The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious (12 page)

From the hospital roof, the number of zombies was more than a bit worrisome. On the same level, it’s unreal. Pull-a-blanket-over-your-head-and-suck-your-thumb kind of unreal. But reality stands in front of us—lurches in front of us—and a garbage can clangs from behind. Those ten zombies are coming. Our reality is that we have to run.

Our movement gives us away by the time we reach the curb. A dark shape plummets from the overpass and crashes to a car roof only feet ahead. It struggles to drag itself down the windshield into our path. We make it past just as others plunge off the road—a quick succession of thuds and shattering glass. I swallow back my scream. More wait in the shade of the overpass. Our only chance is to stay on the cars.

Adrenaline and fear combine into a thoughtless kind of terror. Grace and I run across one car and leap to the next. An SUV that’s too long a jump forces me to the ground. What I thought was six feet of easy travel is curtailed by the sudden appearance of an old man with a hole chewed in his torso.

I stop short. Grace slams me from behind. The man moves closer.
I
move closer, although not of my own free will. I hear Grace hit the ground with a gasp. She’s Kearnery’d me, although she didn’t mean to. My arms rise. My knife clatters to the street.

I shove my palms into what were once living muscles and organs. He stumbles backward. I push again, screaming though I know I shouldn’t. I can’t stay silent at the feel of rib bones and cold, spongy tissue on my bare skin. His hands wrestle with mine in an undead version of patty cake, and his bony fingers catch my wrist.

I can’t twist from his grip. I kick him, but I’m too close to garner much force. He’s stronger than I anticipated, probably stronger than when alive. His other hand reels me in by the hem of my shirt. His sunken mouth opens to reveal gums that hold few teeth, but enough to do damage.

He has me. I have to give in to get away. Close up, his mouth becomes my world and avoiding it my sole objective. I duck to slam my shoulder into his torso. He releases my wrist and stumbles a step, but a second later he’s back in my face. Grace pushes me aside and rams him hard enough to send him under the SUV, and then she pulls me to the hood of a sedan.

Jorge and Maria have circled back to help. Now that we’re okay, they wait for us to catch up. When we do, Jorge puts a hand on my shoulder. I nod that I’m fine, but I don’t have the breath to say so or to thank them. It’s every man for himself out here, or I thought it was, and I wouldn’t have blamed them if they left us far behind.

We gallop up the side street, past vinyl-sided houses with flame-licked black holes for windows. A small boy in crusty Transformers pajamas reaches an arm through a front gate. Maria falters for a moment and continues on.

My body is worn out. We have an agreement: Junk food for reasonably good health. It usually does what I ask, but I’ve never asked it to run uphill through zombies in a state of constant terror. Grace, on the other hand, is nowhere near as winded as I am.

Fourth Avenue is next. Six lanes of dead cars and dead people. The aftermath of a collision sits in the intersection. Car doors hang open. Zombies move under store awnings on the sidewalks and gather in front of a stone church like smokers after an AA meeting. This is our final avenue. We’re practically home free, as long as said home hasn’t burned to the ground. I’m not banking on it, based on the previous block, but it’s a distant worry compared to what’s before us.

It starts with a cocked head on one, an interested grunt from another, and becomes a chain reaction. The hundred or more zombies weave through cars and trip down sidewalks toward our corner. The only plus is that they don’t fall from the sky.

That collision was a death sentence for people on the road, but the mangled cars surround a space of uninhabited asphalt that could be our savior. If we reach it, we can see what’s behind the truck that blocks our view. I ask my body to do this one last thing. I’ll deluge it with vitamins and minerals if it only gets me through.

We make it up and over a red sedan to the center of the box truck, SUV and multiple other cars. A woman leans across a Jeep with a growl, her fingers squeaking on the shiny hood. Her black suit has seen better days, and it’s more than likely she once had two arms.

Behind the truck, cars are jam-packed to the side street. Safe passage to the corner but for the couple dozen zombies who wait at the end. Jorge climbs atop a Prius and whistles. They stagger forward to join the hundred other zombies who surround our barricade. They’re dressed for work, for hanging out on a spring day, and a few are dressed for a long trek in the wilderness, which may have been their plan had they gotten out.

We run along the cars once our route clears and the noise reaches a crescendo. The zombies trail us, but we make the side street ahead of them. We race past brownstones and brick homes with bay windows, gated front yards and stoops to the parlor floors. Much to my relief, they’re unburned.

Near the top of the block, Maria sweeps through a low iron fence, lifts the mat at the side door in the stoop, and grabs a shiny gold key. I peek from behind the neighboring house’s stoop. Much of Fourth Avenue walks our way. We’ll run if we can’t get in, but Brooklyn Heights is ten times the amount we just traveled. I don’t think we’d make it.

The wrought-iron entry gate swings open, followed by the inner door. We bustle through the tiny vestibule to stand in the foyer of the brownstone’s ground-level garden apartment. I droop against the wall, slick with sweat. The groans grow in volume. Maybe they can’t get past the gate, but they can lead every zombie in Brooklyn to our hiding place. The noises stop close by and linger. Maria dares a look through the door window and then gives a relieved shake of her head. It can’t be possible we’re holding our breaths—I, for one, don’t have any breath to hold, and Jorge is tomato-colored—but the hall fills with our sighs. We made it.

Eric

Chapter 17

Eric

Rachel is pissed. I don’t need the Magic 8 Ball I had as a kid to suss that out. All Signs Point to Pissed, from her tight lips to the way her eyes have gone hard. Rachel is the girl you see in an advertisement for healthy living—loose limbs, white teeth, long dark blonde hair, comfortable in her own body, confident of her own strength—but right now her shoulders are by her ears and her torso folded protectively where she sits on the forest floor.

“Just leave, Eric,” she snaps at me.

“Rach, I’m not leaving you—”

She cuts me off with a harsh laugh. “Look out everyone, Steadfast Eric is going to save the day! Just. Leave.”

I sigh. She’s frustrated. I’m frustrated. I’m used to being dirty and risking my life, although in a less dramatic manner, but nothing has properly prepared me for being hunted by zombies. I’m better off than most—we both are—though you wouldn’t know it by the way we act.

If you want to see how fast a tenuous relationship can fall apart, just add in a dash of apocalypse. Our romance burned out in the past year, long before zombies, but the last of our friendship went up in smoke days ago. After we broke up, we agreed we’d finish out the remainder of Rachel’s final year of grad school in our house and then go our separate ways with no hard feelings. Of course, I hadn’t envisioned separate ways to mean my girlfriend of many years heading into Philadelphia on her own. Philly is crawling with zombies.

“Just let me get you to your brother,” I say. “Then I’m gone. You’ll never have to see me again.”

When we first started out from our house in rural Pennsylvania, the plan was to meet up with my sister, Cassie, at our parents’ log cabin in upstate New York. That plan fell by the wayside when Rachel informed me she was going to Philadelphia to find her brother, Grant. It’s dangerous, to say the least. And Rachel, the person who has climbed mountains beside me, who planned to join the Peace Corps, has now reached her breaking point. She’ll never make it in by herself, not with the way she cries over scratches like a baby. I want to shake her, not because she’s afraid—I’m afraid, and with good reason—but because she’s being a bitch. It isn’t my goddamn fault the world has gone to hell.

She closes her eyes and leans her head against the rough bark of a tree. “I’m sorry. I’m just really scared.”

A tear slips down her cheek. I kneel to brush it away, annoyance dissipating. Girls’ tears have that effect. “So come with me to the cabin. Wait with me and Cassie until it’s safe. I promise we’ll come back then.”

“Eric,” she says, eyes still closed, “you don’t really think she made it out, do you?”

I don’t, although I hope. I last spoke to my sister a little more than twelve hours before they blew up the bridges into—and, more importantly,
out of
—New York City. Cassie said she’d leave Brooklyn for the cabin if Bornavirus LX worsened. It did get worse, and quickly, but they didn’t give anyone in New York time to figure that out before they cut off access.

We watched the fires on television. The bodies on the streets and the boats trying to cross the water. The crowds of people on roofs, screaming at the news helicopters for salvation that didn’t come—one did try, and the entire copter was taken down by the weight of desperate people hanging from its skids. Rachel shrieked when it crashed to the street to start a new conflagration. And then the news went dark. Phones stopped once and for all. The internet became a memory.

“I’m going to check the apartment first,” I say. It wasn’t a fully-formed plan until this moment, and, judging by the way Rachel’s eyes pop open, it isn’t a good one.

“You’re crazy,” she says. “You’re going into Brooklyn? In this?”

I raise an eyebrow. “Oh, excuse me, Ms. I’m-going-to-stroll-right-into-Philly-in-the-midst-of-the-zombie-apocalypse.”

Rachel giggles. It becomes a laugh and then moves into hysterics territory. She holds her stomach, cheeks wet, and howls at the treetops. This is more like the Rachel I know, the Rachel I loved. Even if the romance is gone, she’s still counted among my closest friends, and that means I’ll see her to safety.

“Okay, maybe we’re both fucking crazy,” she says when she’s finally calmed. “Jesus, this is the last place I thought we’d end up.”

“Now,
that’s
crazy,” I say, and lower myself down. “We’ve spent half our lives in the woods. How is this any different?” I point to the evening sky between tree branches. “It’s a lovely day for a ramble.”

She sighs. “Just promise me you’ll be careful. You can get pretty stupid sometimes if I’m not there to stop you.”

“Scout’s honor,” I say with two fingers in the air. “I’ll miss your nagging, though.”

She turns, face close to mine. “I’ll miss you, too.”

It’s pointless, even now, to think of trying again. She’s found someone else, which is the other reason she wants to go to Philly, although neither of us has mentioned it. I was glad, if slightly jealous, when she met Nathan in a joint research project at UPenn. She began to spend the week, and then weekends, in Philly. It was only a quiet space in which to finish her thesis that put her at our house when this went down.

I’ve gone on a few dates and had a few hook-ups since our breakup, but no one’s made it to consistent dating status. And I haven’t told my sister about us yet—she’ll be devastated by the news. I figured I’d drop the bomb once school was over and Rachel was gone.

“Should we set up camp?” Rachel asks. “We’ll make Philly tomorrow.”

The weather is nice enough that we don’t need the tiny backpacking tent, but it keeps us out of sight of undead eyes. We appear to be in the woods, but looks are deceiving, as we’re only a half-day’s hike from Philly. This patch of woods is surrounded by zombies and suburbs.

We erect the tent and cover it with debris and branches, then eat trail mix in our sleeping bags as it grows dark. Tomorrow we’ll say goodbye. We both wanted out, but not like this. I wanted to imagine her life as a series of events—the career, the husband, the house, the kids—and to remain friends with a social media buffer, so I could see the pictures as it all happened. Now, once I walk away, I’ll most likely never know if she’s even alive. I have no illusions about how bad it is. The world is over.

“We can get Grant and take him upstate,” I say, about her brother. She chews her lip, so I lay out the big offer. “Nathan’s welcome, too. You guys can head upstate while I go into Brooklyn.”

“Really?” she says. “You’re amazing. You know that?”

“I’m well aware of my amazingness.”

“Too aware,” she says with a laugh. “Let’s get into Philly first. But thank you.” She brushes my cheek with gentle fingers. “I wish…I’m sorry that we…”

A longing for the old days floods in. To have the two of us and a tent be all we need. I think that if I kissed her now, she wouldn’t say no. I could feel her move against me one last time. But it’s a bad idea; she’d never forgive herself, or me. “Me, too. But we’re friends, right?”

“Always,” she says.

***

In the morning, we see plenty of cars for the taking, but no roads on which to drive them. Like the people who fled Philly into the suburbs and the suburbanites who fled the suburbs for the country, we abandoned our car many miles ago at stopped traffic, although by then the cars were empty and the zombies were thick on the ground.

They’re thick here, too. We make our way between houses through giant yards, looking for bicycles. We find them locked inside a three-car garage at a brick house set back from the road by a curved driveway.

Rachel stands on her toes and peers at the street through the thick shrubbery. “If we break the glass, they’ll come.”

I nod. “We need a wire hanger.”

“Why?”

I point through the glass windows at the red cord that hangs from the door mechanism. “See that cord? If we pull that or the latch above, the door will unlock.”

But wire hangers are not plentiful on suburban lawns, even immense ones like these. I use my knife to cut a green stick that will bend without breaking and pull the duct tape from my pack along with my tin cup. The folding wire cup handle snaps off the side easily—too easily for a cup with a lifetime guarantee. “This thing cost fifteen bucks. Did you see how the handle broke off, no problem?”