Undead Menagerie, page 8
Horrified, Mike took a step back. Bloody, hollow eye sockets fixed on him. The prickly feeling of someone walking over his grave swept up Mike’s spine. He was sure this eyeless man could see him.
This… murderer had to be four hundred pounds, and not the football player kind. Everything about him was soft, from his wobbling triple chins to his swollen ankles and bloody, sausage-link fingers. He had no face, no eyes, was drenched in the dying woman’s blood. How had he done this? For a wild, unfocused moment, Mike thought the guy was dead.
The little dog bolted across the dying woman’s body. Mike yelped and jumped back, a new flood of adrenaline coursing through his limbs.
With a howl like a dying animal, the man charged.
Mike stumbled back, about to bolt, but heard a whimper. A little kid, hiding in the back seat of the SUV on the passenger side, blinked up at him through an open window. For a horrifying second Mike wondered if he should run, then snapped back to himself. He yanked the back door of the SUV open.
The guy slammed into the driver’s door, pushing it shut. Mike saw an umbrella on the back seat, the long kind with a curved handle. He grabbed the umbrella and planted his feet. The guy hissed as he banged into the SUV’s back door, slamming it shut.
Then he catapulted forward like a stone thrown from a sling.
Mike held the umbrella in both hands by his shoulder. Screaming, he charged to meet his faceless attacker. He shoved the umbrella into the guy’s open mouth like a spear. He felt resistance and pushed harder, but his attacker’s momentum was too much. The faceless man hit Mike like a freight train. Mike’s hands were knocked loose. His feet lifted from the ground. The guy kept coming, stumbling forward. Then his outstretched hands tangled with Mike’s flailing, airborne feet before Mike landed hard on the unforgiving concrete.
The faceless man stumbled, his feet tangling with Mike’s. Mike rolled, fear electrifying his brain. He pulled his feet free and pressed himself against the median. The grit and dirt of the road stuck to his sweaty face. All four hundred pounds of his attacker landed beside him with a heavy thump. Mike scrabbled away, terror and instinct kicking in. Panting hard, he pulled himself upright using the SUV’s rear bumper. The curved handle of the umbrella had snapped off. The pointy end protruded from the base of the man’s skull.
Mike tripped his way to the SUV’s back door and tugged it open.
The other back door was open. The kid was gone.
Mike whipped around, frantic, gasping, trying to find the kid. Too many vehicles were in the way, people running between the cars or clumping in groups. Everywhere he looked, people were being attacked by snarling, moaning, possessed maniacs. Blood stained the pavement, the vehicles, the concrete.
But they weren’t just attacking.
A woman snapped at the arm of a fleeing man. A cyclist with a bleeding wound on his thigh was swinging his bike like a club at an old man trying to reach him. A man had a woman on the ground. Like the SUV, he was ripping out her throat. He was… Eating her?
The heavy attackers moved at speeds that should be impossible on joints stressed by so much excess weight, yet they were doing it. Other attackers that weren’t as big were slow and shambling, moving like old people.
None of it made sense. None of this could be happening.
Some people fleeing the violence were caught between cars that had tried to reverse and crunched into the cars behind them. The mishmash of fender benders cut off paths of escape. A man and a child scrambled over the tangled cars, but those behind them didn’t have time to follow.
It was like a movie, like the people who’d gone crazy were—
It’s not that, he thought.
Mike’s head swam in a sea of visual input that he couldn’t make sense of. He didn’t know what was happening, but it wasn’t monsters from movies.
A scream cut through the haze fuzzing his brain—the woman he’d seen before by the crappy Buick. A man had attacked her from behind. She was pinned against the open door of her car. The man towered over her, a full head and shoulders taller. His teeth snapped so loud Mike could hear them. Dread coursed through him as the man’s teeth closed on her neck. She screamed, her howl a mixture of panic, terror, and desperation. She twisted her head free. The man’s bloodstained teeth had caught the heavy corduroy collar of her barn jacket.
Mike jumped the median, running for his truck. He scooped up the crowbar from the bed in his hands. The woman saw him coming. She clung to the car door, gasping as she struggled, her knuckles frozen around the doorframe like claws. Her attacker pulled her closer, his pale skin spidered with inky lines of black. The door jerked half-shut from the woman’s desperate grip while she fought to gain ground. She screamed again, the whites of her eyes ivory orbs in the dark oval of her face. Abject terror flooded them with the knowledge of someone who knows they’re about to die.
Mike hoisted the crowbar in both hands.
The woman’s eyes widened even more. She twisted toward the car, just enough to duck her head.
The crowbar arced like a baseball bat. Every ounce of strength in Mike’s body propelled the blow. A sharp crack rang out when the crowbar landed—the crack of breaking bone. The man’s head snapped sideways. His grip on the woman loosened, but he still held her fast.
Mike swung again. He felt the skull give way, the collapsing bone traveling the length of the crowbar into his hands. The woman twisted away, dropping to the ground. Mike rounded the half-open car door. The man leaned against the car, gazing at Mike with slack, vacant eyes. The woman crawled on hands and knees, scurrying past Mike as she stumbled to her feet. He’d punched a divot into the side of the man’s skull, but he wasn’t down. He raised an arm and moaned. And then, somehow, he took a step forward.
With a scream, Mike lifted the crowbar over his head. He slammed it down, striking the crown of the man’s head. There was a sickening thunk, followed by a crack. The man’s misshapen head crumpled. He dropped to the ground, blood coursing from his battered head, graying brains visible through the rent skull. Mike’s stomach heaved, acid tickling the back of his throat. He took a step back, recoiling. Then he turned, looking for the woman.
She stared through the window of the open car door. Her chest shuddered with halting, uneven gasps that scraped between her parted lips. Her face glistened with sweat and tears and… Jesus, was that blood?
“Are you okay?” Mike said, taking her arm and pulling her down beside the car’s front tire.
She cried out, a high, startled yelp of alarm.
“I won’t hurt you.” He peeked over the median and alongside the car’s hood. People stared at them from behind closed windows and locked doors, their mouths hanging open. Others were running between the cars, blurs of size and speed. “Are you hurt?”
She blinked, registering his presence as if she’d only just seen him.
“No,” she whispered, her voice clipped by an accent Mike’s brain was too overloaded to identify. “No, I’m fine. But they’re behind us.” She jutted her chin north, toward the suburbs Mike had just come from.
Mike looked to the light, where the bridge met Butler Street in a T-intersection. On this side of the median there were less of the crazed attackers between where they hid and Butler Street. Motorists fled from the bridge on foot, running between cars. And God help him, but relief flooded Mike’s brain when the moaning attackers altered course to pursue them.
“Not as many that way,” he said, pointing a trembling hand.
The woman nodded, her eyes wide with fear. She took his hand. Hers was small in his, almost like a child’s, but her grip was like iron.
He took a deep breath.
They broke cover and ran.
CHAPTER 10
IMOGEN
Imogen darted between the cars, following the man who’d saved her life. Around her, people screamed and cried, snarled and shouted, ran and fell, killed and died. Car horns blared. Glass crunched under her feet. She couldn’t believe what she’d seen—what had happened to her—moments ago. The faceless man attacking the woman. This man she ran alongside, who had tried to save that woman and had saved her. The abject terror of being attacked from behind, feeling the teeth through her jacket collar, and knowing she was going to die. And the sickening crack and crunch of bone that had been her salvation.
She’d seen the woman die. She’d seen the stillness that settled over her body while the two men fought, the man with no face, and this man, who held his arm back, palm patting the air down to signal her to stop. When the faceless man charged, she’d been sure he would kill this man she followed. Then the pointy end of an umbrella had sprouted below the charging man’s skull in a fountain of deep, dark blood. Fresh blood was bright, much brighter than people expected it to be. The faceless man’s blood had been… wrong. Too dark, a deep red-brown, almost black. Her psyche had recoiled at the unnaturalness of it, of the events happening around her.
But his blood had been exactly like that of the man who’d attacked her.
When they’d stood to run, Imogen thought she’d seen the dead woman in the SUV sit up. She’d seen motion from the corner of her eye and glanced back. The woman had been upright. Her mauled neck supported her swiveling head. Her gray-filmed eyes searched the surroundings. The edges of what Imogen thought was reality warped and crumbled. Then rationality reasserted itself. The woman hadn’t been dead, obviously. The strange film on her eyes, the mangled structures of her neck that couldn’t have supported her head, had been a trick of Imogen’s mind.
They reached the end of the bridge. The traffic light still turned from red to green to yellow to red. The man she followed peeked around a car, checking Butler Street in both directions. Directly across the intersection sat foundations of demolished buildings at the top of three sets of concrete stairs. Behind the empty foundations, a steep hillside erupted toward the sky, blanketed by the green leaves of maple trees beginning to turn orange and yellow. There was no cover save the hillside, which would be difficult terrain.
“Which way?”
Imogen looked into his eyes. They were a dark molasses-brown, vivid against the pink flush of exertion beneath his lightly tanned skin. His fear was reflected in their depths, but he hadn’t been paralyzed like her. She’d been frozen, standing beside her car, while he’d sprung into action to help that woman. She didn’t know him, but she trusted him with her life.
“I was going to the zoo.”
He looked to the left, where Butler Street rose gently before leveling out along the steep bluff above the river below. Figures ran between deserted cars. She couldn’t tell if they were people like her or the crazed killers. They clumped around and banged on cars where others had hunkered down.
He nodded, obviously aware that the zoo was just a quarter mile away. “It’s fenced. We can cut up over Baker Street.”
Imogen nodded. The zoo could be reached by staying on Butler, or by cutting up and over the hillside along Baker Street. Baker Street branched off Butler on the right and ran parallel to the lower roadway. At the crest of Baker Street, the road descended again, its path steep and twisting. The entrance to the zoo’s parking lot was on that last bend. Imogen’s heart missed a beat when she thought of the parking lot, of the vast expanse of open blacktop that had baked all day in the September sun. If they were caught out there, between the cars…
Stop it! Baker Street’s a thousand feet from here. I can do it.
Her heart thudded in her ears. Her legs trembled. Fear oozed from her pores. She’d never felt such fear in her life, total and utterly suffocating. It made it hard to think. It told her to freeze, to make herself small, to hide. She jerked when the man put his hand on her shoulder.
“Ready?” he said, a silent apology for scaring her in his pinched brown eyes.
She nodded. As if rehearsed, they bolted across the road. Her cheap sneakers struck the pavement, the impact jolting through her feet and ankles. The man paced himself to her, his heavy breaths even and steady. Her quadriceps burned but the expansion and contraction of the muscles of her legs felt good. The muscle memory of her morning run sparked to life, joining her like a welcome friend.
Bloodstained figures just beyond Baker Street had turned their way at the sound of their footsteps. These slim figures lumbered along rather than sprinting like the larger ones. They stumbled, bumping alongside the cars in the road.
She ran with the man in the parking lane between the cars and sidewalk, veering onto Baker Street with only the width of a car between them and their blood-soaked pursuers. They smelled not only of blood, but piss and shit. The sounds they made—the hisses and snarls, but especially the moans—scraped against Imogen’s nerve endings like sandpaper. The hair along her spine bristled, standing on end with a shiver.
A stitch formed in her side as they ran. Normally she could run ten miles without getting a stitch, perhaps it was the fear, or the adrenaline, or shock. Baker Street climbed, its incline long and steady, the road sheltered from view by the still green trees. They slowed at the T-intersection with Morningside Avenue at the crest of the hill. Imogen looked down the avenue lined with trim, modest houses whose prices had skyrocketed over the past fifteen years. It looked like a normal day. A few cars waited at the light at the end of the block. The red lights of a school bus winked a few blocks away, a curious sight for a Sunday that her brain latched on to through her fear.
A few people stood kitty-corner from them at the T-intersection, peering down the hill. The descent on Baker was clear, but the sirens were near, probably the zoo’s parking lot.
“Get inside and lock your doors,” her companion barked at the men and women on the corner.
They looked at her and—she realized she didn’t even know the man’s name. Some of the bystanders scrunched their brows in puzzlement, while others looked in alarm at her companion, who was covered in blood. As was she, she realized, for the blood of the man who’d attacked her stuck to her jacket and clothes.
A man said, “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know but you should get inside,” the man said. Then to Imogen, “Should we hide here, in someone’s house?”
They could. There were houses only twenty feet away with stout doors and windows that locked. There would be telephones; they could call for help. If they banged on a door, she knew someone would let them in.
But the people in cars had been overwhelmed so quickly. What if one of those crazy maniacs talked their way inside the house where they found refuge? What if the owner didn’t believe them or went outside to see for themselves? Would she be forced to lock someone out of their own home after they’d come to her aid? Could she, if it came down to it?
She wanted to get to the zoo. There were fences and walls to keep the crazies at bay. She wanted to help her colleagues if she could, and make sure her animals were properly cared for until order was restored. That’s what happened in places like America; order was restored.
“Let’s keep going.”
They started down the hill. When they reached the sharp bend where Baker Street turned left to meet up with Butler Street, they continued straight onto the long drive of the zoo’s parking lot. The lot sat in a bowl in the hollow of the surrounding hillsides. A long outdoor escalator carried patrons up the hillside to the zoo. Cars were lined up, exiting the lot, oblivious to the threat that was walking toward them. Imogen’s head swiveled but she didn’t see any of the crazies. At the far end of the lot, near the ticket booths, police cars were parked at crazy angles, their lights flashing in the fading afternoon light.
They weaved their way through the cars exiting the parking lot, ignoring the people looking at them askance. The lot was at least the length of two football fields. Her body didn’t relax as the ticket kiosks came into view; a line of parked police cars and two ambulances blocked their way.
A young police officer, who looked like he still belonged in high school, held up a hand. “The zoo’s closed.”
“I work here,” Imogen said, breathless. She dug in her back jeans pocket for her badge and realized she didn’t have it. “My name is Imogen Uwera; I’m a zookeeper. We need to go inside.”
By now, the officer had noticed their blood-soaked clothes. He called to other officers to join him. He settled his hand on the butt of his gun. “What happened to you?”
“They attacked us,” the man with her answered. “They’re killing people.”
“Who’s killing people?”
“I don’t know.” For the first time since he’d saved her, her rescuer sounded panicked. “They’re coming up from the bridge, pulling people out of cars. They’re… biting them. Eating them!”
By now, several police officers faced them, varying degrees of skepticism reflected on their faces. A woman was among them, her black hair pulled back in a severe bun at the nape of her neck. She stepped forward and Imogen could see the three sergeant’s stripes on the short sleeves of her black uniform.
“You can’t go inside. The scene is still being cleared. Come sit down,” she said, motioning for them to proceed her around one of the squad cars. Over her shoulder, she said, “Somebody get a paramedic and a supervisor over here.”
Imogen looked past the ticket kiosks to the long outdoor escalator that climbed the hillside to the zoo. That was where they needed to go and these police officers were preventing it. They couldn’t obey this sergeant. She meant well but would get them all killed.
“You aren’t listening to me,” Imogen said, desperate urgency filling her voice.
From behind them came a scream, then another. She whirled around, unable to tell if they were coming from Butler Street on the parking lot’s north side or Baker Street on its west. The police sergeant, her attention pulled away from Imogen, barked new orders. Imogen backed away toward the man who had saved her on the bridge and caught his eye.
He tipped his head to the east side of the parking lot, where a winding road called One Wild Place snaked through the zoo. A walkway connecting the two parts of the zoo—the side near the escalators where there was a merry-go-round and the Administration Building, and the side with all of the animals—ran under One Wild Place. They could scramble up the short hillside from the parking lot and run up the road to the zoo. Then they’d either drop from the overpass or scale the fence along the road at the first service entrance.
