Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (19 page)

“Key, we been eatin’ pretzels and Cheerios for three days now,” Shacelia said, unexpectedly softening. “I know it’s cold out there. I know it’s scary out there. But there’s six of us here and you’re the only one who can do the job.”

He nodded slightly. He knew the math. Him, Shacelia, Burdo’s-and-Shacelia’s two-year-old daughter Kayleece, Edith and Marcellus -- the elderly couple he and Burdo had helped back to their - this - apartment the day the zombies showed up, and Luke, a nine-year old kid he and Burdo had scooped up and brought in with everyone else, closing the steel security door just seconds from the arrival of hundreds of hungry, angry undead.

“I know,” Keyshawn said softly.

There wasn’t any food left. Not in the stores in the city, anyway. Nothing to loot or pillage or raid. Entire neighborhoods for blocks-on-end had been gone through and hollowed out of everything with calories before the end of last summer. You had to keep going farther and farther out into the wilderness of the suburbs if you wanted to maybe find a can of something, but you had to be careful where you went because there was no shortage of shotgun-wielding white guys. Zombies weren’t the only worry.

“I’ll see what I can get.”

Shacelia nodded and walked down the hallway to the communal room where they all spent most of their time. He leaned forward and looked down on the street and shook his head: five walkers had moved in on the couple and were tearing the flesh from their bones.

He hoped Burdo hadn’t met a similar fate, that he had suddenly decided to head out on a whim and had made it. Burdo had always wanted to live in Florida because it was always warm there, but Keyshawn always wondered why Burdo had left that day on his own without telling him. They had a rule against that. But Burdo had told Shacelia he’d heard a rumor about there being food locked in a storage room in the shopping center and had left while Keyshawn had been putting together a charcoal grill on the roof with Kevin and Marcellus. After that, human nature had changed Keyshawn from Shacelia’s comforter into her lover.

Three hours later he was sitting on a bench in Palmer Park, a frigid breeze steady down Seven Mile Road, a low layer of scud clouds slipping by above him. But he was warm in a yellow North Face Himalayan Suit he had rescued from a store in Grosse Pointe in the fall when he and Burdo had decided to head out of the city and raid upscale neighborhoods for gear and provisions. Burdo had laughed at Keyshawn when had tried it on - it had been a warm fall day in the low 70s, and putting on the snowsuit made him instantly too-hot, but he had somehow known it would be colder than normal come the winter.

He stared absently at a group of deer that walked onto the far end of the park near Pontchartrain Boulevard. You saw lots of deer in the city, anymore, and he’d heard rumors of bear sightings. Deer had been wandering through some of the deserted neighborhoods of town for years, especially in some of the parts of town where people had taken to planting large gardens the size of small farms. He’d heard there were chicken coops on some of them. He smiled: farms in the city, inside Detroit motor city, car building capital of the world.

And then it hit him: you can eat deer.

He slowly slid off the bench and took a kneeling position, raising the rifle up and looking through the scope at the deer. None of them had antlers. He wasn’t sure why that mattered, but he knew antlers meant a better deer. He scanned the length of one and wondered where you were supposed to shoot it. Did it matter? He placed the crosshairs on the head of the deer farthest on the right of the group, took a shallow breath, calmed himself, and squeezed the trigger. The deer collapsed into the snow while the others scattered quickly, bounding into some nearby trees and vanishing.

Keyshawn stayed kneeling and pulled his head away from the rifle, turning to scan the area around him, watching for zombies. Gunfire attracted them for some reason. So did running motors, food being cooked, music, talking, and a dozen other common things. They must remember something about their living experience and homed in on the sounds of things alive people did, Keyshawn figured. Although, in his experience, most people ran in the opposite direction of gunfire, so that was weird.

He waited several minutes before moving, giving the zombies time to get to the park. After none arrived, he tramped through the snow, rifle held at the ready, his eyes roving. Zombies might be dead people, but they still had some sense of what they were doing, and it wasn’t unusual to see ragers and walkers working together to trap living people. The walkers would set themselves up to block escape routes while the ragers would attack. He’d seen it too many times, though he couldn’t tell how they coordinated it. It just was.

It was going to be a waste of a lot of meat, he realized, because he had walked and could only carry so much back. Maybe it would freeze and stay okay for a later trip for more? He bent down and took out his Buck 105 Pathfinder knife and began cutting off the rear leg, wondering how real deer hunters did this kind of work.

Keyshawn made it back to the apartment building just as the winter light was getting flat. He was exhausted. He entered the apartment and put the front and back left legs of the deer on the counter. Propped his rifle against the cupboard and grabbed a pitcher of melted-snow water. He drank deeply.

“Holy shit, Key, what happened to you?” Shacelia said, her voice panicky.

“What?”

“You’re covered in blood! Did they get you out there, baby? Are you okay?”

Keyshawn looked down at himself and saw his snowsuit was stained with blood.

“It’s deer blood, I’m okay.”
He turned and pointed with his thumb at the two legs on the counter. “We got meat tonight.”

He looked down at his snowsuit again as he pulled his gloves off and, for a moment, felt disappointed that he had ruined his North Face snowsuit. The thing was expensive even if he hadn’t paid for it, and it was ruined, in a sartorial sense. Not that anyone he knew would have ever been impressed had he worn it around them: he’d have been laughed off the block in the old days and he smiled thinking one of the guys would’ve probably called him “Big Bird” for the rest of his life if they’d ever seen him in such a getup.

“Ya gotta cook it up on the roof. Too many dead around for the courtyard. The wind will carry the smell everywhere,” Keyshawn said, settling onto the floor and pulling off his boots. So far as he knew, zombies didn’t eat cooked food, but they sure knew the living did.

He walked through the apartment and pushed through the blanket covering the doorway into the living room. The others were sitting huddled under blankets, a half-dozen pillar candles burning in the room. The walls in this room and the two bedrooms were covered with pink R-13 insulating foam that he and Burdo had salvaged from a The Home Depot when the weather outside had started turning the apartment cold inside. It was a ramshackle job of gluing it to the ceilings and the walls, but it kept the main living areas of the apartment tolerable. They had pulled in area rugs from other apartments to line the floors, and each of them slept under blankets and comforters scavenged from the other units after the first frost when they realized their shared body heat wouldn’t be enough for survival, much less comfort.

He and Burdo had looked long and hard for propane and sterno stoves when they had finally realized there would be no heat in the building come winter, but everyplace that sold them had been picked clean. The two of them had been amazed that so many people had thought about it before they had, and they wondered what else could be used to provide some sort of heat - and light- for their winter home. They had stood in the parking lot of the Eastland Shopping Center and wondered about alternatives.

“Candles,” Burdo said suddenly, “but we’ll need a shitload of ‘em.”

“Candles?” Keyshawn said.

“Yup.”

They stood in silence a moment more and Keyshawn perked up.

“There’s a Pier One like two blocks from here. Dated a girl who liked their candles because they had scent to ‘em.”

Burdo chuckled. “We need candles with scent, then. The apartment startin’ to smell skanky now that the showers ain’t workin’.”

They drove over to the store and parked in the street without worrying about blocking traffic. Keyshawn had a Beretta 9mm at the time and kept watch for the undead while Burdo broke open the front door with a crowbar.

“No alarm,” Burdo said flatly.

“There’s no electric.”

“I know. Jes’ sayin’ is all,” Burdo said. “Never even thought there’d be a time wit’ no alarms.”

“Or wit’ zombies.”

“Tru dat.”

Inside, everything was fully stocked, as if the clerks had just closed up shop like normal and gone home expecting to open the next day. Burdo had joked it had been left alone because there was nothing to eat and nobody needed wicker furniture or bamboo rugs to survive the apocalypse.

“Least not yet: maybe zombies is allergic to wicker and bamboo,” Keyshawn had riffed back.

They came out of the store with a duffel bag of candles and stepped smack into an ambush of five men with weapons pointed at them. It wasn’t anything special to see, given Keyshawn’s pre-zombie lifestyle, but it was something he hadn’t expected to have to deal with again: hold-ups.

“Yo, homies, jus’ show the sky the palms o’ yer hands and you’ll be walkin’ ‘way from here with no extra holes,” said a large black man wearing a navy blue watch cap and pointing an MP5 submachine gun at them.

“Toker?” Burdo said incredulously as he stared at the big man.

Toker tilted his head to the side, squinted at Burdo. “Burdonne Watson? You still alive? My man, congrats on that.”

“Why you takin’ from us? There’s a whole town wide open for the askin’,” Burdo said.

“Not lookin’ fer yer takin’s” Toker said, motioning for the others in his group to move forward and search him. They took his Sig Sauer pistol and looked in the bag, showing a candle to Toker and dropping it back in the bag.

“Candles?” Toker said, bored.

Burdo laughed. “It gets real dark at night anymore.”

“It do.”

Toker’s gang took Keyshawn’s Beretta next and backed away around the corner. They hadn’t crossed paths since.

Burdo picked up the duffel and turned to Keyshawn and shrugged. “I guess we ain’t done with the old ways of living, yet.”

They walked down the street with their senses wide-open, looking and listening for the approach of the undead. Unarmed, they had only a sporting chance of getting away. Burdo shoved the duffel into the hatchback of the banged-up Chestnut brown Kia Rio they had liberated from an authentically dead white couple caught at the tail end of a traffic pile-up at the corner of Warren Avenue and Dickerson Street earlier in the summer, when everyone had been trying to escape town. Keyshawn had long since grown tired of the taste of gasoline, but neither he nor Burdo had figured out a way to get gas out of a car that didn’t involve a siphon. But driving still beat walking.

“Why the fuck they take our guns?” Keyshawn said, shaking his head.

Burdo settled into the driver’s seat, fastened his seatbelt and turned to Keyshawn. “Prolly ‘cause they di’n’t have no bullets in theirs. Shit, Key, I only had three rounds in mine, what’d you have in yours?”

“Five.”

“So do the math,” Burdo said, starting the car. “They coulda wasted two bullets on us to get our eight, or they coulda just figgered we’d give up our guns wit’out a fight and the zombies’d get us on the way home. Either way, they get ours.”

“The world ain’t s’posed to be like that no more,” Keyshawn said, rolling his window down and resting his hand on the outside of the car door. “We gotta stick together, look after each other. It’s the end times.”

Burdo laughed. “End times? Yo, Key, time still goin’ on, jus’ like before. Ain’t nothin’ can happen to change the way people be. People is people. Some work for a livin’, some steal. Jus’ the law decide which is which. Nature is nature.”

Keyshawn and Kevin walked up the stairwell and pushed through the door onto the roof of the four-story walk-up. The smell of deer meat cooking on a charcoal grill spun around them in the churning wind as they entered the fresh frozen evening air. Keyshawn’s mouth watered and Kevin looked up at him.

“Smells good,” Kevin said. “Ain’t never had no deer before.”

“Me neither.”

Keyshawn walked to the edge of the roof and looked down into the shadow-darkened street below him, searching for any undead that might have caught the scent of the meat. Nothing but the lump of couple from the morning. He looked over the skyline of the city, the buildings becoming silhouettes against the blackening sky, and wondered if the lights would ever come back on in them. A year ago, he hadn’t realized how many stars were in the night sky, hadn’t known they were drowned out by the lights of the city, and had never made the connection why he had never seen many stars before. But the night sky was beautiful.

Life had been hard before the zombies, but he had always been able to get an order of fast food or a slice of pizza. Somebody always had a joint to smoke. Fortys were cheap at the corner store. Nobody expected him to put his life on the line every day finding something to eat, even though he had put his life on the line all-too-often. But now he had a girl to keep happy and a make-shift family to feed.