Impact (27 page)

Jim touched my shoulder. “It ain’t here,” he said sadly. “There’s no manhole after all.”

I looked at him, speechless, as growls and moans pierced the air all around us. The pounding got louder as zombies banged from all directions. The panels shook violently and I knew one would break any minute. Staying underneath this stage was a death sentence.

A weakened panel by Jim’s legs began to shake. A rancid hand suddenly burst in through.

“Zombie!” Jim shouted. Terror etched his face as long fingernails, like sharp claws, swiped at us. He grabbed a board and bashed the arm, ripping it off the decaying zombie.

Panels started to buckle and shake under the strain of so many undead trying to fight their way in. 

Jim gasped for air, breathless with fear. “They’re comin’ for us, man,” he said. “You gotta end me before they do. I’m beggin’ you.”

I swallowed hard.

“Please, Dean. I know I ain’t lived as an honorable man or nothin’, but let me die an honorable death.”

“No! I won’t die a coward’s death. I won’t die a helpless victim.”

His eyebrows arched. “You’d rather be ripped to shreds?” he whispered. 

I felt shaken and unsure. “This isn’t how my life is supposed to end.”

He looked away. “Z once told me the way to overcome the fear of death is to embrace it.”

“I won’t admit defeat.” I sighed. “And I don’t care what Confucius says. I’m not gonna just sit back and accept death. We have to try something, anything. Maybe we can create a distraction and jump back onstage. They can’t get to us up there.”

“That’s suicide!” he said.

“And staying down here isn’t?”

“Kirk’s gotta be pissed, unless he thinks we’re already dead. If they see us, they’ll fill us fulla holes.”

“Maybe not. We can say we rolled off by accident, in the heat of the fight. Instinctively, we just took cover and hid. Besides, I’d rather take my chances with them then these zombies. If he shoots me, at least I didn’t die a coward...or a meal.”

“If he don’t order us killed, he’ll make us continue the fight till one of us is dead. Are you prepared to do that? I don’t wanna kill ya, kid. Really. If we return to the stage, that’s what I’ll be forced to do, and then I’ll be back in bondage once again. I refuse to live that way. I’d rather die right now.”

“You can’t possibly prefer death by zombies,” I said.

He reached for my hand. “I don’t. That’s why I need you to use that gun.”

“No,” I said.

He shook his head. “Dang you, boy,” he said, furious. He then swallowed hard and looked up to the ceiling. “This can’t be the way I’m gonna die,” he said. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Please, God, take care of my family, my wife and kids...and please let them things kill me quick, since Dean won’t shoot me.”

“Another one got in!” I said.

Jim spun around and kicked the mangled corpse in the chest. It fell sideways and he finished it off with his boot.

“I’ve got an idea!” I said. “We can smear zombie guts on our bodies. If we smell like them, they won’t attack us.”

“Trying to blend in with the brain-munchers?”

“It’s worked before!”

“It ain’t gonna work now. There are too many of them! We’re soaked with human blood from that bath Kirk’s guy gave us.”

“It’ll work. It’s saved lives before.”

“It ain’t gonna save ours. There are too many in this horde, and they keep ‘em good and starved so they’ll put on a good show for Blood Fest.”

“When my sister was trapped in a museum, zombie guts saved her. We’ve gotta try.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to be eaten alive. All things considered, I’d rather you just shoot me.” 

Another trio of snapping zombies lumbered in our direction. Two fell over wooden boards, but the third just stared at me like it hadn’t eaten in weeks and was desperate for a meal. It had short, bleach blonde hair with deteriorated skin and a mangled nose. Swinging my bat, its blonde wig flew off, revealing a green, bald head. I put the thing out of its misery. Jim took out the other two with a few swift kicks with his boot.

“So are we gonna end this or what?” he asked. “I’ve gotta do it while I’ve got the nerve.” 

I shoved him away from me. “No, Jim! I’m not shooting anybody.” 

“Don’t make me take that gun from you. I’ll do you and then me if I have to. It’s for your own good!” he shouted.

In an instant, his rage took over, as if he’d morphed suddenly into Quick Death. He body-slammed me, and we wrestled over the layers of debris. Anger consumed me, and I fought with every ounce of strength I had left. In a blur, he had the gun and was holding it against my neck. 

“Don’t do it,” I said.

His eyes welled with tears that I didn’t know he was capable of crying, and his voice began to waver. “I’m saving you from a torturous fate.”

“Liar!” I screamed. “You’re still after your revenge!”

He cocked the gun, his fingers trembling on the trigger. “I told you that I’m over that. Think of this as a favor. I doubt I’ll be seeing ya in the afterlife, but try to remember that I did this one good thing. Please try to remember that.”

Frantic, I slid my hands around in the garbage and boards, searching for anything I could use as a weapon. As I felt around, my fingers hit the edge of something metal and flat. “Wait! I think I found it!” I said. 

He scowled. “C’mon, Dean. Just take this like a man. It’ll all be over before you know it, and then I’m gonna—”

Before he could utter the rest of his sentence, a zombie grabbed his shoulder.

When he turned to smack it off of him, I knocked the gun out of his hand. Ignoring me, he tackled the stick-thin zombie behind him. Grabbing a giant rock, he swung down onto the zombie’s head.

Teeth clacked. A rotter with spikey hair reached for me. Without wasting one precious second, I jammed my knife into its mushy eye socket. It fell backward into the debris. 

I pointed over to where I had felt the metal. “I wasn’t kidding! See for yourself!”

Jim shoved several pieces of debris out of the way, and his eyes widened in surprise. “You’re right!” he said, sniffling. “It’s here! The manhole cover is really here.”

My heart skipped in victory, but the joy didn’t last long. More zombies were crawling inside, and I heard the sound of plastic snapping and metal bending as they broke the panel completely loose. Endless corpses stumbled in through the opening, their mouths agape and salivating. Dread knotted in my stomach, and I hoped we hadn’t lived just long enough to die.

T
he ghouls maneuvered, thrashed, and fought their way through the jungle of junk. Over a dozen zombies quickly made it through, and the others weren’t far behind. Jim, just as frightened as I was, grabbed a pipe and started swinging.

The closet one snarled like an attack dog. I took aim at its wrinkled forehead and pulled the trigger. The gunshot riled the others up, and they moaned and reached for me. I knew it was risky to fire, because Kirk or the spectators or snipers might hear, but I had no choice but to fire off another round. I was hell-bent on escaping, so a hailstorm of bullets tore into the undead.

A second later, something clawed at my pant leg. As its rotting teeth tried to bite into my ankle, I slammed the heel of my boot into its sorry head. Its skull crunched like a porcelain vase. I shot another rotter right in the face as I flung off two more, then slammed another magazine into the gun.

“We gotta get outta here!” Jim shouted. “Gimme a hand!”

Together, we lifted the manhole lid. Jim grabbed the red backpack and scurried down the ladder into the darkness. He screamed when a loud, gruff moan erupted from below.

A chill shot up my spine. “How many?” I shouted, certain that we were about to face zombies galore, no matter which direction we went.

“It’s Pit Bull!” he said, his voice stricken with panic. 

I shined the flashlight down. A tall zombie had grabbed Jim with one hand and was lunging for his neck. With quick reflexes, I reached for my knife and threw it into the zombie’ head. It backed up, as if it was dazed, but it quickly pounced on him again for the kill. Jim thrashed as he tried to fight the snapping thing off of him. Just as the zombie went to sink its teeth into Jim’s neck, I aimed my gun and pulled the trigger.

“Get down here!” Jim said as the thing crumpled at his feet. “Get down here now!”

I took one last look at the dozens of zombies behind me, then scurried down in through the manhole. As green and black hands reached for me, I grabbed the lid and secured it in the opening. Panting for breath, I hurried down the rusty ladder.

Jim pointed at the zombie I had killed. “You got him,” he said.

I pulled my knife from the dead zombie. “I thought you said those two escaped.”

He let out a long breath. “I thought they did, but I guess Pit Bull didn’t fare as well as we did.”

“Are you sure that’s him?” I asked.

“Yeah. He’s still got that spiked collar, his trademark.”

I looked at the zombie and realized he was handcuffed to the wall by one hand. “Looks like The Butcher left him to die.”

“They hated one another, in the ring and outside it.”

My gaze narrowed. “Is this how we’re gonna end up?”

“We didn’t come this far for me to kill you...or vice versa.” He handed me another backpack. “I found two more, one for you and one for me. They left a nice stockpile down here. Consider this a truce.”

“I’m up for that,” I said, combining the supplies from the red backpack with the ones in the fuller backpack.

“You didn’t kill my brother. That psycho Claire did. I can’t blame you for it.”

I didn’t appreciate the things he was saying about Claire as he went on with his rant, especially since he had no right to refer to her as a psycho when his brother was absolutely certifiable. However, I also knew it would do no good to strike up an argument with him. For the time being, we had to be allies. I ignored his rambling and shoved as many supplies as I could into the fresh backpack, then threw it over my shoulders. “We gotta move,” I said. “I’m sure that gunfire will have people coming for us.”

Instead of following me, Jim just stood there, looking down at the filthy, damp floor.

“Let’s go!”

A sob emerged from him.

“What’s wrong? Were you bitten?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

He shook my shoulders. “I just... I can’t believe I’m free, that I’m actually still alive. I thought we were dead back there.”

“If you wanna keep it that way, we’ve gotta get a move-on.”

He nodded. “What were the chances that we’d survive that?”

“One in a billion,” I said, grinning.

“Hmm. Maybe we oughtta start playing the lotto.” Jim smiled and shined a flashlight ahead, and we started briskly walking. “Thing is, maybe you shouldn’t have let off all that gunfire,” he said as we trudged along. 

“Hmm. Well, maybe I shoulda just let that zombified Pit Bull bite you then. Talk about a bad case of rabies.”

“One shot might not have been so noticeable, but you went all Rambo on those zombies at the top.”

“I had no choice. Too many were coming at me. I couldn’t fight them all off with a baseball bat. It was do or die.”

He peered around in the darkness. “How the heck do we find our way out of here?” he asked, wrinkling his nose up at the stench.

“Just look for light shining through a manhole cover.”

“I wonder what they think of them gunshots?” he asked.

“I don’t know. The crowd was pretty loud, and we were way down low, in a blind spot.”

“Yeah. They did see us fall into a pit of zombies.”

“I don’t really care what they think. We’re way ahead of them. I just wanna get as far away as possible from the lunatics who zip-lined me down to a stage surrounded by zombies.”

“There are a lotta lunatics in this world,” he said.

“Yep,” I said, because there was no denying that.

“I know Z was one of them. I realized my brother had a screw loose the second he murdered all those innocent people at the bottom of the hill near your apartment building. He killed ‘em all in cold blood, just to prove a point. He was a cruel man, and I hated that, but I had to love him ‘cause he was blood. I was angry when he died, mad at that Claire chick, but I guess...well, from what I seen here, with this Kirk jerk, I know the world is better without tyrants like Z in it.”

“You’re mad at Claire for shooting him in self-defense, but he locked me and her in a factory and tried to feed us to zombies, then set the building on fire. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he also threw Claire into an ice-cold pool in the middle of winter, full of snapping zombies. I hate to say it, but I’d have to agree with you that your brother was a lunatic.”

“I guess I see why she shot him. I thought she was bitten, but it must’ve been just a gash, ‘cause she never turned.”

I wasn’t about to explain the truth, because I didn’t want Jim to know that we had access to a serum that made her immune to zombie bites. That had to be our little secret, and I couldn’t divulge it to just anyone. “Well, Z thought she was bitten, too, so he had no remorse for what he did to her.”

“That was cold. He tried to take a woman’s life without batting an eyelash.” He shook his head. “Ya know, I don’t know why he was like that. Mama musta dropped him on his head one too many times. I bought into his crap for a while, but I knew he was up to no good.”

“Let’s not talk about Z,” I said. “He was your brother, and I’m sure you don’t want to hear me bashing him. Maybe it’s best to just let him rest in peace.”

Suddenly, moaning and footsteps caught my attention, and I saw something hobbling toward us from the left. When it staggered into view, Jim pointed his gun.

I yanked his arm. “No! If there are more down here, they’ll be on us like—”

“White on rice,” he repeated for the umpteenth time, grinning. “You’re right,” he said, nodding.

I reached for my knife. As the corpse stumbled closer, I plunged my knife into its head. It dropped into a dirty puddle of water without so much as one sound. I then pointed up ahead. “Look!”

Jim’s eyes widened in surprise as he caught sight of streams of daylight shining through the holes in an upcoming manhole lid. “Ya think they’re up there waiting for us?” he asked.