Fortunes & Failures - 03 (15 page)

A thud made Garrett jump. Something had slammed open the front door. Pulling the three-pound sledge from the loop on his belt, he went down to investigate. What was left of a man in what looked a postal carrier’s uniform had stumbled in and was wandering around the living room, bumping into the furniture. A lamp tumbled from an end table and crashed to the floor.

Garrett walked up behind it, setting his backpack down on the arm of the sofa, and brought the sledge down on the crown of the thing’s skull. Thick, dark goo squirted from the octagon shaped impression that sank almost two inches into its head. Garrett wiped off the hammer and slipped it back into the loop on his belt and turned to grab his pack.

At least a dozen more of those things were shambling across the front lawn and headed for the open door. Garrett briefly considered dealing with the closer ones before making a run for it; then he saw another twenty or so coming in their wake. In fact, as he paused to take a better look from the doorway, he could see more. They were coming through yards and around cars, and there were a lot.

He grabbed the pack and ran for the back door. The back yard was empty and he stood on the deck looking into some of the adjacent back yards. He had five to choose from; only two were totally empty.
Where had they all come from?
Garrett wondered. They hadn’t been there when he arrived.

By the time he reached the wall of his kingdom, there were well over a hundred coming on his heels in a stinking tide of undeath. He had to fight the urge to stop and kill some of them. Especially one particular girl who looked to be about nine or ten; she looked fresher than the others, and somebody had done him the favor of removing all her clothes.

As he climbed over the wall and pulled up the rope, several of them crashed through the hedge. He hadn’t swung his left leg over yet and one of them managed to get a hold on his ankle. With an uncharacteristic squeal of fear, Garrett brought his other foot back around and drove his heel into the upturned face. It took three solid kicks to free himself from the dreadlocked, ashy skinned zombie with piss-yellow teeth.

Swinging the rest of the way over and dropping to the ground on the other side, it took him several minutes to calm down. He remembered seeing his momma torn open that first night by several of the neighbors who had burst into their tiny house.

Eventually, his mind shifted to one particular neighbor: Kimmy Vanderwall. He remembered standing over her on his bed. Most likely, that was where she was right this moment, his seed having tunred into a dried glaze on her blue-grey skin.

Recovered from his terrifying experience, Garrett picked up the pack and walked through the shadows cast by the late afternoon sun. He’d untie The Toy from its post and let it watch while he ate dinner.



Kirsten felt a trickle of saliva spill from her mouth and dribble down her chin. She’d lost track of the days a long time ago, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d had something to eat. The Big Man sat beside her on the bed with a bag of barbecue potato chips, crunching loudly. She could smell the tangy, salty sweetness of them and it made her stomach churn and make noises that could almost pass for the noises coming from the monster people.

He’d been back for a few hours now. When he’d untied her, she noticed how skittish he was of the wall of hands reaching though the iron entry gates.
He’s afraid
, Kirsten thought, and immediately her mind went to figuring how she could use that to her advantage.

“Hungry?” a voice snapped her back to the present and the never-ending gnawing feeling in her gut. It was as if one of the monster people were inside her belly trying to get out.

Kirsten glanced over at the hulking figure beside her. The candlelight from the nightstand flickered, adding to The Big Man’s already frightening appearance. She mulled over the idea of actually answering, then decided against it. This was simply another one of his tricks.

She believed every word that he said. And, for a moment, she considered the possibility. There would be pain. But then …nothing. It would be over. Only, that would leave The Big Man alive. He would win. She’d already decided against allowing him to win. She didn’t know how yet, but somehow, she was going beat him.

The Big Man cut the bindings on her wrists and ankles. She tried to sit up straight and everything swirled as the room swam and her vision blurred. Huge hands scooped her up and carried her downstairs. Unable to help it, her head fell against his chest.

The next thing she knew, she was laid out on the rough, shell-textured concrete that surrounded the swimming pool. A moment later, he was rolling up one of the big wheelbarrows and stopping beside her. She hadn’t even realized that he’d been gone.
Am I passing out?
she wondered. She didn’t think so. Picking her up again, he placed her naked body in the cold metal basin of the wheelbarrow. The next sensation was the dousing of her body with pitchers of sun-warmed water. Then his hands went to work on her with soap and a washcloth.

Surprisingly, his hands were gentle as he cleaned her thoroughly from top to bottom. At one point, he even cautioned her to close her eyes as he rinsed her so that she wouldn’t get soap in them. Still, she refused to let her guard down.

When he was finished, he helped her stand so that he could pat her down with a towel. He handed her a water bottle which she sniffed before taking a drink from. He’d given her a swallow or two every day, but this was a full bottle. Kirsten drank her fill, savoring every drop.

While she drank, he pushed the wheelbarrow over to the knee-high grass and dumped it. He waited for a moment, then beckoned her to follow him back inside. Her mind raced with all the possibilities, trying desperately to think of anything that she could do. She came to the conclusion that her choices were absolutely nothing. She could barely walk, much less run or climb. And where did she hope to go? Naked, weak, and starving, she stumbled after The Big Man who had already gone back inside the house.

She made it to the stairs that led up to the back entry and stumbled. Struggling to her feet, she made another attempt. This time she fell hard and cried out. The Big Man stepped back out onto the landing and stared down at her. He seemed to consider her much like she would an insect for several seconds before finally scooping her up and carrying her inside.

This time she was certain that she’d passed out. She opened her eyes to find herself back in her bed. All of the linens had been changed. A tray sat on the nightstand beside her bed. It was piled with canned pears, what looked like a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and a pile of barbecue potato chips. Tears welled up in her eyes in unison with the drool that slipped from the corner of her mouth and trickled down her chin. She knew this trick all too well. He would eat it while she watched. Only…after the bath and the clean bed, a kernel of hope had bloomed against her will. Did she dare to hope? With that thought, her body began to shake. The more she fought it, the worse it got. Soon she was crying uncontrollably and trembling to boot.

“Aren’t you hungry?” The Big Man asked, his lips sickeningly close to her ear.

God help her, Kirsten nodded. She felt something cold press against her budding left breast. The knife. She knew its feel very well. Just as she had suspected, this was a trick.

Then, big hands scooped her up and set her on the floor. She looked up and The Big Man towered over her.

“You can have everything you see on that table, and all the water you can drink.” The Big Man gestured with the knife towards the table. “After.”

After?
Kirsten was puzzled. Then, The Big Man unzipped his pants and pulled that disgusting thing out.

“Your mouth,” The Big Man said in an excited whisper. “And if you bite me again…I’ll cut off your tit with this knife and make you watch as I feed it to those things out there. But,” he inched closer until it was right in her face, she noticed it was already poking straight up, “do this…and you can eat.”

“Promise?” Kirsten whispered after a long pause where her eyes couldn’t keep from all the food just a few feet away.

“Promise,” The Big Man said.

Choking back the tears, Kirsten rose up unsteadily on to her knees. She looked up, but the candles were behind him and all she could see was blackness where his face should be.

Kirsten opened her mouth.



Jenifer-zombie closed her mouth on the warm flesh. She didn’t recognize the screams, nor did she differentiate between those sounds and the sounds of others like her that were moaning, growling, and feasting. A hand reached over, grabbing the arm she clutched as she fed, her teeth tearing away a chunk of meat just above the elbow. Hunching over her prize, Jenifer-zombie shielded it from the intruder.

Eventually, as was most often the case, the feast spoiled. The warmth was gone. Seeming to forget that she’d just been devouring part of the arm still being held in her blood-soaked hands, Jenifer-zombie stood, casting the useless limb aside. The last bite, holding no warmth, and thus, no value, tumbled from her open mouth. She resumed her walking.

Their numbers had grown over the days and weeks. Always on the move, the herd swept up singles, and sometimes ten or twenty of her kind as they moved without a purpose until sound caused them to wheel as one giant organism and follow to its source. They devoured anything in their path: one day a trailer home tipping over to spill out its occupants; another day, a roll-up door to a warehouse never designed to thwart the press of a thousand bodies against it. Always there were the screams which only served to give her and her ilk a focus.

On and on they walked. None of them paid heed to a tremendous storm that blew them to the ground time and again. Futility was not a concept understood by Jenifer-zombie or the others in her wake.

Into a neighborhood they came.
This
was a
real
zombie walk. By now, Jenifer-zombie was in the vanguard of over three thousand. Her head turned, drawn by an enormous source of heat at least twice her size. Others had already peeled off in pursuit. It vanished into a wall of foliage and appeared a moment later; seeming to float just above the hedges.

Jenifer-zombie plowed into the group already filling the street. Her group swallowed, and was swallowed. Like a river meeting another until they poured into a mighty ocean, that is how their numbers grew.

Within hours, the hedges that had surrounded the wall beyond for over a century were gone. The dead stood. Howling and moaning and crying, their numbers grew every day. Amidst the thousands, Jenifer-zombie stood with them.



The warm, late summer rain fell, momentarily cleaning the air and knocking down the stench of undeath that permeated everything. Shaw tightened the straps of his backpack and slipped out the door. He would leave the compound through the east gate. That would put him closest to the river. He would follow that back to Newark.

It had taken no time to figure out what Dr. Peter King had done. Part of Shaw was impressed. The young man had bided his time, picked his girl—and her pregnant sister—and escaped in one of the five-ton trucks; a truck that he’d passed during the retreat.

That was the most impressive part of what the doctor had pulled off. He remembered thinking that it must’ve been one of theirs and that it had crashed up onto that curb during the chase of that SUV. He was willing to bet that every single one of the people that he was now leaving to search for was in shouting distance that day.

He crossed East Main Street and stopped to look up at the body writhing above him on the cross that he passed in front of before reaching the tall grass beyond. Trying without success to recall this one’s name, he smirked. Dead eyes stared down at him. He couldn’t actually see them in the dark, but he could feel them on his body. It began to moan, and others joined in the hellish chourus.

With that, Shaw strode into the tall grass that came almost to his waist. He wore steel-toed boots and shin-guards, so he wasn’t too concerned about what may be hiding in the brush.

It took him longer than expected to reach the railroad tracks. He would follow them until sunrise, then find a place to sleep for the day. As he walked, Shaw’s mind drifted back to the day his life tunred upside-down. He’d been in Mercy Hospital, sitting beside his dying father’s bed. It was difficult watching the most amazing man, father, and Marine that God had seen fit to grace the world with, wasting away from some mysterious form of cancer that ate him from the inside.

All the top minds from Washington denied that those cannisters used to kill off the foliage of the jungles of Vietnam were in any way harmful to the men in the helicopters who sprayed it; much less to the men on the ground. The scientists stood in their shirts and ties with their goddamned liberal lawyers, raised their hands, and swore to a God they constantly tried to disprove the existence of, that they would “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Of course they did that in front of a liberal congress.

Shaw had been holding the Bible, having just finished reading one of his father’s favorite books from the New Testament: Timothy. It was literally as he closed the Bible when the monitor made
that
noise. All the numbers on the screen started going to zero. Doctors and nurses rushed in, but all they could do was declare time of death. His dad had insisted on a DNR order.