Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (5 page)

“It was all volunteers at the end,” Barney said, “people who didn’t want to leave town or hide in their home were allowed to continue unloading trucks here. Corporate was pre-positioning items it thought would be useful once the plague lifted. But the plague moved quicker than anyone thought, so we never got to shut it down.”

“Hey! Over there,” Travis said, pointing over the barrel of his machine gun down the line of trees toward a corner of the parking lot where a gaggle of zombies were gathered. “Up that tree.”

Chase looked through the binoculars and saw Gottlieb tangled in the branches of a tree, a couple of feet above the outstretched arms of the undead. Chase scanned for Randy but couldn’t find him. Chase felt around his waist for his duck call, lifted it to his lips and let out a series of quacks while watching through the glasses. He could see Gottlieb perk up in the tree, his head turning, looking for the source of the duck call. The zombies noticed nothing. And then Chase dropped the duck call from his lips and opened his mouth in amazement.

“Holy crap,” Chase said. “Tim McGraw is a zombie.”

“What? Really?” Travis said, lifting his head and searching through the crowd of zombies at the foot of Gottlieb’s tree. At a hundred yards off, it was too far away to make out anyone distinct.

“Oh, yeah, that’s him for sure,” Chase said, “He looks fresh, too. Must’ve only been turned recently.”

“Probably was doing what we’re doing right now,” Barney said, “trying to get in the building for supplies.”

Chase handed the binoculars to Barney and lifted his rifle to his shoulder, looking down through the scope and bringing the cross-hairs on to the head of the country music star. McGraw was dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, a camouflage Army jacket overtop. He had an empty holster on his right hip and his left arm dangled limply at his side, soaked through with blood at the shoulder.

“Oh, yeah, that’s him alright,” Barney said.

“Well, I’m going to blow his head off,” Chase said. “You two move through the tree line and get closer to them. I’ll fire a few rounds from here then move when they start coming for me. Then you two take the rest down, get Gottlieb and run like hell for Old Hickory Boulevard. Give me blow on the duck call when you’re in place.”

While Barney and Travis moved through the woods, Chase kept his crosshairs sweeping through the crowd at the foot of the tree, counting seventeen walking dead. He also kept frequently checking everywhere else, making sure none of the zombies on the other side of the fence had made his position, and that there weren’t any soloists straggling through the woods near him. There was no fast-and-true rule to zombies: they could be anywhere and everywhere, and usually were. He heard the sound of a duck call and sighted back through his rifle, first acquiring Gottlieb in the tree, who had now seemed to gather in what amounted to a ready-crouch for jumping down. Chase blew his response through his duck call and saw relief flood through Gottlieb’s face as he finally allowed that the sounds were from rescuers and not fowl.

Chase put his rifle's sight on Tim McGraw’s head and squeezed the trigger, the country singer’s head opening up in a burst of brain matter and atomized blood. Chase chambered another round and took aim at the next zombie, putting a round right through its left eye and splintering the former man’s skull. The rest of the zombies at the foot of the tree now all turned en masse and faced where Chase knelt in the underbrush. They began an exaggerated shuffle-stagger toward him, a gait that should’ve made people giggle at the drunkenness of the walkers, but instead instilled fear. Chase let loose with another round and frowned when he saw it hit the zombie's shoulder, only just causing it to stutter-step in response. He quickly realized he had to conserve his small amount of ammunition and began picking his way backward along the tree line.

He stumbled over something and fell to the ground hard, rolled onto his side and stared at the mutilated body of Randy Mills. Without even a conscious thought, Chase raised the rifle above him as a self-defense move at whatever might be near when a woman in her 50s, a zombie, loomed over him. Blood spittle dripped down her broken chin. Her fingernails were chipped and worn to the quick, her gray skin worn to tatters and peeling from her face, exposing gums and teeth. She reached down for him and coincidentally tangled the rifle between her arms, twisting this way and that as if her hands were in a stockade. Blood dripped onto Chase’s shirt. The smell of her breath was foul.

Chase jerked the rifle to the side and rolled quickly away from the undead woman. She lost her lost balance and fell to the ground on her hands and knees above his rifle. With a fluid movement Chase was up in a hunched over squat, pulling his curved Gurkha knife from its sheath. He brought the blade up, changed his handhold on it and brought it down in an arc through the zombie’s neck, slicing it off. There was an eruption of blood from the exposed artery and the body collapsed to the ground. Chase turned quickly in place, scanning the area for more zombies creeping through the underbrush. Nothing. He wiped the knife on the back of the woman’s dress, sheathed it and picked his rifle up just as he heard the pounding footsteps of Barney, Travis and Gottlieb.

Travis stopped, turned, and let out a staccato of fire from his P-90, a couple of micro-seconds of noise mixed with interjections of silence as Travis pressed and released the trigger in even, short bursts.

“Nice move, Chase,” Gottlieb said. “Almost thought you were a goner.”

Chase looked past them at the two zombies left of the little pack that had treed Gottlieb, sighted them through his rifle and took each down in quick succession.

“Damn, Gott, I’m not gonna let some lame old lady walker take me out. I’d never live it down.”

They all paused for a brief second to regard the body of Randy Mills, a friend who would become a zombie in the not-too-distant future. Barney holed Randy’s head with a shot from his pistol and then looked over his shoulder at the distribution center.

“The ones by the loading dock are moving this way.”

The raids and zombie killing became the measure of the days for Chase, pieced together in his mind’s eye as clearly as he saw the notes on the fret board of a guitar. It made sense, somehow, though he could not quite explain how he had managed to figure out which undead were runners, which were walkers. He just knew when he saw them, knew in the same way he knew how to make any of the chords on his guitar without looking at his fingers or the strings. Indeed, it was something he could tell more readily than which people on the car lot were sellable and which were not.

Life had become something unintelligibly different in the months since the zombie plague had wiped out most of the human population, but it had not made it less worth living. At least, not to Chase, who had never really hated his job as an automobile salesman, but had always known it wasn’t his destiny, even though he had long ago come to the conclusion that it would be his unintended, but lucrative, career path through life. Anyway, he saw more of his wife and daughters in this new life, and that made him happier on a deeper, more elemental level. That every time he saw them might be his last now occurred to him, which made it all that more meaningful to him: dying in a car crash on his commute was something that he never really factored into his life, although it was, statistically, the biggest risk he had taken with his life each day.

He poured himself three fingers of Elijah Craig bourbon and sat down on a stool in his garage. He wondered for a moment about Tim McGraw and the life that man had lived, reaching the epitome of success and fame, having it all in a world in which anything could be had, where there were no boundaries, no limits on what you could have. McGraw and Treat Hemingway could do whatever they wanted, could have anything they desired in the world in which Chase had wanted to live, but they had become just ordinary zombies in the world in which Chase now lived.

The old world was over, and nothing in it counted any longer. Chase sipped deeply on the bourbon and let the sweetness linger on his tongue before swallowing. For the first time in his life, he was finally gaining a reputation for something he was good at: killing country music.

Waiting for the Gr
eat Leap Forward

Liepvre, France – Day 159

They were just three, now, down from eleven a week earlier. Remy hated life now more than ever before. As the only man in the group, Syrah and Yvette expected him to be able to protect them. And create fire. And find food. And figure out directions to wherever it was they were going. Scratch fire – that was what had gotten so many of them killed the week earlier: apparently, smoke and the smell of cooking food attracted zombies, and before anybody had had a chance to eat, dozens of the undead were trampling through the parking lot the group was in.

And then they had become dinner. Well, Nicolas, Martin, Valerie, Marie and Gerard had become dinner. Everyone else had run full-steam out of the lot and down the railroad tracks. The six left had holed up in an abandoned train station the next few nights, making no noise and attempting to sleep in shifts, but someone had fallen asleep on shift one night and they had all awoken to the shrill screams of Bernadette being bitten on the arm by a zombie, and Remy had had just a split-second to grab his shoulder bag before sprinting out the emergency doors with Syrah and Yvette, Luc and Pierre right on their heels.

But they had gotten stuck in a traffic jam on a clogged road outside Nancy, picking their way quietly through the parked cars. Some of the cars still had the real dead in them, collections of bones and moldering clothing, but some had the undead in them, laying motionless, waiting for something living to walk by. Pierre had been taken almost immediately by a faded-gray, skeletal goth queen in her early twenties, a girl any of the three men would’ve found attractive in her pre-undead state, her dark hair streaked with purple, her lower lip pierced, the hint of a tattoo on her shoulder. She must have known it, too, some leftover memory from her alive life, because Remy had watched as Pierre paused to regard the undead girl and consider her before-death beauty, preserved in pseudo-death and only slightly altered by her skin’s discoloration and the amount of blood drool on her chest.

Remy had meant to shout a warning to Pierre to move, but Remy, too, had been transfixed at the left-over female attractiveness of the zombie girl. That moment had only lasted a few seconds, the zombie girl almost-but-not-quite smiling at Pierre before she lunged at him and bit a chunk of flesh from his neck. Pierre’s startled yelp of pain had roused a score of other somnolent zombies from their hidey-holes among the automobiles, and it was all Remy, Syrah, Yvette and Luc could do to escape with their lives, the pleas for help from Pierre ignored and drowned out by the pounding of their footsteps.

Luc had been their group leader during the two weeks they’d been on the run after leaving the university dormitory in Rheims. At twenty-four, Luc was slightly older than Remy and was the only person Remy had ever met who had actually served in the military, spending two years in the Army as an infantryman. Plus, Luc had a machete, the closest thing to an actual weapon anybody had. So everyone had agreed, tacitly at least, that Luc should be the leader of their group. Remy would’ve voted against it had they actually voted on it - he distrusted the military and the kinds of warmongers who joined - but he had grudgingly admitted to himself since then that Luc was the only one among them who knew how to read a map, hotwire a car or cut the heads off the undead. And, in the end, it had been his prohibition on fires of any sort that had kept them alive the first week.

But that had all ended two days ago when Luc lost his balance while climbing up a utility pole to get a vantage point on the road ahead. He had fallen thirty feet from the top rung of the pole and cracked his skull on the asphalt, his body twitching as the life ran out of him. At least he got to die all the way, Remy thought as the girls begged him to do something to save Luc. But Remy knew nothing about first aid or medicine, and Luc didn’t last long enough for Remy to have been convinced to try. Luc’s eyes glazed over while he stared up into the blue sky and cumulus clouds, and Remy had turned to look up at them, curious what Luc’s last visual input had been. Given the final visage Pierre had seen, Remy figured Luc had gotten off lucky.

They had covered Luc’s body under a make-shift grave of branches and small rocks before moving on down the road to Liepvre, only knowing that’s what lay ahead of them because of the signs along the road. The girls tried to get Remy to agree to stay off the road and walk through the woods, as Luc had done with the group when he had been in charge, but Remy had only shrugged his shoulders and noted that that technique had only gotten them so far, and he wasn’t up for twisting his ankles on buried stumps and the tiny tunnels to animal warrens. He also didn’t know how Luc had managed to navigate cross-country and didn’t want to get lost in the woods.

“What the fuck do zombies know about roads?” he had asked, finally, in sheer exasperation when Yvette had questioned him for the thousandth time about walking down the middle of the road. “They’re fucking zombies, not enemy soldiers. They don’t have a plan, they aren’t doing patrols, they’re just fucking mindless reanimated corpses roaming the landscape.”

And then he had laughed, hysterically, collapsing to the ground and gathering his knees to his chest as he giggled thinking about the new reality. Reality: mindless reanimated corpses roaming the landscape. He had never been a zombie movie fan because it had never interested him: what could possibly be so scary about zombies? For him, the question had always been even simpler than that: what would cause a zombie, much less a zombie plague? Not, he knew, some American germ warfare experiment gone wrong. That would kill everyone, but the Americans would go first, if the world were lucky, for having fucked around with genetic shit in the first place. Fucking Americans. Remy hated them and their corn-fed beef, sport-utility vehicles, television sitcoms and Nicholas Cage movies.