Jubal whirled to see two teenagers-a boy and a girl-nearly upon him. He had forgotten about the broken picture window.
There was no time to pump the Mossberg. Jubal swung the shotgun like a ball bat. He knocked the girl to the ground. He struck the boy in the face, driving the zombie to its knees. Jubal hammered at the creature again and again until the thing’s head was pulped and it lay unmoving. He pumped another shell into the chamber, praying the barrel wasn’t ruined.
The girl was twitching on the?oor as if she were in the throes of an epileptic seizure.
He stood over her and?red the shotgun.
The barrel seemed to be in good shape. The girl’s brain matter was spread around her like an unholy aura.
There was no movement near the picture window, so he turned back to the front door. Some of the creatures must have moved on. Only two remained in the doorway. The larger of the two, Damon’s old friend Red, shoved his way past the cute cashier from the Amoco station. Red held his arms in front of him,?exing his?ngers, seemingly anxious to get a grip on Jubal. The dead man made hooting sounds that sounded like some great ape.
Jubal raised the shotgun to pump in another shell. He was covered in blood and other bits of his former neighbors, and his right arm was screaming at him. The wound on the back of his neck didn’t hurt anymore, but it throbbed in time with his pulse.
He sprayed Red’s head across the room. Bits of blood, bone and brain spattered the walls, dotting the Amoco girl, who hungrily licked the gore off her lips with a long gray tongue.
After he blew the Amoco girl away, he walked to the broken picture window and took a peek outside. In the middle of the street, the zombies had a screaming teenage girl pinned down. Her distressed cries reached a fever pitch when one of the larger zombies tore her arm from its socket with a loud pop. An arc of blood squirted straight up from within the swarming mass of dead. The girl’s screaming was muf?ed, then gone. The fresh glistening blood that had splattered the zombies looked like wet red paint.
There was nothing Jubal could do for the girl now. He wondered if she had been the last living townsperson besides himself. It sure seemed like it. The dead were walking everywhere. Jubal never knew the town had so many people. He’d never seen this many at the monthly town meeting-ever.
Several zombies wandered about in Jubal’s front yard. One was amusing itself by repeatedly skewering its? nger on the long needles of one of Ma’s favorite cacti.
Jubal stepped back into the house and reloaded the Mossbergs. As he worked, he happened to glance up at a shelf on the wall next to the TV. There sat an old picture, one that had been there so long that Jubal had stopped noticing it until now. It was of himself as a child with his mother and father standing proudly behind him. His Dad had his hand on Jubal’s shoulder. Everyone was smiling for the photographer and looking quite happy.
They had been happy.
Jubal took the picture down and removed the photo from its frame.
Rubbing his neck, which had stopped bleeding, he went to the kitchen and put the picture along with some non-perishable food into a sturdy grocery bag. He would have used his backpack, but that was in his bedroom and he wasn’t about to go in there ever again.
The picture reminded him of something he hadn’t thought about in a long time. He went to his mother’s bedroom and opened her closet. Moving aside dresses and blouses, Jubal reached to the back corner and felt the item he had been searching for. The closet smelled of his mother’s perfume and it made him dizzy with memory, so he quickly pulled the item out and slammed the door closed.
In his hands he held his father’s Tango-51 sniper ri?e. He wondered if there was extra ammunition for it in the closet but he couldn’t bring himself to open that door again. Once was enough. He’d keep the memories trapped there. They were of no use to him now.
There was a thud. Something large was moving down the hallway toward the bedroom.
He leaned the ri?e against the bed near the grocery sack and slid the Glock from its holster.
A lone zombie, its face ruined by disease, saw him and lurched toward him. It moaned hungrily.
Jubal shot it in the head.
A gray-green goo streamed against the hallway wall as the thing fell to the?oor.
Jubal listened for more intruders but didn’t hear anything except for the ones outside, voicing their strange mewlings and groans.
He went to the bedroom’s front window.
Zombies wandered the property, blocking his path to the cruiser. One was sitting in the dirt of the front yard, staring into the face of a severed head, mumbling to it. The head didn’t belong to the teenage girl that had been attacked in the street. It was someone else’s.
“Fucking horror movie,” Jubal muttered as he slid the window open.
He poked the Glock out, aiming at the seated zombie. He pulled the trigger and made a hole in its forehead. Toppling over, the zombie lay still as the severed head rolled back and forth in the dirt.
The other zombies looked around, wondering where the shot had come from.
Jubal pulled back into the room so they wouldn’t see him.
After a moment, he glanced out and saw the zombies standing around the one he’d just killed, staring. One of them kicked the severed head into the street.
Jubal shot them in quick succession, with ammunition to spare. Grabbing the sack, and quickly glancing around the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, he exited the house through the open window.
With three guns strapped to his back, the Glock and grocery sack in his hands, Jubal squatted down and moved quickly towards the cruiser. He unlocked the car using the keyless entry. As he swung the door wide, several of the zombies moaned loudly, having?nally taken notice of him.
Jubal shot at the nearest one, but missed. He shoved his equipment and supplies into the passenger seat and slid behind the wheel, slamming the door closed behind him. He turned the car on and it roared to life.
The gas gauge read half. That would get him well out of town and hopefully to a station along the highway.
Something slammed against the driver’s side window. Jubal turned to see Doc Mitchell with his dead face pressed against the glass. Slime oozed from his lips.
Jubal showed the doctor his middle?nger, then stepped on the gas.
Doc Mitchell spun around and fell on his ass in the street as Jubal sped away.
“That’s what you get for being such a lousy fucking doctor.”
The zombies wandering the streets of Serenity proved a worthy obstacle course. When Jubal couldn’t maneuver around them or nudge them aside with the car, he drove straight over them with a satisfying bump. He had to use that tactic sparingly, as long as he needed the car.
As he rounded a corner, he slammed on the brakes.
Previous to this moment, every zombie Jubal had ever seen had either wandered aimlessly or attacked like a rabid animal.
The cruiser faced east. Spanning the road ahead of it was a line of zombies standing at attention. Behind this row was another. And another.
Jubal put the car in reverse as other zombies joined the formation, and as, all at once, they began to move.
Like a dead army.
Jubal turned the car around and sped back down the road, knocking aside any stray zombies in his path.
They were bad enough as feral beasts of the dead, but this new thing seemed even more unnerving. Organized zombies.
It struck him that he was leaving town for good, a town he had loved and hated (but not really). Serenity was his home and he was going to miss it. And he was going to miss all the people who had made it a home. Who had made his life worth living. Ma, Damon, Fiona, Pops Perez and the rest. All gone now. All dead.
Was his life worth living anymore? Was he alone in a world of zombies, or were things okay in Texas or up north? Out east? He wouldn’t know unless he found out for himself. Who was responsible for all this? There were so many questions. And Jubal wanted concrete answers. Not rumors, theories and half-remembered snatches of dreams.
He took a side road west, which led to Highway 285. He knew he couldn’t go north. That way was blockaded,
