Metahumans vs the Undead: A Superhero vs Zombie Anthology (13 page)

Shifting his view to the street, Missouri saw a dozen more of them, shuffling and creeping, some dragging lame feet, a few bloodied, all unmistakably dead. Turning to the other end of the street, he spied eight more. Among these, he recognized George
Pawelczyk
, his mailman. Even on a good day George walked with a stubborn limp, but now he stumbled along, nearly falling with every step, and left a trail of first class letters and blood drops behind him.

Into the radio: “Hang tight,
kidderoo
. I’ll be right over.”

Pivoting, Missouri made his way to the foyer, moving as fast as he could, prodding out with the tennis balls at the end of his walker’s front legs and then pulling himself close to the bars. He was out of breath by the time he plucked his coat off the hallway rack but he didn’t pause, not for a moment. He headed into his garage.

He’d given up his license in ’95 but not his car. The Fury waited like an obedient dog. She was sleek and black and beautiful, with red rear fins and twin chrome exhaust pipes giving her the look of an exotic, mechanized marine mammal. On many nights, thieves and murderers had fled the scenes of their crimes when her four white-hot headlights focused in on them like converging spotlights. She’d been upgraded several times over the years, body shape changing with the times, but always a decade ahead, her V-8 swapped out for a hemi, then for an experimental nuclear-capacitor-driven engine. The Fury was royalty among cars.

Sliding behind the wheel, Missouri breathed in. Her leather upholstery had aged into a sweet, rustic bouquet. Reaching up, he flipped over the sun visor and let the keys fall into the palm of his hand. Sliding the key into the ignition, he held his breath. The sound of her engine roaring to life always brought a wild, primal thrill. He turned the key.

The Fury’s engine whined, a weak and sniveling sound, coughed twice, and died.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

But Missouri
was
.

Huffing, he nudged the door open, swung himself out, and pulled himself up to his walker. Straining, he reached back into the Fury and snatched the remote control off the dash. Slamming the door, he worked his way up to the grill and stood in front of the double-wide garage door. He thumbed the remote’s button and stood up straight.

The garage door climbed, revealing the street beyond. The dead, roaming in small clusters of three or four, turned toward the whine of the garage door’s motor. Their slack faces remained expressionless, but something in their empty stares did change
—
lazy eyes hardening, pupils focusing.

Leveraging the walker, Missouri took a step out onto the short driveway. He flinched as the loud crack of a shotgun blast sounded from some corner of the housing development’s maze. He’d never carried a gun, not even when he’d crawled up that French beach under heavy fire; not when he’d invaded the bunkers under Berlin in the last days of the European fight; not when he’d crossed into Red Russia to sabotage the death ray before Khrushchev could ferry it to Cuba. All of the new guys in his former line of work carried guns nowadays. He wondered if any of them really knew what courage was all about.

The zombies lurched forward, their moans taking on an urgent, hungry tone. Missouri calculated his path to Kory’s front door. Each of his strides would bring him a foot and a half closer. The road was twenty-two feet wide. Add in his driveway, Kory’s driveway, and the short length of front porch, and he was looking at twenty-eight steps. The dead were slow, but so was he.

“Let’s race, boys,” he told them.

Missouri heaved the walker forward and hobbled a step, leaned heavily on the handlebars, straightened up, and repeated the process. The zombies stumbled toward him, their own motion a ragged pantomime of his struggles, arms raised, mouths gaping open. He pushed the walker, pulled himself up, pushed, pulled. His heart felt like it was using his breastplate as a gong, each beat pounding his chest, reminding him of the impact of
Maschinengewehr
131 rounds on body armor.

Push. Pull. Push.

They were coming in too fast, he knew. He’d just crossed the road’s broken yellow line. They’d overtake him in less than a minute. It was a depressing thought. Once he’d been the fastest man on the planet, even proved it in a friendly race with The Masked Lightning, but now even dead men could outrun him. That thought started a fire in his head. As the anger spread, warmth bloomed in hands and legs in a way he hadn’t felt for decades.

Pushing away from the walker, he turned to face the approaching threat. Although he felt stronger, it was still a far cry from his prime. Still, it felt incredible to stand on his own with fists curled. Glancing up at Kory’s window, he saw the boy staring down at the street with worried eyes. Missouri cocked a thumb in the air.

The first zombie closed in, arms swinging, fingers curled into talons. Missouri drew back his arm, gritted his teeth, and swung. His fist exploded the walking cadaver’s jaw, sending a shower of teeth down to the asphalt. Reeling from the impact, the dead man staggered back, lost its balance, and fell.

Two more rushed in. The
Fantom
landed simultaneous punches, a reverse breaststroke. Colliding, the zombies’ heads fused together as they fell, conjoined, to the road. Whipping his walker off the ground, Missouri pulled off the tennis balls, spun, and removed the bargaining chips from three zombies. Their severed heads landed in a huddle, nose to nose to nose, mouths still chattering.

More were on the way. Feeling his energy wane, Missouri decided against continuing the fight. He righted the walker and headed for Kory’s front door. The power was draining from his body, legs cramping with arthritis, old muscles straining. Glancing down at his feet, no longer walking but now shuffling, he saw he was still wearing his morning slippers. It had slipped his mind to change footwear. So many things fell through the cracks these days.

One zombie broke away from the others
—
a twisted stick figure in a policeman’s uniform
—
moving faster, lurching forward, back bent. As Missouri crossed the threshold onto Kory’s driveway, the dead cop rushed into his path and grabbed hold of the walker. Pulling, the
Fantom
found the tug-o-war to be a stalemate, neither living man nor deceased able to tear it away from the other. Eyes scanning down the zombie’s body, Missouri saw the cop’s sidearm still rested in its belt holster. It would be easy to reach down, retrieve it, and fire a bullet through the monster’s head.

But he didn’t believe in fixing what wasn’t broken.

Instead, he snatched the cop’s handcuffs, snapped one end around the dead man’s wrist and the other to the walker. Letting go, he watched as the cop tried to shrug off the baggage. Missouri reached out and pushed the handlebars, overturning the zombie into the street. It fought to right itself like an overturned beetle, but tethered to a metal contraption, could not.

Legs wobbling, he shuffled to the porch landing and reached for the guide rail. The zombies had reached the dead cop and were navigating around the fallen, convulsing corpse. Missouri had no time to pause, though his heart and lungs insisted that he should. Pulling himself up the short column of stairs, his arms shook and he felt lightheaded, close to passing out, his knees buckling as he pushed up onto the porch.

His footing failed and he fell, his body slamming against the wooden floor. He heard bones break and felt a wave of nausea and confusion flood his senses. Rolling onto his back, he saw the zombies rush onto the stairs, mere steps away.

Ignoring the pain as best he could, he pushed off the floor with both hands, sat up, and rowed, dragging himself backwards across the porch. A dead woman in a torn kimono cleared the stairs. Missouri reached out for one of Kory’s mother’s potted plants
—
a sickly geranium
—
and, without aiming, hurled it at the zombie. The pottery exploded as it struck her in the head, releasing a cloud of black soil and orange pedals.

Twisting, Missouri forced himself to stand up, his left side from armpit to hipbone in fierce pain, and threw open the screen door. Beyond it, the front door was locked.

That detail had slipped his mind as well.

Climbing over kimono woman, a pair of zombies in blue construction worker’s overalls took the lead and blundered onto the porch. The malicious, bloodthirsty grins on their faces reminded him of the Grimm Brothers, a pair of evil gangsters who used faery tales as the basis for their criminal schemes.

Summoning his remaining strength, Missouri pulled back his hand, curled it into the fist that had sent Bruno Grimm into a four-week coma, and swung at the front door with all his might. He’d pushed into many fortified hideouts this way, reducing six-inch-thick lumber to sawdust, bending galvanized steel, even forcing his way through an extraterrestrial force field.

But not this time.

Every bone in his hand surrendered to the simple sugar pine door, knuckles rupturing, phalanges fracturing. He howled in pain and crumbled to the foot of the door. The screen door rattled as it swung back and bounced against the side of his face.

The
Grimm
Brothers
zombies
approached
with
groping
hands.

Missouri thought of Brendon Best
—
Best Boy
—
the kid he’d taken under his wing as a sidekick so many years ago. Best, never popular with the press
—
who preferred their national heroes to work solo
—
had died at the hands of a mob of Mussolini’s
Blackshirts
. Missouri hadn’t been able to save the boy. The
Fantom
had failed
—
only once, true
—
in such a long career, but it had always haunted him. Maybe he’d see Brendon again soon and could finally deliver the apology he’d rehearsed so often in the bathroom mirror.

sidekick dies
, the headlines ran. He wondered if there would be any headlines to commemorate his own death, or whether there would only be a brief obituary buried next to an advertisement for weight loss pills.

The zombies leaped down, covering him.

The front door opened and he fell inside. The Grimm Brothers came along for the ride, falling atop him as he slid onto wall-to-wall carpeting. A shot sounded, as loud and as sharp as a firecracker exploding by his eardrum, and one of the Brothers’ heads disintegrated into fragments. A moment later, a second shot cleared the remaining zombie of anything he might have on his conscience.

Wiping the wet debris off his face, Missouri heard the front door slam and lock. When his vision cleared, he saw Kory reaching down for him, a hand extended to help him off the floor. In his other hand, Kory held his father’s hunting rifle.

Missouri didn’t take the kid’s hand. Pointing at his side, he said, “It’s no good. Broke some ribs, maybe a vertebra or three.”

“My mom’s car’s in the garage. We can get out of here,” Kory said.

Where before he’d seen a terrified boy, the face that stared down at him now belonged to a brave young man.

“I can’t drive,” he told him.

“No need, I can,” the boy said. “
Y’know
, video games.”

Missouri smiled. “You go. I’ll just slow you down.”

A window broke somewhere in the house. The dead were getting inside. There wasn’t much time. The expression on Kory’s face told him he knew the odds of them both escaping were long, but that he was resolved to stay the course. “You came for me. I realized just now, looking out the window at you on the street, what being a hero is all about. It’s not about superpowers, not about what you can do that others can’t
—
It’s about being willing to do it.”

They stared at each other in silence. More windows broke. The moaning grew louder as the dead invaded the house from all angles.