Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (21 page)

He picked up the katana and wiped it clean, taking care near the edge so as not to cut himself. That scared him more than fighting the zombies, just the fact that he could nick himself cleaning it and the zombie blood could commingle with his and he’d turn. All because of dumb luck. He’d thought about that a lot, and he was more than certain that there was no shortage of people turned into zombies by sheer, random bad luck. Hell, anybody not just killed and eaten by a zombie was evidence of bad luck: they’d escaped certain death for imminent undeath. He wasn’t sure which outcome was the better one.

“Probably death, dude,” Bobby said later that night, as they sipped on warm beer in the glow of a propane lamp. “Who knows what it’s like to be one of them? Dead, I can imagine, because I don’t exist anymore. Undead? What if it’s like being totally paralyzed and unable to move or talk, but having full consciousness? Just staring out of your body while some other force caused it to move and eat people? Kill me, that happens to me.”

“I don’t know, man, what if they can cure this?” Jose said. “I know we have to kill them because that’s the only option - kill or be killed - but what if they can come up with a cure and turn them back into the living? You know the government has got to be working on this right now in one of its labs. It’s only been like a year or so since Phoenix fell.”

Garth snorted. “Yeah, right. The government. Let’s see, first they tried to keep us locked up in our homes under quarantine, and then the first responders and police all disappeared and the National Guard never showed up. Those are all government people, so I’m going to guess the government told its people to go somewhere the government people could be kept safe until this whole thing blows over and we’re all dead or zombies.

“And whenever that moment finally happens, the government people are going to come out and kill everyone of us out here because they aren’t going to take the risk those of us still alive aren’t infected.”

“They’re probably all at Fort Knox. I hear that’s the most heavily defended fort on the planet since it holds all the gold,” Bobby said.

They were all quiet for a while, sipping on their beers, each in his own thoughts.

“Is it even worth staying here? Maybe we should get the hell out,” Jose said. “My dad’s cousin has a small cattle farm outside Imuris in Mexico that would be able to take us. It’s not that far from here, maybe two-hundred miles. We could make it in a day.”

Bobby laughed. “Right, because Mexico isn’t filled with a hundred-million zombies between here and there, and if we made it, your cousins wouldn’t just kill me and Garth just because we’re white guys.”

“No, not if I was with you. You’d be fine,” Jose said.

“Jose, it’s hard enough siphoning gas to get around here,” Garth said. “How much harder would it be to do in a third world country? We can’t go anywhere south of the border, we wouldn’t last a day. Hell, we’re lucky we last each day here, and this is the middle-of-nowhere.”

Jose sagged as if the weight of the world had finally been placed on his shoulders.

“This can’t be the future, it just can’t,” Jose said. “I was goin’ to school to learn how to be a machinist. I was supposed to be able to get a job earning real money. I wasn’t supposed to be scrounging food from abandoned houses and killing the undead.”

He paused. “I just don’t get it.”

Bobby shrugged. “Yeah, but at least I ain’t stockin’ shelves at the store no more. That was boring, man, and it was the only job I could get.”

“Nah, man, you could have totally worked in fast food,” Garth said, adding a small laugh for effect.

Bobby gave him a limp-wristed middle-finger and rolled his eyes. “Ooh, a zinger from the comic-book-store guy.”

“Well, we’re going to have to figure out something more to do with our lives than what we’re doing now,” Garth said. “There aren’t any actual rules anymore other than survive, and we aren’t going to live a helluva long time in this cabin just doing what we’re doing. And while killing real zombies is almost as much fun as it was killing them online, we aren’t going to respawn if one of them gets us. Well, we might respawn, but we’d come back like Ray did.”

Bobby brightened and sat forward on his chair. “We could just work on clearing the town out of them. A couple a day, just go in, chop their heads off, shoot ‘em, whatever, and come back here. Maybe in a couple of months we’d have killed them all off and we could live in town.”

Jose furrowed his eyebrows. “And then what?”

Bobby shrugged. “I dunno, man. Hunt deer? Plant a garden? Try and find some girls to move to town?”

“There’s a thousand zombies in town, Jose. We’re three guys with replica swords, a couple of guns and about 300 rounds of ammunition. Those are some long, long odds,” Jose said.

“What are our odds now, Jose?” Garth said softly, dropping his head and staring at the floor. “We can’t survive like this forever, and we’re not the only ones around scavenging for dry goods and canned food. But if we can take maybe - what’d we take down today? Seven? - If we take down seven a day, on average, we can clear out the town in about a half-a-year or so.”

“And then what?” Jose asked.

“I dunno. Maybe we can find a way to start letting the other people know what we’re doing and maybe they’ll come join us. Gotta be people out there with working walkie-talkies; it’s still the twenty-first century and there’re plenty of batteries nobody is using. If the people come, we can start over,” Garth said. “If we can get enough of us who are still alive together, maybe we can fight off the zombies the next time, now that we know what we’re up against.”

The three were silent for a moment as each thought over the idea. Fight or flight. Neither seemed like a good option, but those were the only two options, ingrained in their DNA as the essential survival choices. Choose one.

“Alright, Garth, let’s do it. Let’s take the town back,” Jose said. “We know we aren’t the only still alive people out here, so we can’t be the first ones to come up with the idea. Which means we might not be the only ones doing this after a while, but until then, we’re going to have to get real good at using these swords.”

Garth nodded. “Yeah, our vorpal blades are going to go snicker-snack quite a lot over the next few months.”

The Roa
d Warriors

Perth, Australia - Day 169

The sun was just up, casting long shadows across the road. Duncan Wiltshire stayed in them, taking careful steps, his eyes constantly searching for the infected. Behind him in other shadows were Gannon Hardcastle and Katrina Blandon. They were waiting on the military helicopter a kilometer away to move off so that they could continue on their way out of the city.

Which was illegal, as the government had issued an official "bug-in" policy, requiring everybody to remain in their homes until the military and government agencies had contained the outbreak. That had worked until the power had gone out almost two weeks earlier, causing a massive panic when nobody could watch the news on television or tune in a radio station. With the sudden disappearance of any information about the plague, everyone had assumed the worst and had been fleeing the city.

"Okay, it's gone," Duncan said, his voice a loud whisper. He fished a small pair of binoculars out of his messenger bag and scanned the road. "There's a couple hundred of 'em down to the left, but the right is clear."

The road was knotted with fender benders in both directions, the doors to many of the cars open, evidence of sudden flight. Duncan figured almost nobody had driven out of town, and guessed a large percentage of those that had been in the cars were now in the mob to his left.

The three of them had been five just two days earlier, but Gina and Roger Cavalleri had been eaten by a group of twenty-plus undead yesterday afternoon, Roger swinging a cricket bat at a fast-runner zombie that had latched onto his wife. Fatal mistake, as two other runners had set upon him seconds later while a gang of shuffling walkers moved inexorably down the road toward the whole group.

Duncan had put two rounds center-mass in one of the zombies just before it bit into Roger and been stunned the creature hadn't collapsed until Gannon had said, "Head shots, Dunc," and used his own .38 to blow its skull open. Which was too late to save Roger and had caused the zombie horde to realize there was more fresh meat on the menu: they had barely managed to get inside a building and barricade the door before the dead had tried to pry it open.

They crept down the street in a loose formation, the two men with their pistols and Katrina wielding a gardening hoe. They worked their way slowly through a couple of blocks, carefully checking each car as they passed it, constantly scanning for police or military personnel. The authorities had orders to shoot-to-kill anything moving, but they were obviously overwhelmed with dealing with the zombies. The undead were everywhere. So were the remains of their victims.

Duncan heard a grunt off to his left and startled. He turned quickly and raised his pistol and saw a man trapped between the bumpers of two cars. Not a man-man, but a was-a-man, a human figure turned a deep gray, its mouth deformed and with larger, razor-sharp teeth. It stared right at Duncan and struggled in its predicament.

"Sorry, mate," Duncan said as he lowered his pistol. "Hey, Kat, you wanna come over here and clobber this fella?"

Katrina stopped alongside him and looked at the undead man struggling to free himself from the grip of the bumpers. His mid-section was pinched closed: he should be dead-dead. But, he wasn't.

"That's just...," she paused, reconsidered. "Nobody could live through that."

"I don't think he's 'living' through it," Duncan said, "but I can't say as I know what state of life a zombie is. But we can de-animate the reanimated."

Katrina took a few steps closer to the half-zombie, positioned her hoe above its head for aim before raising it and cleaving deeply into the zombie's head. The zombie torso went silent and motionless between the bumpers.

Gannon walked up and said, "Great, one down, twenty million more to go."

"You don't think it's that bad, do you?" Katrina asked.

Gannon shrugged and looked at Duncan. Gannon pointed. "Over there, look."

Duncan and Katrina both looked.

"What?"

Minutes later they were inside a sporting goods store, trying on protective gear. Gannon slipped an Obo Robo throat protector around his neck and adjusted it while Duncan snuggled himself into an Atlas Pro Body Armor hockey torso suit. The two men looked at each other while Katrina grabbed a trio of Cambelback hydration backpacks and headed to the back of the store in search of a sink to fill them.

“Isn’t that a bit of overkill?” Gannon asked, eyeing the foam armor Duncan was adjusting.

“You saw how those fuckers bit through Gina and Roger the other day,” Duncan said. “Every little bit has to help.”

Duncan caught sight of himself in a mirror and chuckled. "When do we mod some cars for driving in the Outback?"

Gannon smiled. "Not cars, Dunc, bikes."

Minutes later they were pedaling down Graham Farmer Freeway, weaving around grouplets of walkers caught unaware of the silently moving trio of living. A pair of runners had given them chase but had been easily left behind when they switched up gears and pedaled harder.

They came upon an Army blockade at the edge of the city that had been abandoned, and stopped. There were no dead or undead around, just clusters of sand-bagged emplacements and some automatic weapons positions minus the machine guns. They dismounted and poked around the position, looking for anything useful the Army might have left behind when Duncan noticed that the roadblock seemed designed to keep people inside the city. Whatever its purpose, it had been abandoned without apparent use, the Army choosing to fight elsewhere.

"You know, it seems to me that a modern Western democracy with a first world military force ought to be able to defeat hordes of zombies in short order, seeing as they're out in the open and don't move very fast," Gannon said, "but instead, they fly combat patrols over the city and warn the uninfected to stay inside or we'll be shot."

Duncan shrugged. "I don't think the government knew what it was up against. Zombie plague? Really, mate? I don’t think anybody really knew what to do and they tried to deal with it like fighting an influenza outbreak. But the zombies didn’t act like normal sick people, instead of staying in bed, they went out and started making more of them.”

Katrina nodded. "And, they might be working on a cure and not want to kill so many of them, only the ones they have to. Maybe they figure if they kept us in quarantine, we'd be safe while they worked on a cure."

Gannon laughed. "Only idiots would choose that course of action. Have we cured the common cold or AIDS or cancer? And look at how much money the world has spent trying for as long as it's been trying. Nah, Kat, the government isn’t going to go all-in on funding a cure that will save everybody from turning into a zombie. I'm honestly surprised that they haven't started nuking cities by now."

As if on cue, a flight of eight RAAF F-18s streaked by at low altitude, and the three turned their heads quickly to follow them toward the city. Moments later, explosions rippled back toward them, columns of dark smoke rising in the air.