He fell back again, but I knew full well we couldn’t play this game all day. This wasn’t Bill DeForest. Bill DeForest was dead. This was a dead thing that wanted to feed. There was only one way to stop it and I knew it. But I needed a weapon. That’s when I saw the shovel leaning against the fence. I picked it up. I held it over my head, ready to swing. But if that would have had an effect on a sane mind, it meant nothing to Bill. He was a thing of hunger. He understood nothing but feeding.
When he came again, some kind of slime hanging from his mouth, I swung the shovel. The blade hit him square in the face. It opened up a gash from the bridge of his nose to the crown of his skull. But it did not stop him. It made him take a few foundering steps back and then he came again. I swung the shovel, putting all my strength and weight behind it. Bill’s head split open like a ripe muskmelon. The impact drove him to his knees. He looked at me with those weird glassy eyes. A slop of brains had oozed down his face.
I swung it again and his head came apart.
He dropped face-first into the grass. He trembled, but did not move again.
I stood there, panting, the shovel in my hands, staring at the gore-spattered blade. None of it seemed real. Everything had taken on the dusky shades of a nightmare. I staggered back until I was in the alley. I stood there, just breathing, trying to get the world to stop spinning. When it did, I looked down the alley and the alley beyond that which terminated at the gates of Cedar Hill Cemetery.
I saw three, then four and five figures moving slowly, steadily in my direction. By the way they were walking with that loose-limbed sort of shuffling, I knew who they were and what they wanted.
There was no getting around it.
The dead were coming.
SHOCK TROOPS
When I stepped back in the yard, Dick Nickersen from across the street was standing there. Dick and I weren’t real close. I didn’t respect him or like him and I’m sure that went both ways. Dick was our neighborhood pain-in-the-ass. He knew all the city and municipal regulations and routinely reported people if their garages weren’t up to code, if they forgot to cut their grass or rake their leaves in a timely manner or didn’t keep their sidewalks ice-free in the winter time. He was fond of frivolous lawsuits. He had unsuccessfully sued Jimmy LaRue for allergies he’d suffered because of adverse reactions to smoke coming from Jimmy’s backyard barbecue pit and he’d gone after Mitzy Streeter because the leaves from her maples clogged up his rain gutters and made his roof leak. He had motion lights strategically placed around his yard to halt vandals, but it never stopped the local kids from soaping his windows on Halloween or stealing his lawn ornaments.
Dick wasn’t known as “Dick the Prick” or “Prick Dickersen” for nothing.
Right then he was staring at me.
He saw what his paranoid mind wanted to see: two badly-used bodies and me standing there with a shovel in my hand. I could see the fear on him: it made beads of sweat pop on his face. “What…what…what…”
Though I didn’t want to touch it, I flipped Bill DeForest’s body over so he could see it real good. “It’s Bill,” I said. “He came back. He killed Rommy. I hit him with the shovel.”
It was obvious that he wasn’t believing me. “Bill’s dead,” he said, immediately ascertaining the obvious as he always did.
“The dead are coming back,” I said.
He shook his head from side to side. He didn’t want to believe that. He preferred to think I was a nutbag who just did in two of my neighbors. “The dead…no, the dead are just dead.”
Before I could stop myself, I said, “I saw it before, Dick. It happened in Iraq five years ago. Now it’s happening here.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. As far as he was concerned, I was nothing but some fucked-up war vet. I was shell-shocked. I had PTSD. I wasn’t in my right frame of mind. I wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him everything I knew about Necrovirus and what it could do and the assurances I’d been given in Mosul that it was all over with.
Instead, I dragged him right out into the alley and he looked like he was going to have a stroke. I turned him and faced him so he could see the others down the alley. There were not four or five now. There were a dozen of them and they were closing in fast.
Dick just stared.
Then he looked at me. His eyes were moist. “This…this has to be some kind of joke, Steve.”
“It’s not a joke, Dick. You better get home. You better lock your doors,” I told him. “They’re coming out of Cedar Hill.”
“But, Steve…”
“Get home, Dick. When they come after you, they’re insane.”
“It’s Halloween shit. Zombies. Nothing but Halloween—”
“Dick…go home.”
But he couldn’t leave. He came right up to me and put his hands on my shoulders as if he were trying to ground himself in my physical reality. “But this is Lincoln Park,” he said, as if that made all the difference in the world. “This isn’t Iraq. This is fucking Yonkers.”
“Go home,” I said again.
He turned and jogged away. It wasn’t easy for him to take. I think, all things considered, he would have been far happier if I had killed him with the shovel. Dying knowing the dead stayed dead and God still made little green apples would have done his heart a world of good.
But I didn’t have time to worry about that shit, the dead were coming and I had to protect my family. I cut back through Rommy’s yard, thinking I should say something or do something but there simply wasn’t any time. When I got around front, I heard screams in the distance. Then barking. A wild, frantic barking and yapping.
Old Man Castleberry’s beagles.
Had to be. Castleberry was retired and had found a hobby: beagles. He raised them in a kennel in the backyard. Hunting dogs. Sold them for pretty good money. Problem was, when one started barking, they all joined in. And that could be at two in the afternoon or two in the morning.
But this was not your ordinary barking: this was the dogs going haywire, trying to alert any and all to a most unnatural threat.
The dead weren’t just coming up the alley.
They were in the streets.
And they had found the mailman.
He was knocked on his ass. Letters were flying and drifting earthward like goose feathers. A corpse in a black burial suit was biting into the poor guy’s arm. His blue uniform shirt was red with blood and he was screaming something terrible. I made to go to him and then two more zombies came through the shrubs, a teenage boy whose face was more skull than flesh and a little girl in filthy cerements. They both looked right at me with their graveyard eyes and then, passing me, they set on the mailman like hyenas on a fresh kill.
I had tossed the shovel so I had nothing to fight with.
The teenage boy was gnawing on the mailman’s legs, the little girl was going for his throat. Poor guy was writhing and twisting, trying to beat them off, trying protect his face, screaming for help. The little girl seized one of his hands in her jaws and began to shake it like a chew toy. I could hear his finger bones snapping.
Shit!
Was anybody else seeing this?
I looked for a weapon, something, anything. The ice-chopper. It was on my porch. I still hadn’t put it away and for once my incurable procrastination was going to come in handy. It was just a broomstick with a sturdy iron blade on the end, but it was better than nothing. I ran up and grabbed it. In the distance, I could hear screams rising to a fever pitch and I knew the dead were attacking the living. And not just here on Holly Street but all over town.
I made it far as the sidewalk with my ice-chopper.
That’s when the little girl left the mailman to the others and turned on me. She wore a white dress gone gray with mildew. Her face was like wax melting off the bone below. She held her arms out to me like she wanted a hug. Her eyes were glowing hot and savage, teeth barred, tangles of saliva dangling from her mouth. I waited for her. When she got within th
ree feet, I gave her a swift kick that sent her rolling in the grass.
She made a hissing sound and came right back.
She crawled through the grass, grinding her teeth.
She looked like some human insect.
When she came at me again, I swung the ice-chopper. The flat edge of the blade caught the top of her skull and there was a hollow, wet, cracking sound like a baseball bat striking a soft pumpkin. I hit her in the head again until her brains splashed down her face. She trembled in the grass and stopped moving.
Up and down the streets the dead were shambling about.
Some were up on porches pounding on doors and windows.
How could it have amplified so fast?
I ran for the mailman, the ice-chopper held up and ready to strike. A couple zombies shambled past me. They snapped their teeth at me. One of them—a woman wearing what looked like a hospital gown—reached out and I cracked her in the head with the chopper. It made no difference to her: she just shambled away. I might as well have hit a stump.
I reached the mailman about the same time as Jimmy LaRue.
Jimmy had brought a .22 semi-auto rifle with him. As I got into range, Jimmy shot the teenage boy through the head. He staggered comically back a few steps and then folded up, blood and brain matter leaking from a hole in his skull. Jimmy shot the man in the back, which did absolutely no good. He turned on us, his maw dyed red, feral as any wolf. He made a growling sound in his throat. As Jimmy took aim again, the dead man snatched one of the mailman’s arms he had chewed free and tried to walk off. Jimmy cracked off two more shots. By luck or design, one of them went through the back of the zombie’s knee. He hit the pavement, dragging himself forward in a slime trail of ooze and rot, refusing to drop the arm.
Jimmy popped him in the head and that was that.
“What the fuck’s going on here, Steve?” he wanted to know. His eyes were wide and shocked, his face white as the hair on his head. “These aren’t people…they’re fucking corpses. Goddamn zombies like on the late show.”
I was looking down at the gored remains of the mailman. “That’s exactly what they are,” I said.
The mailman’s throat was torn out and his belly had been hollowed, his mangled viscera spilled over the sidewalk. Everywhere he was red and ripped and partially-eaten.
I turned away, my stomach rolling over.
Jimmy said, “I…called the police…there was no answer…”
I looked down Holly Street, dozens of other zombies were moving in our direction. They were making moaning sounds. An army of the dead had been set upon Lincoln Park.
Jimmy started shooting again, dropping three more of them with perfect head-shots.
It was insane.
But it was happening.
A bloated, naked woman whose flesh was mottled with green patches of mildew had Mrs. Hazen by the throat, was dragging her corpse off through all those carefully-tended azaleas, petunias, and morning glories. Her body flattened them as she was dragged into the backyard. I was going to go to Mrs. Hazen’s rescue, but I could see she was already dead. A big, one-armed zombie with a face like a nest of black moss climbed up onto a porch and dove through the screen door. A car came winging down the road, hit the zombie of a young woman with a resounding thud that sent her rolling to the curb. A guy got out and two zombies took him down, began savagely biting at his face and throat. People came out on their porches and the dead went after them.
Everywhere now you could hear screaming and shouting and frantic pleas for help. Gunshots in the distance.
It was madness.
Shouting, sirens, gunfire.
A naked woman came strolling out between two houses. She was tall and leggy, flaxen-haired, and was probably very attractive in life. But in death she was a sheer horror and Jimmy shot her dead. I turned and a fat man greasy with rot and drainage came at me, jowls drawn away from teeth that were stained red. I went at him with the ice-chopper like a man possessed. I didn’t even let Jimmy draw a bead on him. I charged in, swinging, like some bloodthirsty barbarian with drawn sword. I hit him six or seven times until he went down and I kept hitting him, landing that blade on his head, until he rolled over in the grass, from the neck up nothing but raw hamburger.
There were more coming.
Jimmy said, “Better get inside and get your guns out, Steve. I wouldn’t open your door for no one.”
Numbly, I staggered off towards my porch, still gripping the ice-chopper.
There were fifteen or twenty walking corpses in the street by then.
The Living End
Prologue: Tipping Point
It might have been sometime during the days when the Marines were moving weapons systems to secure sites. Or it could have happened in the weeks when the Army and Civil Defense were scattering far and wide to shut down and lock nuclear power plants. Perhaps the day fell when local police forces were disbanding and running. And maybe it was some hour when the general population was in total panic, concerned only with self-preservation, as society fell completely to bits and people were racing about committing acts of theft and violence and generally killing one another at will. But at some point the government dissolved into that same panic, and cholera and dysentery were raging through the population, knocking people down like dominoes…
A tipping point was reached.
It was in those mad days that the zombies began to outnumber the living. It was during those holocaust hours that all was lost.
People trying to flee to cities found the streets lined with the undead. Anyone who attempted to find refuge in buildings or houses generally realized that those places were packed with the monsters, or that they had simply found places to be trapped. Families who took to the main roads discovered a very nasty fact:
The highways and expressways were, quite literally, crawling with the reanimated corpses of the recently deceased. Walking flesh flowed down those asphalt and concrete corridors like water flowing from a high point to a low one. The air was filled with the stench of these things—with the defecations of their dying throes; with the ammonia reek of relaxed bladders; with the rot of tens of millions of death rattles.
In those desperate days, when the tide of battle had turned inexorably away from the living and in favor of the undead, the only salvation to be found lay in constant movement. There was no safe house. Security became an illusion. The future was something to be feared as all those who yet drew breath lived in the here and the now. If people thought at all, it was as if they were rabbits on the run, deer at the wrong end of the chase, cows to the slaughter. People did what they figured they had to do, and in the doing many more of them perished and were devoured, or were delivered as new killers among the raving hoards of zombies.
The landscape became something truly from a nightmare. In some places the ground was covered as far as the eye could follow with a writhing mass of things that resembled human beings but which, alas, no longer were. The forests moved with the constant press of them. Towns and cities and villages and outposts became host to a seemingly unending flood of the walkers. Their moans echoed over the hills and down the valleys and through the canyons of cities that had become slaughterhouses with streets and walls that were covered red and black with the gore of their victims. When they moved, as a single mass, there was no other sound but the tramp and drag of their slow and implacable tread.
They stared and raged and were hungry. The things that had once been us never found satisfaction. There was no satiation for their constant and hideous craving for living flesh. Before them, all who still lived ran like the harried creatures they resembled. In the wake of this poisonous flood the wily among the living hunkered down and watched. Behind that flood, in the ravaged and ruined land to the rear of the rotting march, people began to gather, to assemble, to wait and watch and exist.
The ones who yet lived were searching for one thing and one thing only:
Sanctuary.
Shortly after the end:
They were leaving him!
He could scarcely believe what they’d done. The worst of it was that they had discussed it right in front of him. He’d listened to every word of it. The entire time he’d felt a hideous emptiness in the pit of his stomach while Rick and Tilly had talked about what they were going to do.
“We can’t take him with us,” Rick had said, in a flat, matter of fact way. In such a tone that BC recognized—one that meant he would tolerate no discussion on the matter. Tilly knew it well, and knew well enough to keep her mouth shut when her husband spoke with that voice.
“We’ll leave him food,” she said, merely suggesting it, knowing that to argue it would be to risk a verbal lashing, if not an outright beating. “And water. He’ll need water. For a few days, at least.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rick told her. “But first we need to finish packing the car. I haven’t heard any cars on the street for two days. I think we can make a break for it, now.”
Indeed, the neighborhood had grown very quiet. Over the previous weeks the country had grown increasingly unstable. Even the normally unemotional talking heads on the news shows had become increasingly strident, saying and doing things on the air that were quite strange, displaying emotions that verged on hysteria and madness. Late in the game, the TV stations had all been militarized and men in fatigues, with shaved heads and hollow cheeks and burning eyes, had taken over the job of doling out information. The last real news either of them had seen was a series of short pieces featuring the crews of civilian technicians and soldiers who’d been sent to shut down the nation’s nuclear plants. So that there would be no runaway nuclear reactions if they were suddenly left unattended.