The Zombie Letters (17 page)

             
You need anything extra, Al . . . you come to me. You are good people.

             
The Army Surplus store was already looted when Alvin got there. No one paid any mind to the loose tile in the stockroom that Pops told him about. Pops must have really liked the young and well-groomed internet tycoon. Funny . . . they were from such different worlds. Who would have thought? No one ever visited Pops and his shop was always a bit cavernous for the likes of bright, glitzy Los Angeles. Alvin liked it there because ever since he hit it big, he liked to collect military-issued knives and handguns. Just a hobby. He had pretty much depleted Pop’s catalogue years ago. There was really no need to go back. But . . . the old man was lonely. Mad as a fucking hatter, but Alvin genuinely liked the guy. Pops smelled horrendous, smoked constantly and talked for hours, but he reminded Alvin of his grandfather. The two men would spend hours together, having beers in the back and watching whatever game was playing. Those were good times.

              Pops came back . . . just like the others. Must have been bitten by one of them. Alvin didn’t want to do what he did, but he released his friend from his suffering and took the secret stash that the old man had been hiding for a rainy day.

              It was sure fucking rainy now.

              The two grenades Alvin found were in each hand. He made sure and kept his forefingers looped through the small metal pins. Only Pops and God knew how old those things were . . . if they would blow up in Alvin’s face instead of five seconds after releasing the spoon like they are supposed to. Alvin adjusted the large back window as quietly as he could. Just about one-hundred feet to the plane. Taking a deep breath, he released the pin on the grenade to his left and let the spoon go. He tossed it away from the house and down the steep cliff. “I sure hope they’ll hear that over the sound of the . . .” The explosion was louder than he’d thought. Even at that distance, his ears were ringing. Out of the gathered crowd around the tall, grassy hill on which his home sat, a good number of the dead quickly turned their heads and actually
sprinted
down the hill. The ones that appeared more rotten and less held-together simply turned and walked. They seemed to Alvin French that they at least had an awareness of their own physical state. Either that . . . or they operated on the most primal of instinct. They were less human now. They were animals.

              The thick crowd thinned out a bit as Alvin placed one foot out of the sliding French door. He tossed another grenade off to the other side of the hill . . . about fifty yards away from the other one. More followed the boom. A volcano of dirt, twigs and mud sailed into the sky like a geyser. Steadying the uncomfortable assault rifle’s strap over his shoulder, he cocked it and ran out of the house and toward the plane. A few were still wandering aimlessly all around his path, but with a little luck, he would be a bird soon enough. He had fired M-16’s before. They bucked like a bitch for a guy with a vegetarian’s frame. It was lightweight
enough
, thank God. It would be terrible if he had to lug something heavy all the way there.

              Alvin tore out of the house and into the approaching midday sun. One of the walkers at the corner of the house looked right at him and stepped into his path. Alvin ran around it, shooting the M-16 sideways, mindful not to shoot directly in front of himself and end up hitting the plane. The bullets sliced through the creature’s head, knocking it to the ground with a wet groan. He made a beeline to the plane, spraying fire at both sides of him. He could see out of his peripheral vision that the infected at the bottom of the hill had spotted him and were now running up with arms outstretched . . . looking nearly insane from the insatiable hunger burning inside of them. The scattered remnants of their horde were easy to dispatch as he ran around the tail, making an all-out sprint to the cockpit door. Alvin threw himself inside, spraying more ammo before tossing the gun into the tarmac of the runway. It was too cumbersome to fiddle with in the small, 4-person plane. Plus, he had another one in the back seat. He placed it there last night, when it was sti
ll dark and all the infected
were preoccupied with the city below.

              The runway was clear. For now. The horrible
things
had nearly crested the hill as Alvin popped it in gear and careened down the runway, hitting two strays with the propeller. He leaned his head out the window and screamed . . . a tearful and bittersweet release in honor of his life intact, but the life he had behind him now. Soon enough, the small Cessna was over Los Angeles. Alvin told himself not to look down into the city below, but he did.

              Los Angeles looked like someone had declared war on it. From the safety on-high, he could see an absolutely countless group of the dead chasing one man on foot. He frantically looked behind him . . . his face wide open in terror of certain painful death. The runners were gaining on him. Cars lay scattered about . . . matchbox cars on a child’s floor. The panicked man ran through the thicket of abandoned automobiles. They were merely pillars in a tomb now. That’s all everything was. The pilot in the sky felt a deep sadness pass over his heart as the running man fell. The insurmountable horde closed in on him before he could get up.

              Once-upon-a-time internet billionaire Alvin French set the Cessna’s autopilot to somewhere . . . anywhere . . . other than over this once beautiful city. Turning to the airport, he needed to see if anyone was still in the radar towers. Those people could tell him if there were any other birds in the area. The city was now reduced to a burning nothing. Her streets were now littered with blood and glass. Her buildings were burning and spreading like a wildfire because there was no one around to put them out. Alvin picked up the headset radio installed on the dash and put the cans over his ears. “Mayday . . . mayday, this is Alvin French. Does anyone hear me out there? Alvin French, number 66553 009, I am the Cessna flying over LAX right now. Does anyone on the ground hear me? Come on LA, answer me down there, over. If there are any other birds out there, acknowledge this transmission.” Nothing came through, as expected. Shattered windows, looted shops and destroyed vehicles littered the entire grounds of the Los Angeles Airport. There were four fires on the runway terminals and a 747 lay on its side. One of the wings was torn off. A small crowd of walkers congregated around the plane, looking up into the sky as Alvin passed.

              He could see them down there . . . rotted and falling apart, sun-bleached, peeling, leathery, sallow faces that appeared human. They weren’t, though. Their skin looked like peaches rotting in the sun, but refusing to die. Up here, it didn’t seem real. Their empty eyes expelled everything that used to resemble human. On their torn, bloody and half-eaten faces were the looks of the truly dead . . . no readable light of the souls that once inhabited those bodies.

              French first encountered them at a subway station in downtown LA. He decided to take a sub to the office as he did on occasion; not that the BMW or Bentley didn’t do a fine job of transportation. Alvin grew up poor. Raised by the state and never adopted. He liked to be around normal people, having never had any real friends. The ones he knew now only befriended him for his money and the other people in his class of society that
were
available only cared about money. Frenchie, as he called himself, tinkered with computers since he was a little boy. That’s all he cared to do during those endless hours in that fucking orphanage. The computers were his friends . . . and the only ones that helped him build a life for himself. Money never meant shit to Fenchie. If he had it his way, he would take every cent he ever made and toss it out of the window of the plane. Money was pretty useless now, anyway. Moreso than it was before. It won’t keep you warm anymore. It won’t protect you. Money will never in a million years buy your way out of this situation, either. All the money in the world will still get your ass killed in this world . . . this new world.

              The day he took the subway, he rode it until he was only a couple blocks from his headquarters down
town. People
were always dumbfounded at how the CEO of the fastest-rising mobile software company never parked his car in his own spot. It always stayed vacant . . . the paint that designated it as fresh as the day it was done. He got off the sub and saw a mass of people at the underground stop. They were everywhere. Wall to wall.
Place usually isn’t this busy. Even for a weekday,
he thought as he exited the bus. For a moment, he thought a riot was happening and the sound of the fleeing bus was just the sinking feeling in his stomach. The people were running over each other. They were climbing on top of one another to get to the stairs. Another group of ragged-looking people were weaving their way into and on top of the crowd . . . injecting themselves into it. Alvin didn’t get a good look at anybody. Everything was a blur. Alvin stood on top of a newspaper dispenser and squashed his thin frame into a space between the terminal wall and back wall of the stairway that lead up to the street. He always saw himself as pretty puny, and it was still a tight enough squeeze for him to fear he would get stuck. The stairs were a pain in the ass to navigate, but he got there eventually.

              Outside was hell.

              Immediately after he exited the stairway, a car with the two rear tires on fire nearly ran him over. In an attempt to look around, he tripped over something. A man in a mud-caked pair of slacks and a backwards tux jacket was bent over a young woman. Her eyes were frozen in a state of shock. Alvin could not see what the man was doing . . . he had his back facing Alvin. All he could see was the woman’s eyes lock onto his. She extended a hand to him and uttered a weak sob. “Help me, please . . .”

              “Hey! What the fuck you doin’ to her, man?” Alvin screamed, grabbing her attacker by the shoulder. He turned, showing Alvin his face. A blue, horribly swollen face glared back at him. The man had torn a jagged cavity into the girl’s midsection and had removed her intestines. They were lying discarded on the street beside her. The toothless cavern of a mouth opened wide and the bruised, swollen and bloated man hissed . . . a long and fibrous piece of tissue hanging from his lower lip. The attacker was holding something in his hand. Some of it was in his mouth, too. The girl’s stomach. The guy was
eating
it. Bloated-man appeared to have been dead for quite some time. Alvin saw a video once of what drowning victims look like. They expand like balloons. The eyes bulge and occasionally pop out. The skin turns a blackish-purple. His fingers were all broken with the white bone protruding from the second set of his knuckle joints; like fingerless gloves. The skinned fingers flopped against his palms where he had forced them to move independent away from the effects of Rigor Mortis. One milkfish grape of an eye pierced his. The dead man reached for him.

              Alvin French backed off and ran. He tore away as fast as he could, past the large groups of terrified people running. Some were lying in the street, missing arms, laying down and holding their guts together. Some had been mugged and tied to poles . . . left defenseless to the chaos. Within the scattered swarms of people were those things. They dragged people from alleyways and into the darkness. People fell from rooftops . . . breaking limbs and popping their heads on the pavement like melons. All of them lay there for a moment, bleeding and twitching. They all got back up and started walking around like the others, dragging broken legs behind them. Cries of pain and terror, the sickly groans of the dead were everywhere. Alvin could hear the
SMACK
sounds of people falling from high-rise windows. One woman . . . an elderly one at that, fell from what looked like the IXOR Center Tower. Eight hundred and fifty-eight feet straight down. Both of her legs came clean off on impact and her face caved in when she slammed to the ground. Her skull had to have shattered. Her head and face sagged. Her head looked like someone had filled it with broken stones. She used her arms to crawl to the end of the block, where she grabbed a man by the ankle and twisted the foot right off of his leg. He spilled into an alley. The light was still obscured by the waning sunlight. Frenchie threw up, hearing the terrible screams when about twenty of those monsters ran into the alley after him. The sounds of bones snapping and the man’s shoes slapping the pavement could be heard across the street.

              Alvin ran into what looked like a coffee shop. His body was covered in a cold sweat and he was shaking all over. Among the mutilated pile of people covering every inch of the floor were two children . . . no more than five or six years old. They were fighting over someone’s face. It had been torn off and was now just a fleshy mask. When Alvin saw the strange red-eyed children try to pull it away from one another. He could see the holes where the eyes used to be, the strands of hair still attached to the scalp, the mouth-hole stretching so wide that the lips tore open. That sent him over the edge. He turned and hopped into an old Chevy utility van. It was parked and still running. The windshield had been knocked out. Bloody streaks ran in two lines up the dashboard and down the hood. From out of the hole in the vehicle, the sounds of the outside were like the sounds of hell. The screams were coming from everywhere. It was deafening. Like war must sound like. A tuft of hair hung from the beaded glass on the windshield and a human eye . . . the nerve still attached, was impaled on one of the broken wiper blades. Someone had smashed the windshield and must have dragged the driver out. All around him there was death. Chaos and atrocities everywhere made him feel sick to his stomach. Putting the van into drive, Alvin winced as a hand grabbed the back of his head by his hair. It was pulling so hard that his neck snapped back. He thought he was going to die until he noticed the handgun in the middle console. It had blood all over it, but he picked it up and sent an elbow behind him at his attacker as hard as he could. It felt like hitting a brick. The unknown attacker in the van stumbled back and thumped against the rear doors of the van.

              Another child . . . no more than ten.

              Her bottom jaw had been ripped away from her head, leaving the tongue hanging down like a slug. Her ripped flesh hung like silk where her upper lip had been torn past her gums and exposing the sinus cavities. “Please be loaded,” he said, raising the gun to the little girl’s head. She fell backwards, stumbling into the street when the doors gave way. They must have not been all the way shut. She was still moving when a police officer brought a large machete down onto her neck, severing her head. The body stopped the second the head rolled toward the officer’s feet. The cop extended a hand to Alvin. “Hey, let me in, pal! Start the truck . . . let’s get outta here!” The head at the officer’s feet sank its
teeth into the he
el of his left foot. He howled and kicked it away, where it rolled down the stairs of the subway terminal. “I know what . . . ha . . . happens now . . .” the officer said. He was slurring his words and looking pale. “Go . . . get out. Out of. Out of here.” Just before Frenchie shut the doors to the back of the van, he caught a glimpse of the policeman holding the machete to his own throat.