Swarm (Dead Ends) (9 page)

Somewhat desensitized by what we’ve seen and done up to this point, we barely said a word about it. As I replayed all of the events leading up to this, creating a mental timeline that led to me viewing this undead destruction derby as if it were nothing more than a deer in the woods, something hit me that I hadn’t thought about before. Or maybe I had but not in such detail. I began flashing back to all of the cars in the parking lot as well as the ones we’ve seen on the road so far. With the exception of the hungry toddler and now this rotting Speed Racer, most of the cars were empty. There was plenty of blood, plenty of cars damaged so badly that survival was impossible. But no bodies, either dead or undead, hanging around. I felt stupid that I hadn’t noticed this until now but perhaps being in the relative safety of the Jeep my mind was able to ease out of survival mode and relax a bit, once again able to access all of the peripheral sights and sounds that I wasn’t able to process while fighting for my life. In an attempt to avoid any more added stress I tried to come up with answers in my head before I presented it to the group but could come up with none.

“Where are all the people?” I asked as calmly as I could, given the circumstances.

“I don’t know, probably hiding I guess” Ricky posited while still keeping his eyes glued to the road.

“No not the survivors. The dead ones. Where did they go? There are a lot of cars in that parking lot and on this road but not many people alive or dead. Where the hell are they?” I asked, looking back at Jane for an answer.

Ricky slowed to a stop and looked at me, contemplating what I had just asked. In the back Jane’s eyes were slightly squinted, her brow furrowed as she attempted to come up with some logical explanation that we all knew didn’t exist. It was eerily quiet now as the weight of my question began to sink in. Zoe rested her head on Jane’s shoulder and closed her eyes, hopefully going to a better place in her mind and staying there for a while as we discussed this new revelation.

“Jesus” Ricky whispered, shaking his head. I looked at him, patiently waiting for him to continue.

“In the store…” he continued. “When we were first fighting them off, we blocked off the stair access to the top level so we could shoot them like ducks in a barrel; make it easier for ourselves.” He paused. “They tried to get up the stairs but they couldn’t. They just kept falling down and bowling over the rest of them. Some of them kept trying to attack but a lot of them left…”

“Where did they go?” Jane asked somewhat impatiently, unaware that she was now holding Zoe even closer, perhaps as much for her own piece of mind as Zoe’s.

“I don’t know” Ricky shook his head, trying to find an answer. “I just figured they were trying to find another way to get up there. At the time I wasn’t thinking
these are zombies
. I mean who would? I wasn’t thinking anything really. I was just trying to survive. But they definitely left the store and never came back. God, I can’t believe I didn’t notice that before.”

“So they just left?” I asked. “Where would they have
gone
?”

“I wish I knew...” Ricky responded, his hands now forming a death grip on the steering wheel, “so we could go in the opposite direction.”

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now” Jane said, motioning her eyes down to Zoe who was clearly trying her hardest to not listen to us. Jane’s non-verbal signal that “adult talk” was now over clearly received, I shifted my focus to Zoe, trying my hardest to cheer her up; a seemingly impossible task given the situation.

“Hey Zoe” I said with as happy a voice as I could muster, “Do you think you could help me out?” Her eyes perked up at this welcome distraction. She nodded her head expectantly. “Well I’m really thirsty but I can’t reach the cooler. I think I saw a grape soda in there. Could you fish it out for me?” She shyly agreed, visibly relieved that she now had a task to focus on. Jane gave me a look, knowing full well that we both knew there were no grape sodas in there as I had asked her for one before we left. I just wanted to occupy Zoe for as long as it took to forget about what we were just talking about. Hopefully, searching for a grape soda that didn’t exist would do the job.

“Make sure you look everywhere, kiddo” I said to Zoe, “the grape ones like to hide at the bottom. They’re kind of shy, like you” I smiled. Zoe smiled briefly and quickly shifted her focus to the task at hand.

The wreckage was beginning to thin out now that we’d left the somewhat comfortable confines of Sportsman’s Paradise in the rear-view. Even in complete stillness, this was exactly like the I-5 experience I had come to know very well. Packs of slow cars in between wide open spaces that allowed you to open up the throttle a bit if you could only get around that semi-truck selfishly driving in the center lane or the old couple in a boat on wheels staunchly adhering to the speed limit while backing up the carpool lane for miles. A societal snapshot of the ridiculousness of highway driving that most likely looked the same from Seattle to Saudi Arabia. Still no people to speak of save for a few badly mangled bodies; lucky souls that hopefully never had to experience the horrifying rebirth into un-death, briefly entering the white light only to be sucked back through it into an aimlessly wandering darkness from which escape just wasn’t an option.

“Um, Sam?” Zoe asked quietly, “I don’t think there are any grape ones in there.” She sounded so disappointed.

“Whaaat?” I asked jokingly. “Hey missy, did you drink the last one behind my back?”

She was giggling now. “Nooo!” she said with confidence as she pointed at me, a sign that she knew I was just joking with her. “Maybe
you
drank it!” she chirped.

“Nuh-uh!” I said, feigning shock at her accusation. “I’m gonna keep my eye on you” I said, jokingly raising an eyebrow and pursing my lips. She was now laughing like a little girl ought to, regardless of the situation she’s been thrust into. My plan seemed to have worked.

Jane was noticeably quiet during this exchange and I looked back and realized she was once again writing in a journal or notebook; something that I was too afraid to ask her about. Maybe it was just her way of dealing with things. Some people write out their pain and frustration while others like me would simply attempt to drink it away if the opportunity presented itself. Though with the contents of my trunk still fresh in my mind, I had a feeling sobriety was something I should seriously look into.

We were getting closer now to the exit that always put a smile on my face: Highway 101. The coastal highway that would take you south all the way to San Diego if you so chose. It was like Route 66 but with way better scenery. The skinny southern tip of Capitol Lake would be within view in mere minutes.

For a few moments, I imagined myself taking this road on a normal sunny day, listening to the radio as the venerable Rick Rizzs called the play by play for that day’s Mariners game. The wind whooping into my face and the expectant feeling of being able to smell the sea in an hour or so depending on my speed. Stopping in Aberdeen, the birthplace of grunge legend Kurt Cobain, and taking in the sights of a once-great logging town where my grandfather thrived as the last in the line of great lumberjacks from our family. Driving through a beautiful evergreen forest, the cleansing scent of pine trees preparing my nose for the briny sea air that I would breathe in with as much force as my body would allow. Every breath separating me further from the problems that were waiting for me back in real life. For a few seconds as I took a long slow, deep breath, I almost believed I was there.

Ricky’s voice jolted me out of dreamland and back into reality. “That looks like a group of people up there. They’re just walking on the road.” He slowed down to allow us all to assess the situation. Ricky rolled down the window as we approached. “What the hell is that sound?” he said, straining his head towards the window as if that would somehow provide the answer. I looked back at Jane who looked at me knowingly. Ricky must have caught Jane’s reaction in the rear-view mirror as he was now looking between Jane and myself with “did I miss something?” written all over his face. Before we were able to explain ourselves, the Jeep was within twenty feet of what could now be confirmed as a pack of zombies methodically making their way north. They completely ignored our car, focusing on the road in front of them, step after undead step taking them closer to an unknown goal. As we looked out towards them, I’m sure our expressions were just as dumb-looking as theirs were as they harmlessly shambled by us.

As we approached the on-ramp to Highway 101, Ricky suddenly swerved to the shoulder and stopped the vehicle. “Okay, what the hell was that about? Why do some of them attack and others don’t even look at us? What do you two know that you’re not telling me?”

I looked at Jane then back at Ricky, “outside.”

With doors shut and hands firmly resting on the hood of the Jeep, we stood there looking out at the lake and attempting to look as calm as possible for Zoe’s sake.

“Okay” I began with a sigh, “back in the parking lot when we went back to get the stuff from my trunk, we heard a noise.”

“Was this before or after you almost caved my head in with a chunk of cast iron?”

“After. It was like a low hum. Almost like a beehive or something but far away…”

“And…?” Ricky asked impatiently.

“And human” I said as I directed my eyes towards the ground, almost embarrassed for what I had said.

I could see the gears grinding in his head, “Shit, I’ve heard it too. I just didn’t think much of it, ya’ know? I didn’t have the time I guess. So what the hell is it?”

I took a deep breath, knowing that what came out of my mouth next would be met with a bit of skepticism. “I think it’s some sort of…
call
; something that draws them in like a mating call or something.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch” Ricky scoffed.

“Science fiction coming to life is a bit of a stretch too but look around us man.” I scanned the distance with my eyes, “I think we’ve gotta stop thinking logically. Logic went out the window when your dad tried to eat my - ”

Ricky bristled and I immediately regretted what I had said. “Look I’m sorry, ok? I just…”

He was no longer paying attention to me. His eyes were now focused on something around the lake. He waved off my apology, “It’s OK” he said, nodding in the direction of the lake, “what do you make of that?”

I looked down on the shore to see a group of people, 8 to 10 or so, calmly walking directly into the lake just as someone would walk into a grocery store or a restaurant. One by one, they marched in, the water slowly rising until the crowns of their heads were no longer visible. There was no struggling, no gasping, no nothing. Just a brisk walk that happened to come to an end in the most unlikely of places.

My first thought was some kind of doomsday cult:
the end is nigh, so drink this and become one with the earth
. In a normal world, I would’ve thought it was crazy. In the situation we currently found ourselves in, I actually thought it was too obvious of an answer. Too easy to be the truth, as if my brain were choosing to believe the most unthreatening of outcomes in the interest of staying sane. They had all taken the plunge now, leaving us waiting and wondering if they’d ever resurface, the cold water on their faces jolting them back into reality, millions of years of evolution providing the survival instinct that had kept our species alive and kicking for so long, no matter how poorly we treated one another. But it never happened.

“Whoa, there’s more of ‘em,” Ricky exclaimed as he fished a collapsible pair of binoculars out of his pocket. He held them up to his eyes, adjusting for the right distance. After only a few seconds, he handed them to me, “Unbelievable. I don’t know much about zombies but I’m pretty sure they don’t have a craving for trout.”

As I took hold of the binoculars, my mind wrestled with the decision of whether or not I actually wanted to see this up close. Did I really need yet another visual reminder of the complete devolution of our species? Those five seconds felt like 5 hours as my mind pulled me in different directions. Finally, the train-wreck mentality that every human seems to be born with took over. I was almost too late as I focused on the last one strolling into the water, one hundred percent sure of his decision. All I caught were the dead eyes; masses of black and yellow vivid even from a distance as they sank unblinking into the abyss, followed by a pointy bald head cutting through the water until only a small ripple remained.

For a few moments, the acoustics aligned themselves just right – a few trees parting in the wind, our heads cocked at just the right angle, the concrete of the highway acting as a sounding board for that terrible hum that seemed to intensify for only 5 seconds or so before being swallowed up again by the hilly terrain.

The look on Ricky’s face was one of a man who no longer needed convincing. “Well I definitely heard that” he said, almost to himself.

“At least they’re going in the opposite direction” I said, attempting to find the positive in a situation chock-full of negatives. “Time to go then?” I asked.

“Time to go”, Ricky nodded, the look on his face falling somewhere between sickness and sheer dread.

Safely back in the car, Ricky couldn’t help but try the radio stations yet again. He’d been fiddling with them since we started driving, unable to come to terms with the fact that we were totally cut off from the rest of the world and any information that may help save our lives. I wanted to tell him not to bother but every time he cycled through the static, I couldn’t help but be hopeful that this time we would hear something, anything that could give us a better idea of what exactly we’re dealing with.

“What about a CB radio?” I asked. “Do you think they would still work?”

“Yeah, I thought about that,” Ricky responded, “but they usually only transmit for about 5 miles and as quiet as it is out here, I don’t know if there’s anyone left within a 5 mile radius. If we could get higher, we might be able to hear something but - ”

“There’s a ranger’s tower not far from here” Jane interrupted, “near Summit Lake. It was built as a fire lookout during World War II. Now it’s just used as a rest stop for hikers and bird watchers. It’s got electricity and running water and I know for a fact there’s a working CB radio. I used to go hiking with my ex-boyfriend around here all the time.”