“It’s okay,” Sven said. “I’m having trouble concentrating too. Probably getting low on protein, and I could use a nap.”
“How do we get around them?” Lorie asked.
Sven looked at the milling zombies and shrugged. There was no getting through this many of them. There were hundreds of them—many more than in the previous encounter—blocking the whole road with their aimless staggering.
Wait, no, now they were going somewhere. Or were they? It looked liked there was a subtle shift toward—
“They’re starting to come for us!” Lorie said. “Look, they’re turning.”
The girl was right. One by one, the zombies were falling away from their group and starting off toward the car. Others were joining the departing zombies and Sven got the sense that the whole mass of them would be coming for him soon, its zombie particles peeling off one by one, as if they were the many components of one collective monster.
Sven put the car in reverse. “We gotta get around them, and fast.” He began to back up.
He’d slowly backed up about fifty feet when Lorie said, “Over there,” and pointed to an entrance into a small strip mall that had a hibachi restaurant in it.
“Good call,” Sven said, and he shifted the car into drive and drove into the strip mall. “Maybe there’ll be a back way out.”
“I really hope there is,” Jane said from the back of the car, “I really hope so.”
To the left of the hibachi restaurant was a fireworks store. Sven made a mental note of it and drove around the back of the restaurant. Behind the restaurant was a hardware store, and beyond that Sven could see a road—a way out.
There was a field adjacent to the hardware store, and Sven could drive through the field to get onto the road. The only problem was that there was a ten foot tall, steel-reinforced fence blocking access to the field. There was a gate in the fence. Sven drove up to it and stopped. There was a large lock securing the thick chain that held the gate in place.
“I’ll be just a second,” Sven said, and stepped out of the car. It hurt when he straightened up, but that was to be expected after almost being crushed before breakfast.
“Where are you going?” Jane asked.
“I need to find something to open the gate with. If I’m not back in a few minutes…I don’t know, just try to drive through it or something.”
The cloying odor was there, stronger than before, turning Sven’s stomach and throwing his concentration off. The distant grunts and moans of the now approaching zombies seemed to add to his mental and physical unsteadiness.
“If you’re not back in a few minutes?” Jane asked. “What do you expect us to do? Why don’t we just try to drive through the gate now, or back around or something?”
Sven looked back toward Route 29, coughed, and then turned back to Jane.
“There’s too many of them over there, and I don’t want to risk damaging the car by driving into the fence. Then we’d be on foot, and…I gotta go, hold tight.”
“But—”
Sven hobbled quickly into the hardware store, his chest and neck throbbing with pain at each step. There was no time to argue with Jane, the zombies were getting closer by the second.
A quick glance at the gate, the chain, and the lock had sent Sven spiraling into confused desperation. Why was there a reinforced gate, complete with a mean-looking lock and chain, blocking off an empty field…in
Charlottesville
, a town where people sometimes left their unattended cars running while they shopped? Getting the gate open might be a problem.
The lights in the hardware store were on. Sven looked to the left, then to the right, reading the aisle signs throughout the store. His eyes stopped on the sign that read, “Carpentry,” six or seven aisles away, and he limped off in that direction, trying to minimize the movement of his upper body.
The store looked and sounded deserted. The only thing that Sven could hear was the faint whirr of the overhead fans and the buzz of the fluorescent lights. There were half-full shopping carts and baskets strewn throughout the store, as if the customers had left in a hurry. Reminding himself that he didn’t have time to take in the sights, Sven began to limp faster.
He passed “Kitchens,” “Lighting,” “Home Projects,” “Plumbing,” and two unmarked aisles filled with nuts and bolts and power tools. Just as he was turning into the Carpentry aisle, he heard an unnerving plop.
Sven whirled around painfully, and saw the source of the plop right away. A little girl zombie was, as far as Sven could tell, feasting. She had long brown hair, wore a backpack, and resembled the zombie equivalent of a fifth grader on her way to school. Sven wondered what a kid was doing in a hardware store to begin with, and though this wasn’t a good time to reflect on minor details, Sven’s mind scanned through the possibilities anyway.
Maybe she and her mother had stopped here for some gardening supplies on the way to drop the girl off to school. Maybe that was her mother that the child was feasting on. Sven thought on this for the briefest of moments, and although there was no way he could know for sure just by looking, he
felt
sure that the cute little child zombie was devouring her mother.
Whoever the woman was, the zombie girl was eating greedily of her body. As he stared, shocked and unable to look away, Sven thought he understood where the plopping sound had come from. The woman’s heart was out of her chest, sitting on the tiled floor in an expanding puddle of dark blood. The arteries and veins were torn, and the thing looked like a mess—not like the hearts in anatomy books in school.
It was a ruined thing that sat there in its growing blood puddle. Sven felt nauseated, and then that terrible smell hit him again, and he began to forget what he had come in there for. Was he looking for someone? For something? Why was there a heart—
Sven staggered backward and regained some of his mental faculty. He realized that he needed to get something to protect himself from that smell, it was a dangerous thing to get caught in, like a putrid invisible netting.
They must have masks of some sort in here, Sven thought as he pinched his nose. Then as he was turning into the Carpentry aisle again he caught another glimpse of the heart, and again he stopped in his tracks, unable to look away from the disgusting scene unfolding before him.
Sven’s eyes went back and forth from the torn organ on the floor to the girl zombie gnashing her way through the flesh of the slumping woman’s neck. The zombie girl’s mouth and face were covered with gore, and she looked different from the other zombies that Sven had just seen, more like the zombies in the morning had looked. She didn’t look dry or brittle at all, didn’t look like she was made of crumpled paper. She looked strong and powerful in her disease, if that meant anything.
Why had she set the heart on the floor like that? What was so special about—as if in answer, the zombie girl turned to look at Sven. Her face was worse than anything he had ever seen. The black eyes shone like obsidian pearls from some other world—a world where carnage was all there was, and all that there would ever be. Sven felt a chill pass through him as he looked into those eyes. The blood and unidentifiable globs of flesh covering her face were nothing next to the eyes—the black, unpitying eyes.
Thankfully, mercifully, the girl turned down, averting her gaze. She looked down at the heart, picked it up, and squeezed it into her mouth with a violent slurping. Then Sven was retching, backing away as he did it, watching half-digested bits of protein bar and ribeye make their way out of him. He regretted losing that good food, that protein, but he couldn’t help it. The sight of that girl and the remains of what was probably her mother and the heart—it was all too much for him to take.
Sven turned away while trying to get his stomach under control, and ran.
52
Sven ran down the aisle, trying not to think about the girl and her backpack and the heart. He was looking for something, but it wasn’t in this aisle. He turned into the next one, breathing hard, his stomach burning. The acid taste of vomit tinged his mouth, and a dread was spreading through him that he couldn’t control. He began to think about Ivan, Jane, Lorie, and Evan. They were out there, they were depending on him. He got a hold of himself and made himself look harder.
There it was.
Actually, there were several.
He decided to ignore the price tags on the sledgehammers, and go for size. Price was not a factor today. He could have the most expensive one today, he told himself. Who was going to stop him? But that wasn’t the way to pick out sledgehammers anyway. He needed one that was heavy enough to get the job done. He needed one that could break open the lock on the gate.
Sven hefted each of the sledgehammers at a time, bouncing them in his grasp and weighing them by feel. Each bounce of the hammers pulled sharply at his injury, but he ignored it. Time was running out, and he had to get back to the car. He chose the longest, heaviest of the four, hefted it onto his shoulder, and began to walk out of the aisle.
He reached the end of the aisle, turned left toward the store’s entrance, and there she was: the zombie girl with the backpack and black eyes, who moments before had ravenously sucked down her mother’s heart.
The girl’s lips were parted in a sick, half-grin. She reached for Sven with a grasping hand and began to lurch toward him. Sven reacted in one swift motion, without thinking.
He tugged hard with his right hand, which had been holding the sledgehammer in place on his shoulder. The sledgehammer swung out in a diagonal, downward arc, and took the zombie girl’s head off. Though Sven felt no resistance in the shaft of the sledgehammer, it wasn’t a clean blow.
This zombie was not dry, and the splatter of blood, flesh, bone, and brain matter was a scene any zombie movie director would’ve been proud of, or, perhaps more accurately, would’ve gotten sick over. It made Sven sick, and he began to move past the standing, headless girl, toward the door. He thought about wiping the sledgehammer, and about getting another one altogether, but there was no time for that.
As he ran to the door, he shot a glance over his shoulder. He tried to keep himself from looking, but he couldn’t help it. The girl’s body still stood there, motionless and decapitated. How was it still balanced like that? And the part of her head...the part that was still jutting out of her neck, it was so wrong. Sven could feel the image tattooing itself into his brain. It hadn’t been a clean blow at all.
Sven burst through the door and was outside. He was clutching the sledgehammer and half-dragging it as he went, not wanting to come in contact with its now-tainted head. A wave of the sick, cloying odor hit him and his vision seemed to turn a shade of grey. He realized then that he had forgotten about the masks.
He trudged on toward the car, hoping everyone in it—everyone he was now responsible for—was still alright. The car looked as it had minutes before. The doors were all closed.
I could not have been inside for more than a few minutes, Sven told himself, but he wasn’t sure. Time seemed to fade and stop each time he encountered that awful smell, and when he stared into the girl’s black eyes, he felt as if he’d been snatched out of time altogether. But it could not have been a long time, because Sven saw that the zombies were just now starting to overtake the outside of the hibachi restaurant.
There was still time.
Sven positioned himself in front of the car. Looking into it he saw an expression of relief sweep over Lorie in the passenger seat. Ivan hopped up on top of the dashboard and wagged his tail. Jane nodded at Sven from the back of the car. Sven didn’t see Evan, but the kid was probably still asleep or passed out. They were all alright.
Relieved, Sven turned to the gate. It was held shut by a thick, gleaming chain, two of whose links were secured by an overly large silver lock.
He put his right leg in back of him for purchase and swung the sledgehammer up with both of his hands so that it was over his head and to the right, being mindful not to drip any of the girl’s head matter onto himself.