Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (8 page)

They turned a corner and saw a group of people near a cemetery, some of them with their cell phones out, pointing them at something. On their side of the street another knot of people stood watching the people with the cell phones. Josh and Brooke closed in on the group and then paused alongside them to see what they were looking at. Inside the cemetery were a pair of young men with small handheld digital cameras pointed at a group of a dozen people in soiled clothing, shambling about as if they were extras in a zombie film.

“What’re they doing?” Brooke asked.

“You get film students out here from time-to-time filming short movies for college,” Josh said. “The cemetery is famous for some reason I always forget and the college kids like to use it for that reason.”

Josh turned his attention to the group nearby. “What’re you guys doing?”

A guy turned and looked at Josh, glanced at Brooke approvingly, and then motioned across the street. “Watching them film the dudes filming inside the cemetery. I think they must be doing some sort of movie or something. The guys in the cemetery keep running circles around the actors while these guys across the street are just taking video on their cells and talking about what they’re seeing.”

A girl with her hair in a ponytail nodded and turned to Josh. “Yeah, I think it’s some sort of cinema verite thing. Cool shit if you do it right.”

Brooke looked across the street at the group with cell phones and noticed one of them had moved inside the cemetery through a nearby gate and was recording from inside. She’d never seen a movie being made, and hadn’t realized it might look like this.

“That’s kind of cool to film a movie this way,” Brooke said to Josh.

Josh shrugged. “I guess. You want to get closer? We can stand beside those guys if you want.”

First dates had never been this cool before, Brooke thought, as she nodded at the idea and followed him across the street. Her husband had taken her to dinner at a TexMex place and a Whiskeytown show in a small club. She had thought her husband was cutting edge at the time. Now, he was just some guy she knew who complained they weren’t having sex enough. Josh led her across the street and they watched as the zombie actors lurched and stumbled at the two cameramen inside the cemetery.

And then one of the cameramen stumbled and fell down, his camera bouncing on the grass. Brooke watched and felt the warmth of Josh’s palm against hers, and for the first seconds of what she saw next, she was totally unperturbed. One of the zombie actresses closed on the fallen cameraman, bent over him and wrenched his head sideways so violently she heard the crack of his neck as it broke. And then the zombie actress knelt down and began squeezing the cameraman’s skull between his hands. She was almost certain the actress had grunted out something that sounded like “brains.”

“That’s so cool,” a young man with a Texas Longhorns ball cap said, changing his attention from the screen on his phone to the real life rendition a few dozen yards inside the cemetery. “I wonder how they're doing the special effects. That looks so-"

At which point the other camera operator inside the cemetery noticed his fallen friend being torn apart by the zombie actress and paused, startled, “What the fuck? Gary?”

Gary’s body was completely limp in the zombie actress’ grasp, and the zombie was continuing to squeeze Gary’s skull, resulting in streams of blood from the nose and eyes. Brooke turned her head slowly to Josh and gave the barest squeeze to his hand. “That’s pretty gross.”

Josh nodded. “And kinda cool. I wonder how they’re doing it.”

Just then there was a crack almost like the sound of a baseball being struck by a bat, a loud snap that spat through the air. The other zombie actors reacted to the sound and turned their attention on the female zombie pulling Gary’s skull apart, a light steam rising off the brain matter into the cool California night air.

“Gary!” the other man said, sprinting to his fallen friend as the other zombie actors shuffle-hobbled to the spot of the now available brains. “What the fuck? What the fuck? Gary!”

The other man skidded to a stop and dropped to his knees just as three of the other zombie actors got to the spot, bent over him, and began breaking his arms and neck, simultaneously biting into him. Blood spurt everywhere, but the man screamed only for an instant until his neck was broken and his head hung limply on his chest, blood soaking his shirt.

“Oh, my God, that is so cool,” the Longhorns ball cap guy said to his buddies, who were nodding along and watching as the dozen zombie actors feasted on the two cameramen.

Brooke felt sick in the pit of her stomach. She had never seen anything so gruesome in her life, and the fact it was college filmmakers at work was only kind of comforting. She had always assumed that what she saw on the movie screen looked fake in real life: her husband was a wanna-be screenwriter who occasionally got work as a production assistant on films and would tell her how phony the props and costumes looked on set. But what she was watching inside the cemetery looked real from her vantage point on a sidewalk fifty feet away. She felt Josh give a little squeeze to her palm and glanced up at him, batting her eyes only slightly for effect.

“We should get moving. I’m sure they’ll yell ‘cut’ at any moment,” Josh said. “Then it’s thirty or forty minutes of setting everything back up again for another take. Totally boring.”

Josh turned away from the fence, took a half-step and stopped dead in his tracks. His fingers went slack in Brooke’s hand and she somehow noticed the cool band of metal around her ring finger, a blip of reality that confused her senses and momentarily distracted her from what her eyes saw on the street.

“What the– ” Josh said, his voice trailing quickly from astonishment to silence.

Shuffling down the street in a wide herd formation were more than twenty zombie actors. But that observation existed only for a moment, as the group across the street stood watching the oncoming batch of new zombies, several people of the group smiling in amazement at their luck at seeing such a weird show. Until one of the zombies grabbed the woman wearing her hair in a pony tail, yanked it hard and bit the woman on her throat. An eruption of blood doused the zombie actress, dying girl and the young man standing next to her watching the horrifying spectacle.

At which point he grabbed the girl’s arm and yanked her to him, accomplishing nothing.

“Hey, let her go!” he shouted.

But in those few seconds, the approaching zombie actors had engulfed the little group on the opposite side of the street, and within moments there were shrieks of terror, shouts of surprise and last gasps for life. Blood ran on the street at the feet of the zombie actors as they held the bodies of those in the group between them and took bites from their flesh.

Brooke froze in place at the sight. “I don’t think this is a movie.”

Josh watched the carnage across the street and stood stock still, his eyes flitting among the various zombie actors on the other side of the street. He looked into her eyes and smiled. “It has to be, Brooke. There must be hidden cameras somewhere. Or maybe these guys with the phones are in on it.”

The Longhorns baseball cap guy next to them had been recording the scene with his phone and turned to them. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s super-realistic.”

“I think this is real,” Brooke said softly. “I think those people just got killed by those … people.”

As they watched, a man from the group of onlookers across the street stumbled out of the crowd of zombies, his left arm dangling by a tendon at the shoulder, blood coursing down the side of his body, his face deeply grooved with scratches. He took a few steps and looked around in a daze, saw Brooke and Josh and made an uncertain step toward them.

“Help me,” he said, his voice weak and barely audible.

He took another step and collapsed to the asphalt.

“I think we need to get out of here,” Brooke said, common sense suddenly flooding her body, romantic notions dissolving as the primordial fight-or-flight responses kicked in deep in her brain. “Josh, we need to get the hell out of here.”

Josh turned to her and nodded several short, quick jerks. “Yeah, let’s go this way.”

He grabbed her arm by the wrist and pulled her alongside him, away from the group of onlookers. Brooke looked over her shoulder at them. Even they were backing down the road away from the zombie horde, but still recording everything with their phones. She wondered if maybe she was overreacting, if maybe this wasn’t some elaborate movie set, and then a pair of zombies – two ashen-faced black teenage boys wearing lots of gold necklaces, baggy jeans and over-sized nylon jackets – stepped out of the shadows from a narrow alley on Josh’s side and grabbed him by the arm. For an instant, Brooke noticed the one on the right had a deformed mouth, wider and filled with larger teeth than normal.

One of the boys yanked Josh away from her, ripping his hand from hers and causing her to stumble in her heels. She regained her balance just in time to see Josh take a swing at him. His hand connected with the zombie’s shoulder, but to no effect. Before he could say anything, the other zombie with the large mouth pulled Josh's other arm to its mouth and bit deeply into it, blood pooling around the zombie’s lips as it shook its head to sever flesh from the limb. Josh shrieked in pain, twisting around the bitten arm to try to land a punch on this other zombie, but the first zombie grabbed Josh's head in its palms and bent it down, biting Josh on the back of the neck and crunching into backbone. Josh vibrated violently for a second and his body went slack in the clutches of the two zombies.

Brooke began to run, unaware she had just urinated in her favorite designer jeans, the pair her husband loved on her and said brought out the best curvature of her ass. She had been hoping Josh would notice that, too. She hadn’t made it too far down the street before the guy in the baseball cap and his two companions passed her, none of them even glancing at her as they sped by. Brooke turned her head over her shoulder and saw even more … zombies? … moving onto the main street. This could not be, she thought. There can’t be zombies. Not zombies.

And then she bounced into something and tumbled to the ground, banging her skull against the curb and bringing tears to her eyes. She rolled on the ground for a moment clutching her head at the point where the pain felt like a spike through her skull. She opened her eyes and realized it hadn’t been a something she had run into, but a mottled-gray, mucus-and-blood covered balding man in his pajamas. And he was about to grab her by the head when she rolled over to her side several times, pushed herself up from the ground, kicked her heels off and sprinted down the street.

Flight mode was quickly turning into panic. Brooke didn’t know the neighborhood she was in and her car was parked in front of Josh’s apartment building, which was in the opposite direction. Very soon, she was going to be a shoeless, urine-stained thirty-nine-year old woman lost in Los Angeles, with a would’ve-been-soon-to-be-estranged husband on the other side of town at work, and a should’ve-been-new-lover dead on the street, neither of which was in a position to help her out.

She didn’t realize she was crying until she had to stop to catch her breath. Hot tears were streaming down her face and she was gasping for air amid the weeps. Everything had gone wrong. Josh had just been murdered. Her future life had just vanished into thin air. For a while, during dinner with Josh, she had actually imagined what it would be like to be single again, dating Josh, with every-other week off from her own three children: free from the crushing burden of being a mom and a wife. She had felt like freedom – happiness – was almost in her grasp. She had been falling in love, an emotion that had been lost to her for more than a decade, and it had been taken away from her on the night it was supposed to have been given to her. It was so unfair.

She opened her purse and fished out her cell phone, doing the only thing she knew she could do for help: call her husband.

“Hey, honey, what’s up?” Charles asked.

She gasped and tried to catch her breath, looking around the neighborhood, wondering what to say. She couldn’t tell him she had skipped out on girls night out after a beer with her friends while she checked her make-up and changed her outfit for her date, and she wasn’t sure what to tell him about the attack that wouldn’t involve telling Charles about her date. She just hadn’t had any time to think about it.

“Are you crying?” Charles asked a moment later.

Brooke nodded and rubbed her hand beneath her nose, “Yes.”

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“I don’t know, everything just went wrong,” she said after a pause, subconsciously editing Josh out of her story and inserting her girlfriends on the fly. “We just left the bar and were walking to the car when we were attacked by … oh god, it’s going to sound stupid … but we were attacked by a group of people dressed up like zombies.”

There was an awkward pause on the other end of the line. Then, softly, any incredulity hidden, “Zombies?”

“I know, I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but I think they killed several people on the street right in front of me,” Brooke said, the words coming out of her mouth in small bursts. “It doesn’t make any sense. I saw them breaking people’s arms and biting them on the neck.”

She broke down into spasms of tears as she thought about the carnage, the blood, the sudden onset of mayhem. It had been such a beautiful night, and then horror. A police cruiser with its lights twirling turned the corner in front of her and sped up the road toward where she had been.