Sven the Zombie Slayer (65 page)

She was surprised to realize that she wanted to stay with them. Her family was now completely gone…Lorie hoped Sven and Jane would let her…otherwise where would she go, what would she—

She sighed and walked to another of the roof’s edges, away from Sven and Jane. She looked out over the
University
of
Virginia
grounds and took a deep breath.

The air was getting clearer, that was for sure. The rancidity of the zombies was fading. Lorie poked at the surgical mask that hung around her neck and hoped she would never have to use it again, even while a part of her savored the violence of the past days’ events. She wondered what that meant about her, if that meant that she was crazy. Lorie shrugged and walked over to Jane and Sven.

“Can you see anything?” she asked.

Sven and Jane both shook their heads. Lorie looked out from their vantage point and couldn’t see any roaming zombies anywhere.

Then she walked all around the perimeter of the roof, checking as far as she could see in all directions. Sven and Jane did the same, while giving Lorie her space. Only Ivan stayed close to her, rubbing up against her legs and meowing gently each time she stopped at the edge of the roof to peer down and out over the landscape. She felt so much affection for Ivan that she couldn’t imagine leaving him…he was such a good cat.

After walking around the roof for a good ten minutes, Lorie was satisfied that the outbreak had ended—at least in their immediate surroundings.

She realized then that they hadn’t encountered any more people since Randy.

Were there no more human survivors?

Surely looters would have been out if there were people left.

Could it be that they were it? She, Sven, Jane, and Ivan? Were they the only survivors of the zombie outbreak?

The news report had made it sound like there were others, like the government was relaying a message to all of those people still hiding in their homes. Lorie wondered if those people existed...the news report had been so vague, so neatly packaged…too neatly packaged.

She turned back toward the center of the roof to find that Jane and Sven were standing close to each other, watching her.

“Anything?” Jane asked.

Lorie shook her head. “Maybe it really is over…maybe we can go…” Lorie didn’t know what she was going to say next. Go home? Where was there to go home to now? She didn’t want to go home and find her mother and Evan’s father and their crumpled bodies or whatever was left of them. She couldn’t go back there.

“What’s wrong?” Jane asked, looking concerned and starting toward Lorie.

Lorie stepped backward instinctively. “Nothing, I…nothing.” Lorie looked up at Jane. “I don’t want to go back …back to my house.”

Jane put an arm around Lorie, which Lorie found comforting. “You don’t have to. You stay with us as long as you like.”

Then Sven walked over, looking as perplexed as he’d looked in the small exercise room after watching the news program. “I don’t believe it,” he said, looking into the distance and shaking his head. He had a sad, resigned look in his eyes. “I told him not to eat that crap, but he just wouldn’t listen, I told him…” He shook his head again. Lorie watched Jane put her other arm on Sven’s shoulder, and then the three of them were linked…no, it was the four of them, because there was Ivan, pawing at a mallard on Sven’s calf.

“Why don’t we go home?” Jane said. “It’s over.”

As they walked back down into Memorial Gymnasium, Lorie began to wonder what the zombie outbreak meant.

Who had won? Was it the people who were against genetically modified food, or was it the meat eaters who denounced tofu?

It seemed exceptionally ironic to Lorie that the tofu eaters were the ones who protested the proliferation of genetically modified food, and yet they were the ones that had taken the brunt of the zombie onslaught, as if they were targeted.

Then again, Lorie realized, that wasn’t quite right either, because almost everyone in and around
Charlottesville
seemed to have been affected. Soy was in just about everything, she recalled, and maybe she and Sven and Jane had something peculiar in their bodies that kept them from turning into zombies even though they actually
had
been exposed to the tainted soy.

She shrugged and tried to put all of it out of her mind for the moment. It was over, and there would be plenty of time to put the pieces of the puzzle together later. If the public was ever allowed to have all the pieces, that was.

127

Sven had a hand on each machete when he stepped out of Mem Gym and into the late morning light. Ivan was in his backpack, perched atop Sven’s shoulder. The cat’s head swept from side to side as he sniffed at the air.

“How’s it smell?” Sven asked.

Ivan didn’t hiss, and Sven took that as a good sign. The cloying, paralyzing odor seemed to be settling out of the air, becoming fainter with each passing hour. It was almost noon on the third day of the outbreak, and if the newscasters were correct—if they knew and were telling the truth—then the last of the zombies were crumpling, the outbreak was ending.

“Self-contained deterioration,” that was one of the terms they had used on the news program. Sven didn’t know how anyone could refer to something like this as self-contained. It was ludicrous. The zombies were trying to kill the remaining humans. How could that ever be characterized as self-contained?

Even if the newscasters had just been referring to the course of the virus, the term was at the very least inept, and having dealt with the zombies firsthand, Sven found it offensive.

He looked up at the sky and found a reassuring, almost unmarred blue staring back down at him.

He walked carefully down the steps of Mem Gym, keeping his eyes averted from the area where the burned zombies were. He didn’t want to look at any of that, and there was no time for rubbernecking anyway.

The plan now was to check his house, clear it out if necessary, and relocate there with Jane, Lorie, and of course Ivan. They all agreed it was best to move to a smaller space, one that they could watch more closely, one that at least one of them—Sven—was intimately familiar with.

Mem Gym had worked well for the previous day and that morning, but the building had so many unknown hiding places that they were all uneasy about staying there any longer. They suspected that more zombies might be lurking in Mem Gym’s hidden recesses.

They could barricade themselves in Sven’s house more easily, and keep a better watch over its points of entry, which numbered far fewer than the points of entry into Mem Gym, the number of which they still didn’t know for certain.

They would settle in and lock up—it wasn’t as if the zombies knew how to open doors anyway. It was just a matter of reconnaissance and cleanup now. Sven hoped to God there was no cleanup to be done.

He strode across
Emmet Street
and stepped foot on
Lewis Mountain Road
for the first time since he’d driven away on day one of the outbreak. He kept his eyes averted from the piles of crumpled zombies that he passed, but he couldn’t help wonder how he could bring himself to clean up a crumpled pile that had once been Lars. That thought had kept him insisting to Jane and Lorie that they were better off in Mem Gym, even though he knew that they weren’t. Sven had backed off, feeling a bit of shame for his insistence.

Then he was standing in front of his home.

There were bits of flesh strewn across the lawn that Sven assumed were the remains of the mailman, but they were too unrecognizable for definite identification.

They’ll have to check dental records, Sven thought, and wondered if the zombies’ teeth became brittle and fell apart too. If that were true, identifying all of the victims might not be possible.

Sven’s body shuddered as he inhaled and put his right hand on a machete. He waited, but nothing happened. None of the strangeness that he attributed to the machetes took hold of him.

Unsure of whether to be glad or fretful at the lack of jungle imagery, Sven walked straight to his door, avoiding the scattered remains on the lawn. The way the remains were arranged, it was hard to imagine they had ever been assembled in the form of a human body.

Sven pulled the screen door open and leaned it on his right shoulder to keep it propped open. He unlocked the door, put his left hand on the doorknob, tightened the fingers of his other hand on the machete, and pushed the door open.

Less than ten minutes later, Sven emerged, shocked, confused, and not at all relieved.

Lars was gone, along with any sign of his body.

The back door had been forced open and left ajar.

Apparently Lars had made his way out of the basement and out of the house, no doubt in pursuit of moisture and blood.

There was bound to be some of his friend’s flesh remaining on the splinters jutting from the ruined back door. Sven cringed at the thought.

He sat down on the stoop, closed his eyes, and took deep breath after deep breath until he felt lightheaded. Then he went back inside for another check, pushed the stove up against the broken back door, exited the house, and locked the front door behind him.

No more screams, Sven thought, recalling the sounds that had traveled into his front lawn on the first day of the outbreak.

He started back toward Mem Gym in a slow, painful jog. Sven, Jane, Lorie, and Ivan would move, and in Sven’s house they would stay…at least until the government cleanup crews had finished their safety sweeps, clearing out the zombie remains and dispatching any undead stragglers that remained vertical.

He would retake his house, block the doors with furniture, and wait.

As he jogged, Sven wondered how long
Virginia
would be quarantined from the rest of the country, and how long he, Jane, Lorie, and Ivan could live on stale peanuts and turkey jerky.

At least until the peanuts and jerky run out, Sven thought, at least until then.

128

Sven rummaged through the DVDs littered around the TV stand in his basement until he found the one he was searching for. He picked it up and looked at it, hoping that it might take his mind off everything. He didn’t want to believe any of what had happened the previous two days, and at the very least, he didn’t want to think about it.

He also didn’t want to risk turning the cable on, because he was sure news of the zombie outbreak would be on every channel, and he couldn’t handle any more of that at the moment. He needed to escape, to get away from what had happened.

Sven put the DVD in and went to the basement refrigerator. He made himself a chocolate and peanut butter protein drink and sat down in front of the TV with it.

This protein shake was the second he had made for himself since he reclaimed his house. He told himself that he wasn’t going to dump it out like he had the first one. Sven knew that he needed to get his protein in order to heal. He needed nutrients, but his appetite still wasn’t there.

His mind was in all the wrong places—it was watching Lars splutter on the basement floor, it was sledging the girl in the drugstore, it was burying Evan at the edge of the parking lot, it was watching Brian get ripped apart, it was...

Almost as disturbing was the image of the breached loading dock through which the zombies had entered the Wegmans, killing Brian, and almost killing Sven, Jane, Lorie, and Ivan. The vertical gate had been cut through, the rectangular, human-shaped access point too precise to have been made by the zombies, or even by humans without equipment and experience in improvising entries.