The Z Club (13 page)

They were backed so close to the edge of the porch’s roof that Jack Carver’s foot touched the flimsy rain gutter.  He had one arm wrapped around Bobby, the other around Katlyn, and Melinda had her arms wrapped around his neck.  He felt heavy with their combined weight as they huddled together, watching the zombies pour through the broken bedroom window.

Bobby buried his face in Jack’s shoulder, his words muffled when he said, “Don’t let the monsters hurt us, Daddy.”

And what am I supposed to say to that?
Jack wondered.  In addition to being a father and a provider, Jack had never questioned the fact that being a
protector
also fell within the scope of his parental duties.  It went without saying.  How many sleepless nights had he laid awake imagining different scenarios?  Each scenario had always had one thing in common:
he
was always the hero.  Whether it was gangsters, burglars, terrorists, wild animals, vengeful spirits, or a lone serial killer, Jack had always succeeded in protecting his family in these fantasies.  He always came out on top, and his family worshipped him because of it.  In real life, things had never come down to that, and even in his fantasies he hadn’t dreamt that it would be zombies that would put him to the test.

You’re failing miserably,
he thought. 
It’s crunch time…and you blew it, you fucking failure.  Sure, you can take out the trash or help set the table for dinner because you’re house trained and a dutiful husband, but when it comes down to the tough stuff, the stuff that really matters…

Although he would never admit it, he resented his family the slightest bit at that moment.  Why did they all have to depend on him?  Couldn’t they think for themselves?  All they could do was ask questions and expect him to have the answers.  It wasn’t fair, not fair at all.  Didn’t they know they were putting their faith in the wrong person?

Jack felt the aluminum rain gutter bow under his foot.  He shifted his weight, the roof’s coarse shingles painful on his knees.

The first zombie to come through the window was slowly slithering his way over, his exposed intestines trailing, smearing the roof with blood.  A second zombie came toward them, struggling as she made her way down the incline.  Jack held his children tightly, bowed his head and closed his eyes as the zombie lunged at them.

That was when he heard the jingle playing.  His eyes snapped open and he craned his head around as light washed over them.

The ice cream truck came barreling over the hill, its headlights cutting through the kind of lonely darkness that one only finds on a little-used country back road.  The hollow plastic ice cream cone on top of the truck bobbed back and forth in the wind on its coiled wire base, looking like it could easily blow away if the wind picked up or if the truck hit a harsh bump in the dirt road.

The truck turned into the driveway, crunched over the snow and stopped on the lawn.  The small window in the side of the truck slid open.  Jack, confused, turned his attention back to the zombie that was almost on them now, and suddenly an arrow pierced the zombie woman’s head.  For a moment, her decaying face wore an expression of startled surprise, and then she plunged forward and toppled off the roof.

Katlyn had heard the music too.  She opened her eyes, cocked her head and listened.  “Is that…music?”

Yeah,
Jack thought,
music to my ears.

“Okay,” Ryan said, “stay in a tight formation.  Watch each other’s backs.”

“Did you see that shot?” Fred asked, moving away from the truck’s side window.  “Right between the fuckin’ eyes!”

The back door opened.  As the others piled out, Ryan sat down in the driver’s seat.

“What are you doing?” Becky asked.

“I’m going to give them a way off that roof.”

He backed the truck up, turned to the left, and pulled forward again, so the truck was parked directly beneath where the porch’s roof ended.  He called up to Jack.  “Get onto the truck!”

At first, for Jack, what his baby brother said didn’t fully compute.  It took him a few seconds to realize what he was supposed to do.  “Okay, guys,” he said, “we’re getting out of here.”

Gunfire erupted below.  He heard the whine of a bullet and another zombie fell face first onto the roof and rolled off.  One by one, he helped his family onto the top of the truck; first Bobby and then Katlyn.

“Now aren’t you glad I called?” Melinda said, even now feeling the need to rub it in his face.

Jack helped her onto the roof of the truck, stepping onto it after her.  “That makes one good idea you had in your life,” he said, and laughed.  They weren’t out of the woods yet, but he was elated anyway, which is how he guessed everyone must feel after being rescued an instant before certain death.

“Hang on,” Jack said to his family.

Bobby had his arms around the plastic ice cream cone.  It was almost as big as he was.  “Did Uncle Ryan bring us ice cream?” he asked. 

A second later, the truck lumbered forward slowly, pulling away from the roof, where several zombies stood, dumbfounded now that their late night snack was out of reach.

Ryan put the truck in park and hollered up to Jack.  “Just stay there until we put the rest of them down.”

A zombie came toward him, a slow one, and Ryan put a bullet in its head before joining the others, impressed that they had improved drastically since the fight outside Darnell’s.  They were more cautious now, less erratic with their shots. 
Fast learners,
he thought.

Fred had shouldered the crossbow and had the .44 Magnum out.  The shots clapped like thunder when he fired.

Derek had taken a position farther away, crouched down by the mailbox near the edge of the driveway, and was peering through the rifle’s scope as he fired at the remaining zombies on the roof of the house.

Kevin and Rhonda stood back-to-back, each in their own little world as they downed zombies.

Within ten minutes, they had thinned out most of them.  Becky walked over to Ryan, rubbing her shoulder.  “You were right.  It does have a kick.”

“I’ll massage it later,” Ryan said.  “Among other things.”

“You really know how to show a girl a good time,” she said and giggled.

Spontaneously, he said, “I love you,” without knowing why he said it. 
Maybe,
he thought,
because it might be the only chance you’ll get.

“Wow, you couldn’t have picked a more romantic setting.”

“It’s all about the timing.”

“I love you too.”

After all the zombies in front of the house were dead, and none were filtering out through the upstairs window, Ryan took Kevin and Rhonda with him to clear the inside of the house.  They made quick work of it, moving single-file, going room-to-room, and then upstairs to check the bedrooms.  When they reached Katlyn’s bedroom, they discovered a zombie kneeling on the bed, hand in its pants, gazing up at the Lady Gaga poster on the wall.

“Is it doing what I think it’s doing?” Rhonda asked.

Kevin said, “I think so.  It must remember what it used to do when it was alive.”

“A chronic masturbating zombie.”

Kevin pulled out his cell phone and held it up, pointing it at the zombie.

“What are you doing?” Ryan asked, aiming his Glock at the masturbating zombie.

“Taking a picture,” Kevin said.

“That’s just plain wrong.”

“Smile and say ‘I’m gaga for Lady Gaga,’” Kevin said and snapped a picture, the phone’s flash going off.   The zombie turned its head to look at them.

“Oh gross,” Rhonda said, “he’s wearing his ‘O’ face.”

Ryan fired, spraying blood and brains on the Lady Gaga poster.

Outside the house, Fred helped Jack, Melinda, and the kids down from the top of the truck.  “That was friggin’
awesome!
” Bobby said as Fred lowered him to the ground.  “Can I have some ice cream now?”

“Maybe next time, kiddo,” Fred said, ruffling Bobby’s hair.  “If there are any treats in there, they went bad a long time ago.”

Bobby’s smile faltered for only a moment.  He didn’t seem all that disappointed.  He rushed over to his father and said, “Wasn’t that cool, Dad?”

“I think it was
really
cool,” Jack said, hugging his son just as Ryan exited the house and was crossing the snow powdered lawn over to him.

“I figured it could only be bad news if you were calling me,” Ryan said.

“I didn’t,” Jack said.  “That was all Melinda.  But thank God she did.”

Ryan held his hand out.  “Grabbed these from the house.”  Jack glanced down and his wallet and car keys were in his brother’s hand.  “Take Mel and the kids and get out of town.  Drive a while and then get a hotel.  Better yet, go visit Mom and Dad.”

“What about you?” Jack said.  “You could come with us.”

“I’ve got a job to do.”

“Still busy trying to prove yourself, huh?”

“Had to crawl out from under your shadow sooner or later,” Ryan said.

Jack took his wallet and keys.  He offered his hand.  Ryan shook it.  “Just take care of yourself, all right?”

Ryan nodded.  Melinda gave him a quick hug, and then Ryan watched his brother herd them over to the car, watched as they backed out and headed down the driveway.  The car stopped when it reached Ryan, and Jack rolled the window down and said, “How will we know when it’s safe to come back?”

“Watch the news,” Ryan said.  “If there’s nothing about Trudy on it, then maybe we won.”

Jack stared at him for a moment, looking like he wanted to say something.  They held each other’s gaze.  Both of them knew that there was a lot of catching up to do, that there was plenty that had gone unsaid over the years, enough that they could have went on for hours talking about it, but most of it was exchanged silently then, conveyed with a simple look.

Jack rolled up the window.  Ryan watched them pull away until the taillights disappeared into the distance.  Becky came over and stood next to him.  “You didn’t even introduce me,” she said.

Ryan only smiled.  The others had gathered and walked over to the two of them.  They stood in the darkness, staring out at the barren fields that went on and on for who knew how long.  In the summer months, these same fields were bright with the vivid green of corn and soy beans, and there was the constant sound of tractors rumbling along.  But at this time of year it looked like an apocalyptic wasteland; something out of a dystopian science fiction movie.  There was no hum of insects.  Things were silent.  There was a strong breeze blowing through the trees, but no leaves left to rustle.  The sky had started to gloom over; a thick gray pall eating the stars.  It meant snow was coming.  Probably within the next hour or two.

“What now, boss?” Fred asked.

Good question,
Ryan thought.

They needed a plan, but his mind refused to play that game.  If he had had his way, he would have gone on staring into the night for hours, letting his thoughts drift off, leaving his brain an empty and peaceful hunk of gray matter with nowhere to be except the present moment.

“Ryan?”  Becky said.

“Yeah?”

“Where do we go from here?”

It was snowing by the time they got back into Trudy.  It was 2:00 A.M.  Past the witching hour, but still within that ominous timeframe during which most people felt safer being cozily curled up in their beds, the doors locked and deadbolted.

The streets were deserted, and to anyone who didn’t know any better, it would have been the expected scene for this time of night in a town with a population that hovered just a smidge over ten thousand.

Maybe some of them
are
sleeping,
Ryan thought as the ice cream truck crept west along Ogden Avenue. 
But not most of them.
  His hunch was that if any of the houses’ residents were home, they were hidden in closets, under beds, in the basement, or in locked rooms.  Those who owned guns would be cradling them now, rocking them like babies in their arms, their ears alert for the slightest out-of-place noise.

The rest would have gotten out of town or were holed up in the convention center.  He remembered the noise in the background when he had spoken to Penny; it had sounded like half the town was there.

And what about the rest?  Either dead or
un
dead.

They took a left on Shapiro, drove three blocks, and then turned right onto Crooked Pine Lane.  The convention center was on the west side of the downtown area.

As they reached the downtown area, Ryan killed the truck’s headlights.

“It’s so quiet,” Becky said.  She sat in the passenger seat, the shotgun’s barrel jutting up between her knees.

Kevin stood in the space between the seats, a hand on each of the backrests to hold himself steady as he stared out the front windshield.

Behind him, Derek said, “It’s too bad it isn’t like in
The Faculty
where all you have to do is kill the Mother Bitch and the rest of them die too.  Hive mind or whatever they call it.”

“That’s only in science fiction movies,” Fred said.

“What about
Slither
?”

Fred shook his head slowly.  “Huh uh.  The thing that infected Michael Rooker had
alien
origins.”

Before they made it to the convention center, Ryan drove around the block so they came down a street with a front-facing view of the brick building that served as the convention center.  Back in the day, it had been a high school with an attached auditorium.  In ’96, the town had acquired funding to build a new school, which was located only a few blocks away.  The old Trudy High School had sat in squalor, left to deteriorate until 2002, when it had been auctioned off for a dollar, gutted, and then rebuilt and refurbished as the Merryweather Convention Center (named after Paul F. Merrywether, whose estate had financed a sizeable portion of the project).  The convention center’s grand opening had been in April of ’03.  Since then, it had mostly served as a location for indoor sporting events and productions by the local theater group, but several years ago they had managed to bring in Garth Brooks for a one-night-only concert, which most of the townsfolk considered a feat of magic, but which Ryan and his friends had considered a colossal waste of time.

Ryan stayed close to the curb, allowing the truck to roll forward under its own momentum.  They saw them then.  Hundreds of them, maybe pushing a thousand or better, lining the street outside the convention center’s front doors.  They had sandwiched themselves together, forming a stampede that used their own bodies to ram the doors, the ones in the back shoving against the zombies in front of them.

“Oh my God,” Becky said, cupping her hand over her mouth.

“Must be a third of the town,” Kevin said, stepping aside so that Rhonda could see out the windshield.

“Not quite,” Ryan said, “but it’s a lot.”

“How could there be so many of them already?” Rhonda asked.  “The shuttle only crashed yesterday.”

“Like bacteria growing in a petri dish,” Kevin said.  “Only Trudy’s the petri dish.  It spreads quickly.  I still think it has to be by exchange of bodily fluids, but it’s gotten to people so fast it makes me think it could be airborne.”

“That means any of us could be infected,” Becky said.

“If that was the case, we’d have changed already.  Maybe it has something to do with proximity.  Hell, it could be anything.”

“Either that or we have to be dead in order to be brought back,” Derek said.

Fred stood up, his knees popping.  “What are we supposed to do against
that
?  We’d need an army to take them all on.  Or a couple’ve tanks.  If we had a bomb, we could take most of them out at the same time.”

“My mom could be in there,” Derek said.

Even from a distance, they could see the convention center’s wooden doors heave and shudder under the unrelenting attack.

“They’ve probably got it reinforced from the inside.  So far, it’s held up.”

“But it won’t hold forever,” Ryan said.  “Not with all those things going at it like that.  If they get in, the whole place will be a deathtrap.”

“A slaughterhouse,” Kevin said.

“Exactly.”

Kevin said, “That’s not what I meant.  Something Derek said got me thinking.  That stuff about hive minds.  I don’t think they’re wired together, but they have a tendency to flock.”

Derek looked at Fred and said, “Told ya.  They flock.  Probably communicate telepathically.”

Kevin shook his head.  “Nothing like that.  It’s closer to how wolves behave, I think.  They run in packs.  At least if they catch the scent of brains, they all come running like Pavlov’s dogs.  Nothing supernatural or alien about it.”

“You’re saying they congregate,” Rhonda said.

“Sort of.  I’m willing to bet that most of those things are right here, trying to get into the convention center.  I’m sure there are stragglers like the ones at Ryan’s brother’s place, or anywhere else they catch the whiff of gray matter.”  Kevin pointed out the window at the mass of zombies standing in front of the convention center as though they were waiting to get into a
KISS
concert.  “If we took those out, there would only be a handful left.”

“We need a way to blow them all up.”

“Even if we had a bomb, we couldn’t risk doing it so close to the convention center.  Not with all those people inside.”

“That’s my point,” Kevin said.  “We need to get their attention.  Get them to flock someplace else.  Somewhere we want them to.”

“How do you suggest we do that?” Ryan said.

“Simple,” Kevin said.  “We just need the right kind of bait.”