Speeding down back roads, once cutting across a park, Cooper managed to avoid most of the dead. There were some corpses ambling about, and he wasn’t always able to pass them and had to hit them on occasion. He hated hitting them and slowed as best he could when faced with a road-hogging corpse. He really hated hitting a human; dead or not, it felt wrong. It also messed up the car, and he felt guilty thinking that.
He was running out of places to drive in his attempt to get out of the city. His last hope to get to the highway was the on-ramp just ahead, but as he came closer he could see that the street, the on-ramp, and the highway were filled with dead bodies and overturned vehicles. He started turning around, and that was when he heard gunshots.
The shots didn’t sound too far away. He was cruising slowly back the way he’d come, looking for the possible origin of the shots and wondering who was shooting and at what, when the rear window exploded and bits of foam burst from the headrest of the passenger seat. It didn’t take him more than half a second to realize he was being shot at and to start driving off as quickly as possible. More shots followed, and he hunkered low as he made his getaway.
He looked back, trying to see if he had any pursuers, and when he looked forward again another car was pulling right in front of him. He didn’t even have time to apply the brakes. He T-boned the smaller car, and the impact was jarring. He was grateful his seatbelt was on, and he didn’t even remember buckling up. But still he was tossed about, and he hurt all over. He fought the darkness starting to fill his vision. He was beginning to black out.
He saw the person in the other car, slumped over the steering wheel. The Land Rover had caved it in, almost folding it in half. He heard the sounds of footsteps running up from behind, those who were trying to kill him, no doubt. Then he lost consciousness.
6.
Sal was able to drag each foot mere inches, moving him at a snail’s pace down the road. His body was giving out. He stayed upright by sheer force of will. The sky before him was aglow with colors, and soon he would be blinded as the sun came up over the distant horizon.
He’d walked through the night, and now the Santa Cruz Mountains were behind him. He finally tripped and fell forward, passing out in the middle of the highway. He’d reached the place he hoped to die.
§
“He’s alive.” Jordan Ling crouched over the big man lying in the middle of the road. He was facedown and unconscious. She was concerned he would die if left out here. Sundown wasn’t too far off, and when the sun set it got cold. Already the air was cooling.
She looked back at her two brothers, so close in age and appearance that people mistook them for twins all the time.
“Help me turn him over.” Jordan was small and would never be able to budge the giant man on her own. Her brothers helped, and even all three of them had a hard time of it.
“Thanks,” she said absentmindedly. She could pass for a teenager but was in her late twenties.
Her brothers looked bored. They were almost ten years younger than her, and she’d always worried about them. While she held a doctorate in computer science, college didn’t even seem to be an option for them. The three siblings were on their way into the mountains, meeting their parents at a weekend house they owned.
“Hey.” She lightly slapped the man’s face.
His eyes fluttered but didn’t open.
“What are we going to do with him, Jord?” one brother whined.
“I don’t know, but we can’t just leave him here.”
Her other brother was alarmed. “What if he is infected?”
“He wouldn’t be lying here if he was infected. He’d be naked and running down the highway screaming.”
Sal was waking up; the world was a colorful blur. He was starving, dehydrated, and extremely fatigued. Mostly, he was disappointed to be alive. He closed his eyes, unaware of the three people standing over him, but he felt something hitting his face, like someone patting it. He thought it was Maria for a brief moment before the memory of her headless body jabbed his heart.
He opened his eyes slightly as the patting continued. His gummy lids barely opened. His heart jumped—it was Maria! He knew she was dead, but it was her ghost and that was better than nothing. Maybe he was dead after all, and that was OK too. He tried to speak but only managed a few mumbled words.
“I love…miss you.”
And the apparition spoke. “It’s OK. You will be OK.”
Sal tried to lift his hand to touch the voice, but nothing moved.
“I know…miss you.” He grimaced and started to cry, but his eyes remained dry. “So sorry…”
“You will be OK.” The voice was comforting to Sal, but a reminder of what he lost.
“Not without…you. Never…be OK again. Let me die.”
The patting continued. “No, I can’t let you do that, sorry.”
“No one to…care about…no one…” He couldn’t speak clearly; his mind was so fuzzy.
“Come on, Jordan, the guy wants to die.”
She shot a glance back. “Are you serious? You could walk away from someone like this and let them die?” She worried about her brothers; they seemed so unmotivated and selfish.
“He said he wanted to,” he mumbled defensively.
Jordan turned back to the huge man, not having a clue what to do. “Look at the shape he’s in. We don’t know if he really wants to die or not.”
“So what do we do?”
Jordan looked around. “There.” She pointed. “Let’s drag him over there, where it’s at least a little safer. We can give him some water until he looks better. We can leave him with a little food and water to help him out.”
“Yeah, we can do that.” One brother sighed. Both walked over unenthusiastically.
It took the three of them a great deal of effort to drag the heavy man off the highway and onto a grassy area. Jordan sat by his head and poured a tiny bit of water in his mouth using the cap from a water bottle. After only a few capfuls, she realized that he wasn’t swallowing, as he coughed up the water. He could have drowned on even that small amount, or so she had heard. She had to turn his head so he could breathe.
The boys put a few bottles of water and some cans of soup next to him. Jordan continued to drip small amounts of water in the man’s mouth until he drank a little on his own. She wondered who he was and where he came from and where he was going. Highway 17 snaked for miles through the mountains, and no one lived close to the road for the most part, so maybe he was coming up here for the same reason they had: to get away from the zombies. At least that’s what her brothers were calling them, and it seemed like that’s what they were.
As she worked to get the man to drink, she couldn’t help but replay some of the horrible memories of the past few days. She had gone to work, at an IT firm where she was a vice president, and locked herself away from the madness to keep her mind busy. Then, after the horrible screaming stopped, after everyone apparently died, she started toward her home on foot. She had been walking down her own street when the dead started to rise. She watched in horror as corpses began to stand up all around her. They were nude, dirty, and horribly injured. One corpse a few yards away made it to his feet and stood facing away from her. As he walked away, she saw a few feet of his lower intestines trailing from his anus, like a big red tail.
A few neighbors had been outside moving bodies off their lawns, and they were the first victims she witnessed. The dead took hold of them and started biting even before they were standing. She watched as one man had a chunk of meat chewed from his calf by a corpse on the ground next to him. He started screaming, and other corpses swarmed over him. He quickly fell silent.
Her stomach had turned at the sight, and her heart hammered from the start of the horrible scream. She wanted to run but was frozen in place. She watched as an old lady tried desperately to get back inside her house. She was grabbed from behind by a large naked man who dragged her to the ground. He took a bite out of her shoulder, and she shrieked. The screaming was the worst. It was almost worse to
hear
someone getting eaten than to
watch
them getting eaten.
The old lady was pinned to the ground as another corpse, a teenager with long hair, fell on its stomach in a rush to get to the fresh meat. Jordan felt helpless as she watched. The teenaged corpse bit into her thigh and tore the clothes away, then went back for another bite. The woman shrieked in pain. Jordan put her hands over her ears, but the shrieks were too loud. The old woman shrieked for a long time because the corpses eating her took a while to get to any vital organs. The large black man ate flesh he tore from her back with his teeth. He chewed then swallowed, prolonging her torture. He ripped another chunk and chewed it thoroughly before taking another bite. She flailed and screamed under his weight. And as she screamed, more of the dead piled on and bit and tore at her flesh. They chewed slowly as they held her in place. She was still screaming when Jordan started to run.
She made it to her house and couldn’t believe her idiot bothers were alive and well, sitting on her sofa and eating all her food. The last she had talked to her parents they were safe at the weekend house, so she tried to drive there with her brothers, but they couldn’t get through. Now it had been days of trying to sneak past walking corpses, dragging the two idiots along. They seemed clueless to the threats around them.
The sun was getting low. They had to get going so they could avoid walking in the blackness of the forest. Even on a moonlit night the tall trees and their thick canopies made the forest completely black, and it was hard to walk without tripping and running into things. She pulled a blanket from her backpack and started spreading it over the large unconscious man.
“Really?” Her brother sounded put out.
“Yes! We’re leaving this poor man here on the ground in the middle of nowhere, and at night, so we can walk to a warm and safe house. You know how cold it gets out here at night. Have a heart.” She tucked the big guy in, wishing she could stay to make sure he was safe. She would try to get back here to check on him if possible.
Her brothers were walking away. She was still tucking the big sad man into her blanket.
“I wa…die. Want to die…” Sal was mumbling again.
Jordan patted his face and leaned over him as she tucked the blanket around his body. “I didn’t save you so you could just kill yourself, pal.”
Sal was barely conscious of the goings-on around him. He saw Maria, or ghost Maria. She was moving all around him. Her hair brushed his face and tickled like it always did. That brought him to the surface a little, and he realized that she was saving him. Then she was patting his face and speaking to him, and just before he slipped back into darkness he managed to hear what she said.
§
Sal woke up in the dead of night. The darkness around him was deep and complete, but above him the night sky was framed in a circular silhouette of tree branches. The stars were intense. He shivered in the cold night air, so cold it hurt. He lay still for a moment, remembering his dream. Maria had saved him, even spoke to him. “
I didn’t save you so you could just kill yourself, Sal.
” She said those very words to him; he was sure of it.
He was lying on pine needles. He sat up. A blanket rolled off his body. He remembered falling in the road and passing out from exhaustion. He had been lying face down but woke up on his back. He felt the soft blanket. Where did it come from? Did Maria really visit him? He doubled the blanket over and wrapped his upper body in it. He was much warmer and slept until sunrise.
He woke right before dawn. The world around him was still dark, but the sky was lightening. It was still cold and everything was wet with dew. He was miserable and tried to stand, but he was too stiff and achy, too weak. His feet were killing him. One of his shoes was gone and the other was hanging off his foot, the sole coming off. He pushed the shoe off and lay back on the ground, wrapped in the blanket, and waited for the sun to come up fully.
He was hungry and thirsty, but mostly he was thirsty. He didn’t understand how he’d come to be in the woods, a blanket wrapped around him. And the dream, it felt like it had been real. The sun was finally up enough that the world was warming and soon would be drying too. He could see more and more as light crept into the world. He rolled over so he could get on his hands and knees, then try to stand, when he saw cans of soup and bottles of water. He froze, unsure what to make of it.
“Maria?” He spoke softly, hoping she would respond but knowing she wouldn’t. He was certain she had saved him, and he wondered if he was insane.
He popped the lids off the soup and drained both cans. He drank half a bottle of water. He felt sick at first, not having eaten or drunk anything for so long, but quickly he felt better and better. He started walking again, clutching the bottles, blanket wrapped around his shoulders, with no idea what he was going to do next.
Something tickled his neck, and he pulled at it. It was a long dark hair. He looked at the blanket closely; there were several long dark hairs, Maria’s hairs. He knew she had saved him, no doubt, and he hugged the blanket tighter around his shoulders. He missed her, was still sad and grief-stricken, but she had come to him and saved his life. He needed to survive and find happiness, for her. He was going to honor her memory, her tremendous gift to him. He started walking again on the 17 and into San Jose.
7.
Even with his eyes closed, he could tell his head was spinning. He salivated as his body prepared to vomit, but he suppressed it. When he opened his eyes, it was still dark and his head was still spinning. He instantly knew he was somewhere he didn’t want to be.