Redemption of the Dead (13 page)

“Just pull,”
he growled through gritted teeth. Fierce pain took over the tendons
in his wrists as he hoisted himself up, the window’s remaining
glass coming into view. The right side had the hole, the left not.
He leaned forward with his right shoulder and kept pulling. He got
himself up to about his ribs, his hands stuck so tight against him
he couldn’t adjust them to fall onto his forearms then try to climb
in. If he eased himself back down so he was hanging again, he knew
he wouldn’t have enough strength to pull himself up one more
time.

With a
shout, Joe bashed his head against the glass, at first hearing
nothing but the slam and its reverberation inside his skull. Three
more strikes and the glass broke. He pushed himself forward,
toppling into the window, the glass cutting along his chest. He
crashed upside down on his arms as he came in over the edge. He lay
there, catching his breath, inverted body shaking.

“Never again,” he said, blood flowing
into his eyes. He screamed, not caring if anyone living or dead
heard him.

* * * *

12

Escape from
Chinatown

T
racy took the
SUV, heading back into the city the
way she and Joe had tried after escaping the overturned truck. The
dust was still on the air, but at least she could somewhat see
through it and try and navigate around the crashed cars and auto
pile-ups. Each time she had to ride up onto the curb and drive down
the sidewalk was a geeky thrill.

The undead she had passed on the way
down Main turned to face her but didn’t pursue.

Tracy turned
on the radio and tried the dials. Didn’t hurt to check. At least it
showed she hadn’t given up hope. Up ahead, closing in around
Higgins, the rubble on the street was piled high, most of the
buildings in the immediate vicinity torn down by the giants. Parked
in front of a hill of brick, cement, steel and bodies, she felt the
vibrations of the giants’ footfalls as they roamed up and down the
streets.

Dead end
.
Which was fine. The Hub was over to
the left anyway beneath the Disraeli Overpass.

Armed with the cleaver and mallet, she
left the SUV and kept out of sight as she headed toward the bridge.
A lone zombie stood swaying by a bus stop. When it saw her, it
started to move toward her. Tracy picked up her pace and marched
toward the creature head-on, cocked the mallet, then brought it
across the zombie’s head, busting the skull. The creature fell;
immediately she came down on it hard and struck the head again for
good measure before continuing on.

She didn’t have to get to the Hub to
see what happened: it was destroyed, reams of debris and concrete
all around as if the Hub had exploded.

“
Can’t be . . .” she said. The Hub was the most secure place
in the city and had gone undetected by the monsters for so long. “I
was just here.” She hadn’t been away for terribly long, and to come
back to see it destroyed so quickly sucked the hope out of her.
When did it happen? Were there any survivors?

Furious and heartbroken, she kept her
mallet and cleaver at the ready and ran to the ruins to see if
anyone was there that needed her help. Once at the edge, her heart
sank when she saw that most of the place was caved in, chunks of
stone, cement, rebar, and debris blocking off the tunnels that led
to where people stayed. Tracy slid down the rocks and cement and
walked around the bottom of the hole like it was an empty pool. The
ground was packed hard. She went where it would branch off to the
living quarters and took the mallet, trying to use it as a shovel
to see if some of the packed debris would give way. It was like
digging in a gravel pit with baseball-sized stones.

“
Hello?” she yelled against where she dug. “Anyone trapped?
Can you hear me?”

Silence. Blasted silence.

She hammered against the ground a few
more times then got up, cursed, and headed back the way she came.
As she climbed out, she looked off to the side and saw a crowd of
the monsters not far away and there was another crowd not far from
them.

“
Better get going,” she said
quietly and headed back to the SUV.

If
the Hub was anything, it was good at strategic planning. There was
an underground
safe house
reinforced to withstand immense pressure and weight, enough to not
collapse under the giants. The safe house was meant for only one
thing: refuge in case the Hub was overrun. If there were any
survivors from the undead invasion of the Hub, they would be there.
The problem was, with the road blocked, she’d have to head there on
foot.

Cleaver and
mallet in hand, Tracy quickly checked the SUV. Seeing it was how
she left it, she made her way over the hill of rubble. Standing at
its peak in a cloud of dust, her heart sank when she saw a sea of
the dead wandering in a group on the other side where she needed to
go.

Going headlong into them would be
suicide. She checked the perimeter, but with the dust so thick it
was difficult to tell if there were any of the monsters along the
sides. Weapons ready, she walked along the top of the rubble,
staying more on the side of the SUV than that of the dead, and
headed to its end, which, it turned out, had wound its way into
Chinatown.

Chinatown
had been one of her favorite places in the city before it all went
to hell. The food, the architecture, the strong sense of detachment
from the West even though she was only a few blocks away from Main.
Now the district was in shambles, with buildings crushed, others
with holes in the walls, bloody body parts littering the ground,
vehicles overturned—even a fire hydrant had been knocked over, the
water long run dry.

She went down the hill and made it to
street level. The dust wasn’t as bad here, but she still had to
strain to see and the dirt still coated her tongue and dried out
her mouth.

Booming
footfalls shook the ground beneath her feet. There had to be a
giant close by, but she couldn’t see where. Despite their enormous
size, they had a way of coming out of nowhere just like their small
counterparts.

Stay near the cars, the walls, and they won’t see you and
just take you as part of the scenery.
It was an old trick, one of the first she learned when out
on the street and hunting the undead. One had to draw their
attention to really captivate them. After that, their flesh-hungry
instinct took over. They could smell, that’d been proven, too, but
it seemed their sense of smell wasn’t as keen as once believed.
They could be distracted and avoided if a person knew what to
do.

And Tracy
knew what to do. She was trained for this. Being with Joe, though,
had softened her edge a little. She hadn’t intentionally allowed
it, but like rocks crashing into each other beneath a current, her
own jagged edges were beginning to round smooth.

Groans of
nearby zombies alerted her to a batch of them on her right. She
went for cover behind a bus bench. Remaining perfectly still, she
let them pass, then stood once they were a good ways down the
street.

She kept to
the side of one of the buildings, then rounded into an alley,
wanting the advantage of its fire escapes if she was suddenly
chased down.

Another trick.

She picked
up a garbage can lid off the ground and decided to use it as a
shield despite how ridiculous she felt doing so. It didn’t matter.
She had to use what she could find. A dumpster was off to the side
of the alley. She approached it, cleaver ready, shield on guard,
and peered over its edge. The repugnant smell of garbage that had
been rotting in there for a year made her eyes water. She checked
inside and saw the remains of a boy, his body ripped to pieces,
arms, legs and head missing. Inside, there was nothing of use. Just
packed black garbage bags, pizza boxes—in Chinatown, no less—and
other trash. Nothing that could be used as a weapon.

Grimacing,
she hefted the cleaver in her hand and resolved it’d have to be her
best friend for the time being.

Tracy neared the mouth of the alley.
Something dark dropped from the fire escape above her, landing at
her feet.

A body.

An undead
body that began to move and get to its feet. So much for the fire
escape trick. She swung the cleaver down on its head before it
could fully right itself, splitting its skull and sending gobs of
bloody brain matter into the air.

She kept on,
making it to the edge of Chinatown. Giants shook the ground. The
top of one’s head could be seen a few streets over. The thing
moaned and grunted airy sounds as it moved.

A group of
zombies stumbled out of the large broken window of a storefront
ahead. They set their eyes on her, as if they had smelled her from
within the building. She started to run in between the cars, hoping
to lose them. More zombies joined their ranks as if someone had
just rang the supper bell and it was time for everyone to gather.
It wasn’t long before they started to close in on her.

Tracy swiped
the cleaver side-to-side, forcing its strong blade into every
rotting skull she could see. Losing herself in the combat, she
struck one zombie with the metal edge of the garbage can lid while
driving the cleaver into the neck of another and severing its head.
Using her skilled and swift movement, she lopped the head off
another, kicked the one in front of her, backhanded the one behind
her with the garbage lid, and ducked in between a car, squatting
beside one of the doors to buy herself a few seconds.

The undead
rounded the car from both sides. Heart racing, Tracy stood, opened
the rear passenger door of the vehicle, then quickly crawled across
the seats before shoving open the door on the other side. Bad plan.
She was greeted by a crowd of the undead. Not wasting any time, she
turned back into the vehicle, ignored the zombies that were
crawling their way through the car, and climbed over the seat to
the front and planted her foot on the edge of the broken front
passenger window, using it as a step to get her on top of the
vehicle. She slid down the windshield, hit the ground with a roll,
and bolted from the horde.

She needed
distance. The zombies liked to crowd and create a ceiling with
their rotting fingers and hands, trapping a person in.

Tracy weaved
in and around the cars. The few straggling zombies she passed tried
to reach out for her, their efforts feeble. One came right in front
of her and was quickly dealt with by a cleaver to its
face.

She looked at the large, bloody blade.
I’m actually starting to like this thing.
Different than a gun, but simple to
use as though it was an extension of herself, a sharp deadly hand
instead of one made of flesh and bone.

In the
parking lot of the Walker Theatre, she thought about going inside
to get away, but didn’t want to risk there being more undead within
and inadvertently trapping herself.

The horde
was further down the street, but would soon be upon her if she
didn’t keep moving. The ground shaking more and more fiercely
beneath her feet from the nearing giants, she tried her best not to
trip and only went down once before quickly regaining her footing
and running onward.

There was an
alley just around the corner by the building up ahead. She went for
it, cleaver ready to come down on anything that entered her path.
She rounded the corner and entered the alleyway. A handful of
zombies were at the opposite end. A giant zombie appeared over the
roofline of a building across the street, coming her way. Whether
it actually saw her or not, she wasn’t sure, but didn’t want to
risk it.

The objective: eliminate
threats.

Method: kill the small ones first,
then mind the big one.

Tracy
charged headlong into the four zombies at the end of the alley,
taking two down straight away by cutting through their rotten
throats with ease. The third grabbed her makeshift shield, yanked
it from her hand then came in to grab her. She backhanded it across
the jaw the same time the fourth reached for her. She brought the
cleaver down and sliced off one of its hands. Back to the third,
she brought the cleaver up under its jaw in a powerful uppercut and
sliced off its decaying face, taking some of the jawbone with it.
Blood and brain gushed out the front of its face as the creature
fell to its knees before toppling over onto its side. The fourth
zombie took hold of her with its good hand. She took the cleaver to
the wrist like she had the other one and severed it. With a kick,
she knocked the creature away, then lunged at it full force and
brought the cleaver down on top of its skull, ending it. The
creature dropped.

Tracy removed the cleaver from its
head, the blade dripping with syrupy black blood.

“Gross,” she
said, looking at the pale gray undead hand still clinging to her
wrist. She pulled the body part off and tossed it on the
ground.

The foul
stench of rot suddenly overwhelmed the area. Tracy turned around to
see the enormous zombie—female, with the sagging body of a
sixty-year-old—looming over her.

She had no choice but to run back the
way she came. The giant zombie chased her with massive strides,
gaining on her in seconds. It reached down and took a swipe at her.
She jumped and rolled to the side.