Kevin, Rhonda, and Derek were crouched down behind a parked vehicle, watching as the ice cream truck lumbered forward, the zombies following after it as the occasional brain would catapult from the back of the truck and plop onto the ground. A full fifteen minutes passed before the legion of zombies was fully out of sight.
“It actually worked,” Derek said.
The street was empty again. Kevin hadn’t expected his plan to work quite as well as it did. In the distance, they could still hear the faint sound of Boy George asking if someone really wanted to hurt him.
Cautiously, they remained hunched down and made their way closer to the convention center. They were several feet from the front doors when Rhonda said, “Look!” and pointed a finger to the south.
“Stragglers,” Kevin said. Only three of them at first, shambling toward them. As they came closer, several more zombies came stumbling around the corner from the intersecting street.
“What should we do?” Derek asked. He dropped to one knee, rifle at the ready, eye pressed up against the scope.
“Don’t panic,” Kevin said. “We can take them.”
Derek fired. The first shot went low, hitting one of the zombies in the neck with enough force to spin it around and send it sprawling to the sidewalk. It pushed itself up and began moving forward again.
“Take the shot, Derek.”
Derek fired again. This time, the bullet hit its mark, striking the zombie square in the forehead and creating a ragged hole large enough to see though.
Kevin and Rhonda began firing shots as the zombies got closer. Kevin brought up his handgun, aimed, squinted his eye, and –
froze
. He had the female zombie in his sights. She was attractive despite her condition, relatively intact except for a nasty gash in her upper thigh. She was skinny, wearing a white g-string and a t-shirt that stopped just above her belly button. He hesitated and lowered the gun. “
Angela?
”
Rhonda stopped firing. “What?”
“It’s Angela.”
“As in your ex-girlfriend
Angela
?”
And then all the memories came rushing back. In that moment, Kevin forgot about everything else. The rest of the world fell away, and it was only him and Angela, just like the old days. He remembered the first time they had met, the first time they had kissed, the first time they had fucked (which came only minutes after that first kiss), and how he had spent an entire semester with his head spinning, unable to focus on his classes because he had fallen instantly in love. His first true love. He had given his heart away without giving it a second thought. He also recalled how he had called Ryan to tell him the news and finished by saying, “Small world, huh?” And Ryan told him to be careful, take it slow, make sure he knew what he was getting into. Kevin had agreed, but in the back of his mind had been thinking of how Ryan was always cautious, careful about everything, had become straight-laced ever since he had started working in law enforcement. Fred had put it less delicately, asking Kevin if he had forgotten about Angela’s reputation in high school. “She was kinda a slut, bro, only minus the ‘
kinda
’ part.”
Of course, all of their friendly advice had fallen on deaf ears. Because Angela
had changed
. She was a sweet girl, his angel, his soulmate. Sure, maybe she had been a little promiscuous in high school (euphemistically speaking), but that had been a phase (the way collecting Thundercats action figures when he was twelve had been a phase), and she was totally different now.
Then reality crushed in on him. She had, in fact, been all of those things, but she had also torn his heart out; caused him a severe and tangible pain that had stuck with him.
He’s my soulmate
– the words echoed in his memory. She had completely destroyed him with that simple declaration, and somehow she had expected him to be okay with that; explained it as though it was the work of Fate or the Hand of God or some other powerful deity, and they were all helpless to do anything about it. No use squabbling with destiny. Didn’t she know that from that moment forward she had ruined him, made it impossible to look at women or relationships with the same innocent eyes he had looked upon her with? Didn’t she know she had really fucked him up in the head?
“Kevin?”
It was Rhonda’s voice that snapped him out of his trancelike state. The zombies, including Angela, had gotten closer. Derek shouldered the rifle, pulled out a Beretta and started firing again, picking zombies off until Zombie Angela was the only one left standing.
Rhonda brought up her gun and aimed it at Angela, ready to pull the trigger.
“Don’t,” Kevin said.
Rhonda waited, but kept her finger on the trigger. In the last ten seconds, two things had taken her by surprise: the first was the realization that she had feelings for Kevin, stronger and deeper than she had been aware of. The second, which she had realized after Kevin hadn’t been able to take his eyes off of his ex-girlfriend, was that she was jealous of a zombie.
You have a tendency to fall too fast and too hard.
That was a bit of her mother’s wisdom, the one person who had always been there in the aftermath of a bad breakup; she had handled cleanup duty with empathy and tenderness, but by Rhonda’s senior year, even Rhonda knew that her mother had grown weary of picking up the pieces of her daughter’s oft-broken heart.
Too fast and too hard strikes again,
Rhonda thought.
Same mistake every time. Trumped by a zombie.
“She’s not your girlfriend anymore,” Rhonda said.
“I know that,” Kevin said. “She’s the heartless bitch that broke my heart. That’s why I’m going to be the one that blows her brains out.”
Rhonda smiled, more than a little relieved, some of her confidence restored.
Maybe you got it wrong this time, Mom.
Derek said, “Fuckin’ A, boss!”
Kevin took his time. He unshouldered the shotgun and pumped in a fresh shell. He waited. Angela staggered forward on legs as stiff as boards. She tottered slightly, her eyes on Kevin, mouth bobbing open and closed, blood and drool dripping down her chin.
She’s singling me out,
Kevin thought.
Wonder if she remembers me.
For a moment, he felt sorry for her, and almost lost his nerve. She may have been a bitch, a slut, and a destroyer of hearts, but did she really deserve this? To have died horribly just to come back as one of the undead?
But sympathy was a fleeting emotion.
Goddamn right she does!
When Angela was close enough, Kevin shoved the end of the shotgun’s barrel into her open mouth, tilted it at an angle, turned his head away, and squeezed the trigger. The shot rang in his ears. He felt blood and brains splatter against the side of his head and neck, heard the dull thud of Angela hitting the ground. He opened his eyes and stared down at her body. Most of her head had disintegrated; only her lower jaw remained.
Kevin stared at Angela’s corpse for a long time. He had expected to do a happy dance after he had killed her, but was too shocked by what he had done to go that far. “How’s that for closure?” he said, stomping down on the little that remained of Angela’s head.
From beside him, Rhonda said, “Is this how you treat all your ex-girlfriends?”
“Only the ones that break my heart,” Kevin said.
“And that are zombies, too, right?” Derek said. “
Right?
”
“Yeah…those ones too.”
The oil refinery loomed before them like a sprawling futuristic kingdom with its many lights, cylindrical tanks, iron walkways, cooling towers, and smokestacks. Thick clouds of smoke billowed up into the cold night air. A solitary flame, perhaps six feet high or better, glowed brightly above the tallest column. The snow was coming in large, sticky flakes that clung to the asphalt as they reached the ground.
Paradise City
by Guns N’ Roses piped from the truck’s speakers.
Ryan divided his time between paying attention to the slick road and Fred seated in the back of the truck, one booted foot holding the back door open as he flung brains onto the concrete, making a game of it now, seeing how close he could get them to land to the yellow centerline. Becky stood behind Fred, one hand clinging to a metal rail for support, the other wrapped around the handle of her gun.
Up until now, Ryan had always looked at the refinery (usually from a distance) as an eyesore. A city unto itself, both exclusive and self-reliant. After thirty years in the same town, he discovered he knew relatively little about what went on there. He knew people that worked there, knew they came home from work dirty and covered in grime, and that it provided some of the highest paying jobs in the county. He also knew that if the wind was moving in the right direction, it could cause a hell of a stink.
Little by little, they had put distance between themselves and the zombie horde. The zombies trailed behind by a quarter mile, and Ryan was doing his best to increase that lead in careful increments. At least a thousand zombies trailed behind them, a living mass of death that was nearly swallowed by the darkness when Ryan glanced in the truck’s side-mirror. He couldn’t get too far ahead without the risk of losing their attention, but once they reached the refinery, they needed the time to do…
What are we going to do when we get there?
he thought.
How do we blow it all up?
He shoved the thought to the back of his mind, focusing on the task at hand, which was making it to the refinery with the zombies in tow.
Two of the 30-gallon trash bags were empty. Fred was pulling brains from the one remaining bag, doing his best to space them out.
Ryan turned the volume down on the truck’s stereo and said, “We’re almost there.”
“Good,” Fred said. “Cuz we’re running low on brains.”
“When we get there,” Ryan said, “what do we do? What do we use to blow it up?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“No.”
“
Every
thing. Almost anything in there is combustible. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. Remember that scandal last year? Made all the papers. They’ve been letting the place go to shit. I can’t remember how many violations the inspectors found, but it was a lot. Slapped them with a whopper of a fine. They might have corrected some of the problems, but I’ll bet dollars to jelly doughnuts those tight asses will put that stuff off as long as they can.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Becky asked.
“Damn straight it is. Containers rusting through, contaminants leaking into the soil, getting into the water supply. One big health hazard. But they’ll do anything to save money. Companies like that don’t care about the safety of their workers or the environment. Only two things that make the suits blink. A bad quarter and bad publicity.” Without looking, he lobbed another brain out the back. It hit the icy street and slid several inches before coming to a halt.
“But how do we blow it up without blowing ourselves up in the process?”
“I don’t know if he knew it or not, but Kevin gave us a way.” Fred leaned back, grabbed the backpack that was leaning up against the mini-freezer, and unzipped the top. He placed it upright and slid it across the floor. The contents clanked together before the pack came to rest between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. Ryan looked down into the open pack. He saw the small cylindrical propane canisters that Kevin had stuffed in there.
Remember the Dawn of the Dead remake? Same concept,
he remembered Kevin saying.
Only more portable.
Fred nodded. “There’s a roll of duct tape in there too. Strap those babies to a kerosene tank or something, guaranteed to go
boom
.”
“What do we use to ignite them?”
“One of the rifles. You drive away, I shoot one of them, everything goes kaplooey.”
“And that’ll work?” Becky said.
“Why wouldn’t it?”
Murphy’s Law,
Ryan thought. “Nothing’s ever that easy,” he said.