Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (29 page)

“You got ‘em both?” Will asked.

Frank shook his head. “Fuck no, the other one is behind Greg’s airplane not moving. No shot on it from here.”

“Fuck. Time to run,” Will said. “Watch the tree lines.”

They got up and sprinted into the field, Will pointing to Olandis to watch in the direction of Greg’s parked aircraft. Olandis turned just as the waiting undead monster started skip-hopping right at him. Olandis dropped to a knee, raised his Winchesterr and put a round through the creature’s neck, causing it to pause for a moment to regain its balance. Olandis pulled the bolt back and slammed it forward, but Will had the creature in the the sights of his P90 and put two rounds through the back of its skull. It collapsed in a heap.

“Go! Go! Go!” Will yelled as he ran for his aircraft and began spinning the rotor blade madly.

He hopped in and sparked the engine to life, throttled the engine up, and began rolling forward, gaining momentum, the blades beginning to spin and generate lift. He looked behind him and saw Frank rolling along with Olandis in the back seat of his two-seater. Behind them, he saw more than a dozen super-zombies streaming out of the woods, some of them in full-spittle sprints.

And then Will was in the air, adjusting the controls and gaining altitude above Beechwood Boulevard, turning quickly to watch as Frank pulled into the air with ease, the nearest undead twenty yards behind him. Will stuck his hand into the air and gave Frank the “thumbs up” before motioning for him to take trail and follow him. Will climbed to a thousand feet and turned the aircraft to the north, cutting across the city and turning to the right to follow the Allegheny River upstream, adjusting his altitude down to just a hundred feet above the river: he didn’t want the undead to see him at altitude and, maybe, figure out what direction he was heading in. And, for whatever reason, the undead avoided water. He figured they couldn’t swim.

Twenty minutes later, Will rolled to a stop on the little make-shift grass strip a mile outside of Leechburg. He drove the aircraft to the parking area and shut it down. He leaned forward in the cockpit and rested his head against the instrument panel, working on controlling his breath. Greg was gone. Al was gone. George was gone. Jeff was gone.

All so he could get some snapshots of a wife he’d shot dead years earlier.

He leaned back in the cockpit and began weeping, tears streaming down his face, his nose filling with mucus. Everyone died. Everyone. The world was lost. He pulled the photos of his wife out of the pocket on his vest and stared at them, looking at the blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman he’d know for a total of four years. He’d known Greg and Al for ten, George and Jeff for fourteen. And he’d risked all their lives for a handful of pictures of her and the off-chance that the Giant Eagle supermarket hadn’t been raided by whoever was surviving in the neighborhoods near the shopping center.

He had now failed nearly everyone he had ever loved.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Frank park his aircraft and both he and Olandis walk away toward their encampment. Will calmed and sat still, looking through the photographs, staring at one he had taken of Cora in the spare bedroom one day, her hair falling across her shoulders, an errant strand caught in the hinge of her glasses and laying on her cheek. She was smiling. The most genuine smile of any of the hundreds of photographs he’d taken of her. She had hated being photographed and most of her smiles looked faked, at best. In this one, she looked happy.

He put the pictures back in his pocket and looked up into the morning sky. He never tired of the blue of the sky, never was less-than-awed by the way the landscape looked from altitude. The zombies may have come to rule the planet, but they hadn’t taken away its beauty. A gust of breeze coursed over him and he  enjoyed the sensation. He climbed out of the aircraft and looked around at the world, listened to the trills of birds as they awoke, felt the softness of the grass under his feet.

He walked across the field to the tents in the tree line and pushed through the flap. Frank and Olandis were sitting on the edge of their cots, whatever conversation they had been having suspended by his entrance. Both were quiet as Will stripped out of his gear and dropped it on the ground by his cot. He was exhausted. Sleep pushed in on him, overwhelming all of the emotions he knew he would have to deal with later.

Later.

The world still hadn’t ended.

What
Hristo Gruev Saw

Devin, Bulgaria - Day (-) 8

The shed behind the house collapsed in a loud clash of splintering wood and clanging garden tools. The four walls fell away from each other and the roof spit up chunks of shattered wood and tar shingles. Everyone in town had heard the noise, and lights flipped on throughout the town. Hristo got out of bed and looked through the window into the backyard and saw nothing. He looked over his shoulder at his wife, who was sitting up in bed, and shrugged.

“I’ll check it out.”

He stood playing the beam from his flashlight across the wreckage, his shotgun held idly in his left hand. He shook his head in disbelief: the shed was little more than a year old. What the hell had just happened?

Elena walked up behind him and put her hand on the back of his left shoulder, patting him ever-so-gently. Hristo turned and rolled his eyes. Elena smiled.

“What happened?” Elena asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, handing his wife his shotgun and stepping onto one of the fallen walls, moving the beam back-and-forth through the rubble. “Maybe an airliner dropped its toilet blue ice and it hit the shed?”

“Don’t touch anything then,” Elena said. “You don’t want to get that filth all over you.”

“I don’t see any filth, so it must have been something else.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe a micro-downburst?”

He walked away from the ruined structure and took the weapon out of his wife’s hands and nodded toward the house. “Did it wake the kids?”

“Just for a minute and I told them to go back to bed.”

“Good. Let’s do the same. I’ll check it out in the morning before I go to work.”

The next morning, Hristo Gruev walked into his back yard with a cup of coffee and looked on the ruination in the light of day. His first thought was that maybe it could be rebuilt from the existing pieces, but as he looked closer, most of the walls had suffered severe cracking and most of the studs were broken. On the plus side, most of the tools and equipment seemed undamaged.

And then he saw it: a small, fist-sized rock in a divot on the dirt floor. He crouched down and looked at it. It was a deep gray color with hundreds of pockmarks and small pimples, shaped almost like a seed attached to a wing, like a Maple tree seed. He looked up into the sky and laughed: his shed had been destroyed by a meteorite. He wondered if it was worth money and picked it up, amazed at the weight of the thing in the ball portion. He guessed maybe two or three kilos in all, a solid piece of rock or metal. Hristo finished his coffee and went back into the house.

“Well, I’m off to work, honey,” Hristo said, putting the meteorite down on a bookshelf in the living room. “We were hit by a meteorite, I think. It would be a a lot cooler if it hadn’t destroyed the shed, though.”

At work, he spent time online researching meteors, meteoroids, and meteorites, the last of which apparently impacted the planet hundreds of times a year, mostly without anyone noticing. During this research, he came across numerous sites detailing the asteroid Apophis, which apparently passed close to the Earth on a regular basis and had the potential to devastate a large area of the planet if it struck. He was surprised to find out that scientists across the globe had feared it would strike in 2004 and would be in position to hit again by 2036.

He had had no idea the Earth was in such peril from the universe.

He swiveled his chair and turned to Abel, who was staring at a chart on his computer screen and puffing furiously on an eCig.

“Have you ever heard of an asteroid named Apophis?” Hristo asked.

Abel paused and shook his head. “I didn’t know asteroids had names. I thought they had numbers or letters or some combination of the two.”

Hristo glanced at his monitor. “Well, sure, it’s also known as 99942.”

Abel swung his chair quickly around and dropped his eCig into his lap, exhaled a cloud of water vapor, and brightened. “Nine-nine-nine-four-two? Of course I’ve heard of it! Everyone is talking about it.”

“Jackass.”

Abel smiled. “Why should I know about it?”

“Apparently the thing comes close enough to the Earth every couple of decades that scientists are worried it could hit the planet.”

“Can it destroy the planet?”

“No, but it can kill a significant part of it.”

“Like what? Tunguska?”

“Bigger than that.”

“But not like the one that killed the dinosaurs?”

“No, a lot smaller than that.”

Abel shrugged. “Well, unless the Americans are going to do something about it, there’s no real point in worrying about it. It’s a rock in outer space.”

“I’m not worried, it’s just that a meteorite struck the shed in my house last night,” Hristo said. “Knocked the damn thing down. I only built it just last year.”

Abel laughed. “A meteorite hit your shed last night?”

Hristo nodded.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously.”

“And it destroyed your shed?”

“Yup.”

Abel drummed his fingers on his lap, put his eCig in his mouth and puffed a few clouds of vapor. He shrugged. “Are you supposed to report it to the authorities?”

“Probably only if it were made out of gold so they could tax it.”

Abel laughed.

“But this one is made out of something else. Iron or rock or something, I don’t know,” Hristo said.

“I don’t know what to tell you, but I’ve got to get back to this report.”

After dinner, Hristo took the meteorite from the shelf in the living room and into the home office. He set it down on the desk, examining it with a magnifying glass he’d found in a science kit his older son had gotten for his most recent birthday. He couldn’t figure anything out about it and wasn’t sure if there was anything for him to discover. It looked like a tree seed made out of a weird kind of rock.

There was a light knock on the door jamb and Hristo looked up to see his son Bogdan.

“When do we start packing? I feel like I should start now so I don’t forget anything,” Bogdan said.

Hristo smiled.

“You’re not going to forget anything. Your Mom has a detailed list of everything everybody needs to take. She’s been working on it for the last two months, so I’m pretty sure it’s more-than-complete,” he said. “We’ve still got a couple of days to go before we worry about that, anyway. But you might want to start thinking about what you’re going to take on the plane to keep you busy. It’s a long flight to Los Angeles.”

“We’ll be able to get off the plane, won’t we?”

Hristo nodded. “I think there are short layovers in Italy and New York City, but we won’t be able to see anything but the inside of the airport in either of them, so you’ll need something to read or a video game to play.”

“I can’t believe you’re taking us to America. I don’t think I’ll believe it until I actually see Uncle Gavril and Aunt Sara.”

Hristo laughed. “Really, that’s first on your mind, not the whole Disneyland trip?”

Bogdan screwed up his face for a moment in embarrassment: caught. “Well, sure, Dad, but I think Branimir is more excited about that. I just really want to see if America looks like it does in the movies, if everything is really more modern than everything here.”

Hristo rolled his eyes. “There’s plenty of old stuff there, too, Bogdan. It’s been lived in for hundreds of years.”

“Can I look at the meteorite?”

Hristo nodded and handed the magnifying glass to Bogdan. After a minute, his son put it down and shrugged. “I thought it would be a lot cooler than this, since it came from outer space.”

“Yeah, well, it’s just a rock like any other rock. Apparently, the galaxy is full of them.”

Hristo tossed the meteorite up into the air as hard as he could and watched as it fell back to earth, making one quick spin around before landing with a thud in the grass. He had no idea how much force a falling object had on impact. He had searched online and found numerous sites with calculators to determine the kinetic energy released by a falling object, but not being a science or math person, he had been unable to figure out why the meteorite had only destroyed his shed and not the entire town. It didn’t seem heavy enough based on his throwing it up, but he could only throw it up twenty feet, and it had fallen from outer space.

He threw it up again. It landed with another thud, but for a moment he thought he saw a brief flash of yellow - dust? powder? light? - when it landed on the ground next to him. He picked it up and looked at it, noticing a tiny sand-crystal-sized spot of yellow on its surface. He brought it close to his face and looked at it and then sneezed so forcefully he dropped the meteorite. He sneezed again and stood up. And sneezed again.