What We Left Behind (17 page)

Steve yells, “GUT-TER BALL!”

“Hey, not fair,” David protests. “That’s a strike every day of the week.”

Jane and I laugh.

Steve’s already lining up behind us. He’s got some kind of sports car. I don’t recognize the make, but it’s got a sleek aerodynamic shape and mag wheels.

Bodies line the road, but there are a few stragglers making their way up the pavement.

“Jane, Haze. They’re all yours,” David says. “We’ve gone loud, so no point wasting effort. Cap ’em.”

I grab a box of shells from my backpack and slip them into my pocket.

Jane leans over the roof of a parked car with her gun drawn. I jog across the road with my gun in one hand and my baseball bat in the other. I take up a similar position to Jane, waiting for Zee to get closer.

There are easily a hundred zombies gathered in the bloodstained intersection at the bottom of the hill. They’re confused. Some of them wander after the first Caddie, walking away from us. Others start their way up the street toward us, moving in a mob. Steve releases the handbrake on his sports car. As the car rolls forward, I spot the name Crossfire, and I hope it’s appropriate.

David calls out, saying, “I need a hand back here,” so Steve doesn’t stop to admire his handiwork. He runs back to join David in the parking lot.

The Crossfire screams down the hill. Rather than crushing zombies like the Cadillacs, the coupe cuts them down like daisies, sending dozens of zombies flying across its hood, bouncing off the roof, and sliding from its trunk. The sports car is lighter than the other cars and bounces over the carnage, becoming unstable. Halfway through the intersection, the Crossfire flips on its side and then rolls on its roof, tumbling into the parking lot. Broken glass flies across the road.

“Now that’s a gutter ball!” I call out to Jane. The Crossfire crushes several zombies against a concrete retaining wall before coming to a rest.

The closest zombies begin running up the hill at us. Jane and I are facing roughly a dozen loosely scattered zombies racing up the sidewalk. The main horde is farther back and moving slowly. Like mud sliding into a sinkhole, the zombies on the road clustered together, quickly filling the gaping hole left by the Crossfire.

Jane fires first.

A head jerks backwards and a body slumps to the ground behind a Volvo station wagon. Good shot.

I steady my aim, keeping my arm straight as I lean across the roof of a car. I’m aiming for the center of the neck. The zombie ambling along the pavement toward me is oblivious to what’s about to happen, but one of us has to die. My teachers back at the commune told me I have a tendency to fire high, so I want to compensate and aim for the sternum. Any shot that hits the brain stem or severs the spine will work.

I’ve only ever fired a few rounds before, and although I don’t want to admit it, guns are a little scary. Gently squeezing the trigger unleashes an astonishing amount of violence. I try not to blink as I shoot, but it’s hard not to flinch as my finger tightens on the trigger, knowing an explosion will suddenly propel a small metal slug out the end of the barrel at a hellish velocity.

I focus on the zombie beyond my gun sight. My finger tightens on the trigger, overwhelming the spring within the firing mechanism.

BOOM!

I flinch. I miss.

“Five,” I say, trying to keep calm by counting down my remaining rounds.

Zee runs at me, lunging, snarling. I squeeze the trigger again, yelling, “Four.”

BOOM!

I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to how loud and violent gunfire is in my petite hands, but I got him. I’m not sure where I hit, but Zee collapses and rolls on the ground. I expect him to die instantly, but he doesn’t. He writhes in agony, clawing at his face as though he’s trying to pull off a mask. Dark, black blood stains the concrete. Another zombie leaps over him and I fire again.

BOOM!

“Three.”

His head bounces backwards and he collapses onto the first zombie as it tries to crawl away into the bushes.

A two-ton removal truck rolls into view. Steve climbs out of the cab as the truck begins rolling down the hill. Big wheels make light work of the grass and shrubs growing out of the cracks in the road.

The truck rumbles down the road, accelerating to a breakneck speed before plowing into the zombie horde. Bodies fly outward or are crushed beneath the massive wheels. Like the Cadillac, the truck races through the intersection, steamrolling another pack of zombies before rolling into the distance and colliding with a parked car.

Hundreds of dead and dying zombies line the street for a distance of almost a mile. Mangled, broken bodies lie scattered like the scarlet leaves of autumn. Even from where we are, I can hear the moaning and crying. On one level, it’s distressing to see such misery and suffering, but they would kill us in a heartbeat, and may yet still.

There are two more zombies approaching me on the footpath. They’re walking single file roughly fifteen feet apart. The closest zombie appears to have been hit by one of the cars as he lurches forward with fresh blood dripping from his right leg.

“A little closer,” I mumble to myself, not wanting to waste ammo.

Zee lumbers toward me. He has road rash. Tiny bits of gravel have been embedded in his face. Freshly torn skin peels away from one cheek. His right eye hangs half out of its socket, and he looks dead, but his teeth chatter with the expectation of biting into my soft skin. Faced with this walking corpse, I am ruthless again.

I fire once, twice.

“Two. One.”

Zee falls to his knees. Blood gushes uncontrollably from the side of his neck, and yet his hands still reach out for me, clutching at the air. As he leans forward, the side of his skull falls away and he collapses in a heap. One of my shots has clipped his head, shattering his skull. He slumps to the concrete and his brains slide out onto the grass.

Jane screams for help. She’s being overrun.

I turn and fire across the road at the zombies closing in on her, but I’m such a lousy shot. I don’t know what I hit, only that I didn’t hit Zee in the head.

“I’m out,” I say to no one other than myself. There’s one more zombie climbing the hill toward me, but Jane is facing roughly a dozen of the rabid creatures.

David joins her.

Unlike us girls, who steady our aim by leaning against car doors or over car roofs as we fire, David marches forward as he shoots. He strides down the hill, reducing the distance as he culls the herd. I’m not sure how many shots he fires, but he empties one clip, reloads in an instant, and then empties another. Shots resound in rapid succession and zombies fall behind the parked cars until David is the only one standing.

Knowing his clips hold eighteen or nineteen rounds each, I figure he killed one zombie for every three or four shots, but the speed with which he felled them was impressive. And I’m reminded of his point about doing whatever it takes to survive the next thirty seconds. Here am I, trying to conserve ammo, when I should be blasting Zee to hell. What good’s spare ammo if you get bitten?

It takes me around twenty seconds to reload. I fumble with the box of shells in my pocket, but Zee is too close. I’ve hesitated. It’s too late.

I slip my gun into the holster in the small of my back and grab my baseball bat, bracing myself as the last zombie staggers toward me. To my surprise, the side of his head explodes. I turn and look. David has his arm outstretched, holding his Glock perfectly steady. I could hug him.

There are more zombies clambering up the hill, but they’re stragglers and most of them are badly injured, having been clipped by the truck or the cars. The horde is effectively gone.

We’ve won.

Steve rolls up in a black Cadillac. He jumps out and is about to let the Caddy loose when David says, “Hang on, we’re going to need that.”

David pauses for a second. He’s making life and death decisions for us, but I trust him. “Time to consolidate ammo and water. Dump everything else.”

He tips his backpack to one side and the contents sprawl out over the concrete path. Jane slings a canteen over her shoulder and stuffs her pockets with ammo clips. I jog over, pushing the ejector on my pistol and letting the empty shells fall to the concrete before reloading my gun.

“What are you thinking?” Steve asks David. He leaves the car parked in the middle of the road and grabs a box of shells from his pack.

I consolidate my water and top up Steve’s canteen as David continues.

“I’m thinking we’ve got ten minutes. Twenty minutes max before this place is crawling with zombies again. That gunfire is going to bring them in from miles around.”

“So what do we do?” Jane asks. “Time to bug out?”

I say, “I count seventeen zombies staggering up the hill toward us and another three coming in from the rear.”

David says, “I think we go on. We can slip past them. We’ll leave our packs here as bait. The smell will draw them in. We use the car to creep past without leaving a scent trail.”

David is astonishingly calm under pressure.

“Smart,” says Jane.

Steve and David climb into the front seats of the Cadillac while Jane and I get in the back. We both have water canteens slung over our shoulders, resting on our hips.

“Get down,” David says.

Steve’s driving, if driving is the right word. I can hear him frantically pumping the dead foot brake with his boots as we roll down the hill, trying to build up pressure in the brake lines and slow our speed. He’s also working the hand brake and I’m hoping this plan is going to work. If our brakes fail we’re in serious trouble.

David has his seat back reclined so he can lie below the window. Jane and I huddle half in the foot well, half on the rear seats. Steve has slipped as low as he can while still watching where we are going.

“I’m not liking these brakes,” David says as our speed increases.

“There are other ways of stopping,” Steve says, and I feel the car lurch to one side and clip several zombies. Blood splatters across the windshield. The car rides up over the crumpled bodies. As there’s no engine noise, I can hear bones breaking beneath the weight of the vehicle.

The slope levels out and Steve brings us to a halt in the middle of the intersection on top of a pile of dead and dying zombies.

Outside, Zee wanders around in a daze.

“Not good,” David says.

Peering over the door, I can see hundreds, perhaps thousands of zombies stretching along the broad avenue into the distance. We thought we’d killed most of them, but we barely made a dent in their numbers. For now, they’re ignoring us.

A herd of zombies mills around by the mall, but they look confused, unsure what has happened or what their response should be, which is quite surreal. Steve assesses the situation.

“We’re not going to stand a chance in that animal hospital. There are too many of them. They’ll trap us in seconds.”

“So what do we do?” I ask.

“Jane and I will run a diversion. We’ll head down the road making as much goddamn noise as we can to buy you some time in the hospital. You get in and you get out in five minutes, is that understood?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Regardless of whether you find those worm tablets or not, you get in and you get out. You don’t go to ground. You don’t linger. You stay on the move. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you bug out. Follow the waypoints home, and we live to fight another day. Understood?”

“Yes,” Steve replies.

“OK. Go!”

We climb out of the Cadillac, leaving the doors open. The zombies ignore us. They looked dazed, almost bewildered, as though the carnage around us has deeply affected them. Broken bodies and crushed skulls litter the ground. Blood runs in the gutter like rainwater after a storm.

The lone zombie standing on the grass lets out a wail and Zee turns in unison. A chill runs through my body as hundreds of heads turn and stare at us. I’m starting to think my crazy concept of Zee, treating all zombies as one, isn’t too far from the truth.

None of them move. They just stand there, staring us down, watching, waiting for our next step. Of everything I’ve seen in the zombie apocalypse, this is the most terrifying. Hundreds of zombies standing perfectly still for miles, all looking at us. There’s no noise, just the wind swirling through the air.

We step cautiously away from the Cadillac. I step forward slowly, feeling my way with my boots, pushing between the bloody pile of broken arms and smashed legs, searching for concrete to stand on.

Zee watches.

Dark eyes take in our every step with the intensity of a tiger stalking its prey.

“Ready?” David asks from the far side of the Caddie.

“No,” Steve replies, and I know what he means. I don’t think any of us are ready for what we know is about to happen. At this point, our lives are measured in seconds, in little more than the beat of my racing heart.

“Go!” David yells, screaming at the top of his lungs.

David and Jane run away from the Caddie.

Jane stumbles on the rubble, but she stays on her feet. David picks up a brick and hurls it at a store window. A pane of glass shatters, crashing to the ground like thunder.

Zombies scream with excitement.

Jane has her tire iron. She runs along next to a chain-link fence, running the tire iron against the metal and causing an almighty racket.

Zombies swarm out of the mall, running after them. They’re fast, faster than anything I’ve seen before. They leap over cars, slide across hoods, and sprint with their arms pumping like Olympic athletes. Zee moves with the grace of a cheetah descending on a weary antelope.

Steve and I run for the doors of the animal hospital as David fires rapidly at the runners, emptying his magazine into the herd. There are too many of them.

I want to shout at David and Jane, to plead for them to come back because they’re running into a trap, but Steve pulls me on toward the animal hospital.

Over my shoulder, I catch a glimpse of David and Jane turning up a side street. Barely a second later, the horde swarms into the street behind them.

“In and out,” Steve says, as though I need a reminder.