As he dragged the unconscious chain-smoker through the supermarket, Milt paused at regular intervals to listen, to make sure that no one was sneaking up on him. He was taking this task very seriously, refraining even from snacking so that he may be able to hear better. The last thing he wanted was another confrontation with the idiots who had taken his sword away.
After dragging Randy most of the way, Milt looked back and was hit by a feeling that was half apprehension and half revulsion. Randy’s thick, matted hair, which had been soaked in pickle juice, was leaving a clearly visible trail of pickle juice and pickle matter.
Unlike a trail of bread crumbs, however, Milt wasn’t sure if the repellent brine coming from the man’s head would disappear when it dried. Not only that, but it might also smell horrible enough to lead Sven and his demented posse straight to Milt.
Though unsettled by this development, Milt remained unwavering in his plan. He dragged the unconscious skinny man up the stairs to the roof and closed the door that led back down into the interior of the Wegmans. He was out of breath when he got to the top of the stairs, and even more out of breath when he got to the edge of the roof. His heart was beating wildly in his chest, unused to the exertions to which it was now being subjected.
Standing on the roof, Milt remarked at how much the air had cooled, at how much better it was than it had been in the day with the harsh sun beating down. Then he looked down at the man he had dragged up with disgust. Milt knew he shouldn’t be feeling this emotion, but he couldn’t help it.
It wasn’t a thing to be disgusted with, it was just destiny. Randy was to be a zombie, and Milt was to deal with it. That was the master plan.
As he rolled Randy to the edge of the roof, Milt couldn’t believe how stupid the people downstairs were—always letting zombies into the sanctuary. What was their malfunction? Resolving to figure that out at a later point, Milt was clear on one thing—he wasn’t going to go down with them.
He propped Randy up against a vent close to the edge of the roof. Then he stepped backward, savoring the execution of the first step of his plan.
Though he was fully aware of the spasmodic moaning and scraping of the zombies below, he never once looked down at them. He didn’t want to see them in their current state of pitiful desperation. The zombies were to have a new plaything soon, and then Milt would look at the zombies in their delight and revelry.
He smiled and began to lumber toward the door of the stairs, enjoying his walk across the moonlit roof.
As soon as he opened the door, Sven’s infernal cat burst out, hissing, clawing, and displaying exceptionally bad manners. Milt shuddered at the sight of the thing, simultaneously vibrating all of his blubbery folds. He had just the thing to get rid of the wretched feline.
Milt lumbered around in a circle, staying just out of reach of the cat’s claws—the cat it seemed, wasn’t really trying to attack him, but just to annoy and humiliate him—then he put his hand up to his jaw and squeezed hard.
There was a satisfying pop, and a perfectly aimed globule of pus shot from a bloated pimple on Milt’s jaw, on a direct path into the damned cat’s eye.
But, alas, the cat was too fast for Milt’s pus blast. It ducked out of the way and ran back down the stairs, no longer hissing, but not whimpering either.
Milt rumbled a sigh as he wiped the remainder of the pus on his jaw with the back of his hand, mentally acknowledging the minor defeat at the paws of the evil feline.
Then he went back down into the interior of the Wegmans, to gather the other items he needed.
Chapter 106
Confusion.
The vegan was moving backward.
The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was a gargantuan, moonlit pudding, adorned with a pony tail and clad in a trench coat.
Then he remembered that it was Milt.
Milt was moving away very rapidly.
The skin of the vegan’s face and scalp felt tight, and the vegan detected the sharp, distinct odor of pickled vegetables.
The sound of scraping and moaning.
The vegan was falling.
Understanding.
Then the ghouls had him.
How?
Why?
As he reached for his cross, the vegan’s mind filled with visions of cigarettes and Newman’s Own Peanut Butter Cups in Dark Chocolate.
He forgave Milt. Though the vegan didn’t understand why this had been done to him, he f—
Chapter 107
Sven was doing lateral raises with buckets of paint, concentrating on the burn in his deltoids. After reaching failure on the burnout set, he got down on his back and into a sit-up position. Lars positioned himself over Sven, and tossed an extra large bag of potting soil at Sven. Sven caught it as he began his descent into the negative portion of the sit-up, then he exploded up into the positive portion of the sit-up, launching the bag of potting soil back up at Lars.
The improvised medicine ball was incredibly effective—more so than the real thing on which it was based. The shifting soil within the bag made it more challenging to handle, calling additional stabilizer muscles into action to balance the unsteady weight.
After reaching failure on the potting soil sit-ups, Sven staggered up to his feet for wind sprints down the aisle. Lars was standing there with a stopwatch, screaming at Sven and motivating him to run faster.
After the wind sprints, Sven and Lars did sled runs with the forklift tied to their backs, pulling the heavy machine around the Wegmans for laps. When Sven thought he could take no more, the workout duo switched to overcoming isometrics.
They positioned themselves next to each other at the beginning of an aisle, and pushed against its side with all of their might, grunting and cursing at the thing to move. It didn’t, and that was the point.
Sven had all of his body against the broad side of the aisle. As he was pushing, he felt a jolt from the aisle itself, as if it was shaking. But that wasn’t right, because the idea of overcoming isometrics was to push against immovable objects. The objects don’t push back.
The jolt came again, stronger this time, and suddenly the aisle roared to life and began to push Sven backward. Sven’s cross-trainers tried to find purchase, to keep the aisle immobile, but it was too massive for him to control. He called out to Lars, but Lars was gone, and Sven found himself being pushed backward, unable to get his body out from in front of the aisle. He was about to get steam-rolled.
He managed to peel his head back from the side of the aisle and look over his shoulder. Behind him was a writhing mass of undead, with a rotten Lars at their helm, all of them welcoming his approach with their gnashing, grinding teeth and clutching, grasping arms.
All Sven could do was watch and feel as the zombie horde engulfed him, clawing, biting, ripping, tear—
***
Sven’s eyes opened eagerly, heavy though his eyelids were. On a different day, waking from a dream training montage that ended with a zombie horde would have made him laugh at himself, but now waking from such a dream, into a world overrun by zombies, into a world where Lars really was a zombie, was no more comforting than walking into a different room of a nightmare.
Sven felt the uncomfortable lump in his throat, unsurprised that it hadn’t yet gone away. He was face down, on his stomach. The sheathes of the machetes were digging painfully into his legs, unpleasantly accentuating the steady tick of pain in his chest and neck. Sven’s head hurt badly, but it didn’t hurt enough to prevent him from remembering the terror of the day, and where he now was.
He turned over onto his side. “What time is it?”
Brian’s voice answered. “A little before five in the morning, you have to get up, something’s happened.”
Sven’s vision cleared and he saw that Brian was now waking Lorie and Jane.
That wasn’t a good sign.
He got up, nodding in acceptance as the pain shot through his body. “What? What happened?”
Br
ian turned to Sven, seeming to hesitate before he spoke. “I can’t find Randy, or Milt. I think they’re on the roof, throwing things off...but, I thought you should all be aware of it before I go up there.”
“You’re right, I’ll go up with you.” Sven picked up the shotgun.
“We’ll come too,” Jane said, already up and checking her guns.
Lorie got up and tore open a fresh box of granola bars. Sven admired her ability to eat in spite of the day’s events.
“There’s just no end to this day, huh?” Lorie said, looking up at Sven.
“Guess not.”
Sven, Jane, and Lorie followed close behind Brian and Ivan, who led them to a set of stairs.
On the way to the stairs, Sven thought he saw a trail of dry slime that was unlike the trail left behind in the removal of the dead zombies.
It was slick and shiny, devoid of crust, and Sven was sure he smelled pickles and cigarettes. Not making any sense of this, he put it out of his mind.
Brian put a finger to his lips, motioning for them to be quiet, then they all tiptoed up the steps.
At the top of the stairs was a door.
Brian waited for Sven to join him in front of the door, then he put up his fingers to count. The two men nodded at each other, and moments later, burst onto the roof.
Milt stood at the edge opposite Route 29. The way the moonlight played off Milt’s trench coat filled Sven with trepidation, and it looked like the huge man was lit up from the front, as if he were blocking a spotlight. Something obviously wasn’t right.
Brian called out. “Milt? What are you doing up here?”
Milt didn’t respond.
Sven smelled burning. Without asking Milt or waiting for him to make whatever dramatic response he was planning, Sven pumped the Benelli SuperNova and strode diagonally to the edge of the roof, so that he was away from Milt but also in a position to get a glimpse of what was lighting Milt up.
Sven was surprised enough to see what Milt was holding, but his breath caught when he looked down.
Angry and confused, Sven turned back to Milt. “What the hell are you doing? You’re gonna bring all of them down on us.”
Milt finally budged, turning toward Sven. “How congenial of you to join me. I do treasure your company, you must know that.” Milt furrowed his brow. “And no, I do not believe I am bringing any of them down on us. You have taken up that task, fulfilling it quite well if I may say so. I—I am having a very simple barbecue. They love that kind of activity down here in the good ol’ South.” Milt smiled, revealing a black smudge across his front teeth. “Would you like to partake? It is exceedingly agreeable, I assure you.”
“No,” Sven said, in disbelief at what he saw. He crossed to Milt, snatched the lit piece of firewood away from him, threw it down, and tried to stamp it out.
It wouldn’t go out.
“It is best to throw it,” Milt said. “I have soaked the end in lighter fluid, so that piece of kindling is to be thrown, unless you want to catch the whole supermarket on fire, which would be consistent with your series of actions thus far. However, I must insist that you do not light us all on fire. It seems even more unpleasant than your ongoing solicitation of zombies to join our unfortunate troupe.”
Reluctantly, and not wanting to catch himself on fire, Sven picked up the burning piece of wood and threw it off the roof. It landed on top of the sea of zombies gathered outside, lighting up the clothes of several.
The uneven throng stretched out from the woods where Evan was buried, through the parking lot, and to the entrance of the Wegmans. The crowd of zombies in the immediate area before the entrance was punctuated with lit up patches, where burning pieces of firewood glimmered and caught the zombies on fire. Sven looked for evidence that the zombies were succumbing to the burning, but he saw none.
“You’re attracting all of them here, there weren’t this many earlier! They’re gonna overpower us. And what the hell are you talking about? What zombie solicitation, what are you saying?”
Milt licked at his front teeth. “What am I talking about? I am talking about the zombie boy that you so fervently insisted on introducing into our attempt at a controlled environment, and—”
Brian interrupted. “Where’s Randy? He’s not up here Sven, and he’s not downstairs. I looked everywhere.”
Feeling a chill grip him, Sven looked down into the throng, convinced that Randy was down there.
“You have the right idea, bodybuilder man. The perpetual arsonist has left the building. I may have been too quick to judge him, however, at least in the arson aspect. I have discovered that it is quite an alluring pursuit. Of course, roasting the zombies bestows a certain additional…je ne sais quoi, but then I imagine you would not know anything about such things.”
Sven ignored the portion that was incoherent ramble. “What do you mean he left? To go where?”
Then Sven noticed the ground around Milt’s furry-slipper-clad feet. There were wine bottles in rows, set up like dominoes, bundles of firewood, and a dripping can of lighter fluid. All the wine bottles looked closed. What was Milt doing with the wine?
“A toast,” Milt said. He picked up a bottle of wine and chucked it down into the throng. The bottle hit a zombie in the head, sending the zombie staggering backward. The bottle then bounced off another zombie’s arms before hitting the ground without smashing.
Milt huffed. “An unfortunate toss. I have been successful in shattering most of the bottles so far, and frankly, I must say that I am surprised you did not come up here earlier to investigate. Did you not hear the noise, or are you so used to cavorting among bottle-breakers that the sound did not raise any concerns?” Milt went on, not waiting for an answer, “They do not sell any liquor here, as you no doubt are aware, so Molotov cocktails are out of the question, but I find that the wine gives the zombies a nice coating on their feet, and perhaps may hasten the burning from the ground up. Of course, I also find the sound of shattering glass to be comforting.”
Sven was becoming exasperated. “I don’t see that the burning is having any effect. Where’s Randy?”
“You are quite incorrect. Several have already crumpled in the flames. It is just a matter of expanding the incineration. They are quite dry and crumbly it seems, eager to be consumed by fire…on their way to the netherworld perhaps.” Milt picked up a piece of firewood and began to douse its end with lighter fluid.
“Answer my question.”
“You see,” Milt began, gesticulating and accidentally pouring lighter fluid on his slippers, “improvised incendiary devices are not solely the province of uneducated, mustachioed guerilla fighters and rampaging mercenaries, improvised—”
Unable to listen any more, Sven struck Milt across the face with the butt of the Benelli. “For the last time, where the hell is Randy?”
Milt recoiled, putting a hand to his face. “Very well, if you must resort to such barbaric rudeness. As I have already informed you, he has left the building. He is gone—gone to the zombie horde of which he is now a member…or perhaps he was just a late night snack, I couldn’t really tell in the gloom—that was before I began to light them up, you see.”
Brian stepped forward. “So Randy just walked off, into the night. That’s what you’re telling us?”
Milt began to respond, but Sven didn’t hear him, because Sven was now enthralled by another object he had spied by Milt’s feet.
“He was up here,” Sven said, cutting off whatever Brian and Milt were saying to each other, “Randy was up here.”
Sven pointed to the pack of cigarettes that was in danger of being crushed under Milt’s stretched and apparently-resilient slippers.
“Those are his cigarettes.” Sven turned to Milt. “You don’t smoke, do you?”
Milt turned red. “I most certainly do not, even if I considered taking up the filthy habit, my asthma would not allow it.”
“So he was up here,” Brian said. “Why? You said he left.”
“So he did.”
Brian brandished the baseball bat. “By his own free will? What is it that you’re hiding?”
“Very well, if you must know, he did require some…persuasion. He was turning into a zombie, just like the boy was. I simply helped him find his place in the zombie apocalypse, and simultaneously secured our own safety. What I do not understand is this extreme ingratitude. You are all acting as if I have wronged you in some way.”
Lorie spoke up. “You stabbed him, like you stabbed Evan?”
Milt shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I simply pushed him from the roof. It is what he would have wanted, anyway—to be with his kind.”
Lorie looked incredulous as her eyes filled with tears. “So you pushed him…off the roof…to the zombies, just like that.”
“Well, in a manner of speaking, yes.”
Milt beamed, looking proud of his deed.
Chapter 108
Overcome by rage, Sven grabbed Milt by his trench coat collar. A machete appeared at Milt’s neck, the tarnished blade reflecting small spots of moonlight.
The machete drew droplets of blood that trickled part of the way down toward the haft before finding comfortable resting places on the metal.
Awestruck, Sven looked at the machete, realizing that he had drawn it reflexively, without thinking.
Then the dark feeling was there, tingling up Sven’s arm and into his body, running down his spine and back up it.
Then the jungle enveloped him.
***
It was nightfall in the jungle, and the sun-kissed woman’s eyes flickered at him.
The corners of her mouth curved downward with a knowing peril.
Then she disappeared behind a thick tree trunk.
Sven began to follow, but a blinding bolt of lightning ripped into the ground a few paces in front of him, and he stopped dead in his tracks.
A faint, metallic odor hung in the air, and in the distance was…the beating of drums?