Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse (Issue #2 | September 2015) (5 page)

It wasn’t until Sam flipped the switch on the torch that she saw the girls, all three of them. They were well dressed, decked out in patterned frocks – kind of like they were getting ready to go to church – and the children, the two daughters wore two ribbons apiece in braided hair. The older woman was dressed in pale blue, but she didn’t look like her photograph.

Sam jumped from one to the other, around a large oak dining table, chattering excitedly, and shining the torch in the face of each crooked figure. As he did so, they started to stir and their eyes rolled back. Their movements were sluggish and clumsy, but Kate knew what they were doing. She could see their mouths opening and closing. She let her eyes move over the rough stretch of rope lashing limb to chair in four places.

‘They’ve been sleeping,’ Sam smiled. ‘You might have to give them a minute or two.’

He picked up a handful of broken crayons from the table and turned to his youngest daughter. She let out a guttural moan and strained against her bonds, gnashing her teeth and trying desperately to reach him.

‘What have I told you about this? If you can’t play nice, Daddy won’t bring you nice things anymore Megan.’

Kate stood for what felt like an age watching this man as he bustled around the table, chiding the children for their snarling and joking with his wife about dinner. She saw their mottled skin, hanging in sagging strips from their emaciated bodies and wondered how long they had been this way – weeks, months, did it even matter?

She was gone to Sam now. He was completely engaged with the trappings of his former life. He didn’t see the way their bones peeked through scraps of skin, the way their hair hung lank and lifeless from yellowing crowns. He was laughing and smiling, petting this girl and stroking the other, these cold dead girls.

He didn’t notice Kate pick up the rifle from where he’d hastily thrown it on a sideboard. He didn’t see her flip the safety catch, raise the barrel, or stare him down with it as he had done when they first met. She was comforted by the knowledge that the kill was so quick and clean that he was surely dead before he hit the ground.

Slowly and quietly, one by one, she put the girls to rest, slung the rifle over her shoulder, and headed back out into the world.

“Slow Motion: Day One”

Story #6

By

Priscilla King

The door creaked. Some people always sneaked in late. Bob kept watching his wife up front, so Ray didn't turn around either.

Then he drew a breath and almost gagged. That
smell
! It wasn't
only
carrion, though it certainly
included
carrion. It was that intricate mix of rotting fruit, raw sewage, and black mold that bodies got after
they'd succumbed to the virus.

A woman gasped. A man howled. Ray turned.

Strategically shaded lamps cast only reflected light on the audience but Ray could see the outlines of the couple at the edge of the back row. The man had turned to lean back over the back of the bench, and he was beating the high school kid who'd sneaked in late. He was beating the kid because the kid was choking his flabby, diabetic wife, who always sat next to the aisle. And the kid wasn't letting her go.

"Oh my Go..." a woman screamed, the sound seeming to come from behind a pillar between Ray and her.

As the bright overhead lights came on, Bob pushed past Ray without even saying "excuse me." Bob whose manners were always perfect, Bob who proudly claimed that he'd never spanked his children, rushed to the back row and locked his hands around the kid's skinny neck until the boy crumpled to the floor. The kid's face had already spattered blood onto the bench and the sixty-something couple. The diabetic woman slumped deathly still on the bench.

"Sugar?" Ray heard himself shouting at the diabetic woman's husband. The stench of the virus-tainted body, wherever that was, would have been enough to explain the mass confusion around them, all by itself.

"I don't think it's her
sugar
, man," the husband said. "That little shi' came out of nowhere and
bit
her..."

"I'm a doctor," Ray explained. "Does she carry something with sugar in her purse?" Then, seeing no response from the husband, he pulled the purse from under the woman's death-heavy hand. In the usual jumble he found the half-used, re-wrapped roll of Life Savers. He peeled off the uppermost Life Saver, dropping the rest into the purse, and pulled down the woman's cold, flaccid jaw to shove the candy in.

Bob probably didn't carry a diabetic first-aid kit around, either, Ray thought, fingering for a pulse in the woman's temples. Senior surgeons didn't handle that kind of thing. Cathy might have one. Cathy, the resolute atheist nurse in their car pool, did her grocery shopping four blocks away while Ray and Bob attended Bob's wife's church's open choir practice. If she had a kit it would be in the car. Bob would check for it. Bob was no longer in the aisle, so he must have dragged the teen-troll out of the room, after which he would remember the diabetic patient inside. Ray could afford to listen to the patient's husband, whose voice had been running on, all these seconds, just as if anyone were listening...

"...bit a chunk out of her
head
," the man was saying.

Exaggerating, of course, Ray thought. He maintained his professional calm. The woman's hair did look tatty...her smooth black wig was lying on the floor behind the bench. Surely her husband knew she wore a wig? Her hair was short, uneven, brittle, gray with a brownish tinge...and a bleeding human bite wound at the back of the scalp, yes. Ray raised the woman's head and saw the blood soaking down behind her, over the varnished wood and through her rayon dress.

"Could you get some cold water," he said, not looking at her husband, "and some hand sanitizer, if you don't mind." The voice stopped yammering. Ray wiped his finger on the woman's sleeve--he hadn't felt a pulse--took out his cell phone, and pressed 9-1-1.

The room was almost empty by now. Only the piano player, who still looked like Halle Berry although she'd retired from teaching six years ago, was strutting serenely down the aisle. It occurred to Ray that her elegant posture and majestic pace might be both defense and camouflage against rheumatism.

He summoned the dispatcher, then swabbed the woman's wound, which continued to bleed. There was something peculiar about the way she was bleeding but Ray couldn't put his finger on it. The man kept nattering: "Baby, come back, wake up...Baby--
ow
!" the man yelped. The woman's cold, flabby body jerked back up under Ray's hand. "Whassamatter, Baby? What'd I do?"

The woman jerked forward again, the man not catching her, as Ray realized what was strange about the way she was bleeding. She had no pulse. The blood was not welling back up into the wound in drops. It was running out of her head in a fast, steady, even stream, like a faucet with low pressure. Unnatural. She lurched forward, head between knees, and emptied her stomach. That, Ray thought, was natural. Under the circumstances.

The pianist strolled back into the room with more water and napkins. "Rochelle," she said softly, handing the supplies to Ray, "Rochelle, my friend."

"Thank you, M'am." Ray pressed an absorbent pad against the woman's wound. Bob or Cathy or the emergency team would come in, any minute now. "You didn't see Dr. Peake outside anywhere?" he said, not that he knew whether the women's restroom had a view of the parking lot, but just to make a sound that was more tolerable than the man's emotion and the woman's vomiting.

The pianist slowly moved her head from side to side. "I saw the lights from an ambulance. I expect he's still outside."

The sick woman lurched up again. Oh
splendid
, Ray groaned silently, diabetic diarrhea on top of vomit was going to make the practice room almost as pleasant as it had been with that carrion odor blowing in.

And the door creaked again, and the odor blew in again. Bob must have taken the juvenile delinquent to the hospital, Ray reasoned, counting figures. "Helen?" Glad to recognize the EMT who'd been two years ahead of him in high school, he called out the hospital codes for diabetic shock, possible drug reaction or overdose, if the woman had popped a few extra pills.

Helen did not respond. She kept walking toward them, as if in slow motion. Sometimes Ray perceived things as if they were happening in slow motion, under stress. He should check his own blood pressure, he thought.

The sick woman lurched up off the bench, shaking off the blood-soaked napkin and Ray's hand. The napkin landed in a puddle of diarrhea, releasing a fresh cloud of fumes that blocked even the stench of the virus-infested carrion. The diabetic woman, always short and stooped, Ray recalled, clutched her husband's waist, yanked his shirt open, and shoved her head into the lean flesh above his beltline like a cat eating a mouse.

With a howl the man slapped his wife's head away. He, too, now showed a bleeding bite wound. "Baby,
what
is the
mat-ter
with you?"

Ray turned to Helen, repeating the codes. Helen ignored him. Her eyes looked glassy, rolled upward. An overdose, Ray thought, but what kind? Plenty of hospital staff used pills to get them through the day. He'd done it himself, as an intern, before a reaction had convinced him to quit. But the pills people used normally dilated the pupils in the eyes; Helen's pale eyes showed every reaction in the pupils, and now her pupils had shrunk. Not to pin
points
, that tired cliche, but to pin
heads
.

"Hal-le Ber-ry," she slurred. "Yummy. I've always wan-ned to
eat you right up
, Hal-le Ber-ry."

The pianist called upon her God as Helen lunged along the back of the bench, and then, for all Ray ever knew, her God called her soul home. He never actually looked at what happened to her body, because Cathy's funny little face was suddenly blocking his view.

"Virus," she hissed. "More of'm outside. Y'can't help'm, mate. Y'gotta kill'em. See?" She shoved Ray aside, and he sidestepped willingly, having no intention of fighting with Cathy, and she raised the little walking stick she carried around the city at night. The little walking stick was papier-mache, not very well painted, and crumbling at its tip. Ray had noticed its weight once and knew it concealed a lead pipe.

Acting out her Guardian Angel fantasies, no doubt, Cathy smashed the patient's head into her husband's bleeding body. He fell back across the bench in front of him.

"Get the fire extinguisher!" Cathy leaned over the bench for another skull-crashing blow. This idea seemed good to Ray, although he wasn't sure where the fire extinguisher was. Probably in the corridor?

In the corridor the stench was worse than ever. Its center seemed to be an old man--homeless? Ray wondered--wrestling furiously on the floor with a young male EMT. Which of them was even the aggressor? Were all of them insane? He recognized one of the local fire fighters as the young man pinning one of the EMT volunteer helpers to the floor.

"Never mind the fire extinguisher!" Cathy grabbed his hand. "It's the virus, Ray! Get out!
Get
...!" Incredibly, she spanked him, twice, as he hurried toward the door. "Don't you know anything about zombies?"

"I don't read a lot of fiction," Ray retorted. "Where's Bob?" He opened the door.

The street lamps were bright enough for him to see clearly that blood and body parts were what littered the steps and parking lot. Bodies with the heads exploded, arms and legs hacked off and pushed away from the bodies. Some of the bodies must have been back in the building with him, half an hour ago, but it was hard to be sure. It was recognizing the scattered parts of the dismembered teenager that made Ray vomit. Bits of skinny teenaged boy were mixed with bits of plump blonde, strewn across the wet pavement. A big football-type man was bashing another big man with an axe.

"Ray, for Heaven's sake, get in the car!" That was Bob's voice. At least Bob was the one with the axe. Ray picked his way to the car.

Bob's wife was sobbing hysterically in the front seat, but when Ray climbed into the back she switched to gabbling. "It spreads through blood, like AIDS," she sobbed, "and there's blood on me, and I know there's blood on you, too, and Bob won't come out of it without you, and I
had to
kill that horrible female, Bob never would have been able to, and I'm not licensed to carry a concealed weapon but I have, for years, because of urban crime, and, Ray, I blew the heads off a few of them, just like in the movies, close shots from behind, only this is real life and I got that blood and that smell on my hands..."

Ray let her words soak into his mind while he watched Bob methodically chop up the other big man with, he now recognized, the fire axe from the trunk of the car. Cathy was out there now, too, her short hair slicked with blood, her chic slacks and jacket spattered with gore, as she pulped an old man's head with her now undisguised lead pipe.

"Is that all of them?" Bob called out. "Come on, zombies! Brains! Get some fresh doctor brains!"

"I think that's all of them," Cathy said, after a few agonizing slow-motion seconds. "Kill me next, mate."

"Are you sure?" Bob asked. The lead pipe clanked and rolled a few yards along the bloody pavement.

"Look." Cathy raised the hem of her chic jacket. Some of the blood on her clothes was still liquid, flowing and glistening in the light, down from her breast. "I
liked
killing them. I'll be exactly like them in the morning."

In all the nearly seven years they'd worked and car-pooled together, Ray thought, he had never thought Cathy was pretty. A good nurse, yes. Tough, perky, with that trace of an accent that distracted the patients from the pain of an injection. Only in this last minute of her life, as she leaned against the stair railing and waited for the axe, did her face look pretty.

Ray felt a few tears slip through his fingers before he heard the trunk creak open. Two metal pieces clanked into the trunk. The trunk slammed shut. The driver's door opened. Bob's wife burst out afresh. "You've got their blood all over you." And so on.

"That's the chance we'll have to take," Bob said shortly, and mercifully his wife shut up. The car swung away from the brightly lighted church.

When they stopped at Ray's house Bob broke the silence. "I'm glad you kept out of it, man. If I'm wrong about how the virus spreads..."

"I figured that out by now, thanks," Ray said, talking back to Bob for the first time in his life.