Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (3 page)

All that is true.

The only rule of zombies is there is no rule for zombies.

Or does that count as a rule?

Whatever. So, I’ve been mostly living in the second floor of the Point on 23 pub with eight other people. Used to be eleven of us, but you know about Kyle and Marsha, so now there are just nine of us. Been in here for about five weeks, now, and all the food and beer is gone. The toilets don’t work and there’s no running water, no electricity, no anything like before. I mean, not that I’d been in here before the zombies, I hadn’t, I’m only fifteen and not allowed in bars.

Kyle and I got in here the day the zombies came over from Norristown. They were mostly illegal Mexicans, the shorter, darker brown kind that you sometimes see hanging out in the parking lot of The Home Depot or Lowe’s early in the morning, or like the guys who did most of the construction on the townhouses on Union Avenue last summer. You’d walk by there and all you heard was table saws, hammers and Spanish. Only in America, right?

So, it was about one o’clock in the afternoon and Kyle and I were at the park on top of the hill behind the grade school when we started hearing the shots. Lots of shots. And then the siren from the Swedesburg fire company went off and Old Man Joe Morris told us to get the hell home because the town was done for. Then he and Don Fox took their rifles and headed toward the school on the other side of the park. Haven’t seen Old Man Morris since, but Don Fox is a zombie that mostly hangs out around the Rib House, only he’s missing both arms and looks like someone set his head on fire.

I didn’t make it home. Of course, I wasn’t supposed to be outside of home, either. Dad took Mom, Kelly, Molly and Craig up to Pop Pop’s house out in the country with our dog, Rocket, thinking maybe it’d be safer up there away from so many people, since zombies seem to be drawn to people. I was supposed to stay and guard the house, only Dad took the .45 and the shotgun and left me with Mom’s little five-shot .380, which is good for shooting muggers and carjackers, but not so much for zombies. Not that it matters, since I forgot it on coffee table in the living room right next to the keys to the house.

All because of Kyle, of course, who came by that afternoon to tell me he heard Old Man Morris and Don Fox were going to snipe zombies from the top of the hill and did I want to come watch? He had two pairs of binoculars, so I said sure, and then – you guessed it – click!, the front door locked behind me. And since the windows on the first floor were all boarded up inside and out, well, there was no way back in if you weren’t Spider-Man.

I’m not Spider-Man, I’m Ralph McGuire.

So, I ended up in The Point. Just barely. Like I said, some zombies are fast, and there were some fast little illegal Mexican zombies that came across us as we were walking down Grove Street talking about how bad my Dad would kill me if I had to pry off some plywood from a window, break the glass, and kick my way into the house. I knew there was canned food, water, and all my clothes in there. Plus, that’s where my Dad was coming back to after he dropped off my Mom and sisters and brother.

And then the zombies were just there, kinda running up the alley at us in some sort of stutter-step half-skip run, if you can imagine that. I think they must have played a lot of soccer when they were alive to have been able to run like that.

So, Kyle and I had to start running down the street looking for someplace to hide, and – of course – every house in town is locked and most of them are boarded up, more or less. So we ran a couple of blocks with those zombie Mexicans on our tails and Kyle sees a bunch of people prying open the door to the pub while a lady with a shotgun is blowing holes in a handful of zombies – the normal American kind – and we ran over to them. Almost got shot, too, but at the last second the lady – Valerie – realized we weren’t fast zombies and didn’t shoot us.

Plunked a couple of the Mexican zombies, though.

After we got inside, everyone started pushing things against the door. The first floor windows already had some metal screens on the outside, although most of them were high enough on the walls that nobody – well, no zombie, anyway – would be able to climb up and in through them. After that, nobody really knew what to do, and all the adults started kind of arguing about who should be in charge, almost like we were on that television show Survivor.

I guess maybe we kind of actually were. Only nobody gets voted off, they get eaten off.

Valerie was the only one with a gun, and even though she only had seven shells left everyone sort of let her be in charge. I mean sort of in charge, because Steve “I’m a trial attorney” Douchenozzle was always horning in with his opinion on what should be done and how. Not that there was really anything to be in charge of: there were just eleven of us in a bar, it’s not like we needed to write a Constitution or something.

That first night was the only real excitement. About an hour after sunset, there was a huge commotion a couple of blocks over toward Swedesburg. A lot of gunfire and shouting moving down Prospect Street. A couple of us managed to get up on the roof, but you really couldn’t see anything except a sliver of Fourth Street near the industrial park building. Looked like twenty or thirty people fighting off a horde of zombies while cutting through the chain link fence somebody put up the week before. It wasn’t a real good fence, just one of those temporary kinds they put up around construction sites to keep kids and homeless people from getting hurt or stealing tools. And so Steve can’t sue them for negligence.

That’s when a security guard came running out of the self-storage locker building and began waving for the people to go away. There was no way to hear anything from the roof of the bar, but you could tell the guard was trying to get them to stop and go away, and he didn’t care about the zombies making their way down the street toward the group of people on the outside of his fence. But they ignored him and managed to cut the chain locking the gate and the entire group rushed in, pushing him off to the side. Then a couple of mini-vans and some dirt bikes drove through the gate before everyone pushed them closed and shot some of the zombies on the outside of the fence. Since then, nothing. But you hear the dirt bikes riding up and down the railroad tracks every so often.

In fact, there are a lot of people still in town. You see them up on the rooftops during the day, acting like guards. And everyone has the same idea, too: scavenge. But that’s almost as dangerous as the zombies, because if you try to get into a house that’s got people in it, you can get yourself shot.

I was out with Carla working up the alley between Grove and Bush streets when we saw two older guys trying to pry open the back door to a house when someone from inside just shot through the door and hit the guy with the pry bar. The guy stumbled around the backyard for a minute while his buddy shouted at the people in the house about murdering his friend instead of just telling them to go away. But nobody inside said anything, and the shot guy collapsed in the back yard while the other guy cut through the space between some houses and disappeared onto Grove Street.

Carla and I had to start hustling because if there’s one thing that will bring zombies, it’s the sound of something loud like a gun. Del said he thinks any manmade sound will bring them, because if you watch the zombies on Fourth Street, they can tell the dirt bikes are running and will start walking down to the tracks. Sure enough, before we made it to Rambo Street on the way back to the bar there were a dozen zombies coming up around the corner from Ford Street, shuffling right at us. Slow pokes, so Carla and I were able to run through some back yards and up a couple of streets until we came to Desimone’s Café.

That’s where Mom and Dad would go sometimes on something they called “Date Night.” It had a restaurant in the back that served Italian food, and a bar in the front that still lets people smoke cigarettes, and my parents both smoke, so they like to go there. Valerie, Marsha, Del and Lester all smoked cigarettes, too, until about two days after we got into the bar and they all ran out. Now, the only cigarettes left in town are in the Wawa, and nobody’s stupid enough to try and get into it.

Desimone’s was burnt-out when we walked by, and there were maybe ten zombie bodies on the sidewalk outside, a couple of them pretty burned up. We peeked inside the building, but there was nobody in there, just charred furniture and broken glass. The place was fine just a couple of days earlier, when I went by it with Carla on my way to check and see if my Dad had come back, yet. He hadn’t - the house was still locked - and we had to run like hell from some fast zombies that had been standing behind some trees in the lawn of Our Mother of Sorrows Church.

There ought to be a way to figure out the fast zombies from the slow ones, but so far nobody can do it. They all just stand there moaning or shuffle slowly around until they have a reason to go somewhere. These ones were pretty fast, though. If they hadn’t been running across the street, we wouldn’t have heard their shoes slapping on the ground and they might have gotten us. Instead, since it’s so quiet anymore, you could hear them coming across the road, and Carla turned around on the porch while I was standing on a metal garbage can looking through the transom – the only window on the first floor Dad hadn’t boarded over on both sides – to see if he was in there.

Carla just said, “Shit, runners.”

I turned around and looked, and sure enough, there were five of them coming across the street pretty fast in a lurching skip-hop kind of run. Anyway, you can’t really fight five fast zombies if there’s just two of you, and all we had were a baseball bat and a cheap-o “industrial” chef’s knife from the bar’s kitchen. My Dad’s kitchen knives are way better than the pieces of crap whoever cooked at the bar had to use, but that’s probably because Dad calls himself a “gourmet cook.” Mom says he just likes expensive kitchen gadgets.

So, we had to haul off down Coates Street pretty fast, and then started cutting through some of the back yards. One thing I never really knew about Bridgeport before the zombies came was how many back yards had fences around them. It’s like all of them, practically. So, you have to do a lot of climbing, which is a good thing because the zombies aren’t so good at it. Unless you’re not very good, either, in which case you’ll end up like the guy from A2Z Batteries. He tried to get in the industrial center building the day after the group broke in, but there was nobody at the gate, and when he started to climb the fence a bunch of zombies got to him and pulled him off and tore him to pieces.

We were sneaking through one yard when all of the sudden the back door to the house opens and an old guy leans out and starts waving one of those old-style revolver pistols in the air.

“Over here, quick,” he said.

Carla and I both stopped in our tracks, because nobody did this anymore. Not that anybody ever did, I guess. But, now? That’s when he pointed the gun past us into the yard behind his at the dozen or so slowpokes shuffling straight at us. And then we were inside his house and he bolted the back door with a metal rod that slid behind the door.

He lived like my grandparents. All of his stuff was old tech, like he'd just chosen a year to quit updating his life. He had a tube TV with a VCR; a stereo system that played records, cassettes and CDs; a couch covered with handmade Afghan blankets; and an old style tan computer that sat on a small table in the corner of the dining room.

We had been inside for about two minutes when the zombies started pawing at the back door we’d come through, trying to find something to grab on to and pull off, which is why everybody boards up the windows: they’ll just break right through if the glass ain’t strong. They can be relentless when they know there are living people inside somewhere. I saw one with a screwdriver one day but couldn’t figure out what it would do with it. Maybe something inside its old life told it the tool could be useful? They bang and scratch and pull at stuff until something gives way, and then they just pry their way in. That’s probably what happened to Desimone’s.

The old man said his name was Paul and that he hadn’t talked to anybody since the zombie’s took over the town. His wife had been out getting some last-minute groceries and had never come back. Since then, he’d been stuck in his house, watching out the windows from the top floor at what little he could see on Hurst Street. Which was nothing, except maybe the occasional group of zombies shuffling down the street toward the sound of dirt bikes or gunfire. Every once-in-while he said he’d see someone coming or going from a house, although mostly he saw the random group of two or three people trying to break in across the street.

The most activity he’d seen was a couple of days after the zombies came across the bridge when the apartment building on the corner of Fraley Street burned down. Zombies and people everywhere for a while, and then just zombies and the bodies of the people they’d eaten. Other than that, he didn’t know anything about what was going on. Nobody did, really: there was no TV or radio or Internet anymore. Nobody knew if cell phones still worked because nobody had one with a charge, and the walkie-talkies I had were locked in my house with everything else.

We told Paul he could come stay with us down at the bar and that we had been trying to find a way to get in touch with the people in the industrial center, but he didn’t want to go anywhere in case his wife – Michelle – came back. I wanted to tell him nobody comes back anymore. I mean, if my Dad hadn’t come back, then nobody comes back: my Dad wouldn’t have left me here, not on purpose. Pop-Pop only lives an hour away up near the Amish country in Berks County. Dad should’ve only been gone for three or four hours to just drop everyone else off, but now he’d been gone for weeks.