Undead L.A. 2 (6 page)

“Okay then, so that will be a number five, hold the sauce, with a regular Coke, and a number sixteen with extra cheese and a large Diet. Can I interest you in an apple pie with your order today sir? No? All right then that will be sixteen seventy-five, please.”

Each time, the order and number were different, but the response was just the same. When he was done gabbing his rosy fucking cheeks off, the hungry corpse would reach up with his dirty, blood streaked hands—in some cases with the skin peeling off to reveal bone and sinew—and hand him a single gold coin. He'd then turn around, grab a shiny rectangular plastic tray with a wounded crow on it, and hand it to his eager customer. The zombies twisted those injured birds like they were balls of fresh baked bread, stuffing the helpless creatures into their grayish mouths and chewing hard, while plumes of black oily feathers fluttered in the air, obscuring their terrible gnashing teeth. A loud ruckus from the back resounded, as if hundreds of birds were back somewhere in the kitchen, awaiting their gruesome fate.They grew so loud they seemed to be coming from all around him. Then, without warning, they came from behind the manager and flooded into the restaurant like living smoke.

The monsters broke from their single-file line, flapping and screaming, and began chasing the birds as the fowl looked for an exit from the locked room full of big plate glass windows. The crows shrieked out in panic as they were plucked from the air mid-flight and jammed into a mesh of biting teeth between dead lips. The last thing Tyler saw was the manager, swarmed by black flapping wings, his bloody hands pounding on the plate glass as the fiendish ghouls tore bloody chunks from his back and shoulders. Gold coins fell from his torn pockets, and the incessant demonic cawing drowned out his screams.

Tyler awoke again, the sound of the birds echoing in every direction outside. Something was stirring them up, possibly some other living beings. He could hear them swooping around, calling and responding to each other.

Fuck,
Tyler thought.
How long can we wait in here before the building gives in and they swarm us? Why did we lock ourselves in here in the first place? How the hell did we get here?

He knew exactly how he'd ended up trapped in a shed for the official end of the world party. He'd been running through the neighborhood looking for his girlfriend, Emily. It didn't matter that there were zombies outside at the time. It didn't matter that he'd just lost both his parents and his little sister, or that his older brother, Sean, was begging him not to go. He knew he didn't have a choice. He had to go find her; that's all there was to it. Emily was, and always would be, his whole world. He was closer to her than he'd ever been to another living soul.

There isn't anything I wouldn't do for her,
Tyler realized, enjoying the feeling of certainty that lay just beneath the surface of the words.
I guess now she knows that. If we somehow manage to live through this I'll always be able to remind her that I literally fought my way through a zombie apocalypse to be with her. Should make one hell of a Hallmark card.

He'd been dating Emily since the first week his family moved to Southern California. She was one of the first people he met at his new high school. She was in his English class, right before lunch. He'd impressed her by arguing that Emily Dickinson was actually the mother of rap music, because of her invention of the slant rhyme and its importance in the development of the genre. He'd taken on another popular student, a self-proclaimed hip hop head named Curtis who argued that a sickly white girl with an obsession for death had nothing to do with the art of rap.
 
Like jazz, or the blues, rap evolved from the slave culture in America; it grew out of a custom of calling out an opponent and verbally attacking them. Tyler stuck to his guns, not backing down an inch, and even though Curtis didn't seem to respect him for it, Emily did. She used it as an excuse to sit with him at lunch, and soon they were lost in deep philosophical debates about the meaning of life, the existence of aliens, and the scariest horror movies of all time. A month later they were officially dating, which only made sense since they were inseparable. Not a single day had gone by since they'd met that they hadn't texted each other good morning and good night—at least until the cell towers went down. When he stepped out of the safety of his parents' house, he hadn't heard from her in over a week. By that point, he was ready to risk crossing a mine-strewn war zone if he had to, just to make sure she was still okay.

I was going out of my mind, not knowing if she was alive or dead,
he reminded himself.

He'd fought his way out the front door towards the minivan. He was so pumped up on adrenaline and caffeine at the time that he hadn't stopped to think much about what he was doing. It was only after he'd gotten to the van, started it up, and backed into the middle of the street—knocking over several of his newly transformed neighbors in the process—that he started processing what he was seeing. They weren't just random strangers hunting him down. These were people he'd known for years, people he'd become close to since his dad took the job at Lockheed, after quitting Boeing, and moving the family from the suburbs of Chicago to the perennially sunny streets of Pasadena.

I remember being worried about making new friends,
he thought.
I gave my parents so much shit about it all. If I could have known what was waiting for me, I would have been willing to leave all my shit behind, or even burn it.

It wasn't just Emily that he'd grown to love. His new neighborhood was like something out of a Disney Channel show, with themed block get-togethers, street hockey and baseball games, skateboard launch ramps, summer barbeques, and frequent pool parties. There was always something going on. During Halloween, they shut down the whole area to create the spookiest haunted house show in Southern California. They shut it down once more during Christmas, and set up their own version of the fabled Candy Cane Lane—with guided block tours, fake snow made from shredded plastic, hot cocoa, and loud Christmas caroling—during the entire month of December. Each family tried to outdo the next with the brilliance of their lights and decorations. Christmas day, they all played together out on the hot asphalt with their new toys like one big happy family, and not a single snowflake in sight. A week later, groups from the neighborhood would camp out side-by-side overnight in tents to ensure everyone had the best seats for the Rose Parade on New Year's Day. The thought that things would never be the same again, that those days were all over, made his stomach churn.

I never knew how good I really had it,
he realized.
I just took it for granted that it was always going to be here. It all vanished in an instant!

He saw the Owens family, who lived at the end of the block, but no sign of their teenage kids, Scott and Laurie. He saw Mr. and Mrs. Garcia, from right across the street, fighting with their next-door neighbors, the Campbells, over the gnarled carcass of Dexter, their beloved Siberian husky.

The reality of that hit him hard in the chest. It felt like his heart was breaking as he looked out at their angry, bloated faces. They screamed in agony, driven by their hunger, and surrounded the vehicle, pounding fists and faces against the windows, biting at the glass.

There's Jimmy,
Tyler thought mournfully,
the kid from up the block, along with his dad, James. He has on that shirt my mom always made fun of him for wearing; the oversized Hawaiian one with tropical drinks printed all over it. Mom used to say it looked like something a pregnant woman would wear. Dad said he was retired and it didn't matter what he wore. Mom said he must have retired the last of his self-respect, too. She said she didn't know how his wife put up with it. She said she would divorce Dad if he ever humiliated her like that. He smiled and said he would remember that in case he ever needed an out. She smirked at him.

Tyler thought about his brother, Sean.

I shouldn't have let him try to help me,
he thought, slivers of guilt gnawing at his weary heart.
If he hadn't left the house, he'd still be alive.

Sean was only a year older, but he acted like he was in charge long before the zombie apocalypse happened. They'd shared a bedroom ever since their mom had found out she was having a girl.

I hated it so much at the time,
Tyler thought,
with Sean always snooping around in my stuff, and asking me tons of personal questions about my relationship with Em, but looking back now it wasn't so bad.

Truth be told, he'd learned a lot from him, not just about cars and sports, but also about girls. Sean had given him nearly all the sex advice he'd ever gotten, which made sense. His brother had been the first to show him a Playboy—one he’d “borrowed” from their father. Sean was supposed to go to UCLA in a few weeks. Everyone was so proud that he got in. Tyler had been looking forward to having the bedroom all to himself. He'd begun to plan out where he was going to put all his stuff once Sean was officially gone.

Guess that's not happening anymore,
Tyler thought.
Mom was so proud, too
.

Tyler tried not to think about his parents for fear that the memory would overwhelm him, but images of them turning on him and his brother—the dead look in their empty eyes as they lunged for them driven by their raw hunger—came rushing back to him anyway. He wanted to remember their smiling faces, but all he could see was the rotting skin and dark blood caked in the corners of their blood-smeared mouths.

I'll never forget the way they came at us like animals gone insane.

They'd woken up to the sound of his annoying little sister’s screams coming from the living room. They'd both shot out of bed. By the time they reached the living room, their parents were already kneeling over their sister, Amy's, tiny body, shoveling her slick red insides into their open mouths. They were drenched in her bright red blood. Tyler didn't remember screaming, he just remembered the sound of it. He knew that it had been him, and not Sean, but somehow in the moment it didn't seem real. The creature that used to be his mom looked up, and bared her bloody teeth at him with a hiss. His dad turned around to stare at them, slowly getting to his feet.

“Come on! Let's go!”

Sean had pulled him by the shoulder back toward their room. He had locked Tyler in while he used his prized LA Kings hockey stick to put them down—the stick Dad had bought for him during the big championship game.

Sean told me not to come out until he'd arranged the bodies, Tyler remembered, the sick feeling in his stomach swirling at the terrible memory. He took the remains out into the backyard, but didn't bury them. The entire hallway was stained dark red like someone had coated the walls and carpet with wine.

When it was all over, Tyler watched the lifeless bodies from the kitchen, waiting for them to get up, to tell him it was all part of some sick joke, that none of this was real, but they didn't move. Crows came down from the trees and began to eat Amy's remains. A few scampered over the pale bodies of Tyler's parents, but didn't land or eat any of the infected corpses’ flesh.

It's like they know the meat is bad,
Tyler thought.
How do they know? What can they sense that tells them not to eat the meat?

He wanted to run out and chase them off his sister’s body, but he knew it didn't matter anymore. Nothing did, really. That's when he started thinking about Emily. They were supposed to go to prom in a few weeks, but he knew that was off now. Sean said she was probably dead already. He argued that it was better to stay in the house, to board up the windows, and try to ride things out.

“Once this is all over we can go looking for her,” Sean offered. “Until then, it doesn't make any sense. It's like a suicide mission, bro. Just look out there. We'd never make it two blocks in that mess.”

Tyler hadn't listened. He'd insisted that Emily was alive. He knew it down in his bones, and he wasn't willing to let it go. He'd convinced Sean that with the two of them working together they'd be safe—but they weren't. They'd made a plan to distract the fiends by opening the side gate. Sean would lure them in towards the backyard, and once they took the bait, Tyler would run and get the minivan started. Sean would dash through the side garage door, cut back across the living room, run out the front door, and hop in the passenger seat.

“It will be easy,” he assured Tyler. “These things are dumb. They'll never even know what went wrong.”

But he hadn't anticipated Amy coming back. She caught him in the living room—having let herself in from the backyard through the wide open door—and attached herself by the teeth to his right calf. Sean was still dragging her along as he came out the front door, shouting for Tyler to go on without him. He fell down face-first into the lush green grass in their front yard. A swarm of neighbors converged on him, biting chunks of meat off of him from head to toe, like a kabob. Tyler could still hear his agonizing cries.

Why didn't he make sure she was really gone?

Tyler fought back angry tears. He knew the answer. No matter what happened, nothing in the world could make either of them cave in their little sister’s skull.

“Don't think about it now,” he told himself as another neighbor pounded the minivan. “What matters now is that you survive, otherwise Sean died for nothing.”

He put it in drive, and slowly inched forward, pushing most of them out of the way with the bumper. By the time he reached the end of the street, it was pretty clear his day wasn't going to get any better. He was blocks away from Em's house, and already there was smoke coming from under the hood, along with a terrible high-pitched whining sound that seemed to be drawing the attention of every last monster in suburbia.

“It's like a fucking dinner bell for the undead,” he groused, hitting the steering wheel with both hands as the minivan shuddered forward in jerks and spurts in response to him gunning the gas pedal.