Timothy 01: Timothy (14 page)

When she came at me again, I swung the ice-chopper. The flat edge of the blade caught the top of her skull and there was a hollow, wet, cracking sound like a baseball bat striking a soft pumpkin. I hit her in the head again until her brains splashed down her face. She trembled in the grass and stopped moving.

I ran for the mailman, the ice-chopper held up and ready to strike. A couple zombies shambled past me. They snapped their teeth at me. One of them—a woman wearing what looked like a hospital gown—reached out and I cracked her in the head with the chopper. It made no difference to her: she just shambled away. I might as well have hit a stump.

I reached the mailman about the same time as Jimmy LaRue.

Jimmy had brought a .22 semi-auto rifle with him. As I got into range, Jimmy shot the teenage boy through the head. He staggered comically back a few steps and then folded up, blood and brain matter leaking from a hole in his skull. Jimmy shot the man in the back, which did absolutely no good. He turned on us, his maw dyed red, feral as any wolf. He made a growling sound in his throat. As Jimmy took aim again, the dead man snatched one of the mailman’s arms he had chewed free and tried to walk off. Jimmy cracked off two more shots. By luck or design, one of them went through the back of the zombie’s knee. He hit the pavement, dragging himself forward in a slime trail of ooze and rot, refusing to drop the arm.

Jimmy popped him in the head and that was that.

“What the fuck’s going on here, Steve?” he wanted to know. His eyes were wide and shocked, his face white as the hair on his head. “These aren’t people…they’re fucking corpses. Goddamn zombies like on the late show.”

I was looking down at the gored remains of the mailman. “That’s exactly what they are,” I said.

The mailman’s throat was torn out and his belly had been hollowed, his mangled viscera spilled over the sidewalk. Everywhere he was red and ripped and partially-eaten.

I turned away, my stomach rolling over.

Jimmy said, “I…called the police…there was no answer…”

I looked down Holly Street, dozens of other zombies were moving in our direction. They were making moaning sounds. An army of the dead had been set upon Lincoln Park.

A bloated, naked woman whose flesh was mottled with green patches of mildew had Mrs. Hazen by the throat, was dragging her corpse off through all those carefully-tended azaleas, petunias, and morning glories. Her body flattened them as she was dragged into the backyard. I was going to go to Mrs. Hazen’s rescue, but I could see she was already dead. A big, one-armed zombie with a face like a nest of black moss climbed up onto a porch and dove through the screen door. A car came winging down the road, hit the zombie of a young woman with a resounding thud that sent her rolling to the curb. A guy got out and two zombies took him down, began savagely biting at his face and throat. People came out on their porches and the dead went after them.

A naked woman came strolling out between two houses. She was tall and leggy, flaxen-haired, and was probably very attractive in life. But in death she was a sheer horror and Jimmy shot her dead. I turned and a fat man greasy with rot and drainage came at me, jowls drawn away from teeth that were stained red. I went at him with the ice-chopper like a man possessed. I didn’t even let Jimmy draw a bead on him. I charged in, swinging, like some bloodthirsty barbarian with drawn sword. I hit him six or seven times until he went down and I kept hitting him, landing that blade on his head, until he rolled over in the grass, from the neck up nothing but raw hamburger.

The Living End

Prologue: Tipping Point

It might have been sometime during the days when the Marines were moving weapons systems to secure sites. Or it could have happened in the weeks when the Army and Civil Defense were scattering far and wide to shut down and lock nuclear power plants. Perhaps the day fell when local police forces were disbanding and running. And maybe it was some hour when the general population was in total panic, concerned only with self-preservation, as society fell completely to bits and people were racing about committing acts of theft and violence and generally killing one another at will. But at some point the government dissolved into that same panic, and cholera and dysentery were raging through the population, knocking people down like dominoes…

A tipping point was reached.

It was in those mad days that the zombies began to outnumber the living. It was during those holocaust hours that all was lost.

People trying to flee to cities found the streets lined with the undead. Anyone who attempted to find refuge in buildings or houses generally realized that those places were packed with the monsters, or that they had simply found places to be trapped. Families who took to the main roads discovered a very nasty fact:

The highways and expressways were, quite literally, crawling with the reanimated corpses of the recently deceased. Walking flesh flowed down those asphalt and concrete corridors like water flowing from a high point to a low one. The air was filled with the stench of these things—with the defecations of their dying throes; with the ammonia reek of relaxed bladders; with the rot of tens of millions of death rattles.

In those desperate days, when the tide of battle had turned inexorably away from the living and in favor of the undead, the only salvation to be found lay in constant movement. There was no safe house. Security became an illusion. The future was something to be feared as all those who yet drew breath lived in the here and the now. If people thought at all, it was as if they were rabbits on the run, deer at the wrong end of the chase, cows to the slaughter. People did what they figured they had to do, and in the doing many more of them perished and were devoured, or were delivered as new killers among the raving hoards of zombies.

The landscape became something truly from a nightmare. In some places the ground was covered as far as the eye could follow with a writhing mass of things that resembled human beings but which, alas, no longer were. The forests moved with the constant press of them. Towns and cities and villages and outposts became host to a seemingly unending flood of the walkers. Their moans echoed over the hills and down the valleys and through the canyons of cities that had become slaughterhouses with streets and walls that were covered red and black with the gore of their victims. When they moved, as a single mass, there was no other sound but the tramp and drag of their slow and implacable tread.

They stared and raged and were hungry. The things that had once been us never found satisfaction. There was no satiation for their constant and hideous craving for living flesh. Before them, all who still lived ran like the harried creatures they resembled. In the wake of this poisonous flood the wily among the living hunkered down and watched. Behind that flood, in the ravaged and ruined land to the rear of the rotting march, people began to gather, to assemble, to wait and watch and exist.

Shortly after the end:

They were leaving him!

He could scarcely believe what they’d done. The worst of it was that they had discussed it right in front of him. He’d listened to every word of it. The entire time he’d felt a hideous emptiness in the pit of his stomach while Rick and Tilly had talked about what they were going to do.

“We can’t take him with us,” Rick had said, in a flat, matter of fact way. In such a tone that BC recognized—one that meant he would tolerate no discussion on the matter. Tilly knew it well, and knew well enough to keep her mouth shut when her husband spoke with that voice.

“We’ll leave him food,” she said, merely suggesting it, knowing that to argue it would be to risk a verbal lashing, if not an outright beating. “And water. He’ll need water. For a few days, at least.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rick told her. “But first we need to finish packing the car. I haven’t heard any cars on the street for two days. I think we can make a break for it, now.”

Indeed, the neighborhood had grown very quiet. Over the previous weeks the country had grown increasingly unstable. Even the normally unemotional talking heads on the news shows had become increasingly strident, saying and doing things on the air that were quite strange, displaying emotions that verged on hysteria and madness. Late in the game, the TV stations had all been militarized and men in fatigues, with shaved heads and hollow cheeks and burning eyes, had taken over the job of doling out information. The last real news either of them had seen was a series of short pieces featuring the crews of civilian technicians and soldiers who’d been sent to shut down the nation’s nuclear plants. So that there would be no runaway nuclear reactions if they were suddenly left unattended.

Rick had explained that one to Tilly and the children, Little Rick and Maya. Both of the kids were far too young to comprehend what Rick was telling them, but he was of the impression that if you spoke plainly to kids, that they would eventually understand what you were saying, no matter how abstract the idea. “The fuel rods have to be separated and removed,” he told them all. “That way, if the pools of coolant were to somehow empty, the heat of the nuclear reaction won’t run wild and start a meltdown, resulting in the release of radioactivity into the atmosphere and into the groundwater.” Tilly had nodded and the kids, eight-year-old Maya and four-year-old Little Rick had stared at their father, thinking of toys or lunch, knowing that not to feign undivided attention was to risk one of his long monologues, or perhaps a whipping.

“Did you get the water bottles packed?” he asked his wife.

“Yes,” she told him. “Six gallons on the floorboard and four more in the trunk. I couldn’t fit anymore of them in the trunk.” She’d made several trips into the back yard to quickly provision the auto. In a strange bit of fortune, their decrepit hatchback had looked far too listless to steal in the final days when all Hell had broken loose. One of their neighbors, a college professor who lived one street over, had termed those last rabid hours “Payback Time”. For three days it seemed the nation, from end to end and coast-to-coast, had raged red. Not only had they to contend with the roving groups of undead who plodded about, killing and consuming all they found, but their fellow citizens, too, had degenerated into mad, frightened, killing machines.

“It’s Payback Time,” Ned Waters, their friend and sometime visitor had told them. Ned was a college English teacher and shade tree philosopher. “The Black Nationalists are killing anything Caucasian that they can find. White Supremacists are slaughtering everything darker than Jessica Alba. Baptists are killing Jews and Catholics. God save the Yankees who moved down here for the climate.” Indeed, the city was a symphony of racial and religious and regional hatred that succeeded in tearing apart what was left of law and order.

“Even my next-door neighbor is acting creepy. When he comes out at all, it’s generally to say something nasty to me. You know…he thinks I’m gay!”

Tilly allowed herself to laugh too quickly at that, but even Rick joined in, seemingly without suspicion at her sudden and uncharacteristic outburst. Generally, she didn’t laugh without his permission.

The last time they’d seen Ned, he had come over with three magnums of wine (his last) and they’d all sat in front of the little battery-powered television watching the sixth in a series detailing the brave men who had shut down the last of the active nuclear power plants. The three adults cheered the heroic workers who danced across the tiny black and white screen. They drank a toast and a toast and a toast and a toast and on to these larger-than-life fellows until the three adults were puking drunk.