Sven the Zombie Slayer (11 page)

Locking eyes with the revolting jaw gyration, Milt raised the sword over his head, feeling a sticky, chocolate-infused part of his shirt come unstuck from his body.

Then, when he judged the zombie close enough, Milt belched up some peanut shards, and brought the sword down with all of his sword-wielding might.

28

As soon as Sven turned out of his driveway, he saw them.

Lewis Mountain Road
wasn’t a very wide street, but it wasn’t very narrow either. It fit four cars shoulder to shoulder.

Ahead of him, Sven saw bodies in the road, similar in complexion to the things he had encountered so far that day. The ones in the road stood, pale and deflated, and Sven knew they would be hungry.

There were four of them, scattered about the street. They didn’t look at each other, and they didn’t react when Sven pulled out, shifted into drive, and began to creep up the street toward them.

The closest one was Charlie, who lived three houses up from Sven. Charlie was 34 years old, and lived at home with his mother. The two of them owned a popular Scottish Pub on the Corner, called
The Pub.
Charlie liked to call it,
The Pube.
Sven thought this was very funny, but he also understood that most people couldn’t appreciate that kind of basic humor. It wasn’t crass like everyone said, it was just good, basic, caveman humor. You had to have a certain level of testosterone in your body to understand it, and Sven did. Poor Charlie, Sven thought, he had a lot of potential.

The next was Linda, a professor of economics at the
University
of
Virginia
. She had always been very nice to Sven, and when he saw her that way—the way she was now—he had to look away. Linda lived across the street from Charlie, and at the moment she was standing across the street from Charlie too.

The next grey bodies were farther down the street. They stood together, and Sven didn’t know who they were. Judging from their backpacks and relative lack of pudginess, Sven guessed they were college students.

Sven drove up the street at 10 miles per hour, being careful to...he wasn’t sure what exactly, just being careful. Ivan had found a comfortable spot in the passenger seat’s foot well next to his backpack, and was cleaning his face with a paw.

They passed Charlie and Linda first. Neither Charlie nor Linda moved. They both looked pale, emaciated, and very obviously in need of medical attention, if medical attention could do them any good at this point. Sven rubbernecked, overcome by a dreadful curiosity, then made himself drive past his now-former neighbors.

The two college kids were farther up the street, in the middle of the road. Sven saw that he would have to drive around to their left to avoid them, because there was a car parked on the right side of the street next to where they stood.

Unlike Charlie and Linda, the college kids did react to the car’s movement, and from a distance. They each raised their heads, locked their black eyes on Sven, and began to creep in the direction of the oncoming car.

Sven’s mind flashed on that movie,
The Happening.
Everyone Sven knew hated that movie, but he liked it. It made sense, it was about how people were screwing up nature and nature would come back to get them one day. It was bad to mess with nature. Sven had a feeling that whatever was happening that day, like in
The Happening
, was happening for a reason. Something was out of balance, and the illness that was now ravaging his street was probably there to restore the balance, except Sven hoped he wasn’t part of the balance restoration. Right now it was a matter of living long enough to find out.

When he drove closer, Sven saw that the college kids were an item. Their fingers were laced together and they wore matching outfits.

As he drove around the staggering couple without any trouble, he noticed their skin. It looked dry as paper, like they were all dried up, devoid of moisture. Sven glanced at the rearview mirror. The grey couple had begun to turn after him. Whatever joy they were sharing they would not spread to Sven, Sven was getting the hell out—

“Help!” a woman’s voice screamed. “Someone, please! Help me!”

Sven searched for the imperiled screamer, but saw no one.

“Sven!” the voice screamed, startling Sven into slamming his foot on the brakes. It was Jane.

“I’m trapped in here! She’s trying to…”

Sven took his foot off the brake and careened into Jane’s driveway. He hit the brakes, raised the windows all the way, and put the car in park. He could see Jane now, through her kitchen window.

He got out of the car, put Ivan in the backpack, and slung it on. Leaving Ivan in the car to roast—or worse—was out of the question. The sick people were unusually strong, and Sven was sure they could break into a car for something they wanted, maybe for a cat. As long as Ivan rode in the backpack, he would be able to make a run for it if something happened to Sven.

Sven leapt painfully from the driveway onto the front lawn, then ran to the window where Jane was. Seeing the state she was in made his heart drop. She was screaming, and flailing a knife and cast iron pan at her clearly diseased roommate, who looked just how Lars had looked, and was trying to bite Jane’s arm.

Without a word, Sven tore the screen off the outside of the window, then began working on the window itself, which he quickly realized was jammed.

It was designed like many of the windows in his own house, so that it could be pushed out from the inside. Sven pulled at the bottom of the window, but it wouldn’t move. It was stuck, and there wasn’t enough clearance for Jane to get out through.

Sven pulled hard on the left bottom corner of the window, ignoring the stinging pain in his chest. The corner came free, providing a narrow, slanted opening in the side of the window that still wasn’t practical to climb out through.

Jane screamed again, flailing harder with the pan and knife, inspiring Sven to redouble his window-pulling efforts. Jane had already begun to climb through the gap between the frame and the side of the window that Sven had managed to slant outward. Her right leg dangled out the window as she pushed into the frame with her shoulder, still flailing her kitchen gear at Vicky. They pushed and pulled together, Sven pulling with all of his weight, Jane leaning against the window with hers.

Then there was an awful tearing pain in Sven’s chest, and the window broke the rest of the way out of its frame with an impressive snapping of wood.

Jane fell from the window onto Sven, but she didn’t come down all the way.

Her left leg was caught.

Inside the kitchen, Vicky had hold of Jane’s calf, and was pulling it toward her open mouth. Most of the way out the window and supported by Sven, Jane swiped at Vicky with the knife, having lost the cast iron pan in her fall.

The knife lodged in Vicky’s cheek, but Vicky was dogged in her struggle for Jane’s prized calf. Sven wasn’t going to let Vicky win. He wrapped his arms around Jane’s middle and pulled.

They fell backward onto the grass. Jane was free, and her calf was whole. They lay there panting for a moment, Sven telling himself this was no time to lie down, pain or no.

Then Jane screamed again.

Vicky’s gnarled hands and raggedy parts of her forearms were still latched on to Jane’s shin. One of the forearms was detached from the rest of Vicky’s arm well below the elbow, and the other forearm was detached just above the elbow. The clinging body parts looked bloodless.

Jane’s eyes were half-closed as she lay panting, as if she could get away from Vicky’s detached hands and forearms by refusing to acknowledge their presence. She crawled backward, away from the house, but Vicky’s clingers remained.

Jane looked at Sven, her eyes pleading. “Get them off me, please.”

Sven reached for the twitching hands around Jane’s shin. Reluctantly, he began pulling on the fingers. When Sven pulled on one finger, the others would tighten, and when he let go of one he had pulled, it went back to its place, holding on to Jane’s shin.

Confused by this, Sven looked up. Vicky was looking down at him with sunken black eyes and a gaping, hungry mouth. The tattered stumps of her arms were pointed at him.

Sven swallowed and resumed pulling on the fingers. He was less delicate now, snapping the digits off one by one until the hands were fingerless and could be pried off.

When the hands were removed from Jane, Sven turned to find Ivan watching them from a comfortable spot at the bottom of Jane’s lawn. Sven felt his empty backpack. Ivan must have jumped out during the window-pulling.

Jane’s eyes were wide as she stared up into her kitchen, where Vicky stood framed by the broken window. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, wiping at her face. “Please, please let’s go away from here.”

Without a word, Sven put Jane in the car, set Ivan in her foot well, got in, and started the engine.

29

The sword stuck.

This kind of thing never happened to Miltimore the Sword-Wielder, Milt thought. He had barely been able to keep his grip when he sliced through the zombie’s head. Then the sword caught on something impenetrable at the base of the monster’s neck. Letting a shudder jiggle its way through his body, Milt knew he would never forget the slippery rattle that had made its way down the sword as it lodged in place.

The blade had hit the zombie’s head off-center, and had come down through the zombie’s right eye.

The right side of the zombie’s head began to fall away, exposing what Milt interpreted as dehydrated brain matter. It made Milt think of smoker’s brain, if there was such a thing. It looked like the analog of smoker’s lung—shriveled and brown and not healthy-looking at all.

The monster began to fall forward, and Milt was overcome by a wave of revulsion. He let go of the sword and stumbled backward into his battle station, stepping into the Coca-Cola cooler with one slipper-clad foot and knocking over his urine receptacle with the other. A smell hit him then—not just that of the urine pouring onto the floor or the iced raspberry potpourri toppling out, but a strange, curious smell that seemed to be coming from inside the zombie. Of course Milt knew that zombies were rotten creatures, and yet the smell wasn’t that of decay as Milt would have expected. It was…it was…well, it was wonderful.

Reflecting on the marvelous odor, Milt fell backward onto a Star Wars theme chess set, removing it from mint condition status with a decisive crunch. Milt’s body was pumping adrenaline too furiously to take notice of the jagged chess piece fragments digging into his padding.

Milt huffed and puffed and finally rolled upright onto his knees. He looked down at the twitching zombie with its head split open, lying in a pool of iced urine and raspberry potpourri. Then Milt proceeded to hurl as he had never hurled before.

As he expelled the contents of his voluminous, multi-compartmented stomach—a Coca-Cola-coated mass of partially-digested miniature Snickers bars—Milt remarked at the lack of blood flow from the zombie corpse. It was as if the zombie’s flesh were all dried out.

That made Milt picture bags of salted zombie jerky hung up for sale in the Wegmans meat aisle.

With that salty vision clear in his mind, Milt’s hurling hastened.

30

“Mom? Mom? What’s wrong?” Lorie walked into the living room to find her mom on the floor, slumped against the couch cushions. Lorie was holding her nose, and on a different occasion, hearing her own nasally voice might have made her think of those people on TV that inhaled helium and then talked like chipmunks—not today. Her mind was filled only with fear and concern for her mom.