Couldn’t I have run into any of the assholes I went to school with? Noah thought as he wiped the blade on Hendrick’s pant leg.
His encounters with the dead became more and more frequent the closer he got to the center of town. Noah thought about what he had told Charlie before he left with Alvin, “They’re dying out. You can handle it.” How stupid he had been. This was nowhere near over.
Desperate to get off the street, Noah headed up a dirt road leading to Oakwood Park. The park was deserted, as it had always been even before the outbreak. He and his friends used to spend Saturday nights drinking on top of the “tall hill” that overlooked the JV football team’s practice field. The height afforded them a clear view of the road for times when bored police officers would come looking to bust balls. Whenever that happened, which was rarely, Noah and his friends melted into the surrounding trees until the cruiser hung a U-turn and drove out of sight. Even when the police did spot an underage drinker, the steepness of the tall hill was usually enough to dissuade most cops from giving chase. The ones with too much enthusiasm—usually rookies trying to prove something—would typically sprint about halfway up the hill before turning back to the squad car, wheezing in defeat. The living dead, however, would not be thwarted by fatigue. Noah had seen enough writhing bodies floating face-down in the river to know that the dead didn’t need oxygen—didn’t need to breathe at all.
How was that possible? he wondered. The undead were anaerobic, like cancer cells. Maybe the dead returning was something that happened throughout history whenever life became too abundant. So many ancient civilizations mysteriously deleted from a short meter of history: the Egyptians, the Mayans—hell—the dinosaurs. These sudden disappearances were always theorized as the result of diseases, famine, meteors, etc. But Archaeologists never looked to the dead for a culprit. Even where some cultures were known to have interred their deceased in vaults or heavy sarcophaguses, or had the remains cremated to harmless ash—these practices were always regarded as unique traditions and nothing more. Maybe they were just cultural customs; or, maybe they were precautions.
With the image of a zombie t-rex in mind, Noah climbed the tall hill. When he reached the top, he headed down an overgrown path that cut through the woods. Although nothing crossed his path during the two-mile trek, he occasionally heard movement. The dead were like sloths. They were drawn to the sound of Noah slogging through the undergrowth, but they were so slow that they were always several steps behind.
The trail let out on Irving Hill Drive, about a mile from Alvin’s house. Noah headed downhill, eventually coming to a short, stone bridge running across the Hydraulic Canal.
The Hydraulic Canal was a small waterway dug in the mid-1800s to supply waterpower to the town's many textile mills. In the 1970s, the town connected to a larger hydroelectric power grid several miles away, obviating the need for the canal. It was drained not long after. Since then, it had quietly served as a metaphor for the town’s economy.
Noah could walk through the hydraulic and eventually come up right alongside the Bartlett property—easy—but when he looked over the bridge’s cement balustrade, he discovered half a dozen dead milling about the dry riverbed.
They must have wandered in through a break in the fence and gotten trapped, he thought. Not that they would see it that way. The canal was a no-go, but he could still cut through the backyards alongside it to avoid the roads.
Noah climbed a wooden fence surrounding the yard of a white, split-ranch home. He skirted an in-ground pool filled with fetid water and a body wrapped in a painter’s drop cloth before climbing another fence.
On the far end of the neighboring yard, a man stood with his back to Noah, staring into a toolshed. Noah crept through the tall grass taking care not to give away his presence. As he raised the machete overhead, he paused. He looked the man up and down. There was no blood or wounds on his jeans or denim jacket. Was he alive? Noah wondered. With machete still poised to strike, he snapped the fingers on his free hand. The man slowly turned, and Noah gasped at the steak-knife jammed into his eye-socket. Before a moan could slip between his receded lips, Noah brought the blade down on his head. His body slowly tipped over like a cut tree.
Noah stared at the corpse. Whoever stabbed him was unlucky. Judging by the angle of the knife handle, the blade had slid just beneath his brain. A mere ten degrees would have made a terminal difference.
Something small and dark had slid out of his shirt pocket. Noah bent down and retrieved a Zippo lighter with Rush’s Roll the Bones album cover detailed on the face of the matte black case. He pulled the Marlboros from his pocket and lit a cigarette. Without meaning to, Noah made an unsettling comparison between smoking a cigarette after sex and smoking one after killing the living dead.
“Gross,” he muttered.
Curious, Noah peered inside the shed. He found a lawnmower, gas and oil cans, and gardening tools—nothing of interest to either living or dead, or so he would have thought.
After cutting through several more backyards, Noah finally reached Lake Avenue. As he crossed the street he spotted a few meandering bodies down the road—far enough away to ignore, for the moment. Noah stopped at the end of the Bartlett’s driveway. He unslung his rifle and loaded the magazine to capacity. A machete worked
