Clickers vs Zombies (21 page)

“We’re not screwed,” his associate said. “We’re only a few miles from the armory. They knew to expect us. We’ll just have to go the rest of the way on foot. Once we cross the bridge, we’re in Wrightsville. We can follow the river the rest of the way. Keep off the roads, and we should be okay.”

“Better shoot him,” an old man said, nodding towards the bus driver. “If what they’ve been saying on the news is true, he’s liable to come back any minute and start trying to eat your face off.”

“His brain is damaged. I can…I can see it from here. That metal shard gouged a furrow in it. I don’t think he’ll be coming back. Now, everybody off the bus. Single file. Bring only what you need. Leave your belongings and stuff here. We’ve got a long way to walk, and we don’t need to be weighed down.”

There were thirty-six of them when they left the bus. An aerial attack from a flock of zombie birds subtracted two from their number when the unfortunate victims jumped over the side of the bridge to avoid being pecked to death and were killed in the fall. By the time they reached the far side of the bridge, they’d lost another—the old man who had suggested shooting the driver suffered what appeared to be a heart attack. The guard shot him in the head before he could get back up again. The gunshot attracted unwanted attention, and zombies began converging on them from all directions, including the corpses of the two evacuees who had jumped from the bridge and now waded out of the river, water streaming from their bodies, and their expressions alight with malignant pleasure.

At that point the group broke up because everyone ran in different directions. Jeanette dodged two waterlogged zombies and fled down the riverbank, not knowing or caring where she was going. Indeed, she cared for nothing as she ran, save her own survival. She remembered crossing the bridge again back into Columbia. From there, she’d headed into the country, figuring the less people, the less chance she would have in running across any of the living dead. When she stumbled upon the dairy farm at the top of a hill overlooking the river, she’d run inside, not bothering to seek help at the farmhouse. For all she knew, the inhabitants could be dead—or the living dead.

The barn was empty. All of the dairy cows were out in the pasture. She’d seen them off in the distance as she approached the building. She wondered if they were alive or dead. She’d watched them for a moment from the safety of the barn, then slunk back inside. She started walking down the barn, trying to figure out where the animals were kept. Toward the end of the barn was a single stall with a name plate etched in a gold lettering affixed to the door—Imogene. Engraved next to the name was the figure of a cow.

Who the hell names their cow?
Jeanette thought. Regardless, she headed back down the barn, looking for a more suitable spot to hide. Then, hunkering down inside an empty stall in the middle of the barn, she’d wept silently until exhaustion and fear overwhelmed her. At last she’d fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep.

And now here she was, awake only a few minutes, and all of the fear and panic from the night before fresh in her mind again. Although she’d left her suitcase on the bus, Jeanette still had her purse with her. She rummaged around inside of it, found her cell phone and checked it, only to find that she had no service. When she tried to call Rick anyway, she received a message that simply said ‘Network Error’. She tried calling the kids, but the message was the same. When she tried checking the internet, it didn’t connect.

She leaned back against the wall, and watched a spider skitter past. Jeanette wondered if the spider was alive. Obviously, animals could become zombies, too. She’d seen it herself first hand when the birds attacked. But how far did it extend? What about the cows outside? What about this spider? Could insects become zombies? Fish? Reptiles? Amoeba?

Jeanette closed her eyes and ran her hands through her hair. Her thoughts strayed, returning once again to Rick and the kids. She prayed they were okay. She was just about to try the phone again when she heard footsteps outside. It sounded like people running. She froze, her heart hammering. The footsteps were joined by more. Some of them sounded like galloping. She wondered if it was the cows returning to the barn.

Then somebody shouted. It was a man. She could tell that much. But his words were garbled and slurred, and it sounded as if he was in great pain. A cow mooed, drowning him out. The sound was malicious and baleful. Then another man spoke.

“What’s wrong, Levi? Can’t cast your spells with your tongue bitten off and your hands broken? Too bad for you!”

The injured man tried speaking again. Jeanette cringed, hearing the anguish in his voice. And yes, it occurred to her that he did indeed sound like someone trying to speak without a tongue.

“Take him,”
his tormentor said.
“Let’s finish this. Ob will be pleased.”

There was the sound of a struggle, followed by a gruesome, decidedly wet noise. Then laughter. Pulse racing, Jeanette peered over the top of the stall. She saw a group of dead humans and cows standing over a headless body dressed in blood-splattered Amish clothes. One of the zombies clutched the severed head in its hand. The victim had a long, curling beard and beautiful, soulful eyes that seemed to be looking directly at her.

“Here, Levi,”
croaked the zombie.
“Look at your body before you leave.”

It turned the head toward the lifeless form lying on the ground. Jeanette shuddered.

“And now he has departed,”
the zombie said to the others.
“The great magus Levi Stoltzfus is no more. A pity our brethren will find this head useless.”

The creature tossed the head into the open barn door. It smashed against a wooden support beam and then rolled across the floor, coming to a stop only inches from Jeanette’s stall. She bit her hand to keep from screaming, but her efforts failed her when the severed head opened its eyes again, stared at her, and grinned. Jeanette shrieked, stumbling backward. The dead, alerted by her outcry, stormed into the barn and dragged her outside, where they gleefully fell upon her.

By the time they were finished, there was barely enough left of Jeanette’s corpse to rise again.

Palos Verdes, California

Like most of those across the planet who survived the first night, Dr. Alfred Post and his wife, Janice, stayed barricaded in their home, turned off the lights, shut the drapes, and retreated to the rear bedroom. They monitored the situation on the TV for as long as the networks were on the air. One by one, the networks went off the air beginning with the local affiliates. Then, at one a.m., the power went out.

They’d stayed in the back bedroom, which used to be their son Ben’s room. Ben had just graduated from Harvard Law School and had accepted a position with a Washington DC firm just six months ago and relocated. Al and Janice hadn’t even had the chance to fly back to visit.

“What are we going to do?” Janice asked. Her voice cracked.

“What else can we do?” Alfred asked. “We stay put.”

That seemed to be the general consensus of their immediate neighbors. Palos Verdes was an upper middle-income area. There were a number of cul-de-sacs that were nestled within the winding hills of Palos Verdes that could be considered wealthy—mansions behind gated fences, patrolled by private security. Al and Janice didn’t have nearly the income to live in one of those neighborhoods, but their spread was certainly better than most citizens. Their neighbors were physicians, lawyers, high-level executives, entertainment professionals. There was even a professional surfer that lived in the next neighborhood.

When things started escalating in the city below last night, Alfred had stepped outside briefly. His next door neighbor on their left, Carlton Burke, had also stepped out. Alfred had ventured out clutching the 9mm handgun he’d bought ten years ago and only used at an indoor firing range he went to in Torrance. After thinking about George’s wife and what had happened with her, he was pretty certain she’d died, and that when George had come back to tell him she wasn’t alive, she was really deceased. The brief screams coming from George’s house he could have sworn he’d heard had been on his mind ever since, and he’d retrieved the pistol from it’s storage space in his office, making sure it was loaded and he had spare clips. If George and his wife had risen from the dead, Al wasn’t sure why they hadn’t shambled over to try to get them. He’d peeked through the blinds at their house, which sat in the lot below them in the hilly neighborhood, and it was quiet. Had they moved downhill into the streets below? Perhaps. But he was taking no chances. The 9mm was staying with him at all times.

Carlton was a retired physicist who used to work at JPL in Pasadena. He’d worked on the first Apollo moon landing in 1969 and had assisted in several other missions for NASA. He’d done other government work as well. When Dr. Post saw Dr. Burke, the older man had nodded at him from his back deck. “This is really happening, Al.”

“Yes, it is,” Al had answered.

“And your ticket for surviving the next forty-eight hours is staying put inside your house. You have enough food?”

Al assured Dr. Burke that he did.

“CNN says to shoot them in the head,” Dr. Burke said. “That stops them cold. But they’re cunning. And fast. If we hunker down and hide, any that might happen to come up here won’t bother trying to hunt after us. They seem to hone in on people who are out on the street. They’re easy prey. Do you understand?”

Al said he understood Dr. Burke completely.

“There’s those other things, too. Fox News is calling them Clickers.”

Al said he knew what Dr. Burke was talking about. He’d performed a necropsy on one of them yesterday.

Dr. Burke had raised his bushy eyebrows. “Really? And did you notice anything unusual about them?”

“Aside from the fact that they’re completely different than any other species I’ve ever seen?”

“So they’re not of this world?”

Al had shrugged. “I’ve examined thousands of specimens in my line of work and I have never seen anything like this.”

Dr. Burke had nodded. “I’ve hypothesized about this. That earthquake in the Pacific two weeks ago? It’s location and size on the Richter scale was large enough to disrupt the dimensions. Those Clickers that are invading everywhere? They’re a result of the shifting dimensions—they got let in. So have the things that are invading and reanimating the dead.”

Al had blinked. Dr. Burke was one of those guys that held three PhDs—Physics, Mathematics, and Archeology. He spoke twelve different languages. His IQ was probably on the very high end of the chart. He was so smart he made guys like Al seem like Snooki. “Are you certain of this, Dr. Burke?”

Dr. Burke had regarded Al over the fence of their property. Each man was standing fifty feet apart, but Al could see the look in Dr. Burke’s eyes. He was dead serious. “I haven’t been more certain of this than I was about my work with NASA during the Apollo missions,” he answered. “If there’s a God, he really fucked this one up.”

Al had taken Dr. Burke’s advice. He’d hunkered down in the house with Janice.

And now this morning, things were strangely quiet.

Al approached the window and peeked out. The window in Ben’s old bedroom looked out on the back deck. From this vantage point, on a clear day or evening, you could see the entire city of Los Angeles spread out like a great vast plain of twinkling lights. Al had once been to the home of a film producer in the Hollywood Hills, and the view from the back deck of that house had afforded a similar view, albeit from the opposite side of the Los Angeles basin. Now, when he looked out at the Los Angeles cityscape, he wasn’t too surprised to see a thick layer of smoke covering the city like a blanket. He could make out several fires in the streets below. Dimly, from several miles north, he could hear the bray of car alarms.

What he didn’t hear, however, were people.

They’d heard plenty last night. Screaming. Begging for mercy. Then, several times, cruel laughter followed by bloodcurdling screams, then silence.

Janice approached him from behind. She laid a hand on his bare shoulder. Last night, Janice had driven herself sick with worry over Ben. She’d tried calling him over a dozen times but couldn’t reach him. Halfway through the night, they lost LAN line and cellular communication. Janice had wound up crying herself to sleep.

Al had dozed.

“What are we going to do?” Janice asked. Her voice was soft. Tinged with fear.

“I don’t know,” Alfred said, at a complete loss for words. “I just don’t know.”

Los Angeles, California

As he always did upon taking possession of a new host body, Ob paused to assimilate himself with his new form. He searched through the host’s memory, and to his surprise, found himself inside a Clicker. The creature’s rudimentary memories were like a writhing nest of vipers. It had been consumed only with eating. Of its death, from what he could discern from its memories, it had been gassed by soldiers. Ob took over the beast’s motor controls, and then looked through its eyes to determine where he was.

He found himself in a river winding through a city. He assumed it was in America, given the writing on the billboards around him. Probably California or Florida, if the foliage was any indication. The river was bordered by graffiti-covered concrete abutments. Trash clung to the overgrown vegetation that drooped over the banks. He searched his memory—or rather, the memories of the various host bodies he’d possessed over the years. When he surveyed his surroundings again, he recognized several landmarks and realized that he was in Los Angeles.