Outrunning the Outbreak

I just threw my TV out of my third floor window Jimmy Moon style. As hard as he ever rocked, I doubt he deep-sixed anything to bust the skull of his newly reanimated landlord. The grouchy bastard is now lying in a pool of his caved head contents sprinkled with shattered bits of glass and plastic. It was time to upgrade to the plasma anyway. I rack the slide of my trusty HK 45 compact and shove it in my shoulder holster. My plan is to make for my grandfather's cabin in the Ontario wilderness. That may seem like a long way to go from Laconia, New Hampshire, but I've got an ace in the hole. My neighbor was the former owner of a ridiculous Jeep Wrangler, with mud tires, a lifted suspension, anti crash bars, the works. I don't even need to bother stealing it, since I saw him get eaten by a horde of zombies yesterday (when my liquor supply was still holding out) and I'm fairly confident that the keys are either in his tattered pockets sprawled over the curb or right in the kitchen. I make sure my zippo is finding its flame well, drop it back into my motorcycle jacket, and head down the stairs. Right before I threw the idiot box out the window the succession of increasingly haggard-looking new anchors was saying that the outbreak of Acute Delusional Cannibalism Syndrome (the politically correct way of saying fucking zombie apocalypse) was reaching critical levels and most of the military had been annihilated. That was good news for me, since it meant there were probably plenty of assault rifles laying around the remains of their roadblocks, which might come in handy on my journey north. They also said that the local high school track team was making a pretty good stand with their javelins and shot puts in the ruins of the school. If that was still true by the time I rolled by there, I was going to have to scoop up a few survivors. Nothing says sidekick like an 18 year old who can take out zombies ancient Sparta style.
The zombie outbreak had in fact been getting worse and worse for several weeks. After hearing broken English testimony from Estonia that a headshot or other major disruptive trauma to the brain was the only was to take a reanimate down, I prudently went to the nearest gun shop to get several boxes of .45ACP for my trusty German pistol. I was alarmed to see that prices had quadrupled, but considering that my next stop was to hop through the hole in the adjacent liquor store's window that had been made by looters as I was counting out the cash, I actually saved money in the vintage scotch I carried off. After that I loaded up my car with canned goods from the nearby Sam's club, unbeknownst to the security guards, who were fighting a pitched battle with rioters and the occasional zombie. The outrageous coolness of society crumbling before the moans of the walking damned became considerably less cool when my usual booty calls quit answering their phones. This is of course attributable to their being eaten by zombies, reanimated, shot, or losing their phones, but in any event the easy comfort of Johnnie Walker eased my loneliness. That heavy-headed bliss ended when the sound of gunshots from the street outside brought me to the window. A heavyset man in a neon orange hunting vest made a heroic last stand in front of my building, using the impromptu blockade of collided, burned cars as a high point and ineffectually emptying hundreds of rounds into the crowd of zombies that had followed. A dead girl in a blood-splattered Hannah Montana jacket had crept over the twisted metal and bit through his Achilles tendon; the spray of blood that followed seemed to hang in the air for a sickening, sobriety inducing second before he fell like a tortured, doomed crowd surfer into the demonic crowd, never to rise again. Fortunately for me, the zombies shambled off after a Toyota Prius as it screeched around the corner at the other end of the block and, oversteering, smashed into a building after hopping the sidewalk; the trapped driver's plaintive screams as he sat pinned by the steering column drew them away from beneath my window. Good thing; I would have run low on furniture.
I reached the street without incident, trying not to notice the sprays of blood on the walls of the stairwell. It seemed my building had been busy while I was safely drunk and behind locked doors, and legions of flies had descended on the gore to feast and propagate themselves. Despite my best efforts to move as silently as possible, the sound of my booted footsteps seemed to project across the city. The air seemed thicker somehow, no doubt a by product of death and fear filling the sky. It was late September and the chill in the air was starting to make its first bite of winter known. When the snow started to fall within a few weeks it would no doubt be gray, black, or some nightmare chemical color. I could deal with that when the time comes, I supposed as I crouched on the curb, ignoring the zombie under the wrecked car who gurgled at me while attempting to snap its half detached jaw; at least my landlord had made him feel it after receiving his bite. The disheartening thought that zombies probably don't feel any pain at all, even when their disenfranchised tongues scrape the pavement for God knows how many hours a day flashed through my mind as I moved toward the shell of my neighbors apartment.
An emo zombie in what appeared to be the tattered, blood-slicked remains of an H&M scarf moaned at me from halfway down the block when I reached the door, but I would be in and out before his Secondhand Serenade listening, Chuck Taylor and guyliner bullshit wearing friends could catch up to me. Standing just over the splattered remnants of the occupant, I kicked the door in and entered, weapon at the ready. Much like many apartments would probably still look right now it appeared largely normal, slightly dusty after what would surely have been days or weeks of nervous news monitoring when cleaning would have been abandoned due to emergency. There were no rustles from the floor, no thumps from slouching bodies hitting the halls in their fervor to get at me. I poked around the kitchen for the keys, finding them atop a pile of 'past due' marked letters on the counter. I had seen and heard this Jeep rumbling around the neighborhood before and based on that deemed it appropriate for transit in a post apocalyptic world; it was fully equipped beyond even the suspension changes to include cans with spray painted 'water' and 'fuel' labels and a shovel and pickax on strapped to the hood. The point was driven home by the enameled shrunken head keychain that the keys were stored on. I wanted to get on the road as fast as possible, but swung open the cabinets to see if anything of use had been squirreled away by the munched on tenant. In cabinet one was a box of fruity pebbles, which went right into my backpack next to the Dinty Moore that would be sustaining me for the foreseeable future. The box of 9mm hollow points in the drawer next to the filth-encrusted stove led me to abandon the rush, and under the tussled beds pillows there gleamed a Beretta 92 Brigadier. It would be good to have one in the glove compartment too, and dropped the pistol on top of my cereal box, closed my pack and opened the garage door after the unexpected buzz of a helicopter made me duck low.
The Jeep sat on its massive, knobby tires like a tiger ready to pounce. I climbed up into the driver's seat, noting that the removed cloth roof was tied down in the trunk, which would come in handy. I started it, my heart rising to see that I wouldn't have to tap the fuel can just yet when the gas meter shot to F. The exhaust roared, so I wouldn't exactly be able to travel incognito but that was a fair trade for the ability to roll over most destroyed cars that happened to get in my way. I dropped my Sigg bottle into the left cupholder and my .45 in the right after nestling my shiny new Beretta in what would become its accustomed berth in the glove compartment. The garage door squeaked open, revealing that a group of about 10 zombies had gathered in the street, probably attracted by the moans from when I went into the apartment. I revved the engine, dropped the clutch and floored it, bouncing onto the street and running down 3 ghouls in the process. I wheeled the Jeep to the right to and picked up my pistol after noting that emo zombie was still shambling around almost in the same spot. The first undead hand had slapped the spare tire on the back when I had him in my sights and if there was a second blow I didn't hear it over the report of the bullet that took his overly emotional head off. Write that shit up in your live journal, I thought as I rolled down the street, leaving my apartment the first steps of the zombie evasion journey behind me.

I roared toward the outskirts of newly-undead Laconia with Pantera's "Goddamn Electric" blasting through the Wrangler's sound system; its superb equipment even went as far as to include an iPod plug, so even if I rolled and got devoured I could do it with the right soundtrack behind me. That point was driven home even further when I stopped in the middle of a deserted street, leaning forward in the driver's seat to fully comprehend what I was looking at. Sure enough, a zombified old man was painstakingly dragging himself in no particular direction by withered elbows scraped to the brittle, yellow bone; one well-oiled wheel still spun on a wheelchair tipped over a sewer grate. I turned up the volume and ran him over, making sure to bust his head under roughly 3800 pounds of Detroit steel. Bouncing around over the rigid springs, I hit second gear and kept going north.
Anyone reading this account has got to, at this point, think that that I'm a well-armed, intuitive, alcoholic, murderous sociopath. I would say that under normal conditions, you would be absolutely correct. In the event of our zombie apocalypse, though, I'm a lot more like a self medicating survivor of the highest grade. That's not to say that crowning sensitive teenagers and mowing down geriatric cripples put a smile on my face; One just doesn't feel good about that kind of thing in any circumstance. What stayed with me a lot more afterward was not the killing of the occasional rouge zombie throughout the city, whether I did it with a bullet or with the Jeep. It was the frantic waving coming from the windows, the frantic throwing back of locks on houses, the cries to stop and help and worst, the letters and packages thrown in my general direction. What heat wrenching final messages they contained I'll never know, because I stopped for none of them. The jagged, rotten teeth that bit my reaching hand would have been my death, I've told myself a thousand times. I never believed it once. One letter wouldn't have been the end of the world, just so whoever threw it could die happier knowing their word had been put out.
I stopped as I was nearing the northern edge of town and toyed with the radio. The FM band was down without exception, as every frequency was putting only differing washes of static. I tried AM and was met with a lot more success on a preset usually reserved for weather updates. An announcer whose voice sounded extremely old school from the station's type was reporting that there were still survivors combating a horde of zombies at the high school that lay half a mile off my course. This battle, he went on, was best exploited by any remaining general public to use the undead's distraction to leave.
"Douche bag," I muttered as I put Pantera back on. I swung the Jeep over the sidewalk to point it toward the school. If anyone was still alive in there, let alone fighting zombies with field equipment, they were hardcore little bastards and deserved to have their siege broken. The school had about a 50 yard driveway leading to a central entrance, an obviously aesthetic design whose mastermind would be pissed to know had been obscured by what looked like a post-Gettysburg reenactment. There were corpses over the entire lawn and driveway in, from the perforated remains of ghouls to the mostly devoured carcasses of people who thought they could outrun the masses to a nightmarish school bus whose shattered and blood stained windows would be with anyone who survived it every time they shut their eyes. Right in front of the door there was a crowd of about 50 zombies, moaning agitatedly. I come to a stop, rolled up the front windows and stood up through the roof to watch. The undead were getting nowhere fast into the door, as gaps in the putrefying crowd revealed that the ravaged doors were securely chained shut from the inside. As I watched a javelin sailed through a window on the floor above, skewering one zombie through the forehead. The lethal point continued on, aided by the falling corpse, and stuck in the ghoul right behind the first one, who writhed from his new berth on the ground most unhappily.
That was all the confirmation of survivors I needed. I dropped back into my seat, putting my .45 back in its holster and making sure it was loose and accessible. I cranked up Metallica's "Four Horsemen" and burned through the first two gears before I reached the zombie crowd. Whatever kind of virus or gassed up STD that does this to people makes them pretty dumb, too, since they didn't even turn toward the noise I was making until I was almost upon them. With the Jeep at redline I blasted into the mob. Zombies flew off the hood at crazy angles, bounced back into their cohorts with the impact only to be hit again, crunched under the tires and set the Jeep to bouncing horribly. I was still going 15 by the time I was out of the mob with the entire front half of my vehicle covered in brains and gore. I looked in my rearview mirror to see a track of carnage flanked by remaining zombies, tottering excitedly toward me with outstretched arms. I wheeled around, took down 5 in one pass, then slid the Jeep 90 degrees on the slick of blood. Only 4 zombies were still upright. I rolled the windows back down and placed headshots, ending whatever torture they were currently enduring. The song ended and I lowered my weapon. I took the keys and headed toward the door.
The doors were already being unchained as I made my way toward them, being careful to avoid any still snapping zombies rendered immobile by severed limbs or shattered spinal cords; there were more than a few in the pile of my demolition derby run. As I climbed the bloody steps the doors swung open, revealing a teenaged boy with days-old gel in his hair and a throwing hammer in his hands. Another, taller kid, no doubt his sidekick, stood behind and to his right. Both looked at me in almost stupefied silence, putting me off and making me more than a little awkward, which says a lot about human nature. I had just slaughtered an entire crowd of what two days ago had been human beings, and I was unsure of how to start off with some PSP-playing smartass.
"Uh, you're welcome," I said, mindful of the weight of the pistol under my armpit. "Are there a lot of you in here?"
“We were doing just fine in here by ourselves, weren't we Simons?" said the kid, lowering his ball-and-chain to the floor.
"Damn right, man, we didn't need your leather jacket ass help, f*****," chimed in Simons before both of them descended into hysterically laughing; either these two were just the kind of Xbox Live champions that make me thank God high school is over, or being besieged by the walking dead fries your mind. Probably just the former, I decided as I turned to leave.
"Have fun in here, assholes," I called back at them, stopping at the doorway to look around through the hazy midmorning. Some incoherent profanity came back at me before I heard a cry to stop. Turning around, I saw a beautiful girl who figure, accentuated by the too-small t shirt and track shorts she was wearing, was the the kind of thing movie producers damn sure want in their R-rated zombie flicks running down the hall.
"Hi," she said, "I'm Tiffany. If you're leaving town, do you have room for me to come?"
"That depends," I replied, feeling more like my old self by the second. "Are you eighteen?"
"My birthday was last month," she said with a smile telling me that she was clearly picking up what I was putting down. "Any other questions?"
"Nah, that blonde hair could become a liability but you can find some dye when we hit the outlet stores on the way out of town, I assume you're going to need some clothes. If you've got your stuff, want to leave these retards to mop up the rescue I gave them?"
Throughout this exchange, Simons and his life partner were standing and watching, their jaws sinking lower and lower to the floor by the second.
"Um, I just have my makeup and stuff, I wasn't really planning on a zombie attack when I went to school two days ago," Tiffany said, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. So I'm ready now, if you are."
"Perf-" I began, before the two dudes started up.
"Hold it, asshole," the ringleader began. "Tiffany here's my girl. And she stays. I'm gonna bust your head with this hammer if you don't leave right now!" (Simons may have grunted for emphasis)
I had had plenty of this kid's bullshit, and since the whole worldwide notion of 'Consequences for Bad Behavior' had recently gone down the crapper, I blew his arm off with a single shot. Tiffany wrinkled her face in disgust as we turned and walked out of the school; she took my arm so she didn't slip over the slick of gore.
"Nice Jeep, she said, timed perfectly with a severed arm sliding off the dented hood. "Where are we going?"
"We're heading north," I said, climbing back into my seat as her door closed behind her. "How long were you stuck with those guys?"
"Since the Zombies started up," she said, pulling down the sun visor to powder her nose. "Thanks for saving us like that, we had run out of javelins right before you started."
"Yeah, I saw that," said I said as I put the Jeep back on the highway and rumbled toward the wilderness. The trip through a zombie infested world had just gotten a lot less lonely, not to mention easy on the eyes.


Part 2

I have always been more a less a loner. I was never exactly Mr. Popularity through high school, and after having it out with my bitch mother over the window in my room being open at age 21, (What will the neighbors think?!) I scraped together every cent I had and moved out, setting up a household of my own that didn't function as a snapshot of the Stalinist Soviet Union. I worked fairly odd jobs since then, temping, bartending, hustling, basically doing whatever I could to make proportionally large amounts of money for little effort. That was 2 years ago, and other than girls here and there I had lived alone ever since. I had grown used to the silence, though Tiffany talked enough that it was rapidly becoming a memory.
"I think is is actually kinda cool," Tiffany said as we rolled through the city limits close to the highway that would take us most of the way north and west. "Like, how many people do you know who are total jerkbags and deserve to get their arm eaten by their newly-reanimated best friend? It's a good thing I was ready for it," she continued, pulling a well-weathered copy of The Zombie Survival Guide out of her small bag. I turned to see what it was, and put my well timed nodding to a stop.
"You're into zombies?" I asked her, making sure I paid attention to the road while fully realizing that the perfect, nubile, well endowed young blonde had been dropped into my hands in the midst of Armageddon.
"Yeah, I always loved Resident Evil, and then I thought, what if they came to get me? So I got the book, and learned some stuff. Like what we're doing is good, but it would be better to have bikes. And does your shack have solar panels?"
"It runs off a water wheel that gets turned by a falls nearby," I said, and before what was shaping up to be a full blown sermon on environmental awareness, seized the opportunity to scavenge. "There's a pretty good outlet mall up ahead. Why don't we get you some new clothes and some bigger luggage?"
Tiffany glowed. "Sure, but I didn't really bring any money."
Every once in a while in life, fate gives you the perfect moment with the perfect prop to go along with it. I held up the crow bar that was wedged between the seat and center console. "Honey, civilization just ran screaming out the door." I came to a stop in front of Coach and put the top on, not wanting vagrants to steal all my stuff or worse, a zombie to be waiting for us in the backseat when the shopping was finished. "Let's get to work."
After made sure Coach was clear of zombies or desperadoes (I found only one corpse, and the fully dead kind, curled up in a dressing room) I left Tiffany to equip herself while I ran across the way to EMS. A zombie, still dressed in the fleece vest and lightweight, vented Northface shoes that were the uniform of an outdoorsy store clerk, moaned and lurched toward me, knocking over a rack of "fastdrying knit sweaters!" in the process. I shot him through the eye with my .45, sending him to the floor with a sickening wet thump of his exploded skull. I holstered my weapon and grabbed two highly rated sleeping bags, the highest-end camp stove I could, and a handful of LED flashlights and headlamps. Rushing back to the Jeep to deposit the haul in the trunk, I noted a loose string of about 10 zombies heading through the parking lot of the outlet mall, moaning excitingly and stretching out rotting arms as the came. Taking this loud ass Jeep could really become a problem, I thought as I flew back toward Coach and hopped through the broken window.
"Tiffany, we're getting into a time crunch here," I called. "You almost ready?"
"Almost," the blonde replied, coming around the corner of a display dressed in full rich bitch regalia. "Can you go get me some underwear? I still need to choose a bag and get some shampoo next door. I'm a 34C," she added with the most subtle of chest shakes in order to erase any hesitation from my mind.
I tore through the gloomy recesses of the unlighted Victoria's Secret like ex-Lax through Mexican food, grabbing as many size S thongs as I could before kicking a crippled zombie's head in with my motorcycle boot. She collapsed from her rickety arm stance and I continued ripping open drawers to find the sluttiest undergarments I could; an approaching crowd of zombies was no reason not to be discerning for who it appeared would become my companion for quite some time. Giving the zombie one last look on the way out, I wondered just what kind of work ethic it took to return to your $7.50 per hour job the day after you've been bitten by a walking corpse. I reached the Jeep and dropped the sizable bag of lingerie on top of the camp supplies just as Tiffany was reaching the car with two gigantic purses full of clothing and accoutrements; her cleavage was distracting as she climbed up into her seat even as a fetid-looking zombie loomed behind her.
"Get everything you needed?" I said as she hopped in, shut the door, and used the crowbar to drop the zombie that was following her in an impressively fluid motion.
"Sure thing," she said, plating a kiss on my cheek before looking down to inspect the buckles on her new boots. "Thanks for taking me shopping."
"You got it," I replied, gunning the engine to get us away from the rapidly populating parking lot. "You a whiskey drinker?"

Following an enlightening conversation on the drink, I decided to pull off the eerie highway to take advantage of one of the last outposts of liquor this side of the wilds of canada and see if I could find any gas while I was at it. Tiffany stayed locked in the car with a request to bring her back some Bud light, but I figured that doing badass things in the wilderness definitely necessitated some Knob Creek instead. A zombie moaned from behind the counter, but lacked the mental capacity to lift the countertop barrier that held him in or even go under it. I left in under a minute with several liters of bourbon in my arms and dropped one with a start when I saw a black cloaked figure swirling around the Jeep almost in time to Tiffany's screams.
Setting the remaining grog down, I drew my .45 and held the whirling freak in the middle of the tritium dots, not firing because, well, it was clearly not a zombie. "Back the fuck off, scumbag!" I yelled, thumbing back the hammer. The cloaked man turned, leering at me with a face that had been living hard for much longer than the outbreak of the zombie trouble.
"You're doomed, young bastard, you and your harlot!" the freak crowed with what sounded less like the uphome drawl of the woods and more like the disgusted, hissing cadence of an old-time puritan while rattling what appeared to be a lacrosse stick festooned with bones, beads and a bunch of other shit. "The dead have arisen to devour the proselytizers and the greedy, the fornicators and the M-P-THREEEES! YEAAAHHHH!!"
While this guy was clearly as crazy as a shithouse rat, he just as obviously didn't pose much of a threat to anyone, unless he broke a window with his shitstick and let the rain and maybe the undead in. I made to move past his fire-eyed glare and the zombies he was surely attracting and drive off, no booze was worth this, when he drew a gothic looking, wickedly curved knife from the recesses of his filthy cloak.
"Thou shalt be the first sacrifice, Holden Caulfield, your blood will anoint the loins of the butchered golden whore!"
That was more than enough. The only thing that was going to anoint the loins of the golden whore in question was my dick, and my good friend 45 Compact agreed with me. I shot the loon in the kneecap, well more like through it, since the hydra-shok's violent expansion sheared his lower leg off in a curtain of blood. As he writhed in agony I picked the liquor back up, raised a bottle to the slavering zombie behind the counter, and got back in the Jeep. I turned to Tiffany, not really sure how to resume conversation after such an event.
"That guy was worse than the popular kids," said Tiffany with a sneer out the window at the scrabbling, raving prophet of Salem Village on the pavement.
"You got that right," I replied, rolling the Jeep over to the adjacent gas station. The power must have still been on since the pump functioned normally, and I was even able to grab a few bottles of water on the way out. Mission accomplished, I was about to drive away when I noticed the subtle sign of just the kind of establishment I was looking for. "Tiffany, have you ever shot a gun before?"
"Only when I blew my daddy's head off when I was 12," she said with the barest hint of a southern drawl, flipping her hair as we came to a stop. "He had this real bad problem with touching me in not-nice places."
It took me a minute to process that before I kicked down the hastily secured door. "Baby, you are my kind of woman," I said as I looked around the store in the white beam of one of our newly-acquired flashlights. In that kind of situation, a New Hampshire gun shop is an absolute gold mine, so I won't get into details about the weapons I saw inside. By the time we left I had thousands of rounds for both the HK and the untested Beretta, spare magazines, a shiny new Ruger Mark III for Tiffany, a brick of .22 LR, and a goddamned M40. Live free or die.
I had trouble arranging everything so we could still see out of the back window, but in a few minutes everything was secured with the roof now attached for the foreseeable future. I started up the engine to leave.

"Wait," said Tiffany, chambering a round in her .22. "I want to test it." Before I could say anything she walked across the parking lot to the fallen prophet and capped him, the tiny bullet making a miniature geyser of blood out of his skull. While I watched in admiration and filled with thoughts of what I would do to her, there came a crash from the liquor store, and the reanimated proprietor stumbled toward her. She screamed, emptying the gun into the corpse to no effect as I roared across the pavement. Her gun empty, she dropped to a crouch, putting her hands over her head to await the end, which didn't come following the Jeep's bumper sending the zombie 20 feet. Tiffany climbed in and kissed me again following a clumsy reload.
"Why don't we make camp before it gets all the way dark," she said once her hands had stopped shaking.
"Excellent idea," I said, depositing my pistol in the cup holder before taking her hand. Like it or not, I was a loner no more.
We pulled off the highway right after turning onto route three to sit on the hood of the Jeep and eat a picnic lunch of MREs I had snagged out of the gun shop. The sun was just starting to make its way west with the afternoon and the day was beautiful in spite of the slight but noticeable haze that had formed in the sky the unimaginable smoke discharges over the last few days. I dug at my food and watched Tiffany eating heartily, which surprised me little. You can only hold out on cafeteria food for so long before starvation seems like a rosy alternative. She finished her food in mere minutes, a feat for an MRE, and looked up at me.
"We haven't seen a whole lot of zombies," she said, her brow becoming slightly furrowed with the thought. I was also uneasy about it, which is the opposite of what one would surmise during a zombie crisis. There has been large groups of the damned throughout Laconia terrorizing the few strongholds of the living, but since we had hit the highway there had only been a few tottering down the road, usually not far from cars crashed into road signs or trees. It was possible they roamed in the direction they had been going, but the capacities of the undead mind was of the least concern right now. Unless the military had wiped out astronomical numbers of them in their last stands behind barricades, the zombies were most definitely congregating somewhere within the endless forests. I would much rather know where they were.
"I noticed that too," I said, thoughtfully munching on my MRE poundcake. "I'm sure there's a bunch of them following the noise of the Jeep, but then again we haven't been the only car on the road." There had been more than a few heavily laden vehicles flying in both directions, their wide-eyed occupants seemingly convinced they could outrun the dead.
"Hopefully the military took most of them out," I continued, finishing my food and tossing the bag away before taking Tifffany's hand. "The noise the National Guard would make on the zombie Little Big Horn would bring them from a lot further off than any kind of car, and those do a good enough job." She nodded before we both turned with a start to see several deer crashing through the foliage on the side of the road and running across.
"Something definitely drove them out," I said, hopping down to the gravel and helping Tiffany off the hood. "Let's get rolling before they get here."
Back underway, we rode in almost total silence until my iPod shuffled itself out about an hour later. Tiffany searched the radio for a new update, and found one on the AM band. I really should have just kept the music going, because the update on the state of affairs the world was in was a blow to our morale.
"The president of the United States was found dead in the oval office this morning with a bottle of Remy Martin and an American flag wrapped around himself, the victim of an apparently self-inflicted shotgun wound. In light of the Vice President's consumption at the hands of his reanimated wife and congress's abdication to various fallout shelters, anarchy reigns across the country.
"There have been repeated reports of religious fanaticism taking hold throughout much of northern New York and Vermont and southern Canada. A previously unreported cult, the Church of the Third Prophet, has seized control of the remains of several cities as well as outposts throughout the wilderness to impose their beliefs or death on any individuals or groups they encounter. They have also been reported to capture reanimates and use them as weapons of their bidding. Should anyone listening encounter members of this cult or their undead slaves, it is recommended that you kill them through any means available.
"It has been confirmed that the city of Chicago and its greater metropolitan area is a complete loss following the detonation of a 30 megaton thermonuclear device. This was a self-undertaken measure in order to prevent the contagion from rendering the city, its labyrinth of tunnels, and the bed of the great lakes as an impregnable stronghold of the reanimated. The pizza there sucked anyway.
"On a lighter note, the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan have established a number of revenant-free zones in the cities they occupy. This effort was aided by the cooperation of the local populations, who immediately decided to put aside their differences with the American troops in order to efficiently slaughter any zombies present. These formerly turbulent nations are currently considered the safest places on the planet.
"That's plenty of current events for today," I said, spinning the click wheel to broadcast the much cheerier strains of Taking Back Sunday through the Jeep's speakers, the sound slightly distorted by all the stuff in the back. It was going to be important to secure our vehicle every time we got out and guard it like our life, since there probably wasn't a more valuable rolling treasure trove in this part of the country.
As the sun was going down we puled off the highway after topping off the gas tank with the boon of an overturned gasoline tanker whose zombified driver snapped as me through the windshield and rumbled through the woods to find a spot to camp near what my topographical map of the area told me was a steep drop, a useful landscape feature since it limited the directions that zombies could creep up from. I strung a tripwire of twine in circle twenty yards from the Jeep, figuring that the tripped undead would make enough noise that I could then dispatch them with ease. The camp stove looted from EMS made a delicious meal out of Dinty Moore, and the warmth of a swig of Knob nicely complemented Tiffany's soft form snuggling against me. For an instant I could almost forget that the world had basically ended all around us.
Later that night the moon glimmered through the gently swaying branches of the trees. Tiffany was asleep in the passenger seat of the Jeep, covered in my jacket with the window cracked. We had sex right after eating and the combination finally put her out for the night. I had changed into an Under Armour t-shirt, a succession of which I felt would rapidly become my uniform, to hold back the early fall chill as I wandered toward the tripwire in the dark; a fire had seemed an unnecessary risk, especially when we still held a tenuous grasp on modern convenience. Crouching, I studied my map of the lower reaches of Canada. We were still roughly a day and a half's drive from the cabin, which lay on a lake in the wilderness southwest of la Tuque. Provided we could still cross the border, fend off any crowds of zombies, bandits or the Third Prophet freaks the radio was talking about and not find the place burned to the ground when we got there, it still seemed like a solid plan. At least I was doing something, anyway. As opposed to being devoured in my own apartment or transforming to wander the streets like almost every other idiot out there, in the space of one day I had come up with some kickass weaponry, metal-spewing Jeep and a hot babe to boot, not to mention a pile of zombie kills to my name.
The slight smile that had formed on my face died instantly when I heard a thump to my right and the rustling of foliage as something rose to its feet in the dark while softly moaning. Moving silently, I stabbed the roaming zombie through the eye with the crowbar so as not to bring more of them in with a gunshot, plunged the tool into the earth to clean it, and got back into the Jeep for the night. Before I drifted off I kissed Tiffany on the forehead. We might be able to make a good run out of this yet.
We set out the next morning shortly after dawn. In the two days that I'd been observing zombies in detail, they seemed to be the least energetic (read: desirous of devouring human flesh) in the morning. My back screamed in complaint to the position it had been in for hours, but I ignored it the best I could as I eased myself up. After reclaiming my jacket, taking a leak off the drop and turning back toward the Jeep I saw a zombie that had been hopelessly ensnared in the tripwire struggling with the ground; he had dug up a sizeable patch of the dark, black earth in the hours he'd toiled.
The world seemed a much grimmer place in the fog of that morning, a point emphasized by the sight of a burning Ford Explorer wrapped around a tree. My diagnosis was the driver had dozed off in the early morning, crashed into the scenery and ignited the surplus gas his refugee family had been hauling. Tiffany's was much more dire.
"Do you think they turned into zombies going down the road and crashed? Or else one died and ate the rest of them?" she said, her expensive getup wearing even better the next day. The thought of looking forward to the rest of them flashed through my mind for an instant before it shifted back to business. Life in this world had just gotten a whole lot cheaper.
"That's definitely possible, but let's just be happy we're still cruising along," I answered, keeping my eyes on the road. Tiffany fell silent after that, bringing her knees up onto the seat and lolling back to sleep as we neared the border. Silent traveling companions usually drove me insane, but today I did well enough for company with the roadside zombies that swirled out of the mist like nightmare stick figures, gnashing and stumbling into my field of vision at odd intervals, accompanied perfectly by Oasis's drug-addled contemplations. I wondered what the moving vehicles they saw fly by and even looked back at were to them. Miracles to be feared was definitely out of the question, since there was none present of being hit and pulped by one. Rapidly moving food carriers was more like it. I kept driving, becoming uneasily mindful of the sharply increasing number of wrecked cars I was driving by and increasingly around.
By 10 we were close to the border and the road was becoming so clogged with cars that it was getting increasingly difficult to get through. Tiffany was jarred awake after I ran over a Toyota Corolla's hood to keep going, and after spitting some listerine on a roadside zombie, eliciting a deep moan, got concerned with our situation.
"There's zombies all over the place and the road's almost blocked," she observed, checking her Ruger's chamber and then turning to me. "What are we going to do?"
"I don't know," I answered, moving down a woman zombie in the tatters of a corduroy jumper. "The next time the terrain rises I'm going to pull off, try to put some distance between the zombies and us, and scout out what the situation at the border is....Even if the congestion keeps up at this rate we should be able to roll through just fine, less a few Toyotas though." While that sounds incredibly professional, it's important to note that all of the incredibly foresighted tactical decisions to follow were pulled out of my ass.
"Is that what woke me up? Jerk!" said Tiffany, punching me on the arm. I laughed, almost oblivious to a zombie colliding with the bumper and spinning off with a growl. On an open road there might actually be some danger of being hemmed in and surrounded by an endless swarm of the damned, but the scrapped cars blocking parts of the highway actually worked to our advantage as they formed a major obstacle to the approaching zombies. A few tense minutes later I found the rise I was looking for and threw mud all the way up it, taking the M40 out of the back and climbing onto the filthy, dented hood.
"Any zombies get close, just make sure you hit them in the head," I said to Tiffany, who nodded with her Ruger at the ready. Sitting at the square junction of the windshield and roof, I looked into the telescopic sight, moving the rifle's business end to the northeast to see the border, basically just a large, heavily reinforced toll booth where 91 became 55. I started at what I saw, moving my head back from the scope to try to verify what I had seen with the naked eye. Tiffany cried in alarm and starting firing, dropping an approaching zombie with her third shot. The diminutive casings pinged off the mud-covered side of the Jeep as I moved the scope dot over the border station again, taking in the stomach dropping carnage.
With its back to Canada, the National Guard had obviously made a last stand against he approaching masses of the dead, drawn just as they were now, by the sounds of the engines of mobilization and guns of retribution. That they had been overwhelmed I had no doubt, and I saw many distant corpses sprawled in the indignity of the slaughter and many more who walked again, still locked into camouflage and webgear, forgotten pistols still strapped to their thighs. Strangest yet, though, was that the devastation of military vehicles and doomed civilian cars was not unbroken across the single lanes to cross. A massive force had cleared a path among them, taking down even one of the border's lane dividers in its fervor to keep the living-deserted roads open for some unthinkable purpose. I adjusted the focus a click to verify that a ravaged Mobile Command Vehicle was in the front row of what had been plowed through. Any answers to be found before entering the wilderness leading to the St. Lawrence river would most likely be in there. I lowered the rifle, mindful of the fact that Tiffany had killed three more zombies while I was observing, and swung through the driver's window feet first.
"That took you long enough," Tiffany said as she reloaded while I put the rifle back on top of the gear in the back. "See anything good?"
"The way through to Canada looks clear," I said, spinning the Jeep around with a spray of mud strong enough to knock down one advancing zombie and bouncing us back down the hill. "And there's a command vehicle that's still there, we might be able to find something about the disease that's turning people into these things there. Nice shooting, by the way."
"Thanks," she said absently, taking a swallow of water to relieve what was surely a dry mouth. A few more cars were run down in the effort to keep moving, and twenty minutes of jarring, zombie splattering destruction found us at the border. The undead began to congregate on the Jeep from all directions as we rolled to a stop next to the Command Vehicle. Climbing out onto the hood once again, I started shooting along with Tiffany from the passenger seat, dropping one after another. With two loaded magazines left I told her to just roll up the window if they got too close, scaled the vehicle's side and opened the hatch. I could still hear Tiffany's .22 firing as I dropped inside, flashlight and pistol ready. I crept ahead, almost blind in the dull red light outside my flashlight's beam, and gasped when I got to the control panel. An army colonel with a festering bite on his shoulder and a 1911 trained on me was slumped against it, minutes from death yet still defiant. We each lowered out weapons.
"You the reinforcements I called in, or just here for the scenery?" he asked in a cajun accent, coughed, and spit blood on the floor.
"I'm here for some answers," I told him, looking around in the red gloom, unsure of what to say next. "I'm Russell."
"Colonel Cachere, US Army," he answered, making a feeble attempt at a salute. His pistol's muzzle hit the floor with a clang. "You didn't miss the party by much. Every one of my boys wiped out or zombified over the course of the night. Crazy times, we're a' livin in." He coughed more blood on the floor.
"I've got a barely-legal babe with a .22 out there who spent 2 days killing zombies with javelins," I answered, noting the bloodstained pile of documents on the counter of the control panel. "How'd the army get smoked that fast by the zombies? And if that bite is what I think it is, isn't it about time you zombified?"
"Your statutory morsel is no doubt from the high school that was broadcasting an SOS a few days ago, and they had the good sense to barricade themselves inside a cinder block structure. We, on the other hand (cough) had the greenest new recruits, most of em couldn't hit ah barn, let alone a human head. We was still holdin em, though, just mowing down the crowds of em with .50 fiah, when the cultists showed up."
"The third prophet?" I asked.
"Thems the ones. Opened up on us with small ahms, plenty of em just whirlin in with axes an shit. I blew away 4 with Angelina heah," he indicated his sidearm, "before I got bit by a zombie, said to hell with this and holed up down heah. Good thing they supplied us with the antidote."
"There's an antidote to this mayhem?" I blurted, deciding that getting my hands on some was the new top priority. I also noticed I hadn't heard the dim report of Tiffany's gun in more than a minute.
"One indeed, tha's the only reason I'm still around. It stops the infection from rotting your brain and killing you, but only just. If I don't die from straight up diease it'll be a miracle. The virus did its job, though, the war on terror is surely ovah."
"The government invented the zombies that are taking over the planet?"
"Right again, you catch on pretty quick. The virus that cause the dead to walk and desiah only the taste of other people was developed in the bowels of The Pentagon in order to end the seperatist hostilities in Iraq and elsewheah. Working as designed, the contagion is dropped in aerosol form, where it works to relax muscles and ease violent tendencies. Problem was, it was released at JFK airpoaht after being stolen from a secret CDC facility by a deposed researcher with quite the God complex, if his project couldn't be used to end world violence the exact instant he originally planned on, then to hell with it. As we've seen, the unfinished version relaxes muscles to the point of death, and the stimulation of the brain's 'violent behavior' portions works in opposition of how it should. The antidote left is heah," he handed me 3 vials of a dark golden liquid and syringes, "and that's the story. You might be wanting to be going to rescue your companion out theah and leave me to live or die in peace."
"You sure you don't want me to help you?" I asked him, feeling a sudden sense of gratitude to the wounded man who had just imposed rationality on the cesspool the world had become.
"Only thing would make me feel bettah," the Colonel said, pulling a CAR-15 from the shadows to this right, "is for you to take Elise heah and giver her a few more notches." He handed the heavily weathered short rifle to me and I lifted it, noting the scope mounted to the carry handle and suppressor threaded to the end of the barrel; this was truly the weapon of a veteran soldier.
"Thanks," I said, suddenly frantic about the silence coming through the metal hull of the rolling vault I was in. I took an ammo can with me to the ladder, then turned back to the gloom-enshrouded soldier. "Is this going to be it for the world?"
"If turnin into a drolling cannibal happened any slowah, it would be. But who knows, kid, maybe they'll just find a way to pull it through." His head lolled to the side, and I climbed out of the hatch, making sure to secure it shut after I was back in the seemingly blinding light of the overcast day.
Flipping the scope's green dot on and shouldering my new rifle, I saw the Jeep completely surrounded by a crowd of about 20 zombies ineffectually slapping at the doors. There were many more sprawled dead in a line leading away from the passenger side. My heart sunk, expecting Tiffany to already be a digested corpse, but then saw her golden head head across to the driver's window; she waved at me with a smile that said 'anytime now.'
Twenty violent hisses of the silencer later, the crowd of zombies was down, and I climbed back into the driver's seat and made room in the back for Elise. She seemed entirely incapable of missing the target, a very good feature for a gun to have it going up against the deranged Church of the Third Prophet was going to happen.
"Did we really need more guns?" said Tiffany, obviously furious about being left to contend with a zombie horde while I chatted with a cog in the military-industrial complex that had landed us in this mess in the first place. "Thought you were dead in there, and I don't know how to drive a stick."
"Now that's a lie," I answered, putting the vaccine and syringes in the glove compartment. "You'll be happy to know that if we do get bitten by zombies we have the vaccine, complements of the southern soldier that's locked inside that thing."
"There's a cure?" said Tiffany, her brown eyes going wide. "It's a good thing I javelined Mrs. Woods through the head, I don't want her coming back to get me after somebody sorts this mess out."
I looked at her for a second, deciding then and there that I didn't really want to know many of the details of her previous life. "Um, anyway, there's a group of nutjobs out there that messed up the army almost as hard as the walking dead did. So, like the optimistic news announcer said, we'll have to waste them at any opportunity." The moans of the second wave of zombies drifted in from the debris field of the highway behind us. "Now what do you say we get the hell out of here, find a nice spot to eat some lunch, ace a few roaming zombies and I get to see that rack in action again?" Tiffany blushed and nodded, and minutes later we were rolling north once again.
We followed that plan and kept going for the rest of the afternoon, making camp in an untracked forest as soon as the sun began to go down. Following another delicious meal of MREs I had Tiffany again on the ground on a sleeping bag, happy to hear some non-zombie moans after so many that day. We took a cold bath in a nearby creek, and feeling thoroughly accomplished afterward, we sat close together, not risking a campfire but imagining where one should be. Tiffany lifted her head off my shoulder to look at me, thinking hard about what she said, and seemed scared for the first time since I'd met her.
"What are we going to do when we get there?" she asked, her voice trembling. "How long can we hold out with the world falling apart like it has?"
I thought for a second before I answered. "Well, if we think about it, when's the last time the world wasn't falling apart? It's just a lot more immediate." She nodded, encouraging me on. While I no longer thought of her as a vapid sex object, instead a friend and more to project, the logic of perverts worldwide was abdundantly clear: Teenage girls will believe anything. I continued. "The government invented the virus that makes people into zombies and they have a way to cure it. This'll sort itself out. In the meantime," I kissed her neck, "we'll just lay low in the cabin and wait it out. Like you were complaining about, we have enough guns to take Baghdad, and zombies come moaning and stumbling from a long way off." Tiffany nodded, then fell asleep as I loaded magazines for the Colonel's rifle. I didn't mind the chill of the night at that point; a campfire would have been asking for too much.
I woke up at 2:23 according to my trusty Invicta's long-glowing hands. I hadn't set a tripwire and and thought even as I awoke that a zombie slumping determinedly against the Jeep was what snapped my eyes open, though it wasn't. I tried to settle as comfortably as possible in the driver's seat but couldn't. Something at the edge of hearing was out there. HK in its holster, I also slung the CAR-15 over my shoulder, dropping into a crounch outside the door to investigate.
"What is that?" said Tiffany in a loud whisper from inside.
"I don't know," I answered. "Do you want to come see or stay here?"
Minutes later, after assurances that I could find the Jeep again, we walked through the undergrowth with weapons ready. The sound was getting more distinct as we walked to the northwest, away from the road. Roughly half a mile later it had become a steady drone, rising and falling. I flicked the safety to semi- zombies were incapable of achieving more than one pitch, even if by some miracle they could congregate. The forest seemed to hold its breath as the only noise heard aside from my self conscious footfalls was the dull roar, a wave of sound that quickly became defined as deranged chanting. A fire flickered ahead; I told tiffany to stay put in the deep shadow beneath an ancient oak tree, and in a half crouch, rifle at the ready, I walked into the clearing where the fire was.
In a ring around the blaze were no people, just severed heads skewered on stakes.
The chanting continued as I took in the tableau of death before me, unable to turn my away from the perverse artwork of carnage. A log popped from within the blaze and I jerked the scope toward it, seeing the plume of sparks fade into the smoke and the night. It was time to keep going before whoever arranged this came back to then the fire. The image of the babbling, cloaked freak Tiffany and I had shot down in the sunlight 2 days ago, seemingly so far back it was in another life, flashed before my eyes. What had felt like murder justified by the collapse of social order had revealed itself to be a very, very good move, since it was beginning to look like all his friends were just over the next rise of the forest. I kept going, staying low to the ground as I reached the crest of a knoll. The chanting was almost deafening now, the meaning of the words escaping me but the meaning clear. These people meant to kill, mutilate and possibly eat anyone they came across, and with the world's rule by sanity and order circling closer and closer to the drain, the scales were tipping in their favor.
The light of a much larger fire was painting the leave of the trees red and I crept to the top of the rise. The cultists had set up their meeting in a dell, and I made sure to crawl in on my belly next to a large tree. I could feel my balls retract as I took in what lay below me. A bonfire roared in the center, ringed not just by skulls this time but entire bodies impaled on stakes making the sharpened sticks holding up the heads look like so many twigs. Most were dressed in ripped and filthy Army fatigues, victims of the cult dragged to the middle of the woods as token of triumphs. A few writhed hopelessly, having zombified after their demise at the hands of the freaks, a zombie or both. The cultists stood in rows between the stakes and the fire, in rapt attention of their obvious leader, a tall man whose drapings were mud-splatted white instead of black and who wore a helmet made of a cow's skull as the badge of his office. In a ring containing the fire stood close to a hundred zombies, chained together and fastened to the ground, moaning and swaying in their oblivion to the twisted mass before them. A twig cracked behind me.
I spun in place with my finger on the trigger, plowing up trackers of black earth in my zeal to stay low. The green dot found itself on Tiffany's face, who was hunched as low as me on the downslope. The view down her shirt was impressive.
"I told you to stay put!" I snapped at her in a low voice. We probably could have been screaming and still gone unnoticed by the gathered members of the Church of the Third Prophet.
"I'm not staying in the scary ass forest with the noise of weirdos all around me," she answered without looking at me. "What's up there?"
She crept to view the spectacle over the ridge and immediately dropped back down, the color drained from her face. Just then the chanting stopped. We went rigid, thinking she'd been spotted, but instead who I assumed to be the white-robed maniac with the skull began to speak, in a hideously harsh and halting voice distorted by his headgear, the woods, the fire, the zombies and Christ knew what else. Tiffany and I peeped over to view the scene again.
"The time of our power has arisen!" declared the leader, eliciting boisterous cheers from his congregation and agitated moans from the chained-up damned. "We will creep in the shadows and filth no longer, instead burning the fornicators and the greedy and the disapproved." I had a feeling that his definition of the disapproved was anybody who didn't think that following someone with a slaughterhouse by-product on his head was a swell idea.
"We will break upon up the frivolous world like a tidal wave, rinsing away their impurity with the righteous cudgeon of the Thrid Prophet. The chaos of the dead walking is a sign from the High Lord of Ruin that the time is now. Bring forth the sacrifice!" he thundered, and we watched in disbelief as a soldier with his arms tied behind his back was dragged to up the rows of cult members, past the impaled and made to kneel before the fire.
"Shoot that fucker!" hissed Tiffany. A man who would have been mistaken for homeless in any other situation approached the prisoner from the right with a sickle held high over his head. Another, whose garb was the more traditional tattered robes of the cult, approached from the left, bearing a red-hot iron in front of him. What their intention were I would never know, since I took Tiffany's advice. I centered the scope of the blade-wielding executioner and fired, swinging the rifle left to take the one with the iron before the scope had even resettled. The hit was meesy, sitting him down hard with a hole in his chest but probably not killing him. The silencer attached to the barrel had eliminated the shots' reports, but the supersonic crack of the bullets had still boomed, causing the zombies tethered in the back to snap and look upward curiously. The congregation was thrown into pandemonium, and the leader hopped down from his pedestal behind the blaze and taken cover behind a human shieldwall of his cronies. The captured soldier was pushed out of the way as the ranks dissolved in their search for the shooter. I slid a foot back down the embankment, out of sight.
"Tiffany, get back to the Jeep and hide inside until I get there. They still didn't see me and I want to make it hurt a few more times. If you hear anything that sounds like triumphant cannibal feasting, drive it out of here. The map's in the glove compartment."
"I can't drive that car!" she protested with tears in her eyes. "What am I going to do?"
"Just go back there and wait," I said, turning back toward the ruction coming from the bonfire site. "I'll be right there."
She crashed off through the foliage, no doubt in her mind about the location of where we had camped before the sounds of the cult had come through the forest. I leaned back over the rise next to a tree, observing the chaos that had been the mass of the Third Prophet. Cult members had yanked weapons from their robes and fanned out at the edges of the dell, with several being bitten by tethered zombies in their distraction. They stood and howled at the injustice before being beheaded by their fellows. None of them seemed to know where to enter the forest nor particularly want to. I started firing indiscriminately, dropping more than 20 before stopping to put a fresh magazine into the colonel's rifle. Living or dead in his steel tomb, he would have been pleased to know that his beloved Elise was earning more notches. I was finally spotted by a cultist who appeared to have made his robes from the tatters of garbage bags, who gestured his fellows on to get me. They initially surged up the slope toward me but became considerably less enthusiastic after I shot three of them. I could have stayed and kept blasting, but that would have been death after surviving a long time in an inhospitable new world. I lowered the scope from my eye and turned to run; the last sight of the congregation revealed that someone was finally loosing the zombies.
I ran through the trees in a zig zagging pattern, the rifle slung across my back and my .45 in my hands. Halfway back to the Jeep I dropped into the bushes, looking to see if any pursuers were hot on my trail. I could see the light of several small fires coming through the distances, not real torches of the kind used by angry townsfolk the world over but instead burning branches simply plucked from the fire. I kept slipped out of the bushes and kept going, moving as quickly as possible while staying low to the ground. In a blur of branches I finally neared the clearing where the Jeep was parked. Tiffany had dropped the windows and started the engine as I got close, sending up cries of alarm and recognition from the darkened forest around us. I dropped into a crouch next to the much-abused rear bumper, waiting for any nearby cult members to reveal themselves. They were certainly freaky as could be and capitalized on the world becoming a shambles, but experts on combat they were not, something to be used to one's advantage.
All I heard from the darkened wilderness were the howls of a few zombies, punctuated by a few screams as they no doubt turned against their captors. I turned my back to the darkness for an instant to climb in and get the hell out of there, dropping my rifle on the backseat pile.
"Hey baby," I said to Tiffany, all smile and cockiness. I should have known the Church of the Third Prophet dies much harder than that. I had just only gotten the clutch down when a rag-swathed maniac came bursting out of the darkness with a gleaming ax held high. I leveled my pistol and Tiffany frantically fired her .22, but the shots went wild as he rushed forward, plunging his blade through the plastic rear window; the axhead clanged off the M40's study aluminum case. Howling in frustration at the absence of what he surely thought would be a satisfying window shattering, the madman roared, trying in vain to retrieve his ax from the sliced plastic. I lined up the three tritium dots on him and fired three times, sending him down in a spray of black blood and flying tatters. The clearing came alive with burning brands of firewood and I floored the gas pedal while Tiffany screamed, spinning the Jeep around with its signature twin plumes of clotted earth as I drove out, the glow of the headlights bouncing wildly as we careened over the uneven terrain.
I rocked forward as a goodly amount of the gear in the back of the hit my seat, making for an even more unsettling ride. A cultist who must have run unthinkable fast through the darkness latched onto the door's pillar, picking his feet up on the running board on Tiffany's side and groping his hand blindly inside. Her scream became almost a whistle as she rammed her gun's barrel into the soft flesh of his wrist and pulled the trigger. The shot sent him straight off out moving vehicle and he hit a the sturdy trunk of a gnarled oak tree with a gurling cry that faded with the thick air and sound of the engine. A final swerve and we were back onto the road, streaking up the highway into the north.
At dawn, we pulled off at a roadside diner, kicked in the door and went inside. The 120 miles we had covered meant we had enough time to rest and empty the fuel can into the gas tank without fear of the cult following our tracks, just like the zombies they kept as prisoners (Prisoners? Slaves?) did at the sound of our passage. I slumped into a booth, leaning against the wall with Tiffany against me in the same way.
"We'll have to get some tape for that window," I said before falling asleep with the scent of her miraculously good-smelling hair in my nose.
Part 3
It was about ten that morning when a thump on the window jarred me awake. A second followed, blows not meant to break the glass but definitely get the attention of whoever was inside. I gently slid the gently murmuring and still sleeping Tiffany to the other side of the booth and parted the closed blinds with the muzzle of my pistol, jumping back at the sight of a zombie ramming the window with his face. We had seen far too many zombies to count over the last few days, but I still stopped to study this one. Whatever wanderings this former (From his short sleeved button down and the inferior knot still fastening the ugly tie around his neck businessman? Traveling salesman?) had been on since reanimating had not been good to him. His eyes were fully glazed with an opaque, white film, and livid sores had opened across his face. The teeth he snapped at us were dark yellow and broken where they had mindlessly plowed through bone or armor and given way under the force. He craned his neck to the left and opened his mouth to moan, but failed . The dark crimson of his exposed vocal cords may have had something to do with that inability, and I silently thanked whoever had been handy enough with a knife to put a silencer on the ghoul. I was also thankful that the roadkill stench zombies were developing didn't travel through the glass.
"Tiffany, your ex-boyfriend is here," I said, gently shaking her awake.
"The court says Jethro can't come around," Tiffany muttered before her eyes were even open. Rubbing them with one hand and unconsciously smoothing her hair with the other, she turned to look through the slit I was still holding open and gave a piercing scream, prompting another silent moan and headbutt from the zombie and hysterical laughter from me.
Everything got decidedly less funny after she cracked me in the ribs with the butt of her Ruger. While I shook my fist and rumbled profanity at her and the zombie, Tiffany looted through the kitchen, found the sausage croissants in the freezer were still frozen and made a delicious breakfast out of them on the still-functional gas stove. While I ate, now oblivious to the blows on the window, she changed into a tank top and put my jacket on over it.
"We're going to have to get you your own," I said through a mouthful, not positive but reasonably sure the venom I had tried to muster for the statement had been lost somewhere along the way.
"I like this one," Tiffany said, making sure her cleavage was properly displayed before sliding her pistol into the waistband of her jeans. "How much further is it to your cabin?"
I leaned back against the window and thought about it. "It's only about 50 miles from here, and even though our fuel situation doesn't look good we can definitely make it. I'd like to ditch the Jeep about 10 miles out though. We have a lot of stuff, good stuff that we need, but we're going to have to just carry it. I don't want the zombies or worse, the Third Prophet following us home. Those freaks could definitely fuck us up unleashing their zombies in the back yard and then coming in themselves."
Tiffany was silent for a moment, and proved my thought about her mulling over the approximate weight of her shampoo and clothing supply wrong. "That's a good idea," she said, going back into action as she snapped open her compact, looked in its mirror and got to work. I got up, checked the number of bullets in my pistol and was about to ask if she was ready to leave before a poignant look from her stopped me. She put her makeup in her back pocket and thanked me for being brave last night.
"Tiffany, I almost got us both killed," I said, remembering the fire in the eyes of the cultist who had spotted me killing his fellows from the cover of the tree.
"Well, I would have just screamed," said Tiffany, turning her eyes toward the floor. "Thank you. Are you ready to go?" she asked, looking at me again before walking over and wrapping her arms around my waist. We walked out of the gloomy diner in high spirits, looking back and moving slightly faster after the agitated zombie stopped peering in the window and walked at us with his arms outstretched. After loading Tiffany in the Jeep I looked down at the half-eaten croissant I had my left hand, observed the slavering, hapless zombie, and tossed it on the ground in front of him. He ignored it, but looking in the side mirror after leaving him in a cloud of dust, I could see my offering was being enjoyed.
The ride was uneventful and quiet for the first twenty minutes or so, with the small bits of conversation focused on the trivialities of burned-out cars and shambling roadside zombies. Tiffany began to get uneasy when I spun the wheel of my iPod to Rammstein.
"Why the angry music?" she asked me in a voice that had to be raised over the roar.
"We have to cross the river at Trois-Rivieres," I answered, not taking my eyes off the road. "I have a feeling its going to be a hive of zombies or worse. So, I'm just getting myself into the right state of mind for it."
Tiffany became worried at the thought of it. "Are we going to get stuck there? Should we just stop and hold up in a building instead of the middle of nowhere?"
I rubbed her leg. "We'll get through," I said, "even if we have to ditch this ride at one end of town and steal a new one on the other end of town."
She answered "Ok" and fell silent until the sight of the bridge met our eyes. Judging from the number of wrecked and deserted cars we went by plenty of people had died in the attempt to cross it or had done so immediately after reaching the other side. However, it was not blocked as I had feared, but instead the scrapped cars were pushed to either side of it, many stacked on top of each other; countless more had doubtlessly been forced over the side into the water below with zombie inhabitants still belted into their seats. There was a substantial number of the undead wandering across the impressive span, moaning in excitement at the sight and noise of fresh food arriving. If and when this disaster cleared up, I was going to be immensely curious on what the surviving scientific dudes would uncover about the zombie kind. Stopped at the south end of the bridge, I paused to look at a zombie lying next to the wreckage of an Oldsmobile. He was surely dead, and for good this time, but there was no sign of head trauma anywhere beyond the curtain of flies he was ringed with.
"That's a zombie, allright," said Tiffany. "How about we get going?"
I put the Jeep in gear, said "Right away, madame," and floored it, bobbing back and forth as the knobby tires bit for traction before getting tossed back with the acceleration. Rather than a runway style reenactment of Tiffany's rescue from the school, I only hit one zombie, sending him plummeting into the river below with a splash that was audible over the engine and the bellows of German from the speakers. As we neared the edge of the bridge I wondered what happened to Rammstein when they were presented with the zombie apocalypse and concluded any walking dead that had headed their way were most likely been beaten to paralysis before being incinerated in front of an enthusiastic crowd, happy thoughts in times such as these. I turned off the music, smirked at Tiffany and then noticed a revenant walking right for us.
"Look," I said, pointing her out. Tiffany drew her pistol needlessly, because I think even she realized at that point that the zombie, formerly an overweight, middle-aged woman, was not going to make it all the way over to us. Her arms dangled uselessly, flopping like sausage links from the stretched out, stringy remains of connective tissue visible at her elbows and shoulders. Her sore-riddled head also lolled like its supports had gone bad, and one foot was twisted completely backwards. About 10 feet in front of us the corpse collapsed, made one last gurgle, and fell silent for good.
"They're starting to die?!" asked Tiffany, giving her door panel a bang of momentary excitement excitement.
"I think so," I answered, leaning back in my seat. "It kind of makes sense. Any virus is eventually going to desolate the body if left unchecked, not to mention the lack of rest and injuries the zombies have sustained for a week or more. This whole crisis can't have more than another week left to it."
"That's good news," said Tiffany, beginning to notice the non-dying zombies coming out of the woodwork and beginning to converge on us. "You're house will just be like a little vacation until some friendly member of the Restored Canadian Army shows up to deport us and make friendly inquiries about your military-issue guns. You know I've never been out of the United States before.?"
"Townie," I answered, removing the back of an approaching zombie's skull just as a release. I had totally expected the breakfast Tiffany had whipped up to be my last meal before we were utterly defeated in our attempt to cross the bridge. That unlooked-for success combined with the fact that the zombies were dying of undead old age to make me positively giddy. My .45 didn't make a loud enough bang; sitting in an idling Jeep on the north side of the St. Lawrence River, surrounded by approaching ghouls whose only desire was mindlessly devour my living flesh in a land controlled by a psychotic cult, I felt like bellowing in triumph. We still weren't dead.
"I hope you don't wish you have that bullet later, handsome," said Tiffany. "Can we get the hell out of here, please? I'm sick of being in towns and creepy roads and even worse forests filled up with zombies and those Third Prophet freaks. Is your cabin that we're going to even nice, or is it actually just a trailer you stuck on a lake on land you don't even rent? I had a guy do that to me once."
"We're going," I said as I started driving, depositing my piece in its accustomed cup holder. "Look, you made it for two days stuck in a beseiged school with the fucking popular kids for company, I think you can get through another couple hours of zombie evasion." She looked away, her eyes rimming with tears. "Oh, what's the matter?" I asked her, suddenly feeling terrible. "Was the kid with the gel actually your boyfriend? I figured he just liked to look through holes in the locker room walls a lot."
I was so concerned with her that I was barely paying attention to the debris-choked streets and wandering zombies as I wove through the ruins of the city, oblivious to the scorched and shattered remains of the formerly scenic storefronts down Main Street. A crowd of zombies that looked the worse for wear feasted on someone on a street corner as we made our crooked progress through the town; I was barely watching the road. I would think later with horror that whoever got eaten had probably rushed out at the engine and gunshot.
"I am going to crash this goddamn car," I said while keeping my eyes on her, "if you don't tell me what's the matter right now."
"It's the zombies," Tiffany sobbed. "Right before I went to school for the last time my mom said she wasn't feeling well. I bet she got bitten by someone, didn't tell me and now she's a zombie who's going to rot to death."
It took me a long time to convincer her that wasn't going to happen, but the other great feature of shoveling shit at teenage girls is it's a great way to kill time. The hour long ride to our abandonment point went by in a blur, with the tears eventually slowing down, stopping, and lastly being replaced with happy nods and promises of carnal ecstacy to come, a fairly ideal way to spend a road trip punctuated only by the chilling sight of a Church of the Third Prophet cultist standing atop the forgotten remains of a tractor trailer and waving his ghastly modification of a hockey stick at us. I leaned out the window and shot back at him, but the last sight we saw was him sliding back into the destroyed window at the top of the truck's cab like a freakish worm.
By the time the sun was high in the sky the Jeep was parked in a clearing in the last stretch of dense forest we would have to deal with and the keys were in my pocket. Packing up our wares took a half hour spent as silently as possible as we decided what could wait for a second trip. I shouldered my bulging backpack and one of the rolled-up sleeping bags while Tiffany toted the M40 with a case of canned goods under her arm; I hoped my flask was still in her adopted jacket's pocket. There were enough provisions in the cabin that even if we returned to find only a spot of oil where the Jeep had been this load would do just fine.
"We definitely have enough bullets," whispered Tiffany as we prepared to set out. "Are you ready?"
I nodded, attemped to balance my CAR-15 against the case of cans digging into the holstered pistol, and suddenly became terrified of the forest. The hazy yellow sun of the northern autumn was dappling through the trees in anything but a threatening manner, but the heavy silence was gnawing at me. We hadn't heard a zombie moan or come crashing clumsily through the branches yet, as any that had inexplicably followed the sound of our passage would still have been far behind us. It took more than two tense hours for us to walk the trails on the age-old, family heirloom map I had I produced for the occasion, time I still have nightmares of. The lake seemed almost a mirage as its waters to appear through the gaps between trees as we walked down the familiar slope that dropped into its southern shore. We sat down at the edge of the foliage, damp with sweat even in the September air that bore an edge of chill, and observed the water and the cabin nestled above it, the entire scene seemingly like a painting. Tiffany planted a kiss on me as I observed the area.
My grandfather's cabin was built into the slope of the hill that also housed the waterfall whose ability to turn a water wheel made the place a self-sustaining bastion of electricity in a landscape that had recently had a severe power outage. The upper of two floors housed the kitchen, living room, and master bedroom, while the smaller downstairs held two bedrooms, only one of which contained a woodstove for heat. There was a proch on the front of each level, as well as a door into each. The interior was appropriately rustic, fully furnished and stocked with foodstuffs and cold weather gear. With the right amount of barricading and vigilance it could serve as a refuge for a very long time.
"That's definitely no trailer," said Tiffany, "but these boots look like I belong in one. Good thing I stole another pair!"
I didn't answer, having seen something I definitely didn't like. "Tiffany, give me the sniper rifle," I said without looking at her, and silently taking the weapon after she handed it to me. I looked through the scope to observe the zombie tottering around near the lake's edge, and recognized him. "The old game warden Whatley got himself bit," I said almost regretfully before taking up the slack in the rifle's strap and centering the crosshairs on him.
"Was he a friend of yours?" said Tiffany right before I fired. The .300 caliber round blew his red hunting hat into clearly visible pieces.
"The asshole was always hassling me for a fishing license," I answered, chambering a new round. "Let's go home."
After spending five heart-pounding, rifle leveled minutes of clearing the silent, dusty cabin, the rest of the night was, in fact, like a vacation. The fire roared that night as I knocked back bourbon while a freshly scrubbed, shaved and sexy Tiffany gave up trying to force feed me more of the fish I'd caught as the sun went down and checked off things in her Survival Guide that we had done right. I was trying to figure out whether to take the master bedroom, on the second floor of the rustically-decorated cabin or one of the other two on the ground floor. I decided to go with the one upstairs, even though its wasn't any less accessible thanks to the fact the cabin was built into the side of the hill, just because I truly felt like I'd mastered something. I put the oil lamp next to the bed out after having sex so loud the zombies in Ottawa may have been heading our way and felt like the last people on Earth, stretching my spine out on a real bed once again, with Tiffany snuggled next to me.
I woke up the next morning to the sight of overcast, drizzling skies and the sound of heavy boots stomping around the porch outside the lower bedrooms. Pulling on my Super Mario-emblazoned boxers and checking the chamber on my 45C, I left Tiffany and the rifles in the bedroom, closed the door and began to creep downstairs. The sound of a shotgun's slide stopped me in my tracks.
"It was nice of you to bring Scarlett Johanssen along, boy," came the voice behind me. "Now drop that pistol and turn around."
I turned around slowly, taking in the heavily armed stranger in my house. He was dressed in carhartt coat and jeans that were covered in enough filth to have tracked through endless miles of wilderness before getting here, which had surely happened. His dirty, stubble-covered face was swollen with tobacco at the jaw, a bulge that distorted his vile, triumphant smile. "We done smelt your smoke and came on in. Larry the Gimp's pokin around downstairs. We're fixin to let you live assumin you leave us the girl and tell us how you two showed up. You sure as hell didn't walk." He spit some tobacco juice on the floor of the landing and called to Tiffany. "Come on out, honey, you 'n' me 'n' the gimp are gonna have some fun!"
I really hoped Tiffany was dressed and armed by then, but never really had time to finish the grim thought of what was about to happen to her because a lot of things happened in quick succession, beginning with the Gimp calling from outside.
"Hey Jeb, you best get on out here!" came the voice from the porch outside.
"What a goddamned pussy that man is," muttered Jeb from above me. My eyes flicked to my pistol on the stair above my bare feet. "If it's another zombie, blast the fuck and then get in here!" Jeb roared. "Now then," he continued, taking a step toward the bedroom, "Come on out, pretty young thing, it's been a long journey for old Jeb." He was able to take one step.
"Fuck you!" screamed Tiffany through the door before it became a honeycomb of bullet holes and then disintegrated completely. The violent HISS-CRACK of the CAR-15 on auto continued until the weapon clicked dry. Jeb had very intelligently hit the floor, avoiding being blown away, and rolled toward the wall on his left as I fired two shots at him from my reclaimed pistol. They obviously missed the mark, since his shotgun boomed a two foot blemish of splinters into the wood paneled wall above my head. It was a good thing old Grampa wasn't here to watch his house getting blown to shit.
I heard Jeb muttering to himself as he scraped across the floor back toward the door; perhaps we hadn't been as inaccurate as I had initially thought. In a crouch at the bottom of the stairs I heard the gimp yell again from outside, this time with urgency and fear in his voice, I turned toward the sound before it was suddenly cut off and something thumped hard onto the boards of the porch.
This was quite possibly the dictionary definition of a bad situation. If I went up the stairs to attempt to take Jed out I would likely be met with a shotgun blast; Tiffany had little idea of how to use the assault rifle even if she could bring it to bear. I could go outside and around to the other door to, but Jed would probably hear me leave and rush her; worse yet was the possibility of whatever it was that was lurking outside and presumably took down the gimp. Sighing I checked my weapon with shaking hands in preparation of going upstairs. Leave it to the Church of the Third Prophet to solve difficult situations for you.
The front door above me flew open, revealing a wild eyed cultist whose drapings of the usual rags were supplemented with fox and beaver tails, rotting by the smell of them. He brandished a baseball bat with glass shards sunk into it above his head, and whirled it in a circle as he sighted Jeb.
"Die, Zircadian!" screamed the lunatic as he brought his weapon down, pinning Jeb's shotgun and foreams to the floor with a grisly sound of snapping glass and rending metal. Jeb groaned in pain and kicked his opponent in the hamstring with all his might. The blow went totally unnoticed as the death club was wrenched from the floorboards and sunk into Jeb's head without a second's pause or hesitation. His killer yanked it out of the gory mess he'd made, straightened to his surprisingly impressive full height and looked down the stairs at me, tilting his head 90 degrees before continuing.
"This house shall become the king's lodge of the Third Prophet," he rambled, advancing down the stairs toward me. "The unclean and the vagabonders and the migrants will be culled into the cauldron and the Third Prophet's red sky will shine." He punctuated the last words with a shake of his club before stopping his terrifying descent as some shred of caution and sanity came back into his mind at the sight of the gun aimed at him.
There was really no James Bond-esque one liner that could have fit the situation, so I just fired my gun empty into him, stepping out of the way when his body slid past me, the eyes wide open and focused on the ceiling. I continued to the top, careful not to step on glass shards or wood splinters and knocked on the doorframe of the bedroom. Tiffany's head popped up from the other side of the bed and she then stood up, wrapped in the quilt we had slept under and rushed toward me with the empty CAR-15 still clutched in her right hand. She dropped it as she threw her arms around me and sobbed.

After picking up the mess and dragging the bodies to be burned, a task that was helped by the propane cylinders I found in Jeb and the Gimp's abandoned backpacks, (In case you were wondering, the Gimp was not dressed in a skintight leather suit with a full face mask. I was disappointed too) I pieced together just how we had been hit by every group of undesirables except for the zombies at the same time. This was because the zombies were dead, thanks to the effective brutality of Jeb and his buddy the Gimp. A neat trail of them almost a mile long trailed through the forest to the west; the two must have just travelled on foot through the wilderness dropping any of the undead they came across. Their bootprints as shell casings made their involvement clear enough, but the questions was the lucky appearance of the cult member. Only two days later, when Tiffany and I returned to the Jeep to successfully collect our other wares was the story told- a gnawed on squirrel carcass in our very footprints from the original trip through the woods spoke volumes about the woodcraft of the cult members.
By the time the zombies drawn to the sound of the shooting showed up I was back at the cabin and picking them off from the upstairs porch was like recess. I worked late into that night making a set of bars for the door out of the ruins of the intruders' weapons, hoping that would be sufficient to keep out any other hostiles who happened along by the smell of our smoke, or in that night's case their predecessors' airborne ashes. Neither of us slept much that night as the rain fell against the roof over our heads, but when the next day dawned bright and clear, there was not even a zombie to be seen wandering along the treeline next to the lake.
That was two weeks ago. The edge of winter is even more noticeable in the air, but right now there isn't a cloud in the sky as I sit on the porch with a mug of whiskey, the M40 on the other wicker chair and Tiffany on my lap. The food's more than holding out since it's supplemented by fish and deer from the woods, but then again it might not have to. We're starting to hear helicopters and planes in the sky again, a good sign since the silence of the height of the Undead Apocalypse when we fled Laconia. This place had been built escape from the world, we were probably living better than almost everyone else who had survived the jaws of their reanimated friends and neighbors, and for a while we're just going to keep at it. If anyone out there is on the fence about buying a vacation home, just think of all the good it will do you once the dead walk.