The Hell Season (12 page)

“No!” Thomas shouted at those walking past him. “Turn back! It’s not what you think!” He grabbed at the handgun he’d been keeping in the front of his pants lately, remembered that he’d left it in Dana’s car.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Dana as she reached out and grabbed his arm, her eyes wide with fear. “
Please
.”

“Yes, let’s,” said Gerald from beside her.

Thomas was about to go with them when he turned for one last look at the horde of naked and injured people headed his way. And that’s when he saw her. The breath caught in his throat and he pulled himself from Dana’s grasp. No, it couldn’t be. Could it?
It isn’t really her
, he tried to tell himself. The way she walked, limping badly, practically dragging one of her legs her. The vacant expression on her face. She looked so thin. So vulnerable. Seeing her there, exposed like that, all he could think about was going to her and covering her nakedness and offering what aid he could, holding her and never letting go.

Over Dana’s and Gerald’s protests, he went to her. Other people had started to scream now but he paid them little mind. There was only one thing that mattered now and it was right there, less than a dozen feet away, waiting for him.

“Julia,” he said and moved to cover the distance that separated him from his wife. She held her arms outstretched before her and he was only a few feet from her now, reaching out to take her hands in his. That’s when the side of her head exploded. She collapsed at his feet, brains and blood forming a thick puddle where she lay. He staggered back, horrified and confused by what he’d just seen.

It was then that he noticed the chaos surrounding him, the moans and the screams and the awful sight of people being bitten and clawed and, in one case, a woman on the ground with three of the naked newcomers crouched over her pulling at her clothes and her flesh. Then there was a
crack!
and another
crack!
and a naked woman went down with a red, wet hole in the middle of her forehead and a man was spun about as some invisible force punched him hard in the shoulder.

Gunfire
, Thomas realized.
Someone’s shooting into the crowd
.

Then Dana was next to him shouting the name of her previously missing husband: “Bill! Bill! Over here!” Thomas grabbed her and started pulling her back, pulling her away from the body of his dead wife and the increasing number of those naked and hungry
things
that continued to emerge from the hole in the ground. Amid the chaos Thomas came to the realization—and he fervently hoped it was so—that more than likely these were not their loved ones but vile facsimiles of them. That like the bugs and the snakes, they had been created to deepen the anguish of those who yet lived in this town. By whom and for what purpose, Thomas still did not know. What he did know was that he and Dana and Gerald had to get away from this place as fast as they could.

Dana resisted his efforts to pry her away and so he forced her to look at him and amidst the terrible din of that place he told her, “That is not your husband. That was not my wife. We need to get out of here. Right now. Do you hear me? Do you understand?” It dawned on him that this was a role reversal of the previous night, that now it was him saving her. He saw that somehow he had gotten through to her. Or, more than likely, she knew that something was not right with any of this, that as much as she may have wished it to be, it just wasn’t. She nodded her head then they were walking away as the moaning sound continued to grow, as the gunshots rang out and the world continued to become a more bizarre and increasingly miserable place.

Once they had put a little distance between themselves and the crowd they heard an amplified voice shout, “Thomas! Up here!” He looked toward the auto shop across from the Wal-Mart and saw two figures standing on the roof. The shooters. He didn’t have much of a problem figuring out who they were. As he and Dana and Gerald approached the building, Ron leaned out over the edge and said, “Around back. There’s a ladder.” Then he lifted his rifle up to his shoulder and fired another shot into the crazed mob over near the pit.

They circled the building and found the ladder standing against the back wall. A black extended cab pickup truck was parked nearby. Thomas went up first followed by Dana and Gerald.

Ron and Tanya stood at the far side of the roof near a knee high wall that ran along the edge there. They each had rifles with telescopic sights pressed to their shoulders and were popping off shots. As Thomas approached them he saw a megaphone lying next to Ron’s booted feet. He was dressed in army fatigue pants and a green tank top. Tanya was dressed similarly. Thomas walked over and stood a few feet away from the duo, covered his ears with his hands and watched as they fired round after round into the now seething mass of people near the hole.

“Fucking zombies!” shouted Ron as he turned and looked at Thomas, gave him a tight smile and said, “Good to see you again, man.” Thomas could just hear his muffled voice through his hands, nodded his head and said, “Good to see you too.”

Then Ron went back to his shooting and Thomas stood there with Dana and Gerald and watched the carnage. Even at this distance it was a disturbing sight. People were brought down by groups of the “zombies,” as Ron had dubbed them. Not that Thomas could argue with this moniker. It was just like those Romero movies he used to watch when he was a kid over at a friend’s house. His own parents would never have let him watch them.
Night of the Living Dead
.
Dawn of the Dead
.
Day of the Dead
. Not to mention all the countless knockoffs. And now here he was, seeing it happen for real.
The Pit of the Dead
, or some such nonsense.
Watch in terror and disbelief as the survivors of an inexplicable apocalypse are terrorized by the reanimated corpses of their dead loved ones
…

From here, Thomas couldn’t tell if the bullets were hitting those who had risen from the pit or those who had come to greet them. He could only hope that Ron and Tanya were as good of shots as their confident stances and attitudes led him to believe. He saw a few survivors manage to break away from the melee and run back toward the Wal-Mart across the street. But many of those who’d gotten consumed by the fray, figuratively and then literally speaking, never stood a chance of escaping. The zombies continued to crawl out of the pit, naked and bruised and shambling. Over and over again Ron and Tanya pulled the triggers of their weapons with mechanical efficiency, reloaded when necessary. The sun climbed into the sky and the day became unbearably hot. Eventually, Thomas turned his back on the carnage and walked over to where the top of the ladder peeked above the edge of the building. He sat down, his back against the low wall there, did his best to not think about Julia and how the sight of her—or that broken and terrible replica of her—made him feel. Dana joined him and he placed an arm around her shoulders as she leaned against him and wept for a while.

Finally, the shooting stopped and Dana was able to dry her eyes. The sound of a mindless, collective moan could still be heard. Thomas had no way of knowing if it came from the injured who had survived the attack or more of the walking dead.

*

Of all the movie monsters, I’d have to say that zombies scared me the most. There was just something about them, their seemingly insatiable hunger, their sheer numbers, their mindless and relentless perseverance, and the fact that they were once just regular human beings like me and the members of my family who, through no fault of their own, were reduced to such base and repulsive creatures. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, all of them could be and were romanticized at one point or another. But not zombies. Not much to romanticize about a walking, hungry corpse, I suppose. Those movies always gave me the most terrible nightmares. In them, the world was overrun with the undead. My mother and father had been turned into zombies and were trying to get in through my locked bedroom door so that they could convert me too or maybe just have me for dinner…

Looking back over all that I have written so far it dawns on me that I was a bit of a strange kid. I have to shake my head at some of it, thinking back to how naive and impressionable I used to be. But now I wonder if all the weird stuff I was into has helped me deal with, to some extent, what ended up happening to the world I once knew. Like all the movies I watched were training films of a sort that managed to prepare me in some small way for the sheer, awful craziness I would one day have to endure.

*

Ron and Tanya were prepared for the blazing sun and persistent heat. Inside a duffle bag similar to the one they’d had the first time Thomas had met them, they’d brought supplies once again, a bottle of sun block among them. Thomas applied it liberally and gratefully to the exposed skin of his arms and face and neck, even along the part down the middle of his hair. There was water too and more Granola bars.

“Wow, you guys think of everything, huh?” said Gerald.

“Part of the training,” said Tanya with a shrug.

There wasn’t much to do up there on the roof except talk and wait. The walking dead were everywhere down on the ground, kept climbing out of the hole and wandering around. No one wanted to risk going down there.

“Don’t worry, they’ll drop at some point,” said Ron from where he sat in front of Thomas cleaning his rifle. “Then they’ll dry up and blow away. Just like the bugs and the snakes.”

“Good God,” said Gerald, wiping at the sweat running down his neck and forehead. “It’s a damned oven up here.” He took off the t-shirt he was wearing and draped it over his head. “Can I get some more of that sun block?” Tanya tossed him the bottle and he applied a thin coat to the pale, unblemished skin of his torso. “I really do owe you one, Thomas. It’s so good to be young again.” He patted his flat and toned abdomen.

Thomas still couldn’t get his head around that one. A guy who was genuinely grateful he’d been murdered. Was there a more poignant testament to the extent to which the world had been turned on its head?

Not wanting to spend any more time on that subject, Thomas asked Ron and Tanya about what they’d been up to since the last time he saw them.

“We lost track of you in all that madness,” said Ron. “I don’t know if we turned back... you know, became human again... before or after you.”

“Must have been before. I was alone when I came out of it. The snakes were all but dissolved.”

“There were still plenty of the bastards slithering around when we came to. The first thing we did was find a car and some clothes and get the hell out of there. Sorry we didn’t wait around for you. If we’d known…”

“It’s alright,” said Thomas with a wave of his hand. “I’m sure I would have done the same thing. Especially as disoriented as I was afterward.”

“Even still. A soldier never leaves his comrades behind. Trust me when I tell you this, it won’t happen again.”

“I appreciate that.” Thomas only hoped it was a promise he’d be able to keep.

“Anyway, we found a house a few streets over and stayed there. The following day we went door to door for a while, trying to find other survivors. Nothing. What we did find was a gun shop a few blocks away and so we did a little stockpiling. Then we gathered up some food and clothes and headed over here where we could keep that damned pipeline to Hell in sight. Of course, we saw what was going on across the street, the people going in and out of the building. We decided to hang back, though. Things looked a little too vulnerable over there. And I’ve got a weird feeling that a crowd might attract whatever appears out of that hole next. Because, sure as shit, there’s gonna be something else.”

They spent the afternoon up there, talking occasionally, trying to ignore the omnipresent moaning sound, keeping themselves as hydrated as they could. Eventually the sounds of the undead began to diminish and the group on the roof walked over to to watch them fall over one by one. A good number of them were across the street, clawing at the glass of the Wal-Mart windows. It seemed like a minor miracle that none of them had managed to gain entrance.

“Hurricane country,” said Tanya. “Strengthened glass. It’s obviously up to code.”

An hour later, there were no more zombies wandering about. As the sun crawled toward the other horizon and the day’s heat finally started to subside, Thomas and his companions descended from the roof and went in through the back door of the auto repair shop, past the generator Ron and Tanya had scored for themselves. There was a collection of rations inside, cans of soup and pasta which they heated on a portable propane stove. Another hour and they were done eating, went outside to walk among the rapidly deteriorating corpses, zombie and mutilated survivor alike, before heading over to the Wal-Mart to see how the people there had fared.

“How easily we adapt,” muttered Thomas as they crossed the sprawling parking lot before the megastore. Zombies. Bugs. Bloodstorms. Disintegrating bodies. Already he was used to it. The world had been folded inside out and within five days he and his companions had, for the most part, accepted it. He didn’t even need a drink. Well, maybe just one beer or a shot of something a little stronger would be nice. But he didn’t
need
it. Or the meds. Maybe he hadn’t needed them all along. Just crutches to help him cope with the pressures of a rather humdrum and ordinary existence. Nothing very ordinary about it now though. He seemed to have fallen into a basic reaction mode, not thinking about things too much, just responding to the threats that came his way and moving past them as well as he could. Maybe that was the difference. He wasn’t overthinking things. Or maybe he was in an ongoing state of shock. Maybe the reality of the situation hadn’t fully set in, was so overwhelming that it
couldn’t
fully set in. It was all so surreal. Dreamlike. Or, to put it more accurately,
nightmare
like. He was quite sure that a large part of his psyche was operating under the assumption that all of this was, in fact, a dream no matter what he told himself. It was how his subconscious was able to cope so easily let alone at all. How all of them could. Because none of this was possible, after all. And the impossible couldn’t really hurt you now could it?