The Rising: Selected Scenes From the End of the World (7 page)

The other took a drag off his cigarette and pointed at Terry’s rifle, lying in the dirt. “You know how to use that thing? If so, we could use you.”

Terry stooped and picked it up. He worked the lever.

“Use it? Yeah, I know how to use it.”

He pulled the trigger. The first soldier’s crotch turned red. Screaming, the man slumped to the ground, cigarette still dangling from his mouth.

“Thank you, you son of a bitch! Thanks for rescuing us…”

Terry thanked several more of them before they finally gunned him down. His body fell next to Woody’s. The troops made sure neither of them would get back up again.

The armored column rolled on. When it had departed from sight, the zombie birds returned to feast on what remained of their bodies.

The Rising

Day Twelve

Land O’ Lakes, Florida

By noon, the rain had ended and the mercury skyrocketed again. The streets and sidewalks steamed in the heat. Outside the store, right along the main highway, a family of four cooked inside of their stalled vehicle. That slow, agonizing death was preferable to getting out of the car. The street was eerily quiet. Even the zombies seemed to have moved on, other than the dead birds which perched on the car, daring the family to open their doors or roll down a window.

The family died in the shadow of Camelot Books. The building had once been an old GTE switching station, but Tony and Kim turned it into a bookstore. The walls were sixteen inches thick, and built to withstand hurricane force winds. A glass atrium, now blocked off with plywood and empty bookshelves, stood at the front of the store. Next door was an old United Methodist church.

The family’s reanimated corpses got out of the car and surveyed the street. Eventually, they moved on in search of prey.

Camelot Books’ thick walls prevented the zombies from hearing the screams coming from inside the store.

Before they opened the store, Tony had once owned a gun shop. He knew how to defend himself. But defense was an impossible thing when you were handcuffed to a desk leg. Kim was cuffed to the other side. The minister from next door was duct taped to a chair. Other people, mostly store customers and parishioners from next door, were bound upright to bookshelves.

They watched in horror and revulsion as the skinny man sliced the girl’s throat.

The skinny man was sweating profusely, from both the stifling heat and his own excitement. His long, stringy hair clung to his shirtless back. He pushed his thick, wire-rimmed glasses up on his bony nose and licked his lips in anticipation. After a minute, the girl died, her life-blood covering her clothing and the floor beneath her in a wet spray. A few minutes after that, she began to move again.

And then the skinny man selected a pair of wire cutters from his vast array of tools, and proceeded to snip her fingers off, one by one.

The zombie cursed him in an ancient language. Tony cursed him in a more modern tongue.

“Why are you doing this?” he shouted. “You’re as bad as they are!”

The skinny man giggled. “I have been given the power of life over death.”

“What?”

“I can bring people back from the dead.”

Kim coughed. “You’re insane.”

“Am I?” The skinny man selected a filet knife, gave Tony and Kim a wink, and then moved on to his next victim, a middle-aged Hispanic man.

“No,” the man pleaded. A wet spot appeared on the crotch of his pants. “Please. Please don’t do this. I’ve got a wife—kids. They’re still out there somewhere.”

The skinny man leaned close to him and whispered in his ear. “They are dead, just like everybody else outside. But you don’t have to worry. I can give you something they will never have. I can bring you back.”

The man closed his eyes. “Please, don’t. Please… please… please…”

Sighing, the skinny man plunged the knife into his quivering victim. He twisted it savagely, and then sliced upward. The Hispanic man’s bowels spilled out onto the carpet.

Kim screamed.

“You should be grateful,” the skinny man told her. “You don’t know how lucky you are. All of you are. You get to be witnesses to the summoning.”

Gritting his teeth, Tony strained against his bonds. The handcuffs cut into his skin, drawing blood. “You sick son of a—”

“Ssshh.” The skinny man brought the bloody knife to his lips and kissed it. “Be quiet. Be still. Don’t blaspheme. Just watch.”

The preacher, who’d fallen unconscious before the girl was slain, finally stirred. He looked around in bewilderment, apparently forgetting their circumstances. “What’s happening?”

“I am giving you what your Savior couldn’t,” the skinny man said. “I am offering life after death. I am summoning these souls back from the other side.”

Kim rattled her handcuffs. “But—”

“Watch.”

The Hispanic man stirred. Something looked out through his dead eyes.

“Release me,”
the zombie demanded. The skinny man shook his head. “No.”

Then he poked the zombie’s eyes out with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

The corpse screamed in indignation.
“You will
pay for this, human! I will feast on your own eyes when I
am freed.”

“You’ll do no such thing.” The skinny man grasped its tongue with the pliers, and with his other hand, he sliced the organ off and held it up for the others to see. “If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out. If thy tongue offends thee, cut it out.”

The preacher muttered the Lord’s Prayer under his breath.

“I killed him,” the skinny man explained in a patient voice, as if he were speaking to a kindergarten classroom. “I took his life. And yet, he came back. I summoned him.”

“He’s a fucking zombie,” Tony shouted. “You didn’t have anything to do with it! Everybody is coming back from the dead now. That’s why they call them zombies.”

The skinny man laid down his bloody tools and frowned sadly. “I have shown you proof. I have shown you miracles. And still you don’t believe. Very well. You can be next.”

Tony’s eyes bugged out of his head.

“Listen,” Kim gasped. “Just wait a minute and listen. You don’t have to do this. We believe you now. Tony, tell him you believe!”

Tony’s mouth had suddenly gone dry. He tried to work up enough saliva to speak.

“Tony,” Kim shrieked, “for God’s sake, tell him!”

“I—I believe.”

“Good.” The skinny man smiled. “Let he that believeth in me have eternal life.”

He picked up a propane torch, lit it, and adjusted the hissing flame.

“Oh no.” Kim began to sob. “Please, oh God, please stop! Please!”

Tony shrank away from the blue flame. He yanked on the handcuffs, tried to pull the desk leg free.The skinny man walked towards him. Outside Camelot Books, the heat continued to rise.Inside Camelot Books, the dead continued to rise as well.

* * *

The Rising

Day Thirteen

Towson, Maryland

People said it was the end of the world, but what did they know? In Troll’s experience, most people were inherently stupid. Before the dead started returning, people went through their lives motivated only by their selves. They fed their addictions and rooted for their favorite sports team and political party with equal blind fervor. They paid no attention to world affairs unless it was fashionable to do so, content instead to focus on celebrity gossip and entertainment news. They took no interest in the world around them until that same world encroached upon their own well-being—like it was now.

Yes, it was true that in the last thirteen days over ten thousand years of human civilization had been rendered a moot point, but that didn’t mean it was the end of the world. Not at all. It was just a denouement.

For Troll, the world had ended many years before. It died with his daughter.

Unlike the new dead, his daughter hadn’t come back.

Pausing in his thoughts, he picked crumbs from his thick, scraggly beard and tried not to cry. He sat in an abandoned bomb shelter left dormant after the end of the Cold War. It had been his home for a long time.

Troll remembered his other home. His other name. Remembered his previous life. He’d worked for fifteen years as a drug counselor at a clinic in Baltimore. He was highly respected in his field and had the accolades and certificates to prove it. But all of that changed when his daughter died. He remembered that night very clearly—it was burned into his consciousness. One night she’d gone to a party. While she was there, she somehow ended up snorting heroin mixed with a household chemical of some kind. She passed in the back of the ambulance, en route to the hospital.

She was fourteen.

He’d never known she had a drug problem. He never asked. Never saw the signs, even though he was trained to do so. Maybe it was the first time she’d ever tried drugs. Even so, he still didn’t know why she’d done it. Maybe it was peer pressure, or maybe the divorce or trouble with a boyfriend. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. She died and she didn’t come back—and he died with her. No one called him by his real name anymore. Most people didn’t even notice him. But when they did, they called him what he was—a Troll. Just another homeless person populating Baltimore’s background setting. After his daughter’s death, he’d gone underground, literally. His ex-wife blamed him. He agreed with her. He’d helped so many people, but failed to help his own daughter. So he left after the funeral. Sold his home and all of his belongings and went away. He lived beneath the city streets, inhabiting a network of sewers, maintenance and train tunnels, electrical cable pipes, and other subterranean passageways. He wasn’t alone. When he’d first come here, Troll had been surprised by the number of people living beneath the streets. Like him, not all of them were the dregs of society. There were stockbrokers, lawyers, and even a doctor. Each had their own story, but for whatever reason, they’d flunked out—failed at life and decided to reinvent themselves below or to hide from their mistakes, who they’d been before.

Troll made a new home for himself, a new life. And when the world fell apart above, he figured the apocalypse was just catching up to everyone else. Pausing again in his ruminations, Troll sniffed the air, making sure there were no zombies around. Their stench usually gave them away, even through the thick walls of the shelter. The coast smelled clear. The only corpse was Sylva’s, still lying in the corner because Troll was too exhausted to haul him out. The attacks were increasing in frequency, even down here beneath the city. So far, the undead contingent had been mostly four-legged. A few dead humans had shown up in the tunnels—homeless people who were killed topside and then returned for their friends below. They were easy enough to fight. The zombie rats presented a bigger problem. They were smaller, sneakier, and their numbers multiplied faster. He’d seen them swarm over people, stripping them to the bone within seconds. Whenever he left the shelter, he carried a metal spray can full of gasoline and a lit torch. This makeshift flamethrower had kept the rats at bay so far.It might have worked on Sylva too, if he’d had the nerve to try.

Mark Sylva was one of Troll’s closest friends—or perhaps, the closest thing he had to a friend. Originally from Boston, the younger man had drifted south, going from city to city, staying in various soup kitchens and shelters. He was schizophrenic; never had enough money for medicine or a family to take care of him. Eventually, he’d ended up in Baltimore’s underground. Troll had sort of adopted him.

This morning, feverish, dehydrated, and suffering from dysentery and a nasty bite on his thigh—a wound inflicted by a zombie rat—Sylva had begged Troll to kill him.

Troll shook his head. “I can’t.”

“Please,” Sylva moaned. Bloody sputum had dried on his chin. “I’m dying anyway, man. I don’t want to go out like this.”

“You’re not dying,” Troll lied. “We just need to get some more liquids in you, and I need to find some antiseptic for that—”

“Fuck the antiseptic!” Sylva coughed. His entire body shook. Yellow-white pus oozed from his swollen thigh. “Grab a pipe and bash my head in, Troll.”

“No. I can’t.”

“You have to. It hurts.”

“I can’t do it. Please don’t ask me to.”

“You used to help people,” Sylva said. “You told me that. You used to help people who were in pain. That was what you lived for.”

“But this is different.”

“No, it’s not. You can help everyone else, but you can’t help me?”

“That’s not fair!”

“Why?”

“Because I did help everyone else and none of it mattered. Look what happened in the end. I wasn’t much help to my daughter now was I?”

“So start again,” Sylva wheezed. “You want to forgive yourself for that? You want to live again? Well then help me out, man. Kill me.”

Rather than responding, Troll got to his feet and grabbed a candle. He tipped the wick into the flame burning atop a second candle next to Sylva’s makeshift cot. The younger man’s flesh looked waxy in the flickering light.

“I’m going to look for something to clean that wound up with. Some medicine, too—something for your diarrhea. You rest. Try to drink some water while I’m gone. You need to stay hydrated.”

“Troll…”

“Rest. I’ll be back soon.”

* * *

Troll had spent the rest of the morning searching for supplies and battling the dead. When he returned, Sylva was gone. He’d left behind a note, scrawled on the back of a soup can label. It said that if Troll couldn’t kill him, then he’d do it himself. He didn’t want to suffer any longer, and he didn’t want to come back as one of them.

But he did, anyway.

Later that evening, while Troll read a Stephen Crane poetry book by candlelight, Sylva’s corpse came back. It opened the hatch door and lunged into the shelter, giggling like a child. The suicide method was immediately obvious. Sylva had cut his wrists and slashed at his throat, mistakenly believing that it would prevent him from returning. But it hadn’t.

“You should have killed me when you had the chance,
Troll.”