Clickers vs Zombies (31 page)

She reached out and touched his cheek. “Thank you, Jim.”

Danny stirred again. Yawning, he sat up and stared at them in confusion. “Are we still in the closet? Have the monster people gone yet?”

“I don’t know, buddy.” Jim tousled his hair. “I’ll go peek and see.”

“Jim…” Tammy reached for him as he stood up.

“Yeah?”

“Be careful.”

“I will. Don’t worry. I’m not going to let anything happen to my two favorite people.”

He opened the closet door and stepped into the darkened bedroom. Then he glanced back at her.

“You be careful, too.”

Tammy grinned, but her expression was puzzled.

“That can be our new thing,” Jim explained. “Instead of stumbling over whether or not it’s appropriate to say ‘I love you,’ we can just say ‘Be careful’.”

Tammy’s smile grew broader. She gave Danny a hug.

“Sounds good to me,” she said. “It means the same thing.”

Palos Verdes, California

Janice could only sit on one of the chairs in Al’s cramped little office downstairs as he listened to the guy relate his story over the ham radio frequency. The guy had identified himself as Stuart, his call letters were WB3SDS and he said he was transmitting from the top floor of an apartment building in downtown Philadelphia. Center City, he called it. “It’s so nice to hear from somebody on the west coast,” he’d said.

“So good to hear from you, too,” Al told him. “So tell me, what’s the situation there?”

“It’s crazy,” Stuart said. “These Clicker things just swarmed out of the river yesterday afternoon and started tearing into people. It was a mad house. We had the police, military people, folks with guns trying to shoot them, but there were so many they just overwhelmed the area. I was up here in my apartment working and—”

“Working?”

“I’m a software engineer,” Stuart said. “I work freelance. Spend most of my time holed up in my apartment working. I keep my radio equipment in my office.”

“Oh,” Al said. “Okay, gotcha.”

“Yeah. So anyway, I’m up here working yesterday and…well, I don’t know when shit started happening for you folks in California, but for us it happened at five o’clock during rush hour. I can see the Delaware River from my apartment and at first all I heard was screaming, then I started hearing sirens. So I look out my window and I see something happening, but it was kinda far away. Couldn’t really make it out that well. So I got my telescope—”

“You have a telescope?”

“Yeah, just a little cheapie one. I use it to look at the Big Dipper mostly. And I can see across town with it. I could see things perfectly yesterday afternoon, it was such a clear day before things spiraled out of control. And let me tell you…the things I saw pouring out of the Delaware…well, it was like something out of one of those old Roger Corman movies.”

“The Clickers?”

“Yeah! The Clickers. A ton of them!” Stuart sounded like he was excited to be reliving it, like this was the singular most important thing he’d ever lived through. “For at least the next hour all I could do was watch these things tear through Center City. I could hear people in the apartments next to me looking out and talking about it. And I saw some pretty awful shit, as you can imagine. People dying…the way these things could just cut you in half with their claws…and their stingers! My God, when they sting you, you fucking
explode!
You have to be careful around them things, Mr. Post. It’s like—”

“I’m quite aware of the toxicity level of their venom, Stuart,” Al said, remembering how the heat of the venom on his latex-gloved hand felt yesterday when he’d examined the specimen from Huntington Beach. He thought about clueing Stuart in that he was a marine biologist, that he was one of the lucky few scientists to get a good close look at the creatures in a laboratory setting, but then decided against it. He wanted to hear this man’s story first.

“Well, then you know how fast it works,” Stuart said. “How it just dissolves everything—bone, tissue, flesh, the works?”

“Yes.” Al glanced back at Janice, who remained seated in his easy chair. She looked disturbed by what she was listening to.

“That shit was happening all over Center City,” Stuart continued. “I was watching people die on the street fifteen floors below me. It was hell on earth. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it.”

“There’s nothing you could’ve done,” Al said. It sounded like Stuart was beginning to become emotionally affected by the carnage he’d witnessed.

“But that isn’t everything,” Stuart said. “A lot of these people, especially the ones that merely got chopped up by their claws…they were killed…but then they started coming back.”

“The zombie epidemic,” Al murmured.

“Is that what they are?” Stuart asked. “Because they aren’t like zombies in those movies like
Night of the Living Dead
. They go after other people and eat them, yeah, but they’re not slow at all. Most of them are really fast. And they seem to think…like they have some sort of intelligence. They talk. Shoot guns. Drive fucking cars.”

“So you’ve had the chance to observe them?” Aside from what Al and Janice had heard on the news, he knew nothing else about what the press had reported on the zombie epidemic.

“Oh, hell yeah! They’re zombies all right. People die, they come back almost instantly. I saw people cut in half by those things’ claws and they were still moving. They couldn’t do much, and it was really gross watching them drag themselves down the street with their guts hanging out, and they should’ve been dead, but they weren’t. What else could you describe them as? They’re fucking zombies!”

“Of course,” Al murmured.

“You seen them where you are?”

“I’ve been holed up in my house ever since things started breaking down,” Al answered. “All I know about the zombies is what I’ve seen on TV.” He didn’t add that he thought his neighbors, George and Ginny and their daughter, had probably turned into the undead yesterday late afternoon. Why they hadn’t lumbered over to his house to try to attack he and Janice, Al didn’t know. He needed more answers from Stuart, something more concrete to base his hypothesis on. “I can hear the sounds of a dying society outside my home office window,” Al continued. “And from what I saw on TV and heard outside, I knew enough to stay inside.”

“And we can’t get through to our son,” Janice said. Her voice was sudden and haunted-sounding from the corner chair.

“Who’s that?” Stuart asked.

“My wife, Janice,” Al answered.

“Hello, Janice,” Stuart said.

“Our son’s in Washington DC,” Janice continued. “He’d just gotten a job with a good law firm there. Do you know if…”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Stuart said, his tone cautious. “DC is facing the same problem every other major city is right now. I did hear that President Genova had been killed.”

“My God…” Janice shook her head sadly. “Have you been in contact with other survivors?”

“Yes. All over.”

A thought occurred to Al. “What about more inland areas? I understand the Clickers are coming ashore all over the world, that coastal cities are facing a double onslaught. I would imagine areas much further inland are only experiencing problems with the zombies.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m hearing, too,” Stuart said. “I’ve been in touch with people in Kansas City, Detroit, Chicago, Denver. I even talked to a retired doctor in Montana. He’s got a large cabin off in the middle of nowhere that runs off a generator. He was telling me he shot a zombie deer that came up onto his property.”

“A zombie deer?”

“Yeah. This virus, or whatever it is that reanimates the dead…it’s affecting wildlife, too.”

Al was overwhelmed at this information. It was one thing to be presented with a previously unknown species from the ocean floor and try to wrap your head around it; it was quite another to be presented with another scientific anomaly in the reanimation of the dead.

“You haven’t seen this phenomenon, have you?” Al asked Stuart. “The animals, I mean?”

“No, I haven’t.” There was a short pause. “Actually, I take that back. I think I have…birds.”

“Birds?”

“Yeah. Last night, around dusk. It was getting dark. Most of the fights were over by then and—”

“Fights?”

“Oh yeah. What the media calls the Clickers? They were fighting with the zombies.”

Once again, Dr. Alfred Post was stunned.

Stuart pressed on. “At first they
weren’t
fighting. At first it was just the Clickers streaming onshore from the Delaware river attacking and killing and eating everybody. Then I started seeing people that were dead come back to life. The zombies, they started attacking and killing live people. You know, people that were either trying to get away on foot or in cars. They were coordinated attacks, too, like they were ganging up on groups of people and it all seemed…I don’t know…strategic, in a way. The Clickers were still streaming out of the river but there were so many of them, they were overpowering the people. Most of the people they killed simply dissolved into this bloody goo. The Clickers, they were eating that.”

“Did people die right away after being stung?” Al asked.

“Not all of them. Some of them were screaming as their flesh bubbled off their bones, then they died of shock, I guess. Those Clickers would start eating them while these poor people were still alive, then they would come back to life. As soon as they started trying to move away, the Clickers would sting them again and the zombies would just start to dissolve again. It was the freakiest thing I ever saw!”

“I bet,” Al said.

“This one guy, he got stung in the leg. His leg just started bubbling and he screamed so loud it was painful to hear. The Clicker that got him, it was small, maybe the size of a large dog. It started eating his leg and the guy died. Maybe ten seconds later, his eyes opened. The creature was still eating him, only this time it had moved up his body and was eating his stomach. It was ripping at his insides with its claws. The zombie tried to take a bite out of the creature but it stung him again in the chest. Zombie couldn’t really bite the thing anyway, they have these hard shells. Anyway, the zombie started falling apart where it got stung, its flesh was just sizzling like acid. And the creature starts eating it and the zombie’s trying to get away now, only it can’t, it just dissolved into this pile of gunk.”

“And the Clicker ate that?”

“Yeah.”

“I assume this was happening all over?”

“It pretty much was,” Stuart admitted. “That’s when the zombies and the Clickers started fighting each other.”

“So they turned on each other?” All the thoughts to the zombie birds were gone. Al was more interested in hearing about these battles between the Clickers and the zombies.

“The zombies turned on the Clickers. In fact, from what I saw it became a coordinated attack. It was almost as if they’d gotten orders from somewhere. You know, like they were all tuned into some greater power.”

“A greater power,” Al mused. This was the first he’d heard anybody float the idea that the zombie catastrophe was not just a random event but something calculated and deadly, designed to wipe out every living thing on earth. “That doesn’t seem to fit in with your virus hypothesis.”

“Maybe not,” Stuart said. “I don’t know how else to describe it. And you want to know something else weird?”

“What?”

“The more I watched what was going on and the more I was coming to those conclusions…that the zombies were acting on orders from some higher power…like maybe they were all possessed by some kind of demon or something…the more I got this weird feeling of déjà vu.”

“Déjà vu?”

“Yeah. Like I’d seen this all before or even witnessed it.”

Al searched his mind for the resemblance to what was going on now to the few post apocalyptic zombie films he’d seen and could find no comparison. “Well, the mind is a funny thing, Stuart. Maybe you just saw a movie where something similar happened and—”

“I know, maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. But I gotta tell you, the entire experience of watching the zombies attack those creatures, that feeling that they were possessed by some kind of demonic or alien entity…it felt like I’d lived that before. In fact, last night I dreamed about it, only in the dream it wasn’t zombies, it was…. well, it was like everybody had gone crazy or had reverted to their most feral, most primitive state and had de-evolved into wild animals and they were just attacking other people. There were no Clickers in this dream, but it was still very similar. I was in my apartment watching it through my telescope and I just
knew
that these wild people were all possessed by this demonic entity that was trying to take over the world. Isn’t that weird?”

“Yeah, it is weird,” Al answered. “But you’ve been living under a lot of stress the past twenty-four hours. The mind tends to play tricks on you like that as a way of dealing with it.”

“Maybe so, but it was real detailed,” Stuart said. “I even remember other details. Like who was president, and what was going on in the world, all kinds of weird stuff.”