Vin turned off the TV. “We’ve all seen this, right? No sense it making Emily relive it.”
Emily buried her head in Vin’s thigh.
Everyone was silent.
“We could turn on triple N,” Alexander said. Triple N was the Neutral News Network. “See what’s happening in Atlanta.”
Vin turned the TV back on. The stoic anchors just stared into the camera.
Nobody wanted to relive this, Alexander thought.
Vin flipped the channels: an infomercial selling exercise equipment; an old Super Bowl, the Denver Broncos leading the Carolina Panthers; a veterinary hospital show; The Golden Girls; Seinfeld; M*A*S*H; The Andy Griffith Show.
“This is good, right?” Janice asked. “These stations haven’t been overrun.”
Alexander didn’t have the heart to tell her these channels operated on auto-pilot for the most part.
Then there was a green screen, and at the top right was a display that said this was channel 643, NNN.
Atlanta, it seemed, had gone dark.
Chapter Thirteen
Day Zero
They were ghostly white, they all had ugly sores, and there were hundreds of them. What did Kevin say about the dead coming back?
Marty recognized one of them—Margaret, a cashier from the market. She was such a cute young thing, or had been. Now she had a misshapen skull with blood dripping down her mouth and onto her clothes.
Was it really Margaret?
As he watched the zombies—he couldn’t believe he called them that—walk by the back of his house on the four-lane road, he remembered they were impervious to the police’s weapons.
Maybe a shotgun would fare better? His hands shook as he searched through his key ring to find the one for the gun cabinet.
He found the key and hurried to what would normally be a coat closet but instead housed the cabinet. He opened the closet door, then the cabinet’s steel doors, grabbing the shotgun he’d bought a few years earlier when he upgraded from his double-barrel. It was a Remington M-870 Police Magnum, a 12-gauge slide action with an extended magazine tube. He grabbed the ammunition box of shells and opened it, accidentally spilling the contents onto the floor of the cabinet.
Cursing himself, he bent over to pick them up and stuffed a bunch into his pants pockets. He picked up more and started the slow process of loading the gun one shell at a time into the tube.
He pumped the slide action and chambered a shell, replacing it with one more. Now he had seven rounds.
He got down on the floor and kneeled, peering over the window sash. It appeared the zombies had not noticed him yet. He went to the front of the house and four approached his house from down the street. They were large albino men, all bald but one with enormous beards.
They spotted him.
He opened the door, shotgun at the ready, and stepped onto the porch. The zombies were running up to him now, about thirty yards away and closing fast. The wind carried their stench.
He fired once and missed and almost lost his balance as he wasn’t accustomed to the recoil. He pumped the slide action and fired again, better braced for the kickback, hitting one from twenty yards in the chest.
It slowed down but didn’t stop.
Maybe if he got closer, the shotgun could kill them. How could they survive a massive, direct hit to the heart? Or the brain?
He pumped again and walked steadily toward them, off the porch and onto the lawn. He fired and missed, then pumped and fired and dropped that one, this time in the head, exploding blood and hair into the air, leaving a crater where its left ear and part of its skull had been.
Someone screamed behind him. Amanda’s scream. He turned around to see Amanda in the doorway.
“Daddy!” she cried, clearly scared for him.
Oh, shit. When did they leave the basement? Why?
The distraction was enough to give the zombies the advantage, and by the time his gun was ready, two of the zombies had run around him toward the doorway. Amanda screamed again. The other zombie that remained upright closed so fast that Marty had no time to go after his daughter. He fired at the zombie just before it was about to overtake him; its skull exploded just above the bridge of the nose, and it dropped onto the driveway. Karen’s scream replaced Amanda’s. Marty turned in horror as a zombie bashed the head of his little girl against the corner of one of the concrete steps, her mother a mere two steps behind the gruesome scene.
The other zombie crossed the threshold of the door and propelled Karen back into the house. Tears streaming down his face, Marty aimed into the back of the skull and dropped the zombie attacking his sweet little girl. He stepped over Amanda and the zombie—both covered in blood, bone, and brains—into the house. The zombie was smashing his wife’s head into the hardwood floor. Marty aimed and dropped that zombie also. He thought that was his last chambered round, but he wasn’t entirely sure.
With his free hand, he pulled the zombie off of his wife and was about to check her for a pulse when he heard rapid footsteps behind him.
Hadn’t he dropped all of them? Maybe more were coming!
Without even taking the time to look back, he got up and ran to the basement door. He opened it and fled inside, slamming the door on a zombie’s arm.
Marty turned,
