Plague of the Undead (31 page)

Resurrecting Mindy

The big Christmas tree in front of the Dayton Mall had fallen down sometime during the last year. Kevin’s gaze drifted over the faded tinsel and mud-encrusted ornaments and wondered when that had happened. Probably during the rains back in early September. Those were bad. A lot of the area had flooded, and the winds that came with the rains must have done that damage to the tree as well.

Of course, he really didn’t know for sure.

And, really, when it came right to it, he didn’t care.

The only time he ever came back here anymore was at Christmastime. The world had ended three years before, just before Christmas, and the inside of the Dayton Mall still had a lot of decorations hanging from the common areas and inside the shop windows. Every year right around this time he made the trek back to the mall and scavenged whatever he could carry to decorate wherever he was living at the moment. These days, it had become a ritual, just like keeping up his calendar, and keeping his hair trimmed, and making sure his food stores were well stocked. The rituals, in fact, were about the only things that kept his morale up anymore.

And God knows there was enough to feel depressed about.

There was a sort of soul-sucking loneliness that came with being the last man left alive.

It made him wonder if there was any reason to keep going. After all, did it matter
when
he died? Tomorrow, or thirty years from now, the results would be the same. After he was finished, humanity was finished. Wasn’t he just postponing the inevitable?

Could be. But he wasn’t quite ready to throw in the towel just yet.

For now, he had a mission.

Kevin got down on his belly so he could squeeze between the front tandems of an eighteen-wheeler. From there, he watched the parking lot, figuring out a safe route over to the doors.

It actually didn’t look like it’d be very difficult this year. The zombie hordes that had swarmed the area in years past had thinned quite a bit. He didn’t know if the majority of them had moved on or decayed away to the point they couldn’t move anymore. Maybe they’d started to eat each other. Who the hell knew?

He supposed it didn’t really matter.

Fewer zombies meant it was easier to stay alive, and that was all that mattered.

There were fewer than fifty of them out there walking the parking lot now, and it didn’t take long for a wide gap to open up in the crowd. Kevin tensed, ready to run. Another few seconds and it would be wide enough for him to go.

And that’s when he saw her.

Mindy Matheson.

Holy shit, he thought. He stared at her for a long moment, watching her curious, clumsy movements. That really was her. That’s Mindy Matheson.

And she’s faking it.

It had been a while since he’d seen a faker.

Most didn’t last long. Right after the outbreak, Kevin and some of the other survivors he’d hung out with back then had seen one or two a week. The fakers tried to make themselves look like zombies. They smelled like zombies, moved like zombies, had flies swarming around their eyes and mouths like zombies. But they weren’t zombies, and sooner or later, they messed up. They slipped out of character for just a second.

And that was all it took.

One tiny slip, one momentary distraction, and the zombies they moved with swarmed them.

Usually, at least as far as Kevin was concerned, it wasn’t much of a loss.

The only reason a person ever decided to fake it was because they had given up on their humanity. Surviving among the ruins of what the world had once been was hard. It sucked, in fact. In order to survive, in order to stay sane, you had to work at it. Every day was a fight. Every breath was bought with tears and sweat and loneliness. And sometimes, living free didn’t seem much of a payback.

The fakers couldn’t hack it. The world they’d lived in, believed in, trusted, had collapsed. Many had made weapons, built strongholds, fought bravely, but in the end, their spirit of resistance had collapsed. Everything had collapsed, leaving them alone, scared, miserably vacant of purpose. They looked at the world and saw ruins; they saw emptiness; they saw a pointless future without faith, without hope, without meaning. They accepted that this was the end, and that going on with this world didn’t matter anymore.

But they didn’t have the courage to end it all either.

They were the real walking dead, not the zombies, and Kevin had never felt anything but disgust for them.

Until now, of course.

He and Mindy Matheson, they’d dated right after high school. She’d never said two words to him during school. Neither one of them had been all that popular, but it had been a big school, and she had her friends and he had his. But afterwards, when they found they were working at the Home Depot together, neither one of them with the foggiest notion of what they were going to do with their lives, they sort of fell together.

For about eight months.

They didn’t end on an obvious note. No cheating, no fighting, nothing like that. They just drifted apart. At the time he’d figured they just weren’t right for each other. That explained why they hadn’t noticed each other back in school. What happened while they were working together was just the natural gravity of two lonely people. And so, just as their orbits brought them together, those same orbits carried them apart. She grew distant, he grew irritable. She stopped calling, he stopped caring. Soon they were basically strangers again. The brief interlude was forgotten, and the two of them went back to their lives of uncertainty and quiet desperation.

He found it funny that the world had changed so much, and yet he and Mindy had changed so little. It made him laugh, the way the two of them were still living their half-lives, midway between life and death.

But he laughed louder than he wanted to, and she had heard him. He saw her cock her head to one side. She turned toward the truck where he was hiding, her shifting, searching gaze the only thing that separated her from the wandering corpses nearby.

Kevin whistled faintly, just loud enough for her to hear.

She staggered forward.

For a moment, he thought of running away from there. What did he think he was doing anyway? What could he do? It wasn’t like they were going to run off together or anything. Not now. To fake it for any length of time at all, she would have had to go native in a mighty convincing kind of way.

And that she certainly had.

Kevin looked her up and down, from the stringy, matted mess that was her hair to her bare and blackened feet, and tried not to grimace at the stench that came off her. Her face was filthy, her lips cracked and flaking. Her clothes were so stained and ratty he couldn’t even tell what color they had once been. Flies swarmed about her face.

But she was standing right in front of him now, watching him. She swayed drunkenly, her mouth hanging open slightly. He wanted to hate her, but her eyes were overly bright, pregnant with the suggestion of pain, and despite his loathing, he felt his heart breaking out of pity.

He could, after all, still see the girl under all that grime and slathered gore. She had gotten skinny in a ghastly kind of way, but the curves, or at least the hint of them, were still in the right places. And she still had that cute little upturned nose that used to drive him wild when she smiled.

“Hi, Mindy,” he said.

She just stared at him, no expression on her face.

“Hey, you know why they put fences around graveyards?” he asked her. Kevin waited a beat. “Because people are just dying to get in.”

Again, he waited.

Her expression didn’t change. She just stood there, swaying.

“You heard that one, huh?”

She might have nodded, but if so, it was faint, and he couldn’t be sure.

“How about this one? A guy finds out he only has twelve hours to live. He goes home to his wife, determined to live it up for his last night on earth. So they have sex, and it’s great. An hour later, they do it again, and it’s even better. And then, a few hours after that, he tells her he thinks they can go at it a third time. ‘Easy for you to say,’ she tells him. ‘You don’t have to wake up in the morning.’ ”

He beat his index fingers on the truck tire in front of him like he was firing off a rim shot.
Ba dum bum
. He smiled at her, and then the smile faded. Why in the hell was he doing this? There was no reaching this girl.

And was he really so lonely that he was talking to a faker?

But then he saw a flicker at the corner of her mouth, the faintest trace of a smile, and that brought a huge grin to his face.

“Are you doing okay, Mindy?”

The smile disappeared. He saw what looked like a tear forming in her eyes.

He almost reached up for her hand then, and had one of the real zombies not let out a moan at that very moment, he might have thrown her over his shoulder and carried her away from there.

But a few more real zombies had spotted him. Several were moaning now, staggering toward him. He’d been careless, and now it was time to go.

“I’m staying in an apartment at Woodlawn and Spruce,” he said.

A zombie dropped to the pavement and started crawling under the truck toward him.

“I gotta go,” he said. “Remember, it’s the Bent Tree Apartments. Woodlawn and Spruce, number 318.”

More zombies had gotten under the truck now. The lead one held up a mangled, handless arm, the blackened, jagged tips of its ulna and radius extending from rotten flesh.

“Gotta go,” he said.

Several days later, with Christmas right around the corner, Kevin was putting up ornaments on a fake tree. There was a Hallmark in the Dayton Mall and he’d made good use of the Snoopy ornaments piled on the floor. Growing up, his mom had waited out front of the local Hallmark in order to scoop up whatever was new that year. At the time, he’d thought it was a stupid tradition. But they’re collector’s items, she’d said. Or they will be. Which, to his way of looking at it, hadn’t made it any less stupid.

But now, hanging the Snoopy with the little typewriter and Snoopy as a World War I ace ornaments on his tree, he sensed a surge of painful memories trying to surface.

Christ, he thought. He didn’t need this. Not now.

He heard moaning coming through an open window and he jumped to his feet to take a look. There was no point in it, really. The zombies keyed off of what they saw and heard. Those were about the only two senses that seemed to work, and as long as he stayed out of sight and kept quiet, his little hiding spot up in this third floor apartment was as safe as any spot on Earth.

But he crossed to the window anyway because checking out the zombies was a way to stay busy, and staying busy kept him from his memories.

And that’s when he saw Mindy Matheson for the second time.

Her group had wandered from the mall over to here, probably in search of the pack of wild dogs Kevin had heard baying in the night the last few days. This zombie herd wasn’t especially large. He counted about thirty, though there were almost certainly a few more somewhere out of sight. They wouldn’t be much of a threat when he needed to go out, but even still, there were enough of them that they would probably be sticking around for a few days at least. They hunted collectively, he’d discovered, so the bigger groups tended to stay in one place longer.

Just as well, Kevin thought. It would give him a chance to talk with Mindy again.

He slid out the window and into the chilly evening air. It looked like it would probably rain later. There was a ledge just below his window that led over to another building’s roof. From there, he climbed onto a billboard that looked down on the intersection, where Mindy and the others were wandering around, moaning.

He kept a can of spray paint up here, just in case.

He gave it a shake and wrote: