spinning.
“Son of a bitch!”
The engine had died when we smashed into the side of an overturned tanker and Doc frantically turned the key in the ignition. It whined in protest but tried to turn over none-the-less.
“Start damn it start…. ”
For a moment, it caught and the car sputtered to life.
“Hot damn!”
Doc slapped the transmission into reverse and, as he did, the entire car shook like we had suddenly found ourselves in the middle of an earthquake. There was a loud pop from under the hood before the car flooded with the smell of gasoline and died again.
“Shit shit
Through the shattered windshield, I could see a small cluster of corpses about half a mile away, shambling toward the bridge that stood between us and the next off-ramp. From that distance, they looked to be mostly rotters.
“What the fuck happened?” Doc’s normally deep baritone now bordered on a squeal and dark stains had begun to spread around the armpits of his t-shirt.
“Zombie. Jumped off the overpass to try t’ get us when it saw us comin’. We hafta get out of here, Doc. We hafta get out of here now!”
A freshy had burst through the pack of rotters on the bridge, toppling several and leaving others reeling in the wake of its enthusiasm. Though too far away to actually see its eyes, I had no doubt that they were solely focused on our wreck of a car.
“Damn it, Carl, you think I don’t know that? Shit!”
A quick glance over my shoulder caused a chill to settle into my body so completely it was as if I’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen.
“Doc, we’re in it deep my friend.”
The interstate behind us was swarming with the dead we’d already attracted. They were practically shoulder to shoulder, packed so densely that the freshies among them had to claw and climb their way over the top of the throng.
Doc stole a glance and what little color he had left drained from his face. He was silent for a moment as he gnawed repeatedly on his lower lip.
“Well,” he finally said, “there’s definitely no turning back.”
Ahead of us, more and more corpses joined the slow march toward the bridge. Two more freshies were fighting their way through and the original one had closed half the distance between them and us.
“Just a matter of minutes, now.”
I pulled a cigarette from the crumpled pack in my pocket and studied it for a moment. I looked at the little tears in the paper, the dark stains where it had gotten wet and then been allowed to dry again. Doc may have thought I was trying to play it cool, but in reality I was wondering if my hands would stop shaking long enough for me to actually light the damn thing.
“These things will kill ya, Doc. Be glad you never took up the habit.”
“Son of a bitch, that bastard’s still kickin’.”
I rose up in my seat a little so I could look out the window at whatever it was Doc had noticed.
“I’ll be damned…. ”
The freshy that had leaped from the overpass in the throes of homicidal zeal looked as if it had been attacked with sledgehammers. Jagged shards of bone poked through just about every part of its body; both legs were splayed out in angles never meant for the human form to experience and the left side of its face looked as if it had caved in. But, even so, it was wiggling its way across the asphalt, inching closer and closer to the side of the car.
“Crazy fuckin’ zombies …”
I lit the cigarette and took a long, slow drag. The smoke scratched my throat and tasted like oven-baked shit, but I would be damned if I was going to die without one final puff.
CHAPTER EIGHT: JOSIE
But I didn’t die; not then, not there. As I swung the tire iron and squinted into the brightness of the doorway, a deep voice echoed through the silo.
“Whoa, missy, easy there. We’re alive… we’re living!”
The figure looming before me was still nothing more than a blurry silhouette but as I tried to blink the stinging away I began to realize that it was holding both hands in front of it, palms outward. For a moment I thought of a mime in the beginning stages of a Trapped In A Box routine and my mind rapidly filled in the details: black and white striped shirt, a bowler hat, face painted as white as the gloves he held up before him. And I began to laugh.
In fact, I began to laugh so hard that the tire iron thumped to the ground as I hugged my stomach with both arms. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and I tried to speak but every sound that began to pass through my lips seemed to become the most hysterical thing I’d ever heard.
At some point, I dropped to my knees and what had started as a laugh had somehow morphed into crying; at that moment, kneeling inside an abandoned silo in the middle of snow-blanketed fields that stretched as far as they eye could see, it really hit me:
Everything I had ever loved, everything that had comprised the brush strokes in my portrait of reality… a wave of mutilation had crashed down upon it all, leaving nothing but ruined reminders and artifacts amid the flotsam of rotting flesh. The world had changed in every conceivable way and there was no going back now.
Through a shimmering veil of tears, I saw the silhouette rush forward. He dropped to his knees beside me and gently pulled my face into the hollow of his shoulder; the jacket he wore was scratchy and smelled like stale sweat with an undercurrent of decay, perhaps from the splotches of blood that had dried dark against the khaki colored material. But he was alive, he was warm, he was like me….
He spoke in soft tones as his hand stroked my hair, whispering in a way that reminded me of my mother as she sat day after day in the hospital, watching my father waste away. Despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, everything was going to be okay, it would all work out in the end: we just had to be strong and believe.
Later, I would learn that the man’s name was Doc. The group he was traveling with had noticed a couple of zombies, what they called
“We figured if they were that interested in what was inside, it had to be survivors.”
There were four people in their group, so dispatching the rotters wasn’t too difficult for them: it only took a few blows to the head with an ax while the others created a diversion.
By the time Doc led me out of the silo, my eyes had adjusted to the glare of sunlight on snow. Two people were standing off to the side, bundled so tightly in layers of clothing that it was impossible to tell if they were men or women and they appeared to be talking. Another man, however, was squatting next to one of the bodies that had fallen. If he smelled the stench wafting from the blackened flesh of the corpse, he gave no sign; he simply continued to plunge his hands into the pockets of the rotter, turning them out onto the ground.
“What’s he doing?” I whispered to Doc.
The man looked up at me and I was struck by what I saw in his eyes. I had always read about people who have a haunted look to them and had always thought I understood. But mere words can never do justice to something that so thoroughly penetrates the soul. It was almost as time and space had no meaning in those brown irises: he was an old man with a lifetime of sorrow and regret; he was a young boy coping with his first experience with death; he was every age in between… every pang, every ounce of remorse and pain, all trapped behind those eyes.
“What’s it look like I’m doing? I’m goin’ through its pockets.”
