Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (16 page)

Which is why she had divorced him after starting an affair with Bob Crighton. Crighton was raised a country boy, hunted and fished, followed college and pro sports, and could fix anything. He was the consummate man’s man. He was now lying on the floor of the foyer with a bullet in his neck. Bob had said everything would be fine if they stayed put, that the government would handle it, and then had gone out to fish the day before and come home with a bandage on his left arm.

Now her ex-husband Ken was safe in their cabin near Lake Bridgeport with her dog Beau (she had begged Ken to adopt the dog for her years ago, and it had repaid her by preferring Ken’s companionship), a safe full of weapons and six months of canned goods. He always said you had to be prepared for the worst, but she had always taken that to be the insurance salesman inside of him talking. The boring, nine-to-five working, bicycle-riding, online-poker loving "I prefer single malts" man with whom she had grown bored during sixteen years of marriage. She had wanted something more than his routine ordinariness, and Bob Crighton had been sitting next to her on a barstool one night while she was out with her girlfriends and had provided the spark she thought she needed to get through the second half of her life with the happiness she felt she deserved.

But that spark had faded after a couple of months, and she had found herself trapped in a new relationship with a balding, slightly-less-than-bright "nice guy" with his own ex-wife issues. When Jessica had found out that Bob's marriage had ended because he had cheated on his wife, Jessica had realized the mistake she had made in filing for divorce, but pride wouldn’t let her admit she had been wrong and apologize to Ken and ask for another chance. Ken had settled into his own new single life in the cabin, having sold his insurance business back to the company and written a novel, the dream he had always talked about over weekend cocktails but had never begun. Now, Ken had an agent in Manhattan who told Ken he was certain he could sell his manuscript.

When the plague had started spreading across the nation several weeks earlier, Ken had urged her to let Belle come stay with him, but Jessica had refused because school was still in session and Bob had convinced her "the plague" was just a media scare story. When people had started wearing surgical masks around town, she had wondered what the hell was going on, remembering stories she had seen on television from years earlier when people in Asia had gone nuts over some bird flu scare.

When the plague hit Dallas last week, Ken had driven in from the cabin and begged both of them to come with him. He had traded in his Acura for a used tan GMC Hummer, which he had left idling in the driveway of their home in the cul de sac of Melanie Lane.

"Just grab a bag and stuff it with some t-shirts, underwear and jeans," Ken had said, "and get in the truck. I need to get you guys out of here before the government shuts down the roads and quarantines everybody. You’re not going to be safe here."

Jessica had stood in the foyer looking at her ex-husband and thought for a moment that he knew what he was doing, so assured, self-possessed and calm. Had he always been this way?

"Mom, come on, let's do it," Belle had said from behind her. "We can always come back if it turns out to be nothing."

Jessica had almost said yes.

"No, honey, we need to just stay here and let the authorities take care of it," Jessica had said.

But the authorities hadn't taken care of it. Just like Ken had said, they'd closed the city and quarantined everyone to their houses. At first, there were constant police patrols, the city government even using fire engines and ambulances to drive through neighborhoods and use bullhorns to keep the people inside their homes. She hadn't seen any authorities in two days now. She'd woken up before dawn that morning and found Bob not sleeping next to her and made her way downstairs to find the back door open and the patio furniture overturned.

By mid-morning, some of her neighbors had loaded up their cars and driven off, but she and Belle had stayed indoors and watched cable news, trying to make sense of the coverage of the plague. None of the anchors or reporters actually used the word "zombie," but the images of the infected people certainly made them out to be such creatures. And then the power went out and she and Belle had no way of finding out what was going on in the world other than looking through the windows of their home.

Bob showed up before sunset the next day, his pajamas covered in blood and mucus, two other infected people with him, a twentyish man in a Quick Lube oil change uniform, a barbed-wire tattoo curling up from his left arm and around the bottom of his neck, and a middle-aged blonde woman wearing a lab coat and a torn skirt. Jessica watched them come onto the lawn and try to open the front door of the house before they started circling the house, trying to find a way in through the other doors.

Jessica got her pistol from the safe in the bedroom - it had been a gift from Ken on the last wedding anniversary they had celebrated (she had gotten him a silver money clip with his initials engraved on it) - and told Belle to stay in her bedroom. She had fallen asleep on the couch after watching Bob and his new pals shuffle off down the road, but the splintering of the front door this morning had awoken her and Belle at the same time, and each had run to the foyer to investigate.

And there was Bob with a crowbar, blood-infused drool trickling down his chin, staggering into the foyer in his pajamas and bare feet. He was pale, too, as if the blood had been drained from him. The look in his eyes was a mixture of sleep and hate. Curiously, she thought she heard him moan "brains" as he lurched into the house, the other two groaning behind him as they filed in.

"MOM!" Belle shrieked from the stairs as the zombies approached.

Jessica raised the pistol and put a round into the wall of the house, the recoil of the pistol surprising her. She pointed it at Bob again and squeezed the trigger, the bullet piercing his chest and staggering him momentarily.

“Shit,” she said under her breath, trying to remember all of the things Ken had tried to teach her about shooting. Ken had told her he wanted them to go a range on a regular basis as something for them to do together as a bonding element for their relationship. It was to be a new version of “date night,” and she had almost rolled her eyes at the idea that Ken had thought shooting a gun before cocktails would turn her on.

The zombies moved through the foyer and she took several small steps backward, now looking through the sights of the pistol at Bob’s head. She pulled the trigger and sank a bullet straight through his mouth, splintering his neck bone and collapsing him to the floor.

Jessica stepped back a few more feet, paused, and fired four more rounds at the other two, watching with fascinated horror at the eruptions of blood from the backs of their skulls. Her ears rang from the gunshots. Bob wasn’t dead, but all he seemed able to do at the moment was move his head slightly as blood pooled out of his neck on the floor.

"Move it, Belle, we've got to see if we can get to your father," Jessica said.

She felt weird having said those words. She now realized she needed Ken, needed him in a way she never knew she had needed a man before: he would know what to do. But, then, he had always known what to do, she had just never wanted to do it his way.

"Five minutes and we're out of here," Jessica said. "Get moving."

Twenty minutes later, she and Belle were backing the Toyota Land Cruiser out of the driveway. The sun was up and the sky was littered with a scud layer of clouds below a high overcast sky. A few tendrils of black smoke reached into the air from the direction of downtown, but she wouldn't be heading that way so she shrugged off the significance. Minutes later, she braked the truck to a stop at the corner of Sailmaker Lane and Mission Ridge Road. A five-car pile-up filled the intersection and automobile fluids pooled around the vehicles.

"Shit, that's Claire and Pete's Benz," Jessica said as she looked at the cars. She put the truck in park and popped out onto the street. "Stay inside. I'm gonna see if anybody's hurt."

"Mom, don't," Belle said.

Jessica walked up to the black Mercedes station wagon and looked in through the open driver's side door. It was empty, the air bags deflated. There was luggage still in the back and a small black clutch purse sat on the middle of the front seat. She moved away from the Benz and around a Toyota Prius that was crumpled under the nose of a Ford pick-up, the eco-car's front windshield shattered by the truck's bumper, a white air bag dangling from the steering wheel.

A cocker spaniel was wedged under the front passenger side wheel of the truck, and Jessica wondered if the crash had been caused by someone trying to avoid hitting the dog. She looked around at the nearby houses of the neighborhood: all was quiet. Nobody was in any of the cars and the chirping of birds mingled with the hush of the breeze.

And then she heard a weird stutter-thumping on the pavement and turned to see five blood-stained people skip-hopping toward her. Lurching, almost, but attempting to run. Their arms pumping, spittle foaming out of their mouths, their faces a mixture of rage and intense concentration. It took another moment for her to realize they were coming for her, not toward her before she started running to her own idling vehicle. She could see Belle's look of incomprehension as Jessica closed on the car, her daughter's eyes wide and flitting between her and the group behind her. Jessica banged into the side of the door, yanked it open and slid inside.

Moments later, the five deadened people slammed into the side of the car and began pawing at it. The electric locks slammed down as Belle hit the button.

Jessica turned and regarded her daughter. "Good idea."

One of the men on the outside pulled at the handle on Jessica's side, jerking it violently and leaning his head against the window, his face filled with rage, spittle flecking the glass, bloody drool pooling out of the corners of his mouth. His left arm looked dislocated and his clothes were soaked in a mixture of mucus and vomit.

"Mom! Drive!" Belle shouted as a pair of twenty-something women pounded at the passenger side door her daughter was staring through.

The truck peeled out, spinning the infected assault group to the pavement as each lost whatever grip it had on the vehicle. Jessica drove across the lawn of a house, snapping a mailbox off at the base before losing control of the truck as it jumped over the curb on the end of the lawn and skidded sideways across the street, slamming into a UPS truck sidled up to the curb.

Jessica's head banged into the window. She rubbed it for a moment, trying to regain her wits. What was going on in the world? She turned and looked at Belle, who was staring through the various windows, her head swiveling quickly.

"Mom, they're coming after us, we've got to go," Belle said, careening to look over her shoulder. "Mom! Go!"

Jessica turned her head and looked through the rear window at the five-some she had just left, each of them again skip-running toward her vehicle. She took her foot off the brake and touched the gas pedal gently, easing the truck forward, not wanting to panic and floor it again. She drove through the neighborhood slowly, alert for other panicky motorists and new groups of infected individuals, unsure of which to be more fearful.

The drive down Colt Road chilled the blood in her veins and let her know that not everyone had remained calm in their homes to wait for the authorities to deal with the situation. The shops in the strip malls near the intersection with Spring Creek Parkway were all busted open, the parking lots littered with abandoned burnt cars and a scattering of bodies. The Wal-Mart Super Center bled smoke into the sky. Belle turned the car radio on and tuned through the stations, all of them set to the emergency broadcast outgoing message.

"This is the emergency broadcast station. All citizens are urged to remain in their homes during the outbreak of influenza in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth region. The virus is highly contagious and causes those infected to become extremely aggressive and dangerous. Remain calm and indoors until local officials contact your neighborhood with the all-clear and tune to this station for further updates. This is the emergency broadcast station."

It was the same message on every station, a message as vague and unhelpful as could be.

"They give better updates for thunderstorm warnings," Jessica said absently.

"What's going on, Mom?" Belle asked.

"I don't know, honey, I don't know," Jessica said, steering her way around a car crash and onto the parkway. "Let's just get to your dad's and figure things out."

The intersection with Highway 289 was a nightmare littered with smashed vehicles. Jessica pulled the Land Cruiser over to the side of the highway and stared at the mass of cars, suddenly unsure about whether it would be smart to try to drive around the dead vehicles and down the roadway. The parkway she was on had been lightly traveled for the short distance she'd been on it, and she'd seen almost no traffic in the neighborhoods before then.

Everyone, it seemed, was bugging out of town at the same time. Probably, she thought, since yesterday or the day before, and she wondered how long some of the people on the highway had been sitting in the traffic jam, going nowhere, slowly.

"Let's see if the Dallas Parkway is any better," Jessica said, steering around an abandoned car and back onto the road.

"It's going to be like this everywhere, Mom," Belle said. "We should go the back roads."