Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? (9 page)

A knock at your door. You grab the hockey stick, the splintered end still stained red with the Nazi's blood, and tiptoe to the door. You peer through the peephole. Phew—the Ardle. You open the door.

“Just saw the power went,” he says.

“Yep. Didn't take long, huh.”

“Nope. I've got a solar hookup—keeps the pricks at Con Ed from realizing how much energy I'm drawing for my business. You want to stay by me for a while, you're welcome.”

“Yeah—yeah sure. I'd love to crash on the couch. It'll be about one hundred degrees in here without the AC.”

“No prob, homes.”

So you stay with him. It's like college again. You spend your days smoking pot and playing video games. Weeks go by, each day running into the next. Yeah, it's actually
just
like college. You'd forgotten how quickly time passes when you're high off your ass all the time.

After a month or so, you help him carry his flat screen up onto the roof. You take extension cords from a few abandoned apartments and run cables out through the window. You find two beach chairs in the basement, haul them up there, too.

You spell out
HELP
in empty beer bottles—when you have to go, you piss in them, keeps them from getting blown over by the wind.

The roof is your new home. During the days, the two of you play video games and watch movies. The Ardle's got a BB gun—you alternate between blasting away at pigeons and shooting at the zombies on the street below. The zombies are surprisingly not as fun—the BBs don't register.

It's a cool, breezy afternoon when they come.

You're napping, soaking up the sun, when you hear a loud mechanical howl above you. Your eyes snap open. You're staring up at the belly of a massive military helicopter. It hovers,
kicking shit up all around you—magazine pages flip, an empty Mountain Dew can is thrown off the ledge.

Then a ladder drops.

Rescue has come.

But do you even want it?

A PROPOSITION

“No thanks. That's all you.”

You watch him do his heroin. It's gross, unsettling. So you curl up on the floor, roll your sweatshirt up into a pillow, and close your eyes.

You wake up hungover as fuck. Louis is sprawled out on the bed, needle still in his arm.

You make your way downstairs. The place is trashed. An Angel snores underneath the pool table. Guess that's how it goes after a successful zombie-killing run.

You pass out on the couch and don't wake up until you hear the helicopter. It starts in your dream as an old muscle car, driven by a horrific undead man, chasing you. The engine turns to a roar, and then you snap to, awake.

Most of the gang members are gathered around the monitors behind the bar. You peer over their shoulders and watch. It's a military helicopter—not very heavily armed, looks more like a transport. It lands on the street outside, directly in front of the club. It's a tight fit between the two sides of the street—it takes the pilot two attempts to set down. He finally does, and two soldiers hop out, rifles up.

They give some sort of army hand signal, and a man in a pressed military suit and gray trench coat steps out. He approaches the club, the wind from the slowing blades kicking up his coat so it looks almost like a cape. Standing directly beneath the camera, he gives three hard knocks.

“Whaddya think he wants?” Whiskey says.

“Kid, get the door,” Jones says. “Find out what he wants.”

“Why me?”

“Because I said so.”

Three doors separate the club from the outside world. The first, nothing special. The second, heavy metal. The third, more metal. You unlock all three and walk outside. You look him up and down. He wears a green and beige service uniform. Pins and medals over his left breast. Plenty of stripes, too. Under his right arm is a large manila envelope.

He scans you as well, obviously surprised to see an unshaven kid in a filthy
Point Break
T-shirt open the door.

“Hi,” you say.

“Can I come inside?”

“Who are you?”

“Colonel Troficanto, United States Special Forces.”

“Uh, OK sir, one second.”

“Huh—”

You shut the door. Back inside.

“Colonel something. Special Forces.”

“Well—what's he want?”

“I don't know.”

“You didn't ask?”

“No, sorry, hold on.”

Back through the three doors. “What do you want?”

“I'd like to speak to whoever is in charge here.”

“What about?”

“An opportunity to help your country.”

“One sec.”

“Kid, let me—”

Back inside.

“He says he wants to speak to whoever's in charge and that he's got an opportunity for you to help your country.”

Everyone laughs.

“Fuck we'd want to do something like that for?” one says.

“I don't know,” you say.

Jones stares at you.

“Again?” You sigh.

Jones nods.

Back through the three doors.

“Sir, why would they want to help out their country?”

He doesn't quite know how to answer this one. “Because it's your goddamn country.”

You frown. “I don't think they give a damn.”

“It'll be mutually beneficial, believe me.”

“Alright, I'm not doing this anymore. Come inside.”

You lead him in. Colonel Troficanto stands at the door. “Gentlemen.”

No one returns the greeting.

“Who should I be speaking to?”

“Speak to us all,” Jones responds.

The Colonel frowns, but does. “We've been watching you.”

“What else is new?”

“Not what I mean. To be quite honest—we're impressed. Do you know what's going on in the rest of the world?”

“I can imagine,” Jones says.

“I'll be brief. Four months ago, something went very, very wrong at Mount Sinai Hospital. A virus was released. Yeah, zombies. Right now, Manhattan is the main problem,” the Colonel continues. “It's a complete clusterfuck. We tried a ground assault. Got a lot of my boys dead.”

“Get to the fucking point,” Jones says, lighting a cigarette.

“We'd like your help.”

“Our help.”

“Correct. Like I said—we've been watching you, via satellite. When you go on your little, ahem, runs, you're successful. Very successful. So, we'd like you to clean out some of the, uh,
messier
parts of the city. Soften them up. Then the military can come in and finish the job.”

“And get all the credit,” Whiskey says.

“That's right. I'm not here to offer you a shot at glory.”

You look up at that crest.
when we do right, nobody remembers. when we do wrong, nobody forgets
.

“So why do we do this?”

The Colonel now pulls the manila envelope from under his armpit. Opens the metal tabs and removes another manila envelope. He flips it open.

“Joseph ‘Broadway Joe' DeStefano. Killed two men in a drug-related shootout in Kansas City, 1987.”

He looks up, scans their faces, makes eye contact with Broadway Joe. “Didn't have the beard in this photo.”

Broadway Joe's expression doesn't change.

The Colonel flips the page. “Samuel ‘Wild Bill' Hickock. Rape. Nineteen ninety-four.”

Wild Bill stands up. “Bullshit!”

“Sit down, Bill,” Jones says. Not happy, he does.

“Thomas ‘Tommy Gun' Baker. Assaulting an officer of the law, one count, 1999. Murder in the first, two counts, 2002.”

“Wes ‘Whiskey' Ryan. Operated a methamphetamine lab in southern Georgia. In 2006, it blew up, killing two men, one a United States marshal.”

“And Johnny ‘Jones' Amaru. Murder of a police officer. Nineteen eighty-four.”

Jesus Christ, these are some serious dudes. And this Colonel—well, you hope he doesn't know about that shoplifting charge at T.J. Maxx from middle school…

The Colonel looks around. “Do like we ask, all this goes away.”

It seems simple to you. But many of the guys, especially the old-timers, don't like the idea of, and they say this, “working for the man.”

Tommy's convinced the government won't stand by their promise even if they do complete the job. Some of the Angels resent having to risk their lives to bury crimes some other guys committed two decades ago.

Finally, Jones calls for a show of hands. It comes right down the middle: 17 for yes, 17 for no.

Then Jones turns to you.

“Well,” he says, “what do you think, kid?”

MARCHING FORWARD

You barely have time to think before the shooting starts up again. You press your back against the tail end of a Budget rental truck.

You concentrate on breathing—slowing your pulse rate. Calming yourself. People are rushing about, panicked, mad, and it's getting them dead fast. Some run toward the Army, confused, dying needlessly in some sort of Brooklyn Bridge Pickett's Charge. Others run away from the Army and the M16s, toward the beasts.

You poke your head around the side of the truck and nearly get it shot off. Two bullets whiz by. The young driver of the truck—poor kid was probably moving into his first apartment—is riddled with bullets as he tries to get out. The side mirror pops off, and the kid's shoulder separates from his body. He stumbles back and collapses, smearing a thick line of blood down the side of the truck.

You pull your head back.

Holy. Fuck.

Blood from the kid's body pools around the rear left tire and seeps into your sneakers.

To stay alive, you need to think. One mistake, you're history. And not the good history—not the kind that ends up in a middle school textbook—the bad kind, the forgotten kind.

You peek around the other side of the truck. You don't almost get shot—good start. Squatting down, you make your way along the side of the truck, to the next car. A convertible. The driver and his three passengers—pretty, young girls—are
all riddled with bullets. The arm of the girl in the front seat hangs over the side, blood dripping down to her hand, collecting around a massive diamond ring, and trickling off her fingers. You gently push her dead arm aside and keep moving.

Still low to the ground, you work your way down the bridge, hugging the sides of the cars.

Suddenly a mass of people, twenty or thirty, you can't tell, comes tearing around the side of an SUV up ahead—stampeding right toward you. The Army catches two of them in the back, dropping them. The rest keep coming. You try to get out of the way—no luck. The first guy knocks you aside. The second, a woman, rolls you onto your back. They trample you. You use one hand to cover your face and another to protect the family jewels.

After a few brutal moments the game of doormat ends and you're left bloody and bruised. Since they were running back to the city, the Army seems to have let most of them live. Up ahead, you see the soldiers, guns up, ready to unload on anything coming their way. You slide under the SUV, wipe the blood from your eyes, catch your breath, then slip discreetly out the other side.

You're about two-thirds of the way across the bridge. Only one football field to go. You have no idea what you'll do when,
if
, you make it to the other side—but the United States Army still seems like a better bet than the army of the undead behind you.

You continue your crawl. When the firing begins again, you slide back under the nearest car. When it lets up, you move. It's slow going, but you see no other way around it.