Sven the Zombie Slayer (41 page)

“That is utterly preposterous,” Milt began, but when he looked where Brian was pointing, he wheezed out a gasp and then he was furiously pulling up the back of his jeans so that he could reach into his back pocket and get his inhaler. His bothersome alveoli had become uncooperative at the very instant Milt saw the writhing mass of undead, their limbs flailing without purpose under the heavy downpour.

Then Milt’s ears filled with the sound of his own wheezing breaths, and everything went black.

81

Lorie held the long, serrated hunting knife at her side. She’d taken it out of her back pocket as she climbed into the car, knowing that it would be impossible to sit with the knife in her pocket.

She was sure nobody had been looking—Evan was lying down and Sven was cursing at the pouring
rain. Lorie slowly put the knife beside her, between her leg and the door, where nobody would be able to see that she was holding it. She didn’t think Sven would care much about her having the knife, but it seemed Jane hadn’t wanted Lorie to arm herself, and Lorie saw no need to inform anyone that she had found herself a notched knife to play with. It was nowhere near as big as the butcher knife, but she was happy with it all the same. She was looking forward to breaking it in.

Now they were slowly driving up 29, farther up than Lorie ever went, except when her dad used to pick her up and take her back to
Arlington
with him. Lorie’s mom and dad had separated when Lorie was six, and then Lorie's dad died of a heart attack when she was eleven.

Her mom told her it had to with his stressful government job. Lorie didn't know that much about her father, and she was always working up the courage to ask her mom about him. Now she realized she might never know more about him than she already did.

Concentrating, Lorie gazed out the window and made the memory flit out of her mind and into the storm. She knew it would visit her again, but now wasn’t the time to be a gracious host.

It had been years since Lorie was last up this way, and she didn’t recognize anything. The rain was finally getting lighter, and through the breaks in the downpour Lorie caught glimpses of large expanses of woods, punctuated occasionally and briefly by strip malls.

The scenery they passed made her feel lonely and cold, even though it was a warm day and the storm hadn’t brought more than a few degree temperature drop with it. The panorama they passed made Lorie feel cold all the same. She was grateful to be in a car, in some relative safety, with people who were as determined as she was to survive. That made her think of something, something that she recognized had been bothering her at some subconscious level of understanding.

“Hey,” Lorie said, uncertain of where to begin, “so I keep thinking about all the bad stuff that might happen, all the stuff that can go wrong...not in a depressing sort of way, but to be ready for it. I think we should be prepared for anything right?”

“Right,” Jane said, “of course. What’s on your mind?”

“Well,” Lorie said, “I think maybe we should talk about what we’ll do if something goes wrong with the car. What’s the backup plan for going on foot? Where would we go and what would we take?”

The silence that followed made Lorie uncomfortable, so she spoke again to fill the quiet. “I mean I think it’s doable, we should just be ready for it, like if we split up the food so each of us has some, or if we just have everything in bags and ready to go, and...well,” Lorie’s voice changed to a whisper, “what are we going to do with Evan? We can’t leave him, and I can’t carry him.”

“Jane and I will carry him,” Sven said.

“Of course we will,” Jane said, “we’re not gonna leave him behind, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Lorie looked over at Evan. He showed no reaction to their talking about him.

“Okay,” Lorie said, “good. We can’t leave him behind, I just want to put it out there that with the amount of stuff we’ve just taken, we won’t be able to carry everything on foot. We’ll be too slow, and...”

“You’re right,” Sven said, reassuring Lorie. “People come first, before weapons and ammo. If we get caught and have to leave the car for whatever reason, we leave the heaviest stuff behind and go on with the bare minimum that we need to eat and defend ourselves.”

“I’m going to fill my pockets with extra ammo,” Jane said. “So that if we have to ditch I’ll have some to work with.”

“I can take Evan over my shoulder,” Sven said, “and Lorie, can you take Ivan in his pack?”

Lorie nodded eagerly, happy at the acceptance they had given her fear of going on foot. “I’ll take him.”

Ivan meowed.

“See?” Sven said. “Ivan agrees with the plan.” He laughed, and then Jane and Lorie joined in. Lorie’s laugh felt as forced and uneasy as Sven’s and
Jane’s looked.

The plan worked for Lorie, and helped to set her mind at ease. She needed to know what to do in the eventualities that she could think up.

Luck favors the prepared, Lorie thought, as she lightly stroked her knife’s serrations with the tip of her thumb.

The rain was getting lighter still. Through the rear window, Lorie saw some streaks of light peeking through the storm clouds. Turning back around and looking in the direction they were traveling, Lorie didn’t see any reassuring streaks of light, but the rain was calming down all the same. The ominous sound of the pounding rain on the roof of the car had lessened to a smoother, somewhat less threatening background noise.

“We’re just about there,” Sven said. Lorie was glad to hear his voice. The car had gotten way too quiet. “How’s Evan back there?”

Lorie was reluctant to check on him, for reasons she couldn’t place. “I’ll see how he’s doing.”

“No!” Jane snapped from the front, spinning around in her seat, looking like she was about to keep Lorie away from Evan by force if necessary. “I mean…” Jane seemed to be trying to make up for her overreaction. “I mean we should let him rest. We’ll be able to stop soon, and then I’ll take care of him properly. If he’s able to sleep through this, we ought to let him.”

“Okay,” Lorie said. She held eye contact with Jane for a few moments, and found herself inexplicably sliding into the corner of the backseat, closer to the door, and farther from Evan. She watched him, thinking he must be really sick to be able to sleep at a time like this.

For a while, they rode in silence through the gloom.

Then the rain stopped, and Evan’s eyes shot open.

82

Twinkle, twinkle, the twinkling twinkles twinkled.

Milt opened his eyes all the way, and comprehension dawned on him. He was staring at the water droplets collecting at the bottom of a mud flap. He squirmed sideways, and saw that the mud flap belonged to a tire. He squirmed farther, and saw that the tire belonged to a car.

Then Milt turned his head to the left and screamed.

“It’s alright,” Brian said. “It’s just me. I think you had a panic attack and passed out.”

“Hogwash,” Milt said. “Men such as myself are not prone to panic attacks. A heavy branch must have fallen from the tree above me, crashing into my skull and rendering me unconscious.”

“Actually, I think it had something to do with that.” Brian turned and pointed.

Milt looked, and he began to wheeze again, groping for the top of his back pocket.

“I’m all over it,” Brian said, and handed Milt an inhaler. “I got it out of your pocket when I saw you trying to get it. I gave you a few puffs, and you came to.”

Milt was infuriated at the invasion of privacy to which he’d succumbed while unconscious, but that didn’t stop him from grabbing the inhaler and puffing on it.

The cold, medicated puffs felt magnificent in his lungs. The seditious alveoli unfurled and relented. Milt kept puffing as he turned back to the implausible sight in the parking lot.

It couldn’t be! How could it? They were moving, grasping, clutching at the air, kicking their legs, and contorting their faces into masks unseen even in hell’s lowest rungs.

He could even see the faces of the
decapitated
zombies twist and warp and snap their teeth as if chomping on imaginary hunks of human flesh.

Suddenly cold, he looked with surprise at the inhaler he still held in front of his face. His hand was pumping it violently, and Brian was clutching at his hand and the inhaler, trying to wrestle it away.

The squire was saying something, but the churn of the zombie parts had jolted Milt out of his regular bodily awareness, and so the squire’s voice was far away and hard to make out, if it was there at all.

Then Brian wrenched the inhaler free, and Milt snapped back into himself at once.

“Take it easy on that thing,” Brian said. “You’ll OD.”

“Th—th—they…”

“Yeah, they’ve been doing that for a while. I think it’s got something to do with the rain, but they haven’t put themselves back together or anything like that. They’re just moving in their broken pile.”

“They w—won’t ge—get us?”

“No, they haven’t come any closer. Pretty damn creepy though, huh?”

Milt made a gurgling sound.

Brian pointed up at the sky. “At least the rain stopped.”

“M—may I ask why you s—said the thrashing had t—to do with the rainwater?”

“Because it didn’t start until the rain began. Then the more rain there was, the more violently the parts moved. It was a lot worse than this while you were passed out. Then, when the rain began to let up, the thrashing let up too. Now the rain is gone, and the movement is dying down. I think maybe the rain feeds them. You see how dry they were before, the way their heads exploded when I hit them? It’s as if they’re made of sawdust. I bet they’re not as dry now, I bet if we go over there and prod at the parts or hit them, they won’t turn to dust, they’ll be more like regular people parts.”

Milt calmed, and his sense of self returned. “Preposterous. Truly and undeniably outrageous. How could you have seen or measured the degree of their undead rattling from your position here, and through the substantial rain? I am afraid it is impossible.”

Brian looked crestfallen. “No, no, I’m pretty sure I saw it. The rain was thick, but that kind of thing is unmistakable. I’m not seeing things, no, I’m not.”

Milt felt a pang of regret for ridiculing Brian. He had to admit that Brian had played a role in his revival, and in the prevention of a possible Ventolin overindulgence, sweet though that may have been.

“Although I am certain there is no relationship between the bizarre thunderstorm and the twitching parts, I commend you on your creative vision.”

Brian shrugged, looking even more dejected. “I’m gonna check it out, and see what’s going on in the store. I’ve had enough of sitting out here. I can’t see any more zombies around, and you shouldn’t worry about those dead ones, I don’t think they’re gonna put their heads back on and come after you. Try not to faint again, okay?”

“I did not faint, and you are not to leave at this moment, I forbid it. The time has not yet come for reconnaissance.”

Milt wasn’t going to admit as much, but he was fearful the zombie parts
would
reassemble, and begin to make their way toward him. Though he still looked forward to more zombie slaying in his immediate future, he most assuredly did not want to deal with any kind of zombies that could reconstruct themselves after being hacked to pieces. That was not a fair zombie game at all.