"Now, I know how to get the drugs, so I guess I have to go in, which means that you need to be the distraction. Take the truck. It has four wheel drive so you won't be stuck to the road. Just drive around town. Make as much noise as you can. Once they are all after you, I'll hit the pharmacy. Shouldn't take but a few minutes. Now, we don't want them tailing us straight home, so you gotta head south, then loop back around once you lose them. Hopefully I'll have less on me, so I'll head straight home. Give me 10 minutes then get the fuck out of town, ok?"
I nodded. What else could I do? Drawing the attention of thousands of monsters didn't sound like a great idea. But if Bob was willing to get out on foot in that necropolis, how could I say no to driving around?
It was a simple plan, but it had one flaw. Zombies just don't give a damn. If you drive like a maniac in a normal town, people get out of the street. Zombies stand in your way. Hitting a deer will do some serious damage to your truck. Hitting forty or fifty people is a great way to disable your truck. Almost immediately the zombies were on me. Their willingness to use themselves as speed bumps had me putting the pedal to the metal to get up to a whole fifteen miles an hour. I started swerving into side streets and alleys, over parking lots, anything to build a bit of momentum. But I just kept getting slower and slower. Every zombie I hit, every one I ran over, sapped energy from the truck. I didn't realize it at the time but the wheel wells were full of gore. The wheel alignment was so bad after a while it got hard to steer.
This one time when I was a kid I touched a bird’s nest that was on the ground. My mom told me not to, but I did it anyway. The instant I touched it, hundreds of lice jumped from the nest to my arm. They scrambled up my arm, trying to find a place to feed on me. I screamed and screamed. They needed a garden hose to wash them all off.
It was a bit like that, but with corpses. I did what I could. I bought him a lot of time. Or it seemed like a lot of time. My choice became to stop completely or take the highway south. I took the highway.
After about ten miles, the transmission on the truck detonated. The truck just drifted to a stop. I was stranded and I might just have six thousand zombies on my tail. I could see a farmhouse a mile away, up a hill. I grabbed what I could and booked it that way, looking back every three feet, convinced the horde was going to descend on me at any second. But I made it without seeing anyone. I searched the house. It was empty. No food, no people. The water still worked for some reason. I didn't dare even see if the electricity was still on. Once I found the ladder to the attic, I hauled my gear up and shut myself in. Sleeping in an attic full of fiberglass insulation wasn't my idea of fun, but it wasn't the worst thing someone was doing that day.
CHAPTER THREE
Not Worth the Candle
He woke up in a humid, moldy cell. It was three feet by six feet. He laid on the hard ground and could feel the rough cast concrete suck heat from his body like evil spirits.
Memory was rough, but he had been escaping from somewhere by going somewhere. He couldn't remember where. There had been cops. No, army guys. They had made him stop. They had stripped him naked and put needles in him. The nurse had been a man, which had been disappointing.
He had asked them what was in the needle.
"A vaccine," the nurse croaked. For some reason that hadn't seemed like good news. They should have been in a better mood if they had a vaccine. And then, like a jump cut, he was here. He tried to sit up. His back was so sore he let out a yelp. His muscles felt bruised and dead, but he ratcheted himself up eventually. His cell was totally bare, except for a faucet, a drain, and a slot in the heavy steel door. He was not alone.
He could hear shuffling, and banging. And moaning. He scrambled to his feet. Fucking zombies! Zombies! He banged his head on the ceiling and fell face first into the door. Pain shot through his face from his mouth, and his tongue rolled over shards of his teeth. He screamed, which set the zombies off, and he cried as he wiped bits of blood stained tooth out of his mouth. That's when he noticed the Rubik's cube. A business card had been stuffed in the cracks. It had writing on it. He picked up the card.
"You are under quarantine. Your case has been deemed nearly hopeless. Due to a shortage of man power, this quarantine unit is not manned. It is surveilled by camera. It will be assumed you have deceased unless you present this Rubik's cube, solved, to the camera. The camera is in the hallway."
He must have read the note a thousand times. It just didn't sink in. How could they do this? It was insane. It must be a joke. It had to be. There was no way they would let people die unless they solved a stupid puzzle. He ignored it. He'd just wait until they came to deliver the food or kill the zombies. Then he'd talk. Zombies couldn't talk. They'd know he was human. He didn't need to solve the puzzle.
0919738
Time was hard to gauge in the cell, but he was terribly hungry before he admitted that they weren't coming to give him food. The faucet vomited hot rust water, but he didn't mind the metal on his tongue.
He focused on the cube.
The cube. The cube. He'd tried one when he was a kid. He had never solved it. He spun and spun, trying to get the colors to line up, but just as he got the red side done, the blues scattered like frightened birds, or yellow invaded green.
In this dim light he had a hard time telling orange from red and green from blue. He worked and worked until his knuckles ached with arthritis and his eyes couldn't focus. The answer kept slipping away until he fell into a light dream of sore backs and Rubik's cubes spinning as he tried to direct them, only to have the colors ripple like a chameleon as he screamed in frustration.
He woke up with the solution. With a long fingernail he scraped the stickers off the cube, and put them back on by color. In ten minutes he had a solved, if shabby looking, Rubik's cube. Screaming with joy he shoved his hand out, holding his victorious trophy.
He held it for a long time. Panic began to creep. Someone had to come. It couldn't end like this. He held it for endless hours, waving and shouting. He held it until his elbow felt like shattered glass. He wept and howled, pleaded and demanded.
There was no one to care.
CHAPTER FOUR
The plague hadn't been real to Janet until her next door neighbor showed up at her door. It was Nina Wilson. Or rather, it had been Nina Wilson. She was a grandmother, who enjoyed crochet and bowls of long expired hard candies.
She was pale as a ghost. Her legs were a giant bruise.
She had heard others warn her. She'd seen it on the news. Intellectually she knew that Peoria was not immune. The nightly news was having a field day with it. They made it clear that YOU WOULD DIE if you didn't catch their latest regurgitation of the same facts they had said last night. Only the numbers changed.
So she should have known better. She did know better. But when your neighbor of ten years, a woman who was in the running for nicest old lady in Illinois knocks on your door, you open the door.
As soon as she cracked the door, Nina bulldozed through the door like an NFL linebacker. Janet weighed a buck thirty soaking wet. The heftier grandmother made it through on inertia and surprise.
Janet crab walked away as Nina ran at her. She belly-flopped on top of Janet, and they began to grapple. Nina grabbed her arm like a chicken leg and bit right through the skin. The shock of it, more from the sight of the teeth sinking in than the pain, finally broke the cloud of delusion. This was real. It was really real.
She kicked Nina off her and scrambled to her feet. The bedroom. She started running that way. Her children were in the hallway, looking scared and helpless. She grabbed both by the collar and dragged them with her into the bedroom. She slammed the door behind her and locked it. The shotgun was in the gun safe that sat in the back of their walk-in closet.
Nina started banging on the door.
What was the goddamn combination?
My birthday? No. His birthday? No. Kid's birthdays? No and no.
Her cellphone was in her purse. Her purse was in the living room. The kids didn't know. They didn't have a landline phone anymore.
"Fuck!" she shouted and tried to pry the gun safe open.
"Mom," her son said, "It's the last four of Dad's social security number. 5562."
Janet was so panicked she just punched in the numbers. If she had known he'd known that yesterday, she would have had a legendary fit. Her husband would have been in trouble, her son would have been grounded. But today... well, today they were in a world where the idea that keeping the guns locked up made them more safe was obsolete, like the idea that you should do an oil change every three thousand miles, or that you should open the door when a neighbor comes over looking sick.
The safe opened, the shotgun sitting behind the steel door. She grabbed it and a box of shells. Say what you will about Nina Wilson, she had bulk. The door was weakening. She took a deep breath. With the gun it was her game to lose. Just don't fuck it up, Janet thought, and you've got this. I know this. Pull the action back. Slide in a shell. Press the button. The action slammed shut. Stuff shells in the thing there. Safety... off.
She brought the shotgun around like a turret traversing and aimed it at head level (the news always said to go for the head). She pulled the trigger. The explosion was not as loud as she thought it would be, but the door vaporized in a cloud of splinters. On the other side, Nina blinked, stunned. Her neck was a mess of shredded flesh. The lack of blood was almost as off putting as the mutilated neck. She pulled the trigger again. Boom. She'd let the gun drop and now Nina's chest was a mass of holes. She staggered and lunged back, trying to force her way through the hole. Janet walked up until the barrel was inches away from her crazed eyes, then pulled the trigger again. Nina's head exploded and she went limp.
She stood there for a minute, watching. Then she walked back to the bed and sat down. She fed shells into the gun until it wouldn't take anymore, then clicked on the safety. The whole time her kids had been sobbing, hands over eyes, fetal position bawling.
She looked at them as if they were aliens, then sighed. She supposed she should try to comfort them, but right now she was in an icy place. She couldn't understand why they were crying. They were alive, weren't they? What did they have to complain about?
She sat there for fifteen minutes before her arm started to hurt. Nina had gone to town on her, and she realized she was covered in her own blood. She put the shotgun down and went to the bathroom. She slapped some Neosporin on it and duct-taped a washcloth to the wound. They didn't have any bandages big enough for the job. As she did, she remembered what the news had said about bites. She remembered Ms. Wilson had once helped look for Sophia, their tabby cat, and the emotions pulled her out to sea like a riptide.
Her kids came and hugged her while she sobbed on her knees in the bathroom, putting pressure on a death sentence.
Whatever happens, she thought to herself, I will not attack my own children.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hammer Time
Prison was not the worst place to spend the Apocalypse. There were guys whose whole job was to keep you isolated from the outside world. To feed you. To protect you.
You slept behind iron bars. All the things that were designed to keep him helpless were equally good at keeping zombies away.
So I have it pretty sweet, James thought. For now at least. He watched the news in a big room filled with cheap plastic chairs that reminded him of elementary school. He sipped the Coke he got from the vending machine. It was a lot worse in a lot of other places. Hell, the only person he had to worry about was his cellmate. He was pretty sure he could take his inmate, a counterfeiter. At least as long as the counterfeiter hadn't had been able to find any meth. All these people on the news had to worry about was all their friends and family going bad in the night. But he was worried too, because he knew that one day the guards would be gone, the food would be gone, the power would be gone. Or maybe they wouldn't go away, and people would figure out that those prisoners had it pretty good and take it away. For all the protection jail provided, he didn't have the key. The zombies had overturned the system of the world, made prison somewhere you wanted to be. But that wouldn't last. The world had changed, and for a while prison had become a good place to be. But prison's fundamental nature was to be a place you didn't want to be. Sooner or later prison would figure out how to become itself again or it would cease to be a prison. Like an alcoholic father promising he would never hit his wife again, it was only a matter of time. But that didn't mean you couldn't enjoy that sweet time when reality was thwarted.
But for now the disease spread slowly. The guards went home at night, so when they turned they turned on their wives and kids and didn't come back. The prisoners were clean so far. Many prisoners had found out that their family loved them and all, but they couldn't make it up given current events. Somehow the outside world had gotten the idea that prisons were overrun with zombies. James figured it made a sort of sense. If every other sort of scumbag lived in prisons, then zombies had a natural affinity for prisons too. It was the sort of sense that made you cringe when a black cat crossed your path, but sense was sense even when it made no sense.
James suspected that this belief was a rationalization for an unpleasant truth they weren't coming because the inmates were at the bottom of the totem pole. There were other people to worry about now, and Timothy the Armed Robber was not worth the effort at a time like this. Which is not to say that Timothy's mom didn't love him; she just couldn't do much for Timothy.
Some people did come to visit, but the guards didn't let them in. They believed the outside world was a cesspit of disease. In that it would appear the guards were right. The news reminded James of what he had read about Japan during World War Two. If you read Japan's newspapers, Japan was winning victory after victory. You needed a map to realize each of these glorious victories was closer to Japan than the last. The news claimed everything was under control, but there were fewer and fewer live reports from the scene. When there was a live report it was usually from the heart of a military base.
Through the bulletproof windows James heard muted honking. He would have ignored it, but the TV was showing the same segment he'd seen an hour ago, so he got up. An RV idled at the gate. Rick, one of the prison guards, hung out of the RV arguing with the guards at the gate. What looked like a fat woman, probably Rick's wife, sat in the passenger seat. Somehow, even from 100 yards, James sensed she was scared. Real scared. Rick convinced the guards and the gate opened. He rolled the RV through and parked it as far as he could from the gate. James' nightmare had started to come true; they finally realized that it was better to be in prison now. It wouldn't be long before they were finding ways to kick James out. Last month it would have been a felony for him to leave; now that he wanted to be here he was sure to get kicked out.
Rick was the penguin who dives into the water first. If he survives the rest of the penguins know there aren't any sharks around and they all go in. Soon the outside yard was a campground. The problem was that they brought the disease with them. A dozen people turned over the next few days. Screams and shots were common. Even though they quarantined the people who got near the zombies, the disease still spread through the campers. The septic tanks of the RV's got full and the primitive holes they dug to dump the sewage started to smell. People started getting sick from old fashioned diseases. They demanded the doors to the jail be left open so they could use the bathroom. Soon prisoners started dropping. The cells protected them from bites. But it made it trivial for the Airborne to run through them like the common cold through a kindergarten.
Those were long nights for James. His cellmate was Dick, the meth head counterfeiter. Dick didn't handle the situation well. In fact he was a whiny little shit. Never stopped talking about his family, or how he was going to fuck James up if he so much as looked at Dick funny. Anytime James ate one of his granola bars Dick would stare at him, like James eating anything was an implied threat.
The guys on the block couldn't get enough of the jokes either.
"Hey James, the bible says you shouldn't eat Dick."
"Hey, Dick don't swing that way. He'd appreciate it if you'd eat pussy like a normal guy."
"Hey, Dick muncher, what’s the haps?"
Nobody would work out a system either. Sure, tying up the other guy so you could sleep made sense. But getting tied up? Fuck that! Both of you tie yourself up? The other guy will make bad knots so he can get out, then I'm screwed! And nobody wanted to get near the vacant cells. The best they could do was a watch system. One guy from each cell would stay up and keep a watch on everyone else. Call it out when someone turned. Maybe help if they could. The instant their families showed up the guards' discipline started to evaporate. Food got spottier. Zombies tended to get left in their cells longer. There may or may not be someone able to open the door and let you out if your cellmate turned.
James was on Cell Block G. It took about a week for the Airborne to get to his block. He woke up to screams and growls. The next cell over, Demarco was bellowing and making a tremendous racket. Demarco had been running a successful crack business before his supplier stopped returning his calls. He had used the profits to buy a hammer from a guard’s toolbox for a ridiculous amount of money. The sound of the hammer cracking the skull of Demarco's ex-cellmate made James' teeth hurt. He looked back. Dick was still asleep. How could he sleep through this? James thought, and began to tense.
"Demarco, you ok?" James asked, parroting the question twenty other guys were asking.
"I dunno, I got his spit on me. That mean I got it?" He asked, dead calm.
"Probably not, unless he spit on an open wound or something." James replied. Dick still wasn't moving. James couldn't tell if he was breathing.
"Demarco, I think I need your hammer," James said.
"Fuck you, get your own hammer."
"Demarco, come on, Dick ain't breathing," James said.
"Fuck you, it's my hammer," Demarco replied.
"I'll give it back, I swear. And you don't even need it anymore."
"Still my hammer. Tell you what, how many granola bars you got?"
"Sixteen." He had thirty, but he knew where this conversation was going.
"Sixteen granola bars gets you twenty minutes with my hammer, how about that?"
"All of them? Come on, dude."
"Well you can't suck my dick through these bars, so you got something else to trade?"
"Dick's got a thousand bucks..."
"I don't give a fuck about a grand. I paid ten grand for this hammer, never spent money better. Your granola bars are worth more than a grand."
"Four bars."
"Sixteen."
"Six."
"Your life worth ten granola bars?"
"I ain't even sure he's going to turn! He might just be asleep."
"Twelve bars and the thousand bucks."
Dick's eyes opened. It wasn't Dick.
"Fine, give me the hammer."
"Gimme the bars." James knew that he didn't have time to argue. He jammed a box of sixteen through the bars. Demarco grabbed the box.
"I wasn't kidding-- you give me the hammer back or I will fuck you up first chance I get!"
"I'll give it back," James said with mounting panic. "Just give it to me!"
The hammer was pushed into his hand. Dick stood up and growled, eyes locked on James. It was a tiny cell and Dick was almost on top of James when the hammer whistled down on the crown of his head. Dick’s charge was stopped, and he bobbled back a foot or two before he locked onto James again. This time the hammer broke an orbital bone. Dick's left eye popped out and hung by a nerve. He lurched forward. James pushed him back and Dick tripped over the toilet. James was on top of him, hammering again and again. He could feel the skull shattering and the flesh tearing against the shards through the hammer. He went on quite a while, hammering. Dick was re-dead for a good long time before the world came back into focus.
"Hey, you fuck up my hammer I will kill you!" Demarco was yelling. James shook himself like a dog. Dick's blood was spattered all over the cell. He turned away and washed his hands in their little sink. He washed off the hammer too.
"Demarco, I'm really tired."
"No shit," Demarco replied.
"Real tired."
"So fucking what?"
"Pounding Dick got me real tired," James said. That was a bon mot by Cell Block G standards. A few guys chortled even though they had just sat through two back to back hammer homicides.
"Take a fucking nap. After you give me my hammer."
"I'll give you your hammer. I just need the energy to do it, is all I'm saying."
"What the fuck you talking about, just give me the damn thing."
"I think I need some granola bars to get the energy to give you back your hammer."
"You still got plenty, eat those."
"Yeah, already did. Need ten more to really get my energy back."
"You cunt, we had a deal!"
"Yeah we did. That's why I'm not keeping the hammer, and I'm letting you have six when I know I could get you to hand them all back. ‘Cause I appreciate you helping me out like that. I just have nutritional problems, you know."
Ten bars where thrown through the bars, each accompanied by a new insult. After they arrived James handed the hammer back.
Let no man say James is a thief. But also let no man say James is a sucker.