Surviving Beyond the Zombie Apocalypse (9 page)

     “Momma!” A high-pitched voice screamed from behind the shell.

     The shell turned, letting the woman crumble to the floor. A few feet away stood a boy of about seven. He looked from his mother on the floor to his big sister looking at him with blood covering her face. He started to cry, and a second later the shell landed on top of him.

     A thud on the side of the van brought me back to the moment. The shell of the teenage girl had not moved, but several other shells had come to surround the van. As they slid their hands along the sides searching for a grip on anything to let them inside, I listened to the scratching sound of their fingernails on the metal. The grating noise sent shivers through my body and made me want to scream. Instead I stomped the accelerator to the floor.

     The campervan did not exactly jump forward. Even in a world in which the dead attacked the living, it remained a campervan. It took a little time and space before it picked up speed.

     Despite the rate at which I moved, everything around appeared in slow motion. As the front bumper of the van neared the shell of the black teenage girl, we stared at each other. Rather, I stared at her blank eyes and face, searching for some sign of alarm as the car approached to run her down. There appeared to be no change in the glassy eyes and lifeless expression. An instant later, the shell disappeared beneath the van, resulting only in a couple of bumps.  

     With the van moving along, the shells posed no threat. The only problem would be if I had to stop, and the only thing that could stop me would be if something blocked the street. Nothing blocked the street until I rounded the next corner. Several cars and a bus had met in the middle of an intersection to prevent anything from passing. I had gotten a bit turned around since leaving the newspaper building but was pretty sure that this would be my best choice for getting back to the store. I slowed to a near stop in front of the cars blocking the street. There did not seem to be any shells around, but I waited and watched to be sure. After a moment, I opened the door a little. I left the engine running as I trotted over to the cars blocking the street. My idea was to try to simply push one of the cars to the side of the street and drive through.

     The cars looked as if they had simply coasted up against one another rather than having had any sort of high-speed collision. I wondered if the drivers had died prior to hitting one another. The notion made me pause.

     If the drivers had died behind the wheel, it meant they might still be inside the cars and more than ready to get out and eat whoever or whatever came by. Since I fell into that category, I crept up extremely carefully on the cars.

     Nearest me sat a dark green mid-size sedan, the sort of car driven by someone who cared more about reliable transportation than appearances. I wondered if the driver cared about appearances now. I peered through a dirty window and saw no one inside. However, I did see a huge dark stain covering the driver’s end of the bench seat.

     I kept moving and came to the side of a white SUV that had slammed into the back of an old yellow taxi. About to continue on, my eye caught sight of something which stopped me in my tracks. A clear suction cup held a little yellow sign on the back window that read Baby on Board. 

     My stomach fell and then pitched forward. My vision blurred, and it seemed as if the world was spinning. After a moment, things slowed and my eyes cleared enough for me to see the black plastic of a child’s car seat in the back of the car. I kept my eyes on the car seat as I stumbled a few more feet along the side of the car. From this new angle, the contents of the car seat could be seen. It was not a sight which should ever be witnessed by any pair of eyes.

     The car seat held strapped a small something. It did not seem human. This looked more like a bundle of twitching flesh. Perhaps it had once been an infant. That may have been a possibility, but the thing before me now couldn’t be identified as such. I did not see any eyes. If it sensed me, it might have been by smell. Something had clearly gotten it riled up.

     Through the car window, I could hear the high-pitched shrieks of the little creature. I stared at it for a moment, considering whether or not I would be showing mercy by killing it. I realized that the concept of mercy did not enter into my decision. The truth was I felt sick at the idea of getting close enough to the thing to kill it. I simply turned away from it and continued along the side of the car as the shrieking stabbed my ears.

     My original idea upon leaving the car had been to clear a path for the van. Now as I continued around the cluster of cars, any notion of clearing a way got lost in the images of mangled lives. The sound of the thing that used to be a toddler thrust pictures into my mind.

     A twenty-something father behind the wheel turning to his wife and saying, “What do you say we take Brenda to the park this afternoon?”

     The young woman in the passenger seat twists around to look at the little girl in the backseat. “I don’t know. She seems kind of sluggish like she might be coming down with a cold or something.”     

     “Well, she’s not the only one,” the man replied. “How are you feeling?”

     The woman answered with a sneeze.

     The banging on the window from inside a white SUV on the other side of the mass of cars brought me back to the moment. I looked over to see a black man with his face pushed against the back window of the car. In the next moment, the face had been pulled back from the glass. It seemed to be focused on something behind me. My heart jumped as the shell slammed its head back into the window. Once again, the face pressed into the glass, but this time a smear of blood showed itself. The shell slid its face around the back window of the car until nearly all of the glass became coated with blood. I stood transfixed by the sight. The thing pulled its face back only to slam it back into the glass a moment later. It suddenly dawned on me that my presence might be agitating the shell, but this possibility did not motivate me to move away. On the contrary, I took a couple of steps closer, feeling nothing aside from a sadistic pleasure at the question of whether the shell would continue to slam its head against the glass until its skull cracked.

     I did not have to wonder for long. The black shell pressed its nose into the glass to the point that I thought I heard it crack. Regardless of whether or not the sound was real, the place where the shell’s nose had been had disintegrated into a flattened mass of flesh. This lack of a nose did not cause the shell to hesitate for a second. It drew its face back. The coating of blood meant the glass was no longer transparent. A moment later the shell’s head smacked the glass with a thud. After that, there was nothing more. I did not move for what seemed like fifteen minutes, although it might have been much less time. I waited for another attempt by the shell, but nothing happened. I wondered if the shell had died or merely knocked itself out. 

     Before I pondered the question for long, a groan came from behind me. I spun around to find three shells shuffling toward me from ten or fifteen yards away. The condition of the black shell in the car was no longer a concern. Instead, I found myself sprinting back to the campervan. Fortunately, the trio of shells did not include any fast movers. I got back to the van and inside before they had changed directions.

     Clearly, my forward progress had been blocked and getting back to the store called for an alternate route. I spun the van around and headed away from the nose less black shell and the small thing in the car seat. I would have liked to have had a better idea of the way back to the store, but for now I was satisfied with simply moving.

     I realized how strange it seemed that I had spent so much time in this area around the newspaper building, but it now appeared completely unfamiliar to me. Truthfully, I had never truly looked at it, never taken notice of the details. Such disregard for specifics certainly did not suit a journalist. I suppose that familiarity not only bred contempt but disinterest as well. The consequence of that disinterest had now come back to me. I turned left, which I believed to be the direction of the store.

     The street before me was narrow and lined with shabby store fronts. I saw a couple of shells squatting over the remains of what had probably been a dog. They seemed to be uninterested in me. I felt slightly irritated that between a dog’s carcass and me, the shells preferred the dog. No accounting for taste.

     Such a bizarre thinking process made me realize that ever since I had been away from Christina, Taylor, and Kat, my thoughts had become twisted. The reason for this became immediately clear. When I was with the others, they gave me a reason for going on, a sense of purpose. I needed to protect them. Everything I did had to be directed toward keeping them safe. Even in a world as crazy as this, having a sense of purpose proved crucial. This was the only thing that made continuing to breathe worth the effort. I had never been a high achiever. In fact, I’d chuckled at those people so driven that they spent every free moment seeking ways by which to succeed. Their constant focus on the future meant that they never allowed themselves time to enjoy the present.

     Ironically, in this world, where the present might be all that we had, I had the task of protecting the future in the form of young people. With such a clear purpose, I had no time to get distracted by meditations on the absurdities of the situation. That was what I needed to keep in mind, focus on the purpose of my action without getting distracted by the surrounding events. Of course, when the surrounding events included dead people moving around, being a little distracted seemed excusable. However, if I hoped to get back to the others, I could not afford to be getting distracted.

     With this in mind, I focused on driving.

     As  soon as the engine turned over, the shells turned their attention in my direction. They did not immediately move. It seemed as though it took their brains a few seconds before the idea of something moving registered and a reaction could be made. The shells had simply stood and then begun moving toward me as I shifted the car into reverse. Not being used to backing up using only side mirrors, I started slowly and carefully. 

     Things changed when I glanced through the windshield to see the shells now moving quickly toward the van. I pressed down on the gas pedal and was almost immediately shaken by a bang of hitting something. The repeated slapping on the side of the van followed. Out of the passenger window, I saw numerous shells moving towards me from surrounding buildings. A glance out my window revealed the same thing.

     Surprisingly, a calm filled me as a single idea screamed through my brain: If I do not get out of here right now, I never will.

     My foot slammed the accelerator to the floor. It took a second for the van to react before it sprang backward through the mob of shells. The slapping stopped only to be replaced by a series of thuds that rocked the campervan. Once beyond the shells, I spun the wheel to the left and nearly succeeded in tipping the van onto its side. Somehow all four wheels stayed on the ground, and I headed away from the crowd of shells.

     I watched in the side mirror as the shells got smaller. Just as I started to feel better, I looked forward to see more shells gathering. One at a time, the things posed no problem, but a group of them could stop me dead. I smiled at the bad pun.

     Obviously, the only way the van would be able to make it down the street and back to the store was by breaking this large group in smaller groups. I stopped the van in the middle of the street staring at the shells and considering how to break up the group. It did not take long for the answer.

     As I had noted long ago, some of the shells were relatively fast, while others simply shuffled along. The distinction seemed to depend on the amount of time since the shell had turned. Of course, the reason was not important. It only mattered because the difference in speed meant as the shells approached me, the group gradually became less compact.

     A twisted and completely inappropriate grin curled my lips. I watched and waited. My foot trembled a few inches above the gas pedal.

     The faster shells had reached the front of the campervan and begun slapping the hood. A short, muscular shell in a police uniform did its best to climb on to the bumper and up on the hood. The way it kept slipping off and then trying again was almost comical and certainly would have been funny under different circumstances. Now, not so much.

     I saw the slower shells moving forward at various distances from the van. My foot stopped trembling and stomped on the gas pedal. The shell in the police uniform had just managed to regain its position atop the bumper as the van lunged ahead. The shell spilled over the hood and groped blindly until it grasped the windshield wiper in front of me.

     I wondered if the shell had any sort of satisfaction at having achieved this goal. A moment later, the thing raised its head. I looked into a pair of blank, washed-out blue eyes and knew that it had neither satisfaction nor any other emotion.

     I swerved in an attempt to throw the thing off without success. The pale face of the shell revealed that it had been a younger man. Now it had become simply a thing on my windshield like a bug splattered there on a long drive through the country. In the same manner as I would to get rid of an insect, I turned on the windshield wipers and even sprayed the cleaner fluid as the speed of the van increased. The soapy liquid squirted against its wrist and sent it all around. The shell’s face became wet as did the wiper and hood. It appeared unsure of how to react to this change in conditions. A moment later, I made another sharp turn, and the shell’s fingers slipped off of the wiper. Its arms flailed in the air, but the shell’s expression did not change as it slid from the hood.