Zombie Ever After (18 page)

Nothing. The safety was on. Who would leave the safety on in the middle of a zombie apocalypse?
 

He released the safety and tried again.
 

Click.

The zombies were almost upon him.

Who would leave an unloaded shotgun in the middle of a zombie apocalypse?
 

Then he remembered: ammo had been scarce for quite some time. Guns gave the illusion of safety these days, not the reality.
 

“Ah, shit balls!” He threw the weapon at the encroaching creeps and ran toward the door.
 

Unfortunately, other zombies blocked that exit.
 

Midstride, Donovan turned and made for the kitchen door, which looked to have been forgotten by the undead. He grabbed the knob, shoved the door open, and ran into the night.

Right into an entire horde of zombies.
 

Donovan was weaponless, defenseless. Out of options. Out of luck.

Out of nowhere, shots rang out in the dark night. One zombie fell, then another. A third zombie’s head exploded, and then the creature, too, collapsed. Donovan couldn’t make out much in the darkness, but he caught Tenton, standing ten paces away. Tenton popped shots into the swarm of the undead with astonishing precision, working like a surgeon.
 

“Donovan!” Tenton yelled, waving to him. Donovan jogged over to join him as Tenton reloaded. “Head for the barn. The others are already in there,” Tenton shouted. Then Tenton walked backward, keeping stride with Donovan while firing his shotgun into the night at any unseen undead that might be tracking them.

“Where’d you get the ammo?” Donovan asked.

“Last box. Kept it for just such an occasion. This is the end of it, now,” Tenton said.

Donovan ran to the barn. The surviving women—and, by quick head count, all of the children—filled the truck. Donovan wouldn’t say they all crowded
safely
in the truck, however, considering they sat on over five hundred pounds of explosives. Incredibly
touchy
explosives. The women and some of the older kids carried sticks, bats, shovels, scissors, knives, whatever they’d been able to grab. And they were ready to fight.
 

“Uh—” Donovan said, pointing to the group and then looking back into the night for Tenton. He couldn’t make him out at first. Donovan’s eyes adjusted from the lights in the barn to the dark of the yard outside. He realized he could no longer see Tenton at all. Where Tenton had been standing mere seconds ago, a mound of zombies writhed in frenzy.
 

It was too late for Donovan to save the man who had saved him. Though lapsed in the religious department, Donovan still knew how to give the sign of the cross. He did so now.

Donovan opened the passenger door. No one sat on the driver’s side; that was to have been Tenton’s place. Instead, Donovan slammed the door and ran around to the driver’s seat. He spotted a machete on top of an upright barrel. Without hesitating, he grabbed the weapon, tossed it into the truck, and then got behind the wheel. The engine roared to life, and he slapped the stick into reverse and stomped on the accelerator.

“Hang on to whatever you can grab!” he yelled out the window at the passengers behind him. “We’re going on one hell of a ride.”

*
 
*
 
*

Donovan pulled out of the barn, tires spinning in the dirt, and whipped around a hundred and eighty degrees, aiming for the road. As the truck rotated, the headlights illuminated zombies everywhere. Over by the house. On the driveway. In the yard. By the barn door. Inches from the truck. Each scene a frozen vignette from the Zombie Natural History Museum.

“Stay away from the sides of the vehicle,” Donovan hollered. “They’re
real
close.”
 

He started driving immediately, taking out three zombies in the first few seconds. The truck roared up the dirt driveway to the pavement. Donovan tried to assess which direction appeared to have the fewest zombies, but all routes looked thick with the monsters. He chose left, for no reason other than he had to go somewhere . . .
 
now.

Donovan plowed the truck through the zombies, but he wasn’t sure they’d make it out of this sewer of undead. The truck started to bog down, as if caught in sticky mud and not the broken body parts of zombies. The truck struggled, even though Donovan had the pedal to the metal. He wouldn’t be able to make the laboring machine go much further. Too many undead.
 

Luckily, at that moment, Donovan caught a glimpse of a dirt road to his right. Abruptly, he spun the steering wheel. The path ahead appeared free of zombies, at least as far as Donovan could make out in the gloom. The truck started to gain speed. The zombies grabbed at the door handles and clawed at the people in the truck bed.
 

Someone screamed.
 

Donovan looked in the rear view mirror. Zombies were clawing at one of the woman, biting her as they yanked her off. She was swallowed by the munching crowd.

Donovan gunned it. They moved along well now, and more importantly,
away
from the monsters. Donovan only hoped the road he’d chosen was not a dead end, no pun intended. He considered using the whole bomb setup on this smallish zombie cluster right now as a last resort. He realized, however, that the blast wouldn’t have saved him and the other folks. They’d have gone down with the ship, so to speak. But he’d use it up ahead, if he had to, if they ran into any more trouble.
 

For now, Donovan hoped and prayed with everything he had that they would escape. To the city where the bomb might make a real difference. Where exploding it might compensate for the deaths of Tenton and the others they’d left behind.

Nothing remained for him to do now except drive. And pray. Which was a problem, as Donovan didn’t know the name of the saint who warded off the undead (although he was confident one existed). So, instead, he mumbled some heartfelt but generic prayers and wishes to keep them all safe—Cathren, too, wherever she was. He threw in a few requests to St. Christopher because he was traveling now and hoped to be doing so again, soon, with Cathren.
 

Suddenly Donovan remembered a truckload of saints. He prayed to Saint Anthony of Egypt, for the purification of the world from evil. He prayed to Saint Anthony of Padua, to save the nonbelievers. He prayed to the Archangel Gabriel that Divine Love would conquer the world. To Saint Michael the Archangel that those who were under the influence of Satan might be saved. He even prayed to the patron saint of archaeologists, St. Helena. Why not? he figured. Archaeologists dealt with the dead all the time. But that was all Donovan had, draining his full knowledge of the saints from Sunday school. He was surprised he remembered as many as he did.
 

More importantly, he hoped the saints were taking requests today.

As night turned slowly to a grayish morning, the truck packed with survivors from the New Earth farm arrived downtown without further incident. The streets, once crawling with zombies, now stood empty. At least of living things. Bloodied corpses lay scattered around, as though they’d been dropped from a zeppelin. Donovan understood they only had a small window before these corpses started to reanimate. Regardless, the bodies here didn’t represent nearly enough of the enemy to warrant detonating the bomb just yet.
 

“We need to stop,” someone called to Donovan from the back of the truck. The folks riding on tubs of destruction bounced along in various stages of snoozing and waking. It had been a hard, dazed night.
 

Donovan’s goal: find the biggest herd of zombies available and blow them to pieces. The goal of his passengers was far more basic: find some place to go to the bathroom. Even at the end of the world, there were still some things more important than personal safety. At least for a few, specific minutes every day.

“Okay,” Donovan said, “let me scout out a safe place first.”
 

Did anyone care about cleanliness, neatness, even sanitary conditions anymore? Bushes would do in a pinch. They lived in a different world. Nonetheless, he knew of a city park half a mile up the road. The place had bathrooms, and they had been clean back before the apocalypse began.
 

They pulled up to the park which appeared to be deserted. Donovan wouldn’t trust that on a good day, and this was not a particularly good day. He had to take the chance, however, with a dozen or so folks jonesing for some porcelain. Plus, he could use a moment to himself. Donovan pulled as close to the public bathroom as possible and stopped.
 

“All right, everybody,” he said. “Let’s give this a go.” Donovan grabbed the machete and stepped out. Jamming the blade behind his belt, pirate style, he strode to the back of the truck.

“Be aware while you’re away,” he said. “And make this quick. We’re vulnerable here.”
 

Various occupants of the truck bed nodded in agreement as they jumped out. Some said, “sure,” and “yeah,” and “right.” Then off they went.
 

The group dispersed, agreeing to meet back at the truck within five minutes. They also agreed not to separate; that is, no person left alone at any time. Except Donovan, of course.

While the rest of the group was inside the public bathroom, Donovan guarded the truck. After a bit, it occurred to him that zombies couldn’t drive. He figured the vehicle would be safe enough while he dashed to the toilet for just a sec. Plus, he didn’t want to stay in one spot longer than necessary. The undead seemed to sense it somehow. Donovan pulled the keys out of the ignition as a precaution anyway. He also locked the doors.

He dashed into the men’s room and back as fast as nature would allow. He managed to be, somehow, the first one out. He was not, however, the first one to the truck.
 

Donovan was right: These sons-of-bitches had a sixth sense about humans not in motion. The truck, in less than two minutes, had been surrounded by a group of them. Fuck. They had no guns, no escape route, and now no big bomb.
 

He mentally kicked himself, even though he knew he couldn’t have done anything had they shown up while he was guarding the truck. That’s when he noticed something. True, these guys around the truck shuffled about, hunched over and slow-moving. But none of their body parts appeared to be missing or rotting away. These weren’t zombies, he realized after a moment.

These were fossils.

Now the problem with fossils, unlike zombies, was that they were unpredictable. With zombies, there were no surprises. When they saw someone, they went after them. But fossils? Who the fuck knew how they were going to act? Sometimes they would run away. Other times, they’d go for murder with whatever weapons they carried. Kitchen knives and carving forks. Rakes, shovels, pitchforks. Muskets, rifles, and the occasional blunderbuss.
 

Donovan stood a few yards from the truck, observing them. The fossils teetered where they stood, eyeing him back. They adjusted their thick glasses, shifted on their canes and walkers. One fossil took a sinister hit of oxygen from the squeaky canister he pulled behind him.
 

At last, the New Earth women and children returned in pairs or small groups until they met up with Donovan. They joined in the staring contest.

East of where they stood, a familiar, low groaning—almost indiscernible—wafted toward them. The zombie death whine.
 

The hair on Donovan’s arms pricked up. He shuddered and scanned the cityscape around them. A couple of the girls whimpered. The fossils did nothing except continue to eyeball Donovan’s group with their watery eyes. This was not going to end well. The zombies were coming from the east and they’d be here in a few, short minutes. Fossils in front of them, blocking their access to the truck, to both its usefulness as an escape vehicle and as a zombie bomb.

Donovan had no choice. He snatched the machete from his belt and, with a rebel yell, dashed toward the pack of fossils. Said fossils, meanwhile, continued to gawk, not comprehending that Donovan was an immediate threat. Nor the zombies in the distance as an imminent one.

His work done, Donovan returned to the group, the machete back in his belt. Instead of slaughtering crazy people, glass eyes and false teeth filling the air like smelly confetti, he’d only needed to rattle their cage. They took off for the hills as if the lunch bell had rung at the all-you-can-eat buffet.
 

Donovan waved to his charges. “Come on,” he said. “It’s safe.”
 

No sooner did those words leave Donovan’s lips than the undead arrived. They still made their moaning noises, like a zombie version of the seven dwarves’ marching song.

The women moved first, picking up the small ones or grabbing the hands of the older children. They reacted quickly, but not quickly enough. Donovan pulled his machete back out.
 

Here we go again,
he thought.
The same thing, but different.
Rather than chasing off a handful of fossils, he would need to decapitate
a lot
of zombies.

As the initial band of zombies slunk around the corner toward the little group, Donovan stood his ground, ready to meet them. A thought dawned on him, ever so slowly: this zombie parade was much,
much
bigger than the twenty or thirty zoms he’d originally estimated. The undead lumbering their way numbered over a hundred already. And Donovan had yet to see the end of the parade line.

This was it, the mother lode: the biggest assemblage of undead anyone had ever witnessed or read about.

“Get out of the truck!” he screamed counter-intuitively. “I know that seems wrong, but leave,” he continued shouting. “Run as far away from here as possible. I’m going to set off the bomb!” Donovan pointed up the road, a relatively low San Francisco hill.

For some reason, the woman and children considered Donovan their leader, which worked for him. They ran. Several of the undead became distracted by their departure. They’d have to get past Donovan first, though. Or to be more precise, his truck of explosives.