Zombie Ever After (10 page)

Donovan realized they were no longer being pursued. Had the gangbangers gotten tired of the chase? Was it no longer fun? No such luck. Yes, the gang had stopped running. But only so they could get out their guns and aim.

The first bullet passed close to Donovan’s left ear. Which relieved him of the false hope that the gang couldn’t shoot straight. The second ricocheted off the wall beside which they ran. Bullets rained down, hitting fire hydrants, parking meters, parked cars.

Donovan spotted a
bodega
up ahead. The door was wide open. He dragged Cathren inside.
 

The store was filled—old women, a couple of teenagers. Some moms with kids shopping for dinner. An older man and a young girl, at most sixteen, stood behind the counter. She wore a white blouse with flowers embroidered around the ends of the sleeves. The man wore thick glasses that looked like he’d borrowed them from someone with a bigger head. Everyone in the store—shoppers and workers alike—stared at the blood-splattered couple.
 

Donovan stood in the doorway, breathing heavily. Not the cavalry, he thought, looking around. Not hardly.
 

Donovan recognized the fear in the faces of the people in the
bodega
, and he immediately regretted his move. He should have kept running. Found something better. A place to hide. Someone to help.

Not only did reinforcements not exist here, but Donovan had inadvertently endangered the lives of every one of these innocent people in the store. So he stopped, turned, and started heading back out the door.

Just as the gang members walked in, guns pointed.

“You stupid
fuck,
” the leader screamed at Donovan. “Did you really think you can kick me in the balls and live?
Estás muerto!”
 

“Look, guys, no hard feelings, okay?”
 

“Yeah, you not have any feelings at all real soon,
holmes.”
 

It was funny in a macabre sort of way how gangs worked. Anyone could be on Bloods’ territory one minute, then, cross a busy street, run a few blocks, and there they were on the Latin Kings’ turf. A carload of Latin Kings could jump out of a couple of cars outside the bodega. Pop the leader of this little gang chasing Donovan and Cathren down, and make his head explode. The leader could fall dead right in front of Donovan, splattering him with yet more blood.

Which is precisely how it went down.

Donovan immediately pulled Cathren behind some shelves as the battle continued. Gang war. And they were in the middle of it. Bullets flew like hail, like hell fire. Flour bags exploded, white dust powdering the air. Beer and soda bottles sprayed their contents across the store. A din of screams, shouts, and shots.

Then, after only a surprisingly few minutes, the shooting and the shouting ceased. Donovan waited, expecting more. He heard a girl crying. Liquids glugging onto the floor. But no other sounds.

He stood up halfway and peered at the scene. Someone behind the register to his right was doing the same. There were two bodies by the front door, but other than those, nothing.
 

Donovan stood and walked to the entrance. He sneaked a peak out the door. The street was empty. He caught the sound of shots off in the distance, faint, like Rice Krispies popping.

He returned to where he’d had left Cathren.

But she was gone.
 

Donovan desperately scanned the immediate facility.

“Did you see— ?” he asked no one in particular. He breathed in deeply and swallowed. He tried again. “Did anyone see where my girl went?”
 

Donovan regarded the teenager behind the counter. She stood slowly, snot and tears running down her face as she stared into space. A woman’s cries carried from somewhere in the back. He turned around and headed in that direction.

A Latina woman, curled up in the corner by the beer fridge, held a tiny baby. She’d wrapped the child in a multicolored blanket. The woman cried while also trying to comfort the infant. The baby’s face grew redder, like a steamed hot dog. It suddenly started wailing.
 

And there was Cathren. Standing over the two of them.

*
 
*
 
*

Cathren crouched down and extended her arms toward the mother and the child.

The infant continued to cry. Cathren just smiled and kept her hands out. The woman looked uncertain and frightened. But, eventually, she set the screaming baby in Cathren’s hands. Cathren curled the little one up to her, against her breast. She sat down alongside the fridge next to the woman and rocked the baby in her arms. For some reason, the child responded and began to settle down.

Donovan heard sirens in the distance. He didn’t want to talk to cops. He didn’t want to be found. Or, more importantly, to have Cathren found.

“Cathren,” he said. “We have to go.”
 

She gazed up at Donovan and shot him a look as if she’d never seen him before. Then she turned her attention to the baby. She hummed it a little song that Donovan thought he recognized. The melody haunted him. He knew it, very well, but he just couldn’t connect the dots. At last, he remembered.

Yeah. It was “No Woman, No Cry.” He smiled a tired smile and slid down next to Cathren.
 

Fuck it. Let ‘em come and get us.
 

Donovan awoke.

Cathren’s humming and his state of near-total exhaustion had made it too easy to drift off. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, but the place was now deserted. No shoppers. No shop owners. No Cathren. No cops either, for that matter. Only two blown-apart corpses in sticky blood pools by the entrance.
 

Donovan got to his feet, walked to the door, and stepped over the dead. He strolled to the curb and surveyed the night.

A strange glow radiated off to the north. Donovan strode out into the street another foot or two to get a better look. The glow did not come from city lights, however. City lights were mostly on the red side of the spectrum. With a little orange. This glow, on the other hand, shone a ghostly green.
 

Donovan stood with his hands on his hips. What should he do next? A moan rumbled behind him, coming from the bodega.
Well, that’s odd,
he thought, turning.

He stared straight into the face of the gang leader. The
dead
gang leader. Standing not even ten feet away, half of his face missing, blown off by the guns of rival gang members.
 

“Holy fuck!” Donovan shouted, stepping back.
 

The gang leader groaned. Something dark green oozed out his mouth. Donovan spotted the man’s
compadre
behind him, also starting to move, to get up, to reanimate.
 

These guys are dead. When you’re dead, you’re supposed to stay dead.

Donovan did a quick search for Cathren. He didn’t see any sign of her. Hopefully she’d found refuge somewhere around here with one of the local families. Crap, he needed to get the hell out of there as fast as his feet could carry him.
 

The corpse moved toward him with a hungry look in its eyes.
 

Donovan picked a direction at random and ran.

He should have picked better.
 

He ran north, toward that strange light, looking behind him every once in a while. The thing shuffled after him, but it wasn’t progressing very fast. Okay, maybe it wasn’t too much of a threat after all. After about three blocks, Donovan slowed down.

A crowd appeared in the distance, advancing in Donovan’s direction, shuffling as if in a funeral procession. He couldn’t make out any features from his position. They were still too far away. He stared for long moment. Sheesh, what was wrong with them? They were moving oddly. Not like an army marching or people parading. Jerky movements. Twitchy. Strange.

They filled the block from one side of the street to the other, coming at him with the inevitability of a car wreck. Then the moaning started. That damn, familiar moaning. He recognized the lumbering shuffle. As they drew nearer, step by hitched step, Donovan could see their eyes. In some cases, only hollows remained, the orbs missing. In all other cases, the eyes had no light at all behind them.
 

Then there was the blood.

*
 
*
 
*

Almost without exception, blood splattered every one of the people or creatures or whatever they were, most notably on their faces. Especially around their mouths, as if they’d just finished an all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinner with gusto.
 

Behind him were two undead gangbangers. In front of him a sea of the undead. He’d take his chances with the gangbangers, he decided. He picked up a broken two-by-four with a couple of rusty nails sticking out of it that he’d spotted in an alley earlier. He took it with him as he crossed the street and headed down a side road.

Carlos the Corpse caught up with him somehow, popping out of the shadows like a dead pirate on that Disney ride. Donovan swung the two-by-four at what remained of the dead man’s skull. It smashed open like a rotten jack-o’-lantern. Donovan was relieved that the other gangbanger was not there. He wanted to get as far away from all this ambulatory death as quickly as possible.

He turned the next corner and almost knocked the other walking corpse from the
bodega
to the ground. The corpse grabbed Donovan to stop its fall. Once it had Donovan, it tried to take a chunk out of his flesh. Pukish drool dribbled out of its mouth onto the ground, just missing Donovan’s arm.

They were too close to each other; Donovan couldn’t swing the two-by-four. Instead, he pummeled the zombie’s head like a pile driver. He stunned the corpse enough to cause it to loosen its grip for a second. Donovan broke free and ran.

At the next intersection, a bus loaded passengers. He ran desperately and reached it in time. He hopped on and slid a couple of bucks into the machine, and then held on tightly as the bus jerked away from the curb. Diesel fumes filled Donovan’s nose as he swayed from the sudden motion.

The bus bounced along as Donovan gingerly made his way to the bench seats up front. He crash-landed between two other passengers. Exhausted, he sighed and closed his eyes.

“What’s that I am shmellin’?” the man to his left said. He was dressed in outdated, baggy jeans and a too-tight, blue silk sweater. “Dat chicken?”

“Yeah,” the man to Donovan’s right said. He sported a black New York Yankees cap and a cheap gold chain around his neck. “That’s fried chicken. I sure of it.”

“Smells Chinese, though,” the first man said.

Donovan glanced at him. He didn’t look like a typical goon. Just a run-in-the-mill, neighborhood clown. “You’re both right,” he said.
 

“How can we both be right?” the one in the silk shirt mumbled, mostly to himself. He took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his nose. “I don’t have no friends,” he said. He refolded the hanky into a neat square and stuffed it back in his pocket.

Donovan ignored them and closed his eyes again. While they bounced through the night, he thought about Cathren. They had been together for a few days. Now, for some crazy, fucked-up reason, he was thinking maybe it was love. But evidently, she’d decided to just pass through, move on. Or possibly she’d passed on. For good this time.

As he rode along, Donovan gazed out the windows at the city he once knew. The streets were eerily empty. In a city known for its nightlife, he spied no crowds. No revelers. No mimes or jugglers. Nobody walking on stilts. No streetwalkers.

But plenty of the living dead.
 

They came out of stores with the windows smashed apart. They came out of alleys, blood covering their mouths, chests, and hands. They walked like pre-programmed automatons. These ex-mimes. Ex-jugglers. Ex-revelers. Ex-streetwalkers. For Burkhart Egesa, the man who wanted to bring the dead to life, this must be the Bizarro World version of that dream.

Donovan shook his head. Zombies, he thought. Here in the city. Here in the Haight. Here in reality.

The bus dropped Donovan off about a block from his home. He stepped out onto the sidewalk, looking nervously in both directions. The bus doors creaked shut like the screams of the Valkyrie, then roared away, blasting Donovan with another hot cloud of diesel smoke.

Donovan stood in the silence and the dark. The streetlights nearby either flickered on and off or were completely dead. Machine guns popped in the distance, sounding like very small, very determined choo-choo trains.

Donovan needed to get home. Fast.
 

I think I can, I think I can.

Of course, he was wrong.

From every direction, the moaning grew like hundreds of decrepit chainsaws. Sputtering along, randomly gaining strength and losing power all around him in the dark.
 

So he ran toward his home, even if it meant crashing through zombie hordes to get there. He threw himself at a mob of the undead that stood between him and his home. He smelled their putrid odor. Almost tasted their rank, sticky skin. He sensed their decaying mouths opening, their rancid teeth chomping toward him.
 

So, it’s over before it could even start. Death, at last. How long, really, might I have gone on, anyway?

Then the bullets started.
Fa-fa-fa-FA-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa....
Rapid machine gunning. From somewhere over the hill, the troops had arrived.

He sprinted now. Oblivious to the bullets flying around him, to the noise, to the horrible screeching. To the exploding undead. It was clear that he was in grave danger. To the untrained eye, he was one of the undead, too. Covered in blood, out in the night, just one more zombie in a thousand.

To complicate matters, the toxic gas—which Donovan observed being released into the air minutes before—continued to drift his way. Donovan realized, as he watched zombie after zombie fall to the ground as it enveloped them, that it wasn’t tear gas. Rather, it was an anti-zombie cloud. He decided he wasn’t going to hang around to see if it worked on humans.