The House of Daniel (32 page)

“Come on, you guys,” the usher said. “This way—and hustle, if you want to get away with a whole skin.”

“What's going on, anyway?” Half a dozen people must have asked him the same thing at the same time. I oughta know—I was one of 'em. We didn't all use the same words, but it was the same question no matter who asked it, or how.

As we went down into a dugout, he said, “Maybe you should grab bats. I don't know if it'll help, but it won't hurt. What I hear is, all the zombies in town, and especially the ones from the stockyards, they've gone squirrelly. Wild. Outta control. Whatever you wanna call it. They're killing anybody alive they can get their mitts on.”

I happened to be right by the bat rack. I grabbed me a Louisville Slugger. You bet I did. It was heavier than the one I hit with—probably belonged to Harv or Wes. Even while I grabbed it, I wondered how much good it could do. Zombies are already dead. If you hit one with a baseball bat … Well, so what?

I grabbed it, anyhow. Like the usher said, it couldn't hurt. So did the other players, from the House of Daniel and from the Pittsburgh Crawdads. You felt better with something like that in your hand. It was made for hitting things. And it sounded as though
things
were running loose. No—running wild.

Somewhere not far enough away, a machine gun started banging away. I'd never heard one before, but I knew what it was. It couldn't very well've been anything else.

“Do Jesus!” one of the Crawdads said. “That ain't gonna settle no zombies. They's already too dead to care if they gits shot.” It was the same thought I'd had when I was taking hold of the baseball bat. If machine guns wouldn't stop zombies … In that case, we were all in a lot of trouble.

They wouldn't. And we were.

The will-o'-the-wisp gave us just enough light to see by as the usher led us down the tunnel and through our dressing room. Somebody—I think it was Carpetbag Booker, but it could have been one of the other colored fellas—said, “How'd them zombies go wild like that? They ain't supposed to be able to do nothin' but what their massas tells 'em, and not all that much even then.”

“What somebody told me was, vampires been whispering poison in their ears,” the usher said. “They want to see that red flag flyin' here like it does in Russia.”

It made some kind of sense, anyhow. Vampires weren't dead like zombies, or weren't as dead as zombies, but they weren't exactly alive, either. If anybody or anything could get through to a zombie, a vampire could, or might be able to. That was how it looked to me, anyway.

Most of the time, zombies didn't want anything. Not to want anything any more was the whole point to becoming a zombie in the first place. Vampires, though … Vampires wanted blood. Everybody knew that. And if they could somehow get zombies to spill blood in rivers, we might have a mess something like the kind of mess Denver had right now.

When we got out of the clubhouse and out of the ballpark, the noise was a lot louder, a lot scareder, and a lot scarier. And it wasn't pitch-dark out there now. Here and there in the distance, fires were burning—I mean burning out of control. It wasn't enough light to navigate by, but it was there, and it kept on getting brighter. I smelled smoke, too.

Our bus sat only a few steps from the door we'd come out of. Harv said, “You Crawdads, you can pile in there along with us. It'll be jammed, yeah, but you'll have some iron between you and whtever's going on out here.”

“Thank you, suh. We is much obliged to you,” Quail Jennings said. And both teams got on. We had three on a seat, not two. We had guys standing in the aisle. We didn't have any oil on us, the way sardines do in their tin. But we all made it aboard.

Harv started up the engine and turned on the headlamps. By then, my eyes had got used to the dark. The beams stabbed out like spears. The bus grunted and groaned more than usual because it was carrying so much extra weight, but it went when Harv put it in gear. Slow and careful, he pulled out onto Broadway.

He needed to be slow and careful, on account of people leaving Merchants Park were going across the big wide street as quick as they could. Other cars coming by almost knocked them over. Everybody in the cars was honking his horn as hard as he could.

Harv drove north past a big Montgomery Ward's store next to the ballpark. That was the direction of our boarding house, and of the fleabag hotel in the colored part of town where the Crawdads were staying. We were trying to make headway against the tide, though. That was also the direction the riots were spreading from.

People came driving down Broadway like maniacs. They were coming south on both sides of the street. It made going north, well, interesting. Exciting, too. Harv learned on his horn. My thought was that, if folks coming the other way couldn't see our big old bus, they weren't likely to hear it, either. I just thought it, though. I didn't say anything. I might've been wrong. Even if I was right, honking wouldn't hurt anything.

People came running down Broadway, too, on the sidewalk and in the middle of the street. Some of them were bleeding. Some had their clothes torn off. We saw all this in bits and pieces, as they got in the way of somebody's headlamps or as they ran past some house or shop that was on fire.

“I hope the ballpark doesn't burn down,” Eddie said. “It's all wood—the stands, the fences, everything.”

He was jammed onto the seat behind the one where I was practically sitting on a Crawdad's lap—or maybe the colored guy was practically sitting on mine. “Thanks a lot,” I told him. “Now I've got something else to worry about.”

Up ahead of us, a fire engine raced around a corner. It had its headlights on and its red light going, and its siren wailed like a lost soul. The guy in the Model A trying to get away from the zombies broadsided it even so. He was going way too fast to stop. I don't think he even had a chance to hit the brakes.

It was an awful crash. Pieces of metal and glass flew off the Ford and the fire engine and smashed and cut people on the street. Another car ran over one of the Model A's wheels. It went out of control, bounced up onto the sidewalk, and slammed into a telephone pole. Three or four people flew out of the car. They lay there thrashing. They might even have been lucky, because the car started burning like nobody's business.

Some of the firemen got knocked off their engine, too, when the Model A hit it. Harv pulled the bus over to the curb and stopped. “Come on,” he said. “We have to help those people. It's the only Christian thing to do.”

Right then, I wouldn't have been too disappointed if he hadn't been such a good Christian. But when the bus's door wheezed open, I jumped out with everybody else. I wasn't brave enough to stay behind when other people didn't. The bat in my hand felt as though it would do as much good as a fly swatter against a boa constrictor.

We were trotting toward the wrecks—and trying not to get run over ourselves—when I saw my first for-sure rioting zombie. He—no, she—wore shapeless, colorless coveralls, the cheapest kind of stuff you could still call clothes. She wasn't moving slow and stupid, the way zombies are supposed to do. Oh, no. Oh, Lord, no! She sprang on one of the people thrown from that car that hit the pole and started tearing and biting at him. He'd been groaning. Now he shrieked.

“C'mon!” Harv yelled, and ran toward her, waving his baseball bat. “Like I said before, remember the fourth man in the fiery furnace.”

He had faith. Me, all I had was not wanting to look yellow to the guys on my team and to the Crawdads. That was enough to make me follow him. Go ahead, call me a fool. I sure was calling myself one.

The zombie looked up from what she was doing. Her face was all bloody from the nose down, but I knew that wasn't her blood. I don't think zombies have any or use any or however you want to put it. The fire from the burning car blazed out of her eyes. I know people's eyes don't shine like that. She wasn't a person. She was a zombie.

She yowled. I'd never heard a zombie make a noise before. I hoped I never would again, but I wasn't so lucky as that. Then she charged us.

Harv swung on her first. If he'd hit a baseball with that swing, he would've bombed it out of the park. He rearranged her face pretty good and knocked her back on her heels. But that's all he did. How could he kill her? She was already dead. She didn't care if she got uglier than she was before. She just cared about ripping him—ripping all of us—to pieces.

We all waded in. Some of us got scratched and cut a bit, but she couldn't bite the way she had before thanks to Harv's home-run swing. We kept at it, swinging from the heels. A zombie with face and arms and legs all broken up may still want to kill you, but it can't move any more to do what it wants.

Then Carpetbag pulled a book of matches out of his hip pocket. The zombie knew what they were. She yowled some more with that ruined mouth. Carpetbag struck a match and touched it to her.

She burned. She burned like you wouldn't think flesh and bone
could
burn, so we all had to hop back to keep from catching fire ourselves. I suppose zombies aren't exactly flesh and bone any more. Whatever they are, they're fire's friends.

“Now we know how to kill 'em—well, to end 'em,” I said.

Carpetbag Booker whistled between his teeth: a low, flat note. “My mama learned me that zombies'd burn when I was jus' a chile,” he said, wonder in his voice. “I ain't thought about that for years an' years, but I ain't never forgot it, neither.”

“Good,” Wes said. “Good if we can make 'em hold still to get lit up, anyhow.”

“We'll worry about that later,” Harv broke in. “We got out to help these folks, remember?”

Well, we did what we could. Harv and Wes knew as much about first aid as any ballplayer is likely to. They were the ones who tended sprains and sore arms and the like. They could bandage cuts and even splint up a fireman's busted ankle and a woman's broken arm. They couldn't do anything for the poor son of a gun who was gunning the Model A when it rammed the fire engine. He'd gone straight through the windshield and busted his neck on the engine's red-painted iron side.

Some of the Crawdads gave them a hand. The rest of us stood guard with our bats. If the zombies came at us one at a time, we could mob them and end them before they hurt us bad. And we did end a couple like that.

But then a whole wave of people—live people, human people—rolled down on us. “Run for your lives, you dummies!” a man shouted as he ran. “They're right behind us!”

And they were. I don't know how many zombies there were. Probably not so many as I imagined I was seeing then. The only thing I'm sure of is, there were too many of 'em for us to deal with 'em the way we had been. And if we couldn't deal with 'em like that, they were gonna deal with us instead.

“Harv!” Fidgety Frank called. “Harv, we've got to get out of here right this minute. If we don't, we're gonna end up zombie food.”

“Can't leave these folks here, or else they will,” Harv answered.

“Put 'em on the bus, then,” Frank said. “We'll do it some kind of way. We—” He broke off then, because two more zombies were coming at us. Job Gregson broke the leg on one of them, so it could only crawl. Carpetbag lit it up. Half a dozen of us smashed the other one down before it could do us much harm. But more and more of the horrible things were running toward us.

Some kind of way
is about how we did it. I'd thought we were crowded before, with Crawdads and us on the bus. It was way worse now. If any zombies had got on, we couldn't've fought 'em off, on account of we couldn't have raised our arms to swing a bat.

Harv made a U-turn on Broadway. He saw he couldn't keep going north. Whatever happened at our boarding house was gonna happen without us. Same with the Crawdads' hotel. We'd sort all that stuff out later, if we stayed alive long enough to do it.

We did make better headway going south. Now we were in the flow, not trying to buck it. Harv blared away with the horn, clearing people on foot out of the bus's path. Sometimes they'd move aside in a hurry. Sometimes they wouldn't, and he'd come about
that
close to running them down.

And then he let out a whoop. I was standing close enough to the front to let me sorta see out the windshield. Those two shapes ahead of us weren't people. They weren't live people, I mean. They were zombies, out to turn live people into dead ones.

“Prepare to ram!” Harv sang out. He might have been at the wheel of a battle cruiser, not a semipro ballclub's bus. I just had time to grab the seat next to me before he hit those zombies. They went flying. I don't suppose he killed them or ended them or whatever you want to call it. They didn't catch on fire or anything. But they got pretty well smashed up. No matter how much they might want to go on killing live people after that, they weren't going to be able to go anywhere to do it.

After a mile or so, he turned off of Broadway. I saw why a second later—there was a hospital down the side street he turned on to. Lanterns and flashlights and wills-o'-the-wisp lit it after a fashion. Outside the building stood cops and ordinary folks. Some had pistols, some carried rifles, and one guy cradled a Tommy gun. They wouldn't kill zombies the way they would with ordinary people. Break arms or legs and you'd do some good, though.

Out the window, Harv called to them: “We got hurt people we need to drop off!”

I wonder how close he came to getting shot. A long-haired, bearded fella in a baseball suit—Lord, he was still wearing his cap—driving a bus with some brand new dents in the front end? They might've figured him for a zombie … or they might have started banging away without any figuring at all. Easy to be jumpy right then, mighty easy.

But they held fire. A burly cop with a sergeant's stripes on his sleeve came up. He looked us over, a revolver in his hand. Then he said, “You guys were in the
Post
tournament. I seen you play once.”