Zombie Ever After (27 page)

“Yes!” he said, pumping his fist in the air.

“Thank God,” Cathren said, closing her eyes.

Donovan knew what he had to do. He jammed the transmission into second, then straightaway into third. The crowd of ghouls up ahead was large enough to stop this thing by their sheer mass and numbers. That was true only if the bus proceeded at a slow pace, however—say, five or ten miles an hour. Therefore, Donovan had to get it up to speed as soon as he could.

They hit the first zombie at twenty-two miles per hour. The thing skidded straight under the bumper. At twenty-six mph, they slammed into another freak. At thirty, a third bit the dust. These stragglers had been easy targets, though, and Donovan was worried once he connected with a large knot of the fiends that the bus wouldn’t have the power to plow through them. He wasn’t driving a tank, for crying out loud.
 

At thirty-five miles per hour, he took out two aides and a patron, sending books and library cards into the air as the bus crashed over the cart. At forty, zombies careened across the street and ricocheted into the air. Others crumpled beneath the crushing wheels of the vehicle. Donovan and Cathren sped on their way to freedom.

Except for the zombies still hanging onto the bookmobile.

*
 
*
 
*

One dangled from the rear view mirror to Donovan’s left. Another gripped the door to his right, making significant inbound progress. It had forced an arm between the rubber gaskets that sealed the two halves of the mechanical door. Its fingers stretched out monstrously toward Donovan. The zombie at the window wasn’t making as good progress, but it was getting there.
 

A truck—a moving van, in fact—sat abandoned ahead, boxes and packing material dispersed about the road. Donovan slowed down a bit to ensure his aim was true. He didn’t want to hit the truck (a disabled bus would be the end of the two of them); he only wanted to side-swipe it. When they finally reached the van going forty-five mph, the zombie—along with the side mirror—scraped off the bus like a big bug.

Continuing on, and getting farther from the masses of zombies, Donovan kept an eye out for government troops and any living people he might be able to help by taking them onboard. He almost forgot about the creep at the door, which now, unfortunately for Donovan and Cathren, had made its way onto the first step of the bus.
 

Donovan reflected again for a split second how handy a gun—and ammunition, of course—would be at this moment. He had nothing to fight with and hoped he didn’t have to stop to run into the back of the bookmobile on the off chance there might be a knife or a shotgun there, perhaps as part of some library weapons exhibition.

Problem was, he had to kill a zombie completely and thoroughly to stop it. He couldn’t wound the mothers. He needed a gun, a chainsaw. A freakin’ hand grenade. He had jack squat. He and Cathren were, for lack of a better expression, screwed. Donovan feared, this time, the end, indeed, was nigh.

The undead librarian on the bus managed to get its entire body into the cab of the bookmobile. She, or it, made horrible gurgling noises as it came on board, crawling up the short set of steps.

“Arrghrgurrgle!”
The devil got up off its knees, righted itself, and snarled at Donovan. Its vacant eyes bore through him as if he wasn’t there, a situation which, in fact, Donovan would have preferred. The freak’s bloody face and limbs reeked of mutant death and decay, a kind of mashup between rotten cauliflower and roadkill. The zombie twisted and shuddered its way toward Donovan, while Donovan attempted to twist away from it, shuddering.
 

Kicking the thing would do no good, nor would punching it, as the beast would only take Donovan’s swinging appendage as an invitation to snack. Donovan needed something with which to defend himself, something not attached to his body.
 

Donovan slipped the bus into neutral. He let go of the steering wheel and let off the gas pedal. While the bus rolled slowly to a complete stop, Donovan dove past the creature’s outstretched arms into the main part of the bookmobile and grabbed Cathren’s hand. Together they fought their way to the back of the now-parked (but idling) bookmobile.

“Think!” he said. “There must be something here that can be used as a weapon.”

As the zombie lurched toward Donovan and Cathren, the couple found themselves backed further and further into the bowels of the bus. They were almost pressed against the rear door, with this undead nightmare just steps away, when it came to Donovan: He had no weapon on the bookmobile, the weapon was the bookmobile.

“Get in that space,” he said to Cathren, pointing at a large storage cabinet that ran the length of the bus beneath the rows of bookshelves. Cathren climbed in without questioning the command. Donovan slid the door shut and locked it. He pulled the key out and stuffed it in his pocket.
 

Then he turned, slammed down the exit bar, and kicked the back door open. He grabbed a chair and lowered it to the ground, a good three feet or more below the door. With a devil-may-care attitude, he stepped down into the chair and from there onto the pavement.

The zombarian followed. As the monster pitched out of the bus, Donovan kicked the chair away. The undead menace, in a move worthy of Chevy Chase, made a pratfall straight to the asphalt, and onto its face, bones cracking and blood vessels popping like plastic packing bubbles. It was still “alive,” but temporarily incapacitated.
 

Donovan lifted the chair and drove one of the metal legs through the ghoul’s fragile skull, crushing it like a rotted melon. The chair leg made a sickening sucking noise as he pulled it free of the zombie’s head.

Donovan returned the chair to beneath the back door. He stepped up on it and then leaped back into the bookmobile. He slammed the door shut and secured it. Next, he unlocked Cathren and helped her to her feet. Together they ran back to the cab. Donovan sat and gunned the still-idling bus, shifted out of neutral, and pulled away.
 

In the remaining side mirror, Donovan spied a thicket of zombies making their way toward them. The mob struggled along far enough away not to be an immediate problem. Somehow, and perhaps only for now, Donovan and Cathren had survived.

Rolling freely down Avenue D, Donovan drove to 4th and the Avenue of the Palms. Any random zombies that got in his way simply became victims of a hit-and-run.
 

Donovan would not be slowed. He would not be stopped. Unfortunately, this turned out to be more of a slogan than an applicable practice. The zombies swarming over the Avenue of the Palms made it look like the greatest zombie convention of all was taking place. Too many to blast through with the big bus. And now that he’d stopped, too many behind him to back out. He cut the engine. As it chugged to silence, he and Cathren sat and watched the approaching menace.

“Not good,” Donovan said.

In a death march, the zombies shuffled toward the bookmobile, closing in like obsessed and homicidal bibliophiles.
 

Déjà vu
all over again.

Looking at the hideous creatures in disgust, Donovan realized something. The undead were getting faster. In the reanimation game, speed was not good. In fact, the surviving humans required a certain sloth in their undead, a slowness of movement and of evolution. With this kind of acceleration, what was next? Fit jogging zombies in Juicy Couture running outfits, their decomposing hands clutching Starbucks cappuccinos? No, humans had to rely on their shuffling, stumbling ways. Their sluggishness. Their utter lack of evolutionary change.

Donovan glanced over at Cathren. “Time to abandon ship,” he said.
 

The two jumped out the middle side door, the exit of least resistance and smallest zombie clustering, and ran for their lives. Their only hope was that this Rose Bowl Parade of zombies represented most, if not all, of the local zombie population. If that wasn’t the case, then they were effectively running out of the undead frying pan and into the zombie fire.

“You any closer to morphing, babe? Even a teeny, tiny bit?” Donovan asked Cathren as they ran away.

“Nope. Sorry,” she said, scrunching up her face as a kind of visual apology.

“Well, I hope you do soon.”

“You and me both.”

They took the first possible left, onto 6th Street and up to Avenue B where they stopped to catch their breath.
 

Which was when the zombies—the damned, swift, evolving zombies—showed up.

“For such slow-moving mothers, they sure can cover a lot of ground when they want to.”

“Stick-to-it-ive-ness. Admirable,” Cathren said.

“So, anything yet, in the morphing department?” Donovan asked as the two picked up speed again.

“Nope, still me. A hundred percent human.”

“We could sure use some of that anti-zombie power right about now,” Donovan said, trying to sound encouraging and supportive, not nagging and desperate.

“Don’t I know it,” Cathren agreed.

They pushed themselves harder to gain extra speed and a little more distance from their pursuers. They ran through a small retail block that appeared to have recently hosted a full-scale riot with doors barely hanging on by a broken hinge, or missing altogether. Windows shattered. Merchandise stomped and scattered. Drug stores. Shoe stores. Candy stores. Dry cleaners. Diners. Extreme sports rental companies.

“What? Wait!” Donovan said, coming to an abrupt and ill-advised stop. “Look.”

Among the broken shards of the display windows at the Sky High Fly storefront, color pamphlets showed happy people in the heavens hanging from paragliders and parasails. Inside, charts gave the schedules and prices.

“A
Flying Fox!”
Donovan shouted. “Just sitting here!” He picked up the famous Flying Fox’s basic black backpack, swiftly and securely strapping it on.

“Um, what are you doing?” Cathren asked, calmly.

“Check it out. Fits like I’m carrying sandwiches in the pack, instead of the primo tandem paragliding kit.”

“Are you stealing? Really?” Cathren put her hands on her hips and stared at Donovan.
 

Donovan gazed past her at the encroaching zombie hordes. “First of all, we need to get going, no if, ands, or buts about it. Second, no, I’m not stealing,” he said, adjusting the pack’s shoulder straps. “No such thing as robbery when it’s the end of the world.”

Cathren rolled her eyes. “When are you ever going to use that thing, anyway? You planning on going on vacation in the middle of a zombie apocalypse?”

“Hey, what better time for a holiday, right?” Donovan started jogging along with Cathren. “By the way, you never know,” he continued. “Maybe we’ll fly away together one day into the sunset.”

“You’re a dreamer,” Cathren laughed, as they started running again. “Especially considering there ain’t no such things as real sunsets anymore.”

“Hey, over here,” Donovan said, changing both topic and course on the spur of the moment. They sprinted toward two connected asterisk-shaped buildings, roughly ten stories high.

With caution, the couple stepped through the main entrance and into the building.
 

Once inside, they walked past massive, Soviet-looking statues built right into the façade of the building. These consisted of, for the most part, topless and muscular women. Cathren and Donovan trotted along, side-by-side, around a partial rotunda covered in marble and large murals. Art deco at its finest.
 

They stopped in front of a pair of tall double doors. Donovan glanced back outside to where they had just been. Zombies—moaning, drooling, shuffling—limped their way closer by the minute.

“Damn those little shits,” Donovan said. “Don’t they ever take a break? Don’t they ever get tired?”

“Type A, I’m guessing,” Cathren said, grinning.

Together, they pushed open one of the heavy doors and stepped through to the inner sanctum.
 

There they stood, dwarfed within a vast room as big as a small stadium. Ceilings grew to at least twenty feet high. The chilly air smelled of antediluvian dust and dungy, dirty animals.
 

When their eyes adjusted to the dark, Donovan and Cathren realized the odor came from the lifelike stuffed critters cramming the room. A grizzly bear roared from just a few feet away. A tiger was posed to pounce just beyond the bear. A wolverine, teeth exposed and gums drawn back, hid behind an artificial bush. A boa constrictor coiled, poised to strike the wolverine. A bald eagle flew, suspended from wires about fifteen feet above their heads, as if circling for the kill.
 

Straight ahead, a massive desk dominated that side of the room. It was constructed of solid mahogany. It was easily twelve feet, possibly longer, from bow to stern (so to speak). Above the desk, a huge tapestry hung on the wall. The embroidery depicted a heroic scene of horses on their hind legs, men brandishing swords, and women waving flags. Woven into the tapestry was a Latin phrase and the name of a company Donovan and Cathren had grown to loathe: ATELIC.

The couple stood in horrified silence for a brief moment. Then Donovan spoke.
 

“What a crock o’ shit.”

“I must respectfully disagree,” a voice echoed in the darkness behind them. “I think it captures the spirit of the company remarkably well, yes?
Valoris. Vigor. Virtus.
‘Valor. Vigor. Virtue.’ Although I grant you that, yes,
atelic
is an old Anglo Saxon word meaning ‘horrible.’ Of course, we didn’t know that at the time, when we named the company thus inadvertently creating the acronym.”

Donovan and Cathren did an about-face to find out who was doing the talking.

Yes, of course: Dr. Burkhart Egesa, with a pistol in his hand.

“You are surprised to see me, yes?” Egesa twisted his mouth into something resembling a smile.

Both Donovan and Cathren rolled their eyes.

“Happy to see you again, too,” Egesa said. “In case you’re wondering, I have allowed you in. You didn’t just walk in.” He gestured toward the entrance. “Those doors lock with electronics, yes? They have the solid metal core. You would not have gotten in even with a bulldozer and dynamite.”