The zombies on the other side of the gate were all chewed up. There were nine of them there, not eight as Sven had previously estimated, and they were a sight almost as horrific as the mostly headless standing girl in the store had been. The nine zombies looked like they had been fighting with each other, and biting each other, and ripping off gobbets of each other’s flesh, and some were missing parts of limbs, and eyes, and one had a nose that wasn’t quite all there anymore, and—
Get a hold of yourself Sven, he told himself, and took a deep breath. He deftly stuck his fingers through a gap in the gate, grabbed hold of the vertical bar, and raised it from its stop in the gravel. He tightened his grip on the hammer, gritted his teeth, flung the gate open, and lost all control.
He was off the mark with his first swing, but that didn’t matter. The five inches of shaft behind the head of the sledgehammer made contact with the first zombie’s ear, the head of the sledgehammer hooking behind the zombie’s head. There was so much force behind the swing that the side of the zombie’s head flattened, and the ear came away like a clipped fingernail, flying up into the air.
The sledgehammer kept going, and smashed into the face of another zombie, pushing its nose into and through its cheek. Sven twisted with the swing, and the momentum was so great that he fell on his side and lost his grip on the hammer, losing it in the gravel.
He was on the ground now, and the zombie with the smashed face was next to him, staring at him with one leaking, exploded eye, as the numbness began to creep into Sven’s body, began to seep into his mind.
Then three zombies were on top of him—over him, clutching at his track pants, and, it seemed, trying to pull the pants off him. A primitive part of Sven awoke from its slumber, and he growled with so much ferocity behind it that the three zombies stopped their pulling for a second.
And a second was all that Sven needed.
He rocked up to a sit-up position and grabbed the hair of the two zombies who were on the outside of the group standing over him. He cringed as soon as his hands closed in on the wiry, matted hair, much of which fell away at his touch. But he had enough purchase, and he twisted, breaking one of the zombie’s necks, but not getting enough rotational force to break the other one.
The broken neck was an unexpected bonus, and not the maneuver Sven was trying to perform. He continued with his original plan, sweeping his arms across his body and toward each other in a brutal pectoral fly that brought the two zombie heads into a crunching, moaning collision with the head of their zombie compatriot in the middle. The three skulls dented, collapsing and spewing coagulated blood and other unidentifiable, too-dry goop.
Sven let go and let the three broken, crushed heads fall away from him. The three pant-pulling zombies, though dead, were still clutching doggedly at Sven’s track pants.
As his vision grew hazy, Sven crawled backward, holding on to the awareness that there were still more zombies around him. He kept crawling backward, but those damned zombies kept their firm grip on his pants. Reluctantly, and cursing the zombies under his breath, he wriggled out of his track pants, losing both of his cross-trainers in the process. He wanted to rip the zombies limb from dry, rotten, disgusting, putrid limb. And he would have, if he wasn’t dying to take a breath. But he knew he couldn’t breathe there, not yet.
He stood up and got his bearings. The gravel hurt, cutting into Sven’s socked feet, and he felt uncomfortably exposed in his boxer shorts among the zombies.
This would never happen in a zombie movie, Sven thought. Nothing is ever how it’s supposed to be in the movies.
There were only four moving zombies left, and they were blocking Sven’s path around the side of the hibachi restaurant, over to the drugstore.
Only four, Sven thought, and he would’ve spat had he not been holding his breath—the head-crushing maneuver had let out too much of his air already. He danced around the dwindling group of undead and picked up the sledgehammer.
Sven was consumed with anger, and he let it take control of him. There would be no more merciful headshots.
He didn’t see their faces, didn’t see their clothes, didn’t see the people they once were. He just swung.
The head of the sledgehammer found home in the first zombie’s rib cage, tearing through clothing and skin, and launching shattered, splintered bones into the air. Sven pulled on the shaft of the hammer, and as its head pulled out of the rib cage, the zombie’s sternum came with it, strands of dry flesh and sinew offering little resistance.
The zombie began to topple, and without waiting for it to fall all the way to the ground, Sven took a full backswing and connected the head of the hammer with the side of the next zombie’s kneecap. The zombie’s whole leg bent sideways at the knee, and in spite of the wild anger that had overcome Sven, he cringed. He could almost feel the unnatural bend of the leg, and the sight recalled the sound of nails scratching across a chalkboard, as unconnected as that was.
The zombie’s destroyed leg buckled in a series of sharp cracks, and Sven saw a jagged piece of bone rip through the top of the zombie’s thigh. The zombie fell over onto its side, then settled on its back, hands reaching up, trying to grasp Sven’s bare legs.
There were two left standing, and Sven’s lungs were burning now, crying out for air. He sniffed at the air cautiously, and then snorted all of it out, feeling the dizziness rush into him. The taint was there, as strong as ever. He would have to move faster.
Rushing forward, he swung the hammer diagonally and downward. The head of the sledgehammer smashed a zombie’s shoulder, and initiated a series of cracking that ended in the zombie collapsing onto its knees and then falling onto its face. It didn’t even twitch.
He struck the remaining zombie in its stomach with the shaft of the hammer, and ran around the creature while it was stumbling backward, off balance. Then Sven brought his hammer down again, on the back of the zombie’s neck. There was a snapping, tearing sound that was growing familiar, and the zombie fell forward.
Sven relaxed his grip and let his burning muscles loosen, but he didn’t let go of the hammer. He was still holding his breath and beginning to suffocate, but he took a brief look at the fallen zombies still clawing for him and the zombie parts strewn around him, dumbstruck at what he had done.
Then he ran back to the gate and shut it, being careful to lower the vertical bar into its proper place, and put on his shoes. As he did so, he saw he was bleeding through his socks, and hoped that one of the zombies that he had just destroyed was the idiot that decided to forego pavement in this part of the strip mall. It was unlikely, none of them were dressed like they had that kind of power. He considered the track pants for a moment, but there wasn’t time to pry off three pairs of dead zombie hands, so he left them.
Sven looked through the fence at Jane and Lorie and the unconscious boy. Their faces were hard to make out at that distance, and Sven wasn’t sure he wanted to see their expressions. He was sure they had been watching him, except for Evan of course, who even at that distance Sven could tell was out of the game.
He felt ashamed, and it wasn’t because he had lost his pants. Sven turned away and ran around the hibachi restaurant to the drugstore, dodging four zombies that tried to grab him with their gnarled hands. He shouldered the drugstore’s door open, burst in, and fell on his hands and knees, gasping for breath.
In the background, the door bing-bonged a welcome.
58
Jane watched Sven dispatch the zombies on the other side of the fence. She had feared for him, but once he passed through the gate, the fear left her. He had become someone else, something else.
It was not the Sven that she knew who fought on the other side of that fence. It was not the Sven she had once dated. It was a monstrous killing machine, a survival machine, a machine that was going to see that she and the two hapless kids they had met would make it through whatever sickness had befallen their city.
While she watched Sven reduce the zombies to pieces, she had a passing thought that she should cover Lorie’s eyes, or make her turn away, or something equally parental like that. She was holding Evan, who was a dead, unconscious weight in her arms, so he was in no danger of seeing the violence. She could tell Lorie to turn away, not to watch, but she didn’t. What was the use? In the world that had dawned this morning, this was the kind of thing that needed to be seen—by everyone, young kids included. There was no shielding Lorie from reality, and there was no shielding herself. The truth had to be faced. Jane had to face it, and Lorie had to face it too.
Once Sven had felled the zombies, Jane turned to Lorie, who was looking toward the gate. Jane heard a clanking sound and turned back to Sven, who was closing the gate behind him. That was good of him to remember. She had no idea Sven could be this resourceful, and so stupidly brave. Then Jane turned back to Lorie and saw what was in the girl’s eyes.
There was no fear in Lorie’s eyes, only concern—concern that must have been for Sven, and for Evan. Jane considered that she herself might be the only one in the group that was terrified. The girl was far braver than she, and the boy probably would have been too if he wasn’t—the boy…
Jane looked down at the unconscious boy in her arms. Was he turning into one of them? Into a zombie? Should she say something? How could they be sure until it was too late? She looked at Evan’s pale, drooping eyelids, and was ashamed that the first thought that came to her—her instinct—was to leave him behind.
But she resisted.
“Get in the car,” Jane said. Lorie obeyed, without a word. Jane placed Evan into the backseat, and was startled by Ivan’s hiss. That made her feel worse about everything. Ivan was right, her instinct was right, the boy was wrong, too much like Vicky had been, but how could she just leave him there? How could she just leave him there to die?
Jane held Evan’s head up as she put a seatbelt around him, then let his head nod down to his chest. It was a terrible mistake, and she knew it.
Then Jane closed the rear door, got into the driver’s seat, and backed the car up to the gate without getting too close. She put the car in drive, resolving to keep her foot on the brake while she waited for Sven to return.
Lorie put a hand on Jane’s. “He’s going to come back. I know he will.”
Jane nodded, but she wasn’t sure. And they were running low on fuel.
59
The air was amazing. Fresh, clean, and free of that sickening foulness.
But, Sven thought, what if it hadn’t been, what if it had been contaminated? He would not have been able to hold his breath any longer and he would’ve been...he would’ve been...what exactly?
There would be time to wonder about that later, Sven told himself, and scrambled to his feet. He began to jog down the first aisle. Too quickly, he was in half-darkness, and had to backtrack to the entrance to feel around for a light switch.
He felt around on the wall with his free hand, and when he couldn’t find anything, he gave up. There wasn’t time to search for the light switch. Sven reentered the first aisle, and started on a slow jog back into the dimness, scraping the head of the sledgehammer along the floor as he went, and hoping that the medicine he needed would be in a relatively lit part of the store.
Sven felt a hitch, a tug at his arm, and then he was sprawled face-down on the floor, his bare legs cold against the tiles. The sledgehammer had caught on a shelf-divider at the bottom of the aisle, Sven had been holding on tight, and had been pulled down with the hammer.
Exactly the kind of thing that doesn’t happen in zombie movies, Sven thought, exactly.
Reluctantly, he let go of the sledgehammer’s shaft and slowly, painfully pushed his chest off the floor, settling on his knees. He unhooked the head of the sledgehammer from the aisle, put the head of it on the floor, and used it to pull himself back up to his feet. Behind him, on the other side of the glass door, the four zombies that he had dodged were now congregated, and others were coming up to join them. That was bad.