’s what had made it so confounding to the average person: how could anyone know what to choose?

But now, with almost nothing to choose from, it was easy to figure out what made you content: a woman, a bottle of wine, the flicker of a candle. Dinner wasn’t what you had to choose amongst, it was what was offered. Remy smiled to himself as if he had made some sudden great insight into the nature of life: choices were a trap, you only need a few options to make you happy, not infinite ones. He smiled. He had a blonde and a brunette in his room; he only had to choose.

All Hell Breaks Loose

Los Angeles, California – Day 21

Brooke Tammerlin felt Joshua Sparks’ fingers lace through hers as they stepped onto the sidewalk outside the bar and for a second she could feel her wedding ring get pressed into her finger. For a millisecond she remembered that she was married, that her husband had just texted her from work on the other side of town wishing her a good time out with her girlfriends, and then she forgot about the ring and her marriage and felt the warmth of Josh’s palm, the light pressure of his fingertips on the back of her hand.

She had known Josh twenty years earlier in high school and had never thought about him since. Rather, she had known Josh was in her high school twenty years earlier and never thought about him then, either. But she had run into him one night in a bar on the last girls night out and began idle chit chat with him while her two friends reviewed the karaoke song menu. He was a nice guy, almost bland conversationally, but he had an easy laugh and knew when to flatter a girl. He was a normal guy with a blue collar job, a soon-to-be ex-wife, two little girls and a shiny pick-up truck that was immaculate on the inside.

He had mentioned right away that he was going through a divorce when she noticed the wedding ring on his hand. He had told Brooke that until the divorce was final, he was still officially married, and so he was going to wear the ring right up until the end. That sense of commitment had made Brooke feel something for Josh that she no longer felt with her own husband. Hours later, they had drunkenly made out in the parking lot alongside his pick-up truck, exchanged cell numbers, and begun the intoxicating initial stages of an affair that had led to this night: dinner, cocktails and then sex in his apartment. Which is what both of them were anticipating as they walked down the sidewalk away from the bar, she eager for a charge of romance in her life and he just looking to get laid.

Brooke had been listening to Josh talk about a soccer trip he was planning to take his two girls on in a few weeks time but she had been imagining the scene to come in his apartment. How would it transpire, she wondered? Part of her just wanted to strip naked immediately and fuck, replace the boring routine of marital sex with a new paradigm, and part of her wanted him to find some way to seduce her, to make the moment something she would never forget, the beginning of the next phase of her life.

Which is when a blood-spattered Latino man ran past them on the sidewalk, his eyes wide with terror.

“Jesus, what the hell happened to that guy?” Josh said, absent-mindedly releasing Brooke’s hand as he turned to watch the man run away from them into the night. He turned to Brooke, “Did you see that guy? He had blood all over him.”

She hadn’t seen. She’d been inside her head, fantasizing about what was about to happen just a few minutes from then, if he would notice the brand-new pink underwear set she had bought specifically for the night.

“What?” Brooke said, turning and looking. “Was he shot or something?”

Josh shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s gone, now. He went that way. Blood all over him, though.”

“I thought this was a safe neighborhood.”

Josh smiled, a smile she had grown to love the two other times she’d been with him in person, on nights she'd told her husband she had to work late but had met Josh for beers and flirting. His smile was wide and genuine, his teeth white.

“Oh, it’s safe,” Josh said. “Probably some dude trying to break into a car and got beat up by the owner or something.”

“You get a lot of that around here?” Brooke asked.

“Yeah. It’s a nice neighborhood for cars, so this is where the thieves come to steal them,” Josh said. “Caught an asshole trying to break into my truck last summer, but he ran off before I could get to him. I probably shouldn’t have shouted at him when I saw him trying to slim-jim the door, but at the time I was more worried about him getting in the truck and driving off than I was about beating the shit out of him.”

Brooke smiled at the notion: Josh didn’t seem like the kind of man who could beat the anything out of someone, even if he looked lean and trim in his button-down plaid shirt and blue jeans, his receding hairline close-cropped and conveying the impression of speed.  They got to an intersection and paused for traffic; she felt Josh lace his fingers back through hers. A thrill ran up her spine at his touch: this is what it felt like to fall in love, the heady dose of infatuation, the draw of pure lust, the overwhelming sense of excitement that good things were going to happen to you. He pulled her to him, wrapped his free hand around her waist and kissed her, the press of his lips firm and slightly wet. She felt light, as if she would float, and watched him longingly as he pulled his head away from hers and smiled. She hadn’t felt this way in a long time.