Zombies! A Love Story (10 page)

Authors: Maggie Shayne

BOOK: Zombies! A Love Story

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I rolled the window a tiny bit, just so he could hear me. “Are you still you?” He nodded. “Not for...much longer. Let me in.” He leaned away from the door so I could open it. Then he started crowding in while I scooted out of the way, almost onto Chuck’s lap.

“I’ll stay with the truck,” Reynolds said. “You two get out. Get clear.” He pulled a lighter out of his pocket. It wasn’t a cheap disposable one, but a fancy silver one with a horse embossed on the side. “I’ll bring them in and then I’ll touch it off.”

Chuck looked at him for a long moment, but we both knew there was no point arguing. He didn’t have a chance anyway.

“All right,” Chuck said. “Give us a full minute.”

“I’ll try for thirty seconds. Not sure I’ll... make it that long.” He flicked the lighter in his hand, then held it, but not steadily. Nodded. “If it was the potatoes...I’m sorry.”

“I know.” Chuck said. He looked at me. I nodded, and we got out his side, and hit the ground running, right through the gasoline rain shower, toward the closest road.

As we ran, I counted in my head. One thousand one, one thousand two. My clothes were damp with gas. If Reynolds dropped the lighter too soon, we’d be goners.

Reynolds hit the air horn. He let out a long, loud blast, then several short bursts, followed by another long one. Chuck and I kept on running. I could see the top of the Hastings’ red pickup truck now. One thousand twenty-four, one thousand twenty-five.

Over and over, Reynolds blasted the horns. I turned to look behind me at one thousand twenty-eight. The horn had worked. They came and came and came. Hordes of them. Hundreds, I was sure of it, a swelling mob surrounding the truck in the center, smothering it like ants on sugar.

One thousand twenty-nine and my foot hit the pavement. “Fuck you, zombies.”

Chuck grabbed my arm and then the world exploded with a powerful whoosh that launched us both. The explosion rocked the world, and debris that included truck parts as well as zombie parts, rained down on our backs while we covered our heads and hugged the ground.

The fallout eased and I sat up, rubbing my eyes and looking around.

The field was ablaze, the creeps staggering around with their clothes on fire, not even seeming to notice, before falling down and not getting up again.

“You okay?” Chuck got up onto his feet, reaching down for me with one hand.

“I think so.” I took the hand he offered, let him pull me to my feet, and brushed myself off a little.

He looked me up and down, and gradually the worry in his eyes changed to relief. “So, does this count as our victory yet, Suz?”

I looked around. The potato field was destroyed. We’d bulldoze up any tubers that remained and see to it that they were annihilated as well. And the fire seemed to be doing the trick, killing the undead. Putting them to rest. As they fell one by one, I didn’t see any survivors.

“I think so,” I said, when I finished surveying the damage and met his eyes again. “So now I can say it. I love you Chuck. I have since second grade. And if you didn’t already know that, then you’re not as smart as I always thought you were.”

“So then why were you trying to break up with me?”

“Why? Jeeze, Chuck, look at me. I’m a small town vegan hippy chick and I don’t really aspire to be much else. You’re going places in life. Walking in circles with rich people and famous people. Hell, you’ll be one of them before long. You need a classy wife who knows which forks to use and what to wear and how to make her hair look like it’s made out of plastic and stuff.”

He took both my hands and held them in his. Beyond him, smoke and flames provided a dramatic backdrop. “Wife, huh?”

I shrugged. “I’d just hold you back.”

“As long as you hold me.”

“I never want to leave Bloody Gulch, Chuck.”

“That’s why I took the Sonatta job, Suz. So you wouldn’t have to.”

As soon as he said it, I knew it was true. He’d seen the same potential problems between us as I had, but his solution was to find an answer, to solve the problem. Not to abandon ship.

“We’ll have to figure out another way, now,” I said softly.

“And we will,” he told me. “But whatever we do, from now on, we do it together. All right?”

I felt my heart surrender. I was done protecting myself. I was completely in this. “Yeah. All right.”

He pulled me close and kissed me deeply, and I knew right then that whatever we faced in the future, we’d face it side by side.

He turned me into his arm and started walking us forward. The Hastings pickup was right where it was supposed to be. We climbed into the bed, and Chuck tapped the roof twice, and Mr. Hastings gave us a thumbs up and started driving.

We rode that way all the way back to the village, stopping in front of the bank to see those we’d left behind already down from their rooftop perch. I hugged my mom like I’d never hugged her before. “It’s going to be okay,” I told her. “We’re all going to be okay. Thanks to Chuck.”

“Because of both of you,” she whispered. “Damn, I’m proud of you, Suzy.” She kissed my head, then added, “And I always liked that boy.”

Epilogue

THERE HAD BEEN
a few stragglers, but they were easily picked off. And when we were sure the town was zombie free, we all gathered outside the Sonatta processing plant and watched it burn.

There were more survivors than just Tam and Curtis Reynolds, Mrs. Applegate, and the two teenagers. More than Mom and Chief Mallory and Chuck and I. Gradually people had come crawling out of their basements, out of the desert where they’d run to hide. All told there were just over a hundred survivors of the Bloody Gulch Zombie Apocalypse.

And we still hadn’t had any help from the outside world. Though we had finally seen signs that they hadn’t abandoned us to our fate, in the form of military vehicles parked along the main road out of town. Maybe they were on every road out. I didn’t know. I was glad to see them, but resented that they’d only shown up after we’d saved our own asses.

We were about to get to the bottom of why that was. Chuck and I were walking along with Mom and the chief, and Old man Hastings, along Bloody Gulch’s main thoroughfare. The village was behind us, the Sonatta plant burning and lighting up the sky far to the west. The town limits was just up ahead.

“I still don’t fathom how a potato could cause all that,” Hastings said. “But if there’s any way they did, then I’m sure glad they’re gone.”

“And before they had a chance to blossom and spread their pollen,” Chuck added.

“No, no, son, that’s not quite so.”

I stopped in my tracks. Something was off about the tanks and trucks parked in the road up ahead.

“What do you mean, not quite so?” Chuck asked.

“Those plants were in full blossom two weeks ago. Pretty purple blossoms covered just about every inch of those fields.”

I looked at Chuck and he looked at me. “The pollen,” he began.

“It’s spread,” I said, looking off into the distance. “It’s already spread.”

Chuck closed his hand around mine. “Not necessarily. There’s no guarantee the infected crop will cross pollinate with other plant life. And even if it does, we can’t be sure what the result will be.”

“I wasn’t talking about cross pollination, Chuck.” I looked him hard in the eye, then nodded toward the roadblock, where there should be armed soldiers challenging us about now.

He followed my gaze, saw what I saw. A lot of blood, weapons lying abandoned on the ground. The military had been sent to surround our town, to contain the plague we’d been suffering, so it wouldn’t spread beyond our borders.

But from the looks of things, it had spread all the same.

Chuck put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me close to his side. We stood there staring down the road, beyond the borderline of Bloody Gulch, both of us wondering what remained of the next town over, of the county, of the state of Arizona. Maybe even...of the world we’d once known.

“Whatever comes, we face it together,” he said to me.

“Damn straight we do.” I leaned into his chest, and felt his heart beating softly against my cheek.

-The End-

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