[Dying to Live 01] - Dying to Live Read online

  It was a late spring day, bursting with a sunshine that didn’t make it hot, but just made things seem better, brighter, more alive than they were on other days. I still had the instinct to call it beautiful as I looked around and forgot the obvious shortcomings of the day for a moment. One shortcoming I couldn’t forget, however, was the gnawing hunger I felt.

  Never one for breakfast, I had definitely been put off from eating anything this morning after killing Daniel Gerard, a man who, after all, had only been looking for something to eat, just as I was. I had some supplies in my backpack, but if I was near an area where I could forage for more and conserve what I had, that would be the much wiser course.

  The undead weren’t exactly afraid of sunlight—they weren’t afraid of anything—but they did seem to avoid it unless aroused and provoked. Maybe it hurt their skin or eyes, or maybe they could sense that it was speeding their decay and that brought them some discomfort. Whatever it was, during bright daylight, you could walk through places where the walking dead were nearby without immediately attracting a crowd, so long as you were quiet and downwind. Still, I never went too far into an urban area. Right now, I just wanted to find some food and get back out to the sticks before nightfall.

  From what I’d seen, many cities had burned more or less to the ground, once fire crews were no longer there to put out the inevitable fires. But here, for whatever reason of wind or rain or luck, many buildings were still standing. Some were gutted or damaged by fire, and all had the usual marks of looting, ransacking, and the final, desperate battles between the living and the dead. There were few unbroken windows.

  In the street, wrecked or abandoned cars were everywhere. There were a few bodies and pieces of bodies in extremely advanced stages of decay, and paper and dead leaves rustled about on a light breeze.

  The sight of the burnt-out remains of a city was almost as overwhelmingly depressing as the human wrecks that wandered everywhere as 2ombies: this place should be bustling and alive, and instead it was—quite literally—a graveyard.

  I always wondered why there weren’t more animals around now, since zombies didn’t eat them, but everywhere I went, it always seemed like there were even fewer animals than when people had ruled the earth. I almost never heard a bird sing. I seldom saw pigeons or squirrels. It was almost as though even the animals fled from such horror, fled when the ruler of the animal kingdom died, and left the king’s mausoleum in peace, until it could completely crumble away and they could reclaim it after a suitable mourning period. I know it seems almost delusional in its anthropomorphism, but sometimes you can’t help thinking like that when you’re alone in these dead places.

  I checked the remains of a couple stores, barely venturing inside the darkened buildings, for fear of the dead hiding in ambush. The inventories of a clothing store and a jewelry store were barely touched: it was funny how quickly things had been re-prioritized in the final, chaotic days of the human race.

  I looked at what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of dollars of diamonds, now mixed in with the smashed glass of the cases that had once displayed them: both sparkled in the sun, but their value had been radically and traumatically equalized a few months ago. I imagined that during last winter—the first winter of a world that would now remain more or less dead in every season—the snow too had sparkled just as brightly when it blew in and covered the diamonds that, in better times, would’ve adorned hundreds of brides.

  A quick look into a liquor store revealed much less remaining stock—human nature and appetites being what they are—but there was a bottle of some bad bourbon just a few feet inside the door, so I reached in and grabbed it. I didn’t know when I’d be able to drop my guard enough to partake, but since I wasn’t carrying that much, it made sense to take it.

  I knew I was getting too far into the dead city, but on the next street was a convenience store where there might be food. It was facing perpendicularly from the stores I had examined, so at least it would be brighter inside. The big front windows were still intact, but the glass of the front door had been smashed. Looking up and down the street and still seeing no movement, I went inside the store.

  I was looking for snack cakes. When the final crisis of humanity had begun, people had instinctively stocked up on canned food: I guess Spam is forever etched in our collective consciousness as the foodstuff of the apocalypse. People at first had bought up everything canned, and then, within just a couple days, as cash became utterly worthless and stores weren’t even open, the stronger smashed and grabbed from the weaker. I had never seen a can of food in a store since I had started foraging: you could only find cans in people’s houses, and even then they were getting pretty rare at this point. So, for now, snack cakes were the way to go. What I would do when those finally went bad and the last few cans ran out—that was a question still a few months off, and therefore way beyond any reasonable contingency plans.

  I don’t know if all the old urban legends that Twinkles and those pink Snow Ball cakes could survive a nuclear explosion were true, but they and their kind definitely had a shelf life well over a year, if the box wasn’t opened and you weren’t fussy, which I clearly wasn’t at this point.

  There was a treasure trove of them in the second aisle into the store, and I smiled when I saw there were no chocolate ones: I guessed some priorities remained effective right up till the last gasp of humanity. I made my way quietly to them, tore open the boxes, shoveled a bunch of the wrapped ones into my backpack, and proceeded to gorge myself on what I couldn’t carry. I was licking white creme filling off my fingers when I heard the crunch of a shoe stepping on broken glass.

  Chapter Two

  The zombie was about twelve feet away from me, at the end of the Twinkie aisle. It was staggering toward me with the usual slow, stiff motions of the undead. It had been a teenage girl, blonde and pretty, as far as I could tell now, wearing her boyfriend’s high school letter jacket, way too big for her. Its mouth moved noiselessly, except for the clacking of her bloody, yellow teeth.

  The jacket was open, and the lower half of her t-shirt was flayed and soaked with blood, which also had soaked her jeans down past her knees. Her abdomen was torn wide open in a wound about a foot wide. They’d ripped all her organs out when they killed her. She wasn’t moaning now the way zombies usually did, because she didn’t have lungs. You could see right through to her ribs and spine, not glistening and drippy the way a wound on a living person would be, but dark and dry and caked, like mummies I’d seen in museums.

  It was coming closer, slowly but inexorably, but I couldn’t look away from that horrible tribute to mortality and incarnation. You saw all kinds of wounds on the living dead, but some still commanded shock, almost a reverential awe at the miracle of life and the horrible mystery of death. Partly you were aghast at the perverse will to go on “living,” despite terrible mutilation and decay: why couldn’t it just lie down and die? Just rest, damn it, and stop struggling. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—that was how it was supposed to be, and this was some hideous violation of nature.

  But mostly, you couldn’t help the pity that spasmed up from your own gut, putting a lump in your throat, at how awful and degrading and unfair the person’s death must have been. People—even young and pretty ones—died in car crashes, or from diseases, or in war, or from horrible crimes, and their young, healthy bodies might even be mutilated and disfigured. Such deaths were hard enough to take without anger and despair. But no one was supposed to be gutted like a fish, butchered like an animal, and left to dry out like a damn piece of jerky. You might see shit go down most every day, but if you were going to go on living, you had to know, deep down, that some things were still just plain wrong, and you could still let out a primal scream against them as some kind of evil abomination. And what I was staring at in that convenience store, on a glorious spring day, licking sweet white creme off my fingers, was as wrong as anything ever could be.

  There was that damn thousand yard stare again,
closing me off, tunneling my vision and lulling me to just let go.

  To my left, something roared, and I turned. Over the shelves, which were about at chin level, like they usually were in convenience stores, I could see what could only be described as a hairless bear, its arms out in front, Frankenstein-like, lurching toward me. I swear the thing looked like it had been a professional wrestler in its human life—probably 350 pounds, almost a head taller than me, covered in tattoos, though its flesh was now a mottled gray that obscured much of the artwork.

  It crashed into the shelves, tipping them over onto me and the other zombie. I was pushed back and pinned against the opposite shelves as the monster scrabbled at my face with its foul nails; the shelving unit kept it from getting closer. The girl zombie wasn’t pinned as tightly as I was, so she was still slowly working her way toward me, teeth clacking.

  The top shelf was pressing into my upper chest and arms, making it hard to breathe, as well as almost impossible to get to a weapon, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to bring it up to eye level to get a head shot at either of them. I had no leverage to push the shelving unit off me, and I wasn’t sure I could do it anyway, as the zombie was so much bigger than me.

  I struggled and drew my .357 magnum from the holster in the small of my back. I’d have to shoot from the hip. I fired, and my ears started ringing from the roar of the magnum. The plate glass window behind the big zombie shattered as the bullet went through his torso. A bullet anywhere other than through the brain won’t put a zombie down, but this one made it stagger back just enough for me to push the shelving unit off of me.

  The zombie lunged again—I stuck the barrel in its face and fired. Its arms shot up as it spun around and dropped on its face, the back of its head blown off.

  I turned as the girl zombie grabbed my shoulder. This was it. Another second and she’d sink her teeth into me—then it wouldn’t really matter if I shot her or not: the bite would kill me and turn me into a zombie in a matter of hours or days.

  I grabbed her hair, wrenched myself free from her grip, and shoved the barrel of the gun under her chin. I yanked her head down and to the left, so she wasn’t looking at me. “I’m sorry,” I rasped as I pulled the trigger. Her brains were blasted out in a gray slop all over the ceiling surveillance camera and the cigarette display case above the counter.

  I shoved her away from me, and she fell on her back with a cracking sound. I was panting and drenched in sweat. I grabbed my backpack and looked down at her one more time. Thankfully, her long hair covered her face. I pulled the flap of the too-large jacket across her belly. What a world, where that’d be considered an unusually kind gesture, covering up the magnificent corpse I had made out of what had been a ninety-five pound girl.

  As I stood up, I heard the moaning underneath the ringing in my ears, and I suddenly felt icy cold. One zombie was already stepping through the broken window. At least ten were closing in on the shattered storefront, and I knew there were dozens more nearby, and hundreds more behind them.

  It was getting seriously close to being time for me to eat a bullet. At least then I might get to see God and ask Him what all this shit had been about. Some days, like the days when I blew a teenager’s brains all over the ceiling, I wouldn’t even mind meeting the other guy. At least with Old Nick, it seemed like you knew better where you stood.

  * * * * *

  I made my way to the back exit of the store, holstering the magnum, shouldering my backpack, and drawing my Glock. The magnum was wild overkill against zombies anyway, and with three of its six shots fired and no time to reload, the seventeen-round magazine of the 9mm would increase what little chance I had.

  I was only a few steps ahead of the growing horde of zombies filling the store. If I couldn’t get the back door open, or if there were more outside when I opened it, it was all over. You couldn’t risk a close-in fight with them: they might grab your gun arm and make it impossible to shoot yourself.

  The closest zombie was at the end of the hallway that led to the backdoor, maybe fifteen feet away from me. Several were right behind it, and more were shuffling in steadily—old women in housecoats, men in suits, young people in shorts, men and women in aprons or uniforms. Most were white, while several were black, Hispanic, or Asian. Normally, they would’ve staggered around without even noticing each other, but their hunger had united them in a way that would’ve been quite remarkable in life. The human species had finally overcome racism. Too bad we had to give up our intellect and turn into mindless cannibals to do so. The plausibility of the whole apocalypse/judgment thing occurred to me again as I turned away from them and grabbed the door handle.

  The door was a big, heavy metal one. That was a huge bonus for me, as was the fact that it opened inward, though for the undead, these two facts slightly lessened their chance for lunch that day. Before the first zombie could figure out to push down on the thumb latch and pull the handle toward itself, the others would have pressed up against him and mashed him against the door in a writhing, moaning mass. Then the only way they were coming through the door would be when enough zombies in the back of the mob lost interest and wandered off, so that the pressure was taken off the front zombie and he could pull the door back. Given their monomania and their inability ever to get bored or distracted, that could take hours, if not days.

  I squeezed the handle and yanked back on it. I couldn’t afford to examine the alley behind the store before I went outside: so long as a bony hand didn’t grab me immediately, I was going out that door.

  No bony hand.

  I stepped through the door and closed it.

  With my left hand, I drew my knife—not the thin-bladed eye-poking one this time, but the big Crocodile Dundee-type one, the kind you could use to hack off a grasping hand, or bash-in the side of a zombie’s head with the pommel. Within seconds, I heard the thumping of the dead assaulting the door from within, but as I had suspected, there was no sign that the door was opening.

  At the end of the alley, several zombies were staggering toward me, and they let out a moan which would surely bring more. I had no choice but to go the other way, though this would probably take me farther into the city, which could be even worse. Again, there wasn’t much choice. I ran that way till I reached the next cross street.

  Zombies this time were everywhere, though there were definitely more to the left, closing in on where I had originally fired the shots. The farther I could get from that zombie magnet, the better my chances got, especially if I could do it without firing more shots.

  I turned right and began running down that street. I dodged between the scattered undead, only once getting close enough to actually fight one off. It was an older woman, and it came around the front of a van that was up on the sidewalk as I ran between the vehicle and the building. The hair was matted to the left side of her head with blood from where her ear had been bitten off.

  Her left arm reached out for me, clutching, even though much of the flesh of her forearm had been torn off, so much so that you could see the bones and tendons in her forearm moving back and forth. Her soulless moan sounded the alarm to any other zombies nearby.

  “Die, bitch!” I growled as I brought my left hand up as hard as I could, driving the blade up under her chin until the tip of the blade shattered through the decayed top of her skull. I quickly drew the blade out and let her fall. For the first time that day, I felt exhilarated, and I almost wanted to spit on her body. I shivered at my reaction. Like the thousand yard stare, if you got the bloodlust, your chances of survival went down, because it made you careless and foolhardy. I wanted to get out of that town and to somewhere relatively safe before I descended further into that or some other species of madness.

  I was making good and uneventful progress, not running too fast, conserving my strength, and not taking anymore shots that would draw more zombies. For almost a block, I was able to jump from the top of one wrecked car to another to avoid the grasping dead.

  As I came
over a rise, the street descended slightly to end in a cross street, beyond which was a park on the banks of a fairly large river. On the other side of the river looked to be a continuation of the park, and then lower buildings, not like the small downtown district I was in at the moment. The bridge across the river was one block to the left. All I had to do was run there, across the bridge, and I would be outside the city proper, on my way to the suburbs.

  But as soon as I turned left, something moaned behind me. On the cross street that paralleled the river, at least a hundred zombies were heading my way.

  * * * * *

  I needed to get way ahead of them before nightfall, but that in itself was not a huge problem. Zombie top speed seemed to be about two miles per hour, so even a brisk walk—so long as you didn’t get hung up with more obstacles—meant you could pull very far ahead of them in a short time, easily out of eyeshot. They weren’t herd creatures by nature, which maybe says something about people—I don’t know. They’d all follow the same goal, which was always the same: find someone to kill and eat. But they were never really a herd, much less a pack; they were just separate individuals who happened to be going in the same direction at the same time. And once the mob didn’t see you, it would start to disperse. So as terrifying as a crowd of a hundred zombies looks, if you keep moving, it’s not nearly as dangerous as a small crowd in an enclosed space, like I had just faced in the convenience store.

  I kept running and made it to the bridge. It was a broad, low bridge, with four lanes plus a sidewalk on each side. At my end, a barricade had been built: two Humvees, parked perpendicularly across the roadway, supplemented with some cop cars, sand bags, concrete traffic barriers, and barbwire. It may well have held, for whatever good it had done, as the vehicles still effectively blocked the bridge. They did not appear to have been moved from their original spot, nor was there any sign of fire or explosion, common at such scenes.