Eden 01 - Eden, page 4
The ruckus from the zombies was unmistakable. The ones that were capable were screaming, bawling. The faster ones were already dashing madly to the intersection, the stumbling mass behind them roiling, moving as one, a tide rolling in.
Fuck! mouthed Adlard from across the intersection, looking from Orlando to the other men, bringing the AK to his shoulder, wondering what the hell he should do.
Orlando hugged his knees behind the motorcycle, pissing himself, and risked a look over the seat of the Harley.
Buddy waved Adlard off, pointing back the way they’d come. Orlando stood up in the open and started to scream hysterically.
“Fuck!” Yelling out loud, Adlard stepped round the corner. The pigeons scattered above as the AK-47 started bucking on semi-auto into his deltoid. He fired at the advancing mass, the AK spitting shell casings out into the street. “Orlando, move your fucking ass fucking now!”
Harris readied the 9-millimeters, moving to step out onto the avenue, when Buddy stopped him. “Run. We gotta run!” Louder to Bear and Turner: “We out!”
The other two did not need to be told twice, and hoofed it in Davon’s direction.
Across the avenue, Adlard dumped a mag. Zombies in the fore were running over those brought down, scrabbling their way toward the intersection. Orlando extended his pistol and fired out the clip, not hitting a single one.
“Run, bitch—run!” Adlard himself fired more rounds from the assault rifle, turning and hauling ass back in the direction they’d come. Buddy pushed Harris—“Go!”—but Harris didn’t move fast enough. Buddy shoved him ahead, propelling him with his free hand.
Orlando tried to reload his pistol on the run and fumbled a fresh clip; it bounced to the asphalt out of sight under a car. Orlando shrieked, legs moving faster than they’d ever moved before, burning him his own zigzag path down the avenue between the lifeless vehicles.
Halfway up the block on the fly, Harris risked a look over his shoulder. “Oh shit!” A dozen or more of the things had turned on the street after them. The majority pursued Orlando, his yelps and cries diminishing with distance. It was the last anyone from Eden ever heard from him.
“Up ahead,” Buddy said, pointing. Davon signaled from an alley between two buildings.
“Harris, Buddy,” Bear gasped in the alley, rivulets of sweat streaming down his face. He looked like he was prepping for a coronary. He summoned them farther along the path, Davon and Turner at the opposite end.
Passing a Dumpster, Bear stopped, hands on knees, his breath gone. “I can’t,” he wheezed.
“Alamo time.” Buddy didn’t even think about it, tracking the 9-mil toward the mouth of the alley, shrugging the shotgun off his back and into his free hand, tensing it on the sling.
“Wait,” Bear gasped, squatting down and finding a grip under the Dumpster. With a rapid succession of grunts and jerks he catercornered the metal bin, cutting off the alley.
“Nice.” Harris patted the giant on his sweaty back.
The next hour was spent navigating back alleys and roofs, avoiding the mass of zombies on the avenue streaming past in one direction.
The street outside the MJ’s Wholesale Club was deserted. Most of the zombies in the area were hot on the trail of Orlando or Adlard. It was unsettling to the men, how one street could be empty of them, another thronged.
The parking lot behind the discount warehouse was equally barren, save an unhitched trailer from an eighteen-wheeler.
Inside the building’s cavernous depths, Davon and Turner wheeled the gate shut and fastened the chain from the inside. Dust motes swirled in the beams of their flashlights and the high-powered torches as they fanned out. Their cursory glances through the looming aisles sought to ascertain they’d not stumbled upon a warren of the undead.
John Turner said it as he pushed his glasses up his nose. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here since we were last time.”
“Hmmm.” Buddy was concerned. Eden was not the only enclave that periodically raided this store. He didn’t envision any of the refugees in Jericho across town making it this way, but the place they called the Farm had to be less than a mile from this spot. No one from Eden had ever met the survivors from the Farm, but they knew of its existence from those at Jericho.
As the younger Turner had said, however, it didn’t look like anything had been touched since their last visit.
“Let’s get working on those lists.” No time to mull it over. “Somebody check the pharmacy section, see if there are any inhalers left for Bobby.”
Bear filled two gunnysacks, leaving them next to the gate with his chain saw. Against his better judgment, he walked over to what had been an employee office. He’d been there before, knew what he would find, and the lure was inexplicably strong.
A suite of rooms. The first was the largest, with tables and chairs for staff, a refrigerator long dormant, and a row of cubbies for personal belongings. Two doors led off into smaller offices, one with a copy machine and watercooler.
There were three dead zombies outside one of the doors, decomposed, crumbling into flakes on the tile floor. That door was broken open. Inside, a skeleton in a chair sat hunched over a desk. On the desk were a flashlight and a couple of framed pictures of a family with two kids. There was an organizer with pens and a ruler sticking straight up, and a faded white monthly desk calendar took up much of the surface area.
One other item lay on the desk. A personal journal, closed.
Bear shined his lantern about, the same as last time. Over their visits to this place, he’d pieced together a tale, what he thought had happened in the room. The skeleton, judging from the clothes in the chair, a man—a manager? Employee? Some hapless schmuck wandered in from the street? Whoever he’d been, he’d locked himself in the office, the three zombies outside.
Whoever he’d been, he’d written entries in the journal: some long, others two or three sentences. A few were moving, personal. Others were detached, written in the third person, the first person interjected randomly. Bear imagined the man in the chair, the door locked, listening to the things outside, the things that kept him from the water in the cooler one door over, the things waiting for him. Bear pictured the man writing in the journal by flashlight, filling pages as he slowly dehydrated and starved to death, the flashlight dimming and dying, leaving the man alone in darkness with the noises outside.
Bear imagined someone else, someone from the Farm, maybe some other anonymous group of wanderers, first gaining entry to the warehouse where they found the three zombies outside the door, the man inside long dead. The zombies had been felled, the office door forced, and anything worth taking was gone. If the man had any weapons with him, they were part of the booty. But Bear couldn’t imagine the man inside with a weapon and not using it, opting instead to wait for death in the dark. Either the original plunderers hadn’t read the journal, or they’d decided to leave it on purpose, just as Bear had abandoned it each time.
He’d read from the book before, sometimes only getting a few sentences before he’d had to close it and leave. The words written there were nouns, adjectives, and verbs, yet they were too much for him. Bear looked at the journal, wondering if he should, knowing he would. Placing his lantern on the desk, the calendar beneath it brittle, he opened the diary at random, crossed himself, and picked up at the first full paragraph, reading an entry he hadn’t before.
We had to call them something, so we came up with a variety of names. Undead, walkers, zombies, ghouls. Other more colorful, less polite terms. Whatever one chose to call them, there was no doubt to what one referred.
They own the world now. There is no telling where the first undead came from, what made them sally forth and seek human prey, though in the first few weeks of contagion there was no shortage of theories. As world governments and military forces scrambled to at first annihilate and then contain the spreading threat, scientific establishments, rooted in empiricism and rational thought, sought to cope with the very irrational—but nonetheless real—idea that the dead had come back to life, kept coming back to life, attacking the living.
Within a couple of months of the first outbreaks, the human population had pitched into a frenzy. Towns, counties, provinces, then whole countries crumbled. Large urban areas, home to great populations, were the first to fall.
Zombie numbers expand exponentially. For every one felled two take its place.
The major communications media broke down within the first week, followed in short order by the infrastructures of most countries. On the streets and plains it became chaotic, sheer pandemonium, with humans doing their best—our best—to arm ourselves and find refuge. Safety isn’t necessarily found in numbers. Isolation is the key, being able to lock yourself away someplace safe from them. But no refuge is completely impenetrable, either from the undead without or from demands within. Human beings need food and water, supplies, some word of what the hell is going on outside everyone’s individual little private sanctuaries, and eventually they set foot outside their areas of protection only to be pounced upon by the waiting undead.
They, the undead, are nothing if not patient. If they chase you into a room and the door is solid enough to keep them out, they will wait, standing around outside the door, just as those outside now wait for me. Others would join them in the following hours, in the ensuing days and weeks, knowing something edible is locked away behind that door, something worth the wait. But I suppose when you’re already dead, you’ve got a lot of time to kill. Eventually hunger or thirst would drive survivors out of their hiding places, in weakened states, and they’d be no match for what awaited them. I will not leave this place.
Those who managed to survive for some length of time did so because they found out a few things quickly. The undead “rules” so to speak. First and foremost, there are only a few ways to bring them down. The easiest way involves destroying the brain, just like in the horror movies. Head shots, bludgeoning the skull, even a well-placed blow to the temple if powerful enough, all can fell an undead. Burning works too, although one has to be careful to really fry them, to burn them until they collapse and stop twitching, and then, just to be sure, to burn them even more or shoot them in the head.
Blowing them up works, but not well, because explosions cause massive damage but not all of it to the brain. This strategy worked well enough for the armed forces early on, when their helicopters and bombers would rain missiles and bombs on cities and large concentrations of the undead. Poison gas and nuclear weapons didn’t do shit to them. It took a horrendous toll on the civilian population though, but what could one do?
The brain has to be destroyed. That’s all there is to it. An undead can literally lose its head—have it severed—and the thing’s mouth will still attempt to bite at human beings. Zombies with their legs blown off by explosives or weapons fire will crawl after living prey. The disemboweled stagger forward tripping over their own intestines. None of their major internal organs seem to be necessary.
They are driven by hunger and human beings are their favorite meals, but they will also eat cats, dogs, any other animals they can get their hands on. Unlike other mammals, people often rise as undead themselves after being bitten. It all depends on the severity of the feasting. If a slew of the undead take a human down and eat him, devouring most of his innards, separating limbs from trunk, rending flesh and muscle from bone, for some reason these dead humans remain dead. They will not get back up. They will not start walking around.
But if an undead takes a few bites out of you, or even one nibble, you are doomed to walk the Earth as one of them. From that point it’s just a matter of time, and the length of time seems to be related to the severity of the bite and its proximity to the brain. Humans with their throats torn out, writhing on the street while their arteries pump out the last of their precious lifeblood will often get back up within a minute of dying. I have seen this all too often with my own eyes. If the zombies are gathered around to start feasting on the newly dead, they immediately stop when the dead one stirs, signaling his ascension to their ranks.
On the other hand there are human beings who sustain relatively small bites, mere scratches to their ankles or feet, and the wounds will often appear to start healing over the next few hours. But they too turn, within a night or two at most. At least the dogs and cats, the rats and goats, the horses, whatever else the undead get their hands on and their teeth into, at least these things don’t return.
There are different types of the undead that we survivors have armed ourselves against. The majority of the undead are shamblers. These creatures stagger through the streets and country, moving relatively slowly. In open areas you can see them coming from a distance and easily avoid them. In the dark or in enclosed spaces they are especially dangerous. Such are at my door now.
The bookers are so called because they really move, they chase you down. These undead (were they spry human beings when alive?) launch themselves into a sprint in pursuit of fresh flesh. Some are fast, others extremely fast, and most human survivors do their best to avoid these creatures. Not only are they quick, bookers, unlike the survivors they chase, don’t tire. They are relentless. The silent bookers are especially dangerous, as they are on you before you’re even aware of their presence.
Howlers can be either shamblers or bookers. These undead scream, literally howling, their range covering everything from shrieks of frustration to roars of anger. They’re never able to keep quiet, so you can hear them well in advance of their appearance on a scene.
Only one of the things outside this room now makes any noise—and it won’t stop.
Most of the undead appear to lack anything but rudimentary intelligence. They don’t work together. If a group corners a human being they attack all at once as individuals, each jockeying for position and attempting to secure the choicest meat for itself. At times they appear aware of the presence of other zombies, but mostly they ignore one another, shuffling past each other with the bookers racing between slower-moving shamblers.
The most dangerous of the undead are the brains. They are cunning. They will stalk prey, awaiting the best opportunity to pounce. They also work as individuals, but their stalking and waiting behavior is like a form of hunting. Brains could be shamblers or bookers, but there aren’t many howlers amongst their numbers, probably because stealth and bloodcurdling cries don’t go well together.
Each time the undead eat, it is as if they are eating for the first time. Their hunger cannot be satisfied, but they can go weeks or months without eating until a human being or a rat shows itself. They don’t appear capable of starving to death, and they aren’t deriving energy from their feedings. Their feedings are hedonistic frenzies, pure bacchanalian gluttonies. Three bookers—they eat as fast as they run—could reduce a human being to the bone within five minutes of its being brought down. Shamblers eat more slowly, seemingly taking their time, perhaps even savoring the experience more than their booker cousins. I will stay in here rather than suffer that fate.
The elements don’t seem to bother the undead. Rain, snow, extreme heat, there they are, moving around the countries, invading cities and farmhouses, waiting out human strongholds until supplies and patience disappear and those safe inside are forced to venture beyond their confines. Standing around in rain and snowstorms, the weather burns and rots their undead skin. Some of them are no more than walking skeletons with shreds of flesh and the clothing they died in hanging from exposed tissue and bone, yet they also seek food.
Some survivors refer to the coming of the undead as “the plague.” The more religious amongst us dub it “the apocalypse” or “end times.” No savior has appeared. The origins of the outbreak are unknown; the nature of the contagion, spread by bites, is unclear. But there is one stark reality left we survivors: being human after the outbreak isn’t easy, and the tenure usually isn’t long.
“Bear, we’re ready to get out of here,” Turner called from outside the office.
“Just a sec.” Bear gently closed the journal, considering, as always, taking it with him, but deciding, as usual, not to.
He retrieved his lantern, cast its beam toward the door, and looked back toward the desk and chair at the clothed bones in the sightless dark.
5.
You shaved.”
Julie’s look of surprise transitioned into a smile. She’d never seen him clean-shaven before.
“Yeah.” Harris rubbed his smooth chin between thumb and forefinger. “It was time for a change.”
His dirty blond hair, streaks of gray showing through, was still shoulder-length, shaggy like some aging British rock icon.
Julie, Bobby Evers, Bobby’s third wife, Gwen, and half a dozen other men and women worked throughout the house Harris and Julie shared, carting off trunks and limbs, scrubbing walls and carpets, trying their best to get things back to the way they’d been before the predawn assault.
“Damn, look at you,” said Keara. “A new man.”
“They never could get one over on you, Harris.” Mickey saluted and Harris sighed, forcing a smile. He got along well with Mickey because Harris liked movies, and Mickey—well, Mickey loved movies. But this was tough, keeping it together in front of all these people.
He’d stitched the bite wound on his left upper arm as best he could, wrapping it with gauze, securing the gauze in place with surgical tape. He’d changed to a fresh set of clothes: loose carpenter jeans, a flannel shirt over a ribbed tank T-shirt, different boots.
“We got lucky,” Harris replied, still not sure what to say. Telling them he’d been bitten was not an option. He knew what they’d do. He knew what he’d do if he was in their situation. Julie might hesitate and he loved her for it. She loved him, and love lent itself to hope, even when hope was absent.
Harris knew what Bobby Evers would do, decent man that he was, and he knew Bobby would do it with regret, probably an apology. Not the way Buddy would do it, but still, Bobby would do it anyway, which would be doubly awful, for both of them, seeing it coming. When the time came, Harris would figure something out, maybe tell Bobby then and let Bobby handle it.
