Swarm (Dead Ends) (3 page)

I didn’t plan on letting him stay that way for long. I swung wildly, underestimating my own strength, and forcefully connected with his left shoulder sending him wavering a bit to his right. The second swing didn’t have as much on it as my ailing left shoulder was beginning to put up a fight. But it connected with his right temple and collapsed his body to the ground like an elk taken down with a perfectly placed shot to the heart. I stood over him, still holding the bumper like a baseball bat, admiring the corpse like a trophy with a look in my eyes that I’m certain has never been there before.

Just when I thought I’d won, he came roaring back to life, grabbing my left ankle with that same unwavering strength that had almost done me in earlier. I jerked my ankle away and began beating him over and over again until the mirrored finish came away with chunks of skin, hair, and a thick reddish-black substance with the viscosity of a diner milkshake. With each successful blow I became more like an animal and less like a human. My confidence grew as I quickly transitioned from hapless prey to ruthless predator. I stopped only when there was no more head to pummel. I let out a primal scream and quickly collapsed backwards, falling into the side of my car with enough force to dent it as I slid to the ground in total exhaustion. I sat there drawing in quick shallow breaths for what seemed like an hour before I was able to move.

The pain was everywhere which oddly made it easier to handle. I’d already forgotten what it was like to feel nothing and strangely was in no hurry to find out again. Pain got me higher than any drug I’d ever taken. If I survived this somehow, maybe I’d have to think about marrying a dominatrix.

I forced myself to stand up again, painfully slithering my way up the side of the car as the thought crossed my mind for the first time that there could be others out there like him. I scanned the area, looking for signs of movement but could see none. Everything was still eerily quiet. Just as I noticed that my senses had returned to normal, I keeled over and started puking out everything I’d eaten in the last 24 hours. The reality of what happened was beginning to sink in and it was just too much to handle. Toeing the line between survival and death had frayed my nerves something fierce. I crawled back into my car and opened the glove box to find my salvation: A bottle of water, my emergency Vicodin stash, and a package of Hostess Snowballs. I urgently downed them all and sat there motionless for a few minutes while I figured out what to do next.

When the sugar and painkillers took effect, I was ready to make a plan. My cell phone was nowhere to be found so I decided to check Jim Bob’s corpse to see if he had anything useful. On one side of his belt he had a cell phone holster with a crushed phone still inside which was of no use. But on the other side was a sheath containing an 8-inch bowie knife with a serrated blade on one side and an inscription at the base of the blade that read “To Dad. Love Ricky.” I found it strange that he didn’t think to use it when he attacked me. But it is good to know that this big fucker was an actual human being at one point. I struggled to get his belt off and remove the sheath but the effort was well worth it. My hands were pretty torn up from swinging that bumper like a tire iron for what felt like hours. A knife would be much easier to use if I encountered one of these things again. The belt was way too big to wear so I put the knife in its sheath, buttoned the flap and put it in my back right pocket being sure to mentally remind myself of its location.

Having no idea if this was an isolated incident or a harbinger of things to come I decided to make the long slow walk to the store to see if there were any supplies that could prove useful. I would make sure to tread lightly and keep my eyes open knowing there had to be people around here somewhere. With each step my imagination created another scary scenario that could possibly be waiting for me upon entering the store. A few hours ago my imagination was as far as it would have gotten but now I wasn’t so sure.

In an instant, the rest of my life – no matter how fleeting it may come to be – had changed forever. There’s no going back to a peaceful, drug-filled, almost nihilistic existence after what I’ve seen. Though I couldn’t help but be proud of how I had handled myself up to this point. Obviously there were only two reactions to your life being threatened: run like hell or dig in and hold your ground. I was surprised that I had chosen to fight. I’d made a living out of running away. Whether it was my commitments, responsibilities or fears, I was no stranger to abandoning my problems and leaving them seeing nothing but taillights. Strangely, I was never really ashamed of this until right now as I was walking toward an uncertain fate that I would’ve avoided like the plague only a few hours earlier.

I had always viewed my flakiness as a quirky little personality trait like my father’s restlessness or Melissa’s need to always have some other guy’s balls on her chin. I’d even embraced it at times, being unreliable and aloof for no other reason than it’s what people had come to expect. Today was different. I stuck around. I faced the fear and promptly punched it in the gut. Or in my case, bludgeoned it with a piece of a car. I had finally felt the gratification of seeing something through; of
being
the final result instead of
fleeing
from it. And damn if it didn’t feel amazing.

In that small moment in which I had allowed myself to crack a prideful smile, gunshots rang in the distance behind me, glass shattered in the storefront in front of me and all hell broke loose in a matter of seconds.

Chapter 4

Without thinking, I ran away from the gunshots behind me more out of instinct than an actual threat assessment. In a normal world, gunshots were generally a bad sign but if there were more of these freak-shows or whatever the hell they were lurking around, it struck me as I was running for the cover of the store that running towards gunshots might actually save my life instead of harm it. My light bulb moment was cut short however as I realized that the people stumbling out of the broken window, undeterred by glass shards plunging into their flesh and disjointedly listening to find the source of the noise they had heard, were not people at all. The shell may have been human but on the inside all that seemed to exist was 10 kinds of crazy with a shitload of bloodlust thrown in for good measure. And those damn eyes looked downright alien. As I feared, Jim Bob was not an isolated incident. Though somewhere deep in my mind, I seemed to already know that to be true.

A couple that looked like they were in their early 30’s – in my imagination where humor existed as my sole defense mechanism against the events unfolding around me, I felt they should be named John and Jane Dead – were shambling towards me. From a distance the looks on their faces could’ve been mistaken for bedroom eyes, the same look used by creepy single guys in bars the world over who mistakenly think this makes them appealing to the opposite sex. I should know; that look has been plastered across my face plenty of times over the years, always ending in either abject failure or on a really bad night bodily harm at the hands of the boyfriend who is nowhere to be seen until the split-second I decide to make my move. As the Dead’s shuffled closer though, Eric Carmen’s song “Hungry Eyes” popped into my head, a song I hated myself for knowing the words to but due to every girlfriend I’ve ever had forcing me against my will to watch “Dirty Dancing” ad nauseam, I had no choice in the matter. They were the lions stalking me on the open prairie and I was the zebra mindlessly staring at them like a deer in headlights. I clearly needed time to adjust to this whole
being the prey
thing.

The Z-word had been floating around in the back of my head since Jim Bob and I had our little exchange but I refused to let it take root anywhere near my tongue. Reality and fantasy don’t often intertwine, and when they do the result seems neither real nor made-up; like a suspended animation where you’re awake but the events unfolding in front of you are slowed down to half-speed and you’re perpetually convinced that a simple left-right-left shake of the head will bring you back to the predictable world to which you’ve been accustomed. For a second I thought, hell even
prayed
, that maybe I was just a paranoid schizophrenic having a psychotic break. But the rub of being mentally ill is that you aren’t often aware of said illness. I was in this whether I liked it or not and if calling John and Jane Dead what they really might be – a couple of zombies who wanted my face-meat on a platter – helped me deal with things a little better then that’s exactly what I would do. If the shoe fits, I guess.

They looked like they’d been a respectable looking couple before the whole
wanting brains
thing really screwed up their weekend. I imagined them drinking wine and watching movies on a Saturday night, then being bad and sleeping in until 9 in the morning on Sunday where they would read the paper together over coffee and croissants before they set out to do yard work if the weather allowed. The kind of peaceful existence that everyone strives for in life but very few actually attain. I probably would’ve envied them before all of this happened but now I silently cursed whatever it was that selfishly stole this couple’s happiness without an ounce of sorrow or regret. I knew they needed to be killed for safety but I was in no shape to fight two of them at once. I was hoping the gunshots that rang out in the distance behind me would continue and take care of the two little problems slowly but intently closing the ground between us to the point where I could smell what I could only assume was the stench of death; corpses in the beginning stages of decay who should have no business being anywhere but six feet underground, entombed in a coffin surrounded by thousands of pounds of earth. I needed to get the hell out of the way so hopefully these gunmen (I was praying there was more than one) could clean up this mess and let me go find a safe place to curl up into the fetal position and cry for a while.

Perhaps emboldened by painkillers or maybe geeked up on high doses of sugar and trans fat, my “brilliant” plan created on-the-fly was as follows:

1. Run towards the hungry couple making sure to gain enough speed to jump and catapult off of them, using their shoulders as a makeshift pommel horse as I propel onto a partially extended scissor lift located just to the right of the store windows.
   
2. Climb the scissor lift, ignoring the inevitable pain coming from my shoulder as it resists any and all movement, until I reach the lower roof portion where I can finally take a break and figure out what to do next. Of course this portion of the plan only works if number 3 comes out in my favor…
   
3. Pray to God that in their undead state, Jane and John are no longer capable of climbing.
   
4. If my prayers work, hole up on the roof for a while, get some rest and then search around for some kind of roof access where I can shimmy into the building unnoticed to get supplies.
   
5. Take supplies and find a car that hasn’t been involuntarily turned into a convertible, preferably a large SUV (which shouldn’t be hard in this parking lot), and make my way to the coast where there’s less people and more room to move.
   
6. With a bit of luck, make it to the Irish Pub in time to attempt to drink away the horrible memories that seem to be burned into my retinas and hope that whatever this is that is happening will mimic my unavoidable hangover and just simply fade away.
   

In the heat of the moment my plan was clearly bulletproof but if hindsight were currently an option, it would prove to lack a certain simplicity and adherence to reality that most successful strategies seem to have in common. Unsurprisingly in the blink of an eye, a plan that took roughly 10 seconds to create took less than half that amount of time to blow up in my face.

Chapter 5

I managed to start off the plan perfectly, getting into a solid sprint as I reached my undead stepping stones. Reality could take a back seat no longer however as I jumped and attempted to propel myself from their shoulders onto the scissor lift. I hadn’t taken into account the lack of blood flow and the ensuing rate of decay that occurred in the skin and bones as a result. My hands almost sank into their shoulders, making a squishy crackling noise that sounded like an amalgamation of a partially clogged sink drain and a wet fart that’s one muscle spasm away from becoming a full-fledged bowel movement. Soft spongy surfaces don’t often make for a great vaulting-off point which is why I only managed to hurl myself about 3 feet in back of them, leaving me several feet from the bottom of the scissor lift and nowhere close to what was supposed to be my amazing escape. I landed ass-first with a dull thud that reverberated up into my teeth. I pushed myself up, my arms begrudgingly giving support long enough for my legs – the only part of my body
not
in pain – to take over. Luckily my failed gymnastics audition had a positive side effect. My momentum had caused me to push John and Jane away from me and send them falling headfirst into the pavement which gave me some much needed wiggle room. Jane didn’t appear to be moving, her head apparently caved in from the fall. John seemed to be struggling mightily against the still-attached pieces of skin and skull fragments that clung to the pavement like a warm tongue on a frozen flag pole. I turned around and stomped on his head with all of the force I could muster, the remains of his rotting skull offering no more resistance than the horrible Jell-O mold my aunt made for every family get-together since the beginning of time, seemingly undeterred by the fact that everyone treated it as an involuntary set-piece rather than something to actually be consumed. Even having just experienced the squishy nature of their bodies, for some reason I didn’t apply this knowledge to their heads. The abundance of force I used to jackboot John’s head into oblivion caused my knee to hyperextend thus adding to the layers of pain I was already experiencing. I now counted my left leg as the only pain-free zone remaining on my body. I managed to finally crawl up the scissor lift and onto the lower roof overhanging the entrance. I collapsed onto my back, looking up at the sky and remembering when I was a kid and I would create whole worlds in the clouds – pirate ships, monster trucks, zoo animals, you name it – where the only limit was my imagination. Now I was mortified at the thought of letting my mind wander, seeing what other horrors I could imagine, what nightmares lurked on the outskirts of my psyche waiting patiently for me to fall asleep.