Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
Book Three
Run. It is all I have now. I run as quickly as I can, no longer caring whether there are Zombies lurking around the corner. I have confidence now, the kind of confidence that comes from a man who has lost everything. It’s a dangerous, reckless sort of power that gives me little pause. I’m tired of philosophical and ethical dilemmas. I leave that stuff for the dead men with beards that sat around in togas, back when the world was still green. No, the only thing I have left is the distance, the pounding of my feet on the hard earth, and the shadows that wrap their embrace around me, welcoming me and telling me that I’m safe. The world is a dark, cruel place and I have no more love for it. All I have left is the need to run.
Take a chance on life. Take that sweet chance to find hope in the darkness, and watch as the world wraps its blackened, shadowy fingers around that twinkling light and strangles it into annihilation. Take a chance on life and watch it drown before your very eyes. That’s what I say now. Take a chance and watch the world die.
There’s no happy ending to my story. I know that now. There is only death waiting for everyone. God has turned His back on the world and we all know what it’s like to hang on that miserable cross, slowly dying. Some of us—the lucky ones—they died long ago, fading into the sands of history and burning away in the first blast. I envy that lucky bastard who fell after the first gunshot or that old fart who died of a heart attack when he heard about the world dying. This is the grand finale and I’m left here in the audience as the lights go out.
I can still feel the tears burning down my cheeks.
We all die alone. It’s been the cold, unforgiving truth of the world since the dawn of time. The frigid reality of this has settled on me like a wet blanket in the middle of a blizzard. There is a void in this world where every man falls down, his eyes wide, and the truth descends upon him like a pack of wolves. Death is a solo journey. All of this, it’s just one long march to my own death. I wonder what exactly all this running is prolonging. Another death, in another city, at the hands of other killers. I am a corpse, waiting to find my grave.
I have darkness. That’s all I have. That’s all I need. The darkness keeps me alive. The torches give away everything. Their light swells and fades across the facades of the dilapidated, forgotten buildings of Atlanta, and when the darkness is all that’s left in the world, that’s when I move. I run as quickly as I can, ragged and worn, I run with all I can muster. Keeping to the shadows, I drop behind trash cans, dumpsters, abandoned and obliterated cars. Everything in the city is hunting for me. If they find me, if they know to look for me still, then I’m dead. They want me dead for crimes that I didn’t know I had committed, but they don’t care. There are still rules in this world and the powerful have all the advantages now.
Atlanta is a nocturnal heaven for me. There are no Zombies on the streets. The zealots that hunt me, with crosses painted on their faces, locked them all away inside of abandoned houses, corralling them like cattle. I don’t know who they are or what they intend to do with the Zombies, but they’ve done an efficient job. There’s nothing out here to hunt me, nothing to pop out at me, and nothing to try and eat me. I’m left alone in a world of darkness to flee from my hunters unimpeded. I am an animal at this point, scurrying and racing for survival against something that I cannot possibly defeat. I feel more like a rabbit eluding the hounds than a human being. We were supposed to be past this as a species. How did we come back to this? How did I get chosen as one of the survivors?
I stop at the edge of a neighborhood, heading into more commercial areas past the ruins of an emaciated, dead park. There are dozens of the hunting zealots in the park, their torches lifted high as they encircle someone who is standing on a bench shouting to the others. There are dogs with them, barking and wagging their tails eagerly. I can only wonder what it is that they’re feeding the dogs to keep them alive. How can they have so much food? They can’t. I wipe more tears from my eyes and wish I had a rocket launcher or a flamethrower, something that I could use to completely incinerate the bastards. I look over my shoulder to the north and wonder what they’re doing to her. What have they done to her body?
She deserves a grave. She deserves respect and remembrance. All I can picture in my mind are the heaping mounds of charred, dead bodies. I can only picture the dried out husks of the dead, strapped to lamp posts and left there to wither and dry out. There aren’t even any birds left to eat them. They just desiccate. It’s a certain kind of horror that leaves me repulsed and disturbed by who these people are. How could they do this to all those poor souls who had just been looking for passage through their city or just wanted to survive without painting crosses on their faces?
As for this lot, they have their crosses painted on their faces. Clad in white with crosses painted on various surfaces, they all have some sort of weapon in their hands. Some are holding homemade spears, others have beaten metal in the shape of swords or axes. They’re a bunch of barbarians, masquerading as saints in the streets. Whatever their religion is, I don’t want any part of it. I want to get out of here. I want to get out of Atlanta and never see or hear of this terrible place again. I want to head south and hop the border. I want to get to Florida before it’s too late. After all, they do have an army of murderous fanatics. How long until they get tired of Atlanta and decide that they need to expand, find better resources, or burn some more corpses and lock the Zombies up in houses? They’re sick. There’s something not right about their minds. I want to stop them, but there’s nothing I can do.
Slipping from my hiding spot, I take up another behind a bank of trashcans and peek my head over them, spying on the army that’s assembling in the small park. From the size of it, it looks like some little park you’d take your kids to on an autumn day just to get out for a walk. There isn’t even enough room for a baseball field or a basketball court. There’s just a walkway with a fountain in the center of the park and a children’s play area on the far side. There are no trees, no grass, nothing green anymore. It’s all just a barren, vacant space with the pale brown shafts of trunks sticking up out of the ground with their gnarled, dead finger-like branches reaching out, long void of their leaves.
Instinctively, I turn and look over my shoulder. Nothing. How can this be an instinct already? I turn back and look at the mob ahead of me. My eyes focus on the fire-lit faces as they stare at the man in charge. He’s a tall, thin man with his hands spread out and looking over his flock with fiery eyes and a booming voice.
“We must find this man,” he informs his audience with fire in his voice and wrath swirling around them like a thick cloud of smoke, fueling their fanatical rage. “We must bring him to justice! We must show him the reality of his grave and horrid crimes. He has sinned against us, our city, and our God! He will stand before us and he will weep out the confession of his sins before the fire cleanses his soul. His body will fight, but his soul is willing. His soul longs for the redemption we offer him. We will bring his salvation to him with blood and fire. Though he resists with his earthly body, when we meet him in heaven, he will thank us.”
Like hell I will,
I tell myself as I watch the mob nod and mutter to one another about how true and righteous their cause is. Fuck their cause. I’m not going to let them roast me alive for their ridiculous ideals. Hell, I'm not letting anyone burn me alive for anything. I’m going out fighting. They’re not going to get a chance to bring me to some trial. I’m going out screaming and bloody, whether they like that or not.
“Our brothers believe that the sinner has turned south,” the leader begins speaking again like some firebrand preacher from Louisiana. His long beard, streaked with white, hides his mouth as he thunders, but I can only imagine a blackened mouth with rotting teeth poking out of festering gums. “If they are right, then he is headed straight for us. We must spread out, we must find him, and we must take him alive. Spread out, brothers! Find this unbeliever!”
Dropping down behind the trash cans, I listen as they shout and the light on the faces of the buildings around me begins to shift and change, spread and ebb. Their footsteps and the baying of hounds fills the air as I hunker down, waiting for one of them to rush past the trash cans and see me, shouting just before his dog rips out my throat. That’ll be a better end than burning to death. I look down at the machete in my hand and wonder how bad it would be to just to stick the blade between my ribs and to slide down on the wide blade. God, that would hurt. I can’t do that. I shake my head and wait.
No one comes my way, so I decide to chance a peek over the trash can. There’s a few men standing around the leader, discussing the strategy and logistics of burning me alive, no doubt. There’s four men still standing in the park while the others have slipped into the dark canyons of the alleys, vanishing into the city. I don’t know if it’s the smartest thing to do, but I think I can take them. It’s at least worth a try. The leader looks like he’s maybe seventy years old and doesn’t even have a weapon. I think I can take three men. I think I can kill them before they can set out a call for help if I engage all of them. Part of me wants to slip on a robe of theirs, try and blend in, but I doubt it would work.
I lean over and spit. It’s long, ropey, and fully of phlegm. It lands on the small mound of dirt built up along the base of the trashcans. Rubbing my fingers in it, I get the mud all over my fingers and draw a line down the middle of my face. I can feel the stinking, muddy spit as I take the time to draw the line with enough dedication to try and sell it before painting mud across my eyelids from temple to temple. Gripping my machete, I decide that this will have to do the trick. Standing up, I take a deep breath, sucking it in and looking over my shoulder to see if she’s ready.
She’s not there anymore.
I feel a sinking feeling in my heart, a void spreading and consuming my interior. She’s not going to be there anymore. She’s gone. I have to accept that. I have to move on. I take a step forward, my feet silent on the hard concrete as I walk across the walkway and into the actual interior of the park. I can only imagine what this place used to look like before everything died. What did it look like when the color green still sponsored the majority of the world?
One of the four looks over at me, his arms crossed as he’s got some sort of axe strapped across his back. He looks at my face thankfully before turning back to the others, nodding and saying something to join the conversation. He didn’t even bother to give my body a look over. He doesn’t see the blood smeared across my hands and chest, blood from Lindsay, blood from my friend. He doesn’t see that I’m not wearing white. As he’s talking with the others, I figure that I can get two of them before engaging the third. I’ll kill the old bastard last. That’ll do nicely, I decide.
“He can’t be far,” one of them says. “Just keep your eyes open for a tall, bald man.”
“I heard he was red-haired,” the one who looked at me says.
“Either way, Buck says that he wasn’t wearing a shirt,” the man who has his back to me interrupts. “If he’s coming this way, he’ll run into one of our groups, no question about it.”
“He made it past Ryan’s men,” the old leader warns them. “He’s a resourceful sinner.”
Before any of them have a thing to say, I slip my bladed stump into the back of the man standing directly in front of me. Pulling and tearing the insides of the man as I rip the blade in every direction, before swinging the machete at the guy who had looked at me. His mouth opens in a ghastly, abhorrent expression of pure disgust as the man in front of me groans and gasps, his arms twitching and uselessly try to claw at me. The machete sinks into the second man’s face, coming down right on his forehead, digging down deep, through his eye socket and sinuses before it’s jammed in there. I don’t waste any time, I reach for my other machete, pushing the dying man on my stump at my third target. By the time my machete is drawn, he’s on the ground, tangled with his fellow tactician. He’s squirming to escape me, his brown eyes wide with terror as his fallen torch begins to ignite on the dying man’s arm. He’s too far gone to care. His death has already come for him.
I ignore the old man for a moment, savoring this moment of unfiltered terror in his eyes as I kneel down and dig my knees into his chest, leaning with my full weight on his shoulder to keep him pinned as his friend starts to burn more and more of his arm in the growing fire.
“Please,” he gulps weakly, terror robbing him of a voice.
“Fuck you,” I hiss before sinking my bladed stump into his throat. It goes in so easily, vanishing into the flesh of his neck, disappearing into the meat and sinew. The man’s eyes widen even more as he realizes what’s happening. I don’t think the actual pain of it has reached him yet. No, this is just the horror of understanding. Death has come.
The old man is standing with a knife out. A steely look in his eyes warns me that he means to use it if I dare come any closer to him. I don’t care. Truthfully, he’s a dead man. I’m going to kill every last one of these bastards that I can. Holding my machete ready, I take another step toward the man. He had his chance to kill me. He could have stuck that blade in my back while I stuck my bladed stump into the throat of his pal, who is now drowning and choking on his own blood while the corpse of his friend burns on top of him. No, this old man’s a coward. That or he’s really determined to bring me in alive for brownie points.
“Where are you all coming from?” I demand.