House of Zack
I almost didn't bother avoiding the fallen corpse in my path as I ran –I was rather drained of the shock factor that seeing a corpse once held for me—but I did manage a somewhat clumsy leap when I realized that I could nonetheless trip over the damned thing. And tripping would be a very, very bad thing when you are running from a mob of the undead.
"Hey," shouted Jay ahead of me. "Isn't that the guy we saw when we came in?"
"Yeah," I was out of breath, and my none-to-graceful style of running put a bounce in my tone. "Think so. What about it?" I heard several thumps behind us; apparently our clammy pursuers hadn't bothered avoiding the obstacle as I had.
"I mean he was still dead. Not one of them." He jerked a thumb behind him at the dozen-or-more pack of zombies we had en tow.
"What does-" I managed to get out before succumbing to a coughing fit. I admit I wasn't in the best of shape; I'm a band nerd, not a marathon runner. True, I can jog a mile on the treadmill like a beast, but I'm not one to sprint through campus buildings, hurdling over fallen desks, chairs, and potted plants. Or bodies, for that matter.
"What does…(pant)…that have to do with anything?"
Jay, who was of course in great shape, and not the least bit out of breath, responded with: "Well if he isn't trying to fucking eat us, why the fuck are these fuckers?!." It was almost refreshing to hear Jay's extensive cursing in a more appropriate context.
"There are slightly more pressing matters at hand, Jay!" Charles shouted from behind us, his chubby legs pumping as hard as they could to keep up. And, more importantly, away from the decaying mouths of those behind. "He probably wasn't bitten." Charles looked as if he wanted to elaborate more on the subject, but deemed Jay a waste of precious oxygen.
After taking a shortcut through the broken glass door frame of what may have once been a clerk's office, we came to a long hallway and I dared to look behind me without fear of plunging headfirst into a wall. I saw Charles, looking miserably exhausted, and not far behind him, Ginger. Now she, on the other hand, was a marathon runner. I'm guessing she stayed behind us to keep tabs on everyone.
"Just a bit further, everyone," she said encouragingly in her moderate English accent. "If we can beat them in the library, we should be safe."
The library had seemed like such a good idea at the time. That time being, of course, several hours ago, huddled under a windowsill in the music building waiting for the moans to drift away. Not the campus library, of course; the building was more glass than brick, and smack dab in the middle of the university. Designed to be stone's throw away from most of the dormitories, and within easy reach of the students -undergraduate and undead.
No, our goal was the mostly ignored president's library. It was small, sturdy, and very old; built way back in the first days of Clark State University. It has long since been replaced as the university's main library, but some old fart had deemed it "of too much historical importance to the school" to be demolished. So it became the university president's own personal library. Still open to the students, but this was more of a gesture of good will than anything else; as far as I know, the president himself had never set foot in there.
No sooner had the thought crossed my mind that it was a little too convenient that all of the zombies in the area were behind us that a middle-aged woman in a tattered, bloody power suit and a vast hole in her cheek that revealed a row of professionally treated molars gurgled her greeting in front of us, almost directly in our path.
"Shit! Now what?!"
"Oh, just barrel her over!"
Jay did so; using his tried-and-true trucking technique (which in no small part led his football team to a regional title), he ran into the woman without breaking stride. Her head recoiled forward –I thought for a moment that it might go so far forward that she would be able to reach the nape of his neck- and we heard a loud snap! as her own neck broke, then she toppled to the ground. Jay hurdled over Power Suit Woman and kept pace with us in one semi-fluid motion. Charles and Ginger gave the fallen woman a wide birth as they passed: within seconds, she was up and, broken neck and all, joined the approaching crowd to resume chase.
"Damn," I muttered, mostly under my breath. "These things are tough sons of bitches." It seemed appropriate. I didn't curse all that much before –usually just when we lost another basketball game or when I stepped outside during a Kentucky winter without the proper coat. But they were some though sons of bitches; decayed and ugly as hell, but every bit as solid as the human beings they once were. Why couldn't they be like the zombies in the movies, or in that Michael Jackson video? Shambling, slow, and falling apart?
It'd be pretty cool if they started dancing, too.
Yes, even with my life in peril, being chased by a mob of living corpses, topped off with an overwhelming urge to pee, I was still in my own little world. I was some big, tough Joe Everyman from one of those apocalypse movies, the one that was just your average accountant who also happened to have the physique of a bodybuilder and a terminally persistent five o'clock shadow. You know, the one that leads the rag-tag group of survivors from all walks of life out of the rubble and into the safe haven that was conveniently located in his home town. The Joe Everyman, the one that the beautiful super model/average nurse falls for, the one that starts out shy and subdued but ends up as the one-liner shooting bad ass that everyone (except the other, more criminal-type bad ass that almost kills them all before the credits) follows without hesitation.
The habit that Joe seemed to have of dying at the ends of these movies tried to claw its way into my thoughts, but it was quickly silenced until I saw him: a muscled, tall-dark-and-handsome type in a varsity jacket, slumped over against the wall with blood dripping into his crotch from an unseen wound in his head. This was movie star Joe Everyman. In real life, Joe Everyman the bad ass accountant dies anonymously, without even outliving Tyler Evans, the freshman trumpet player. No explosions, no sum-it-all-up speech on life, no valiant struggle to protect a group of orphans. He just gets bashed in the head and falls beneath the blessed EXIT sign that we were running towards. I was either proud or crushed that I had outlasted Joe; I honestly couldn't tell which.
Then Joe started to get up. Ginger looked as if she was about to kneel down to help him, but the throaty moan reverberating from his throat changed her mind. I had a wrench at my belt that I had planned on using to get passed a locked door, although I had no idea how to go about doing that if the situation came up. Instead, I wielded it in front of me with both hands, and swung it like a baseball bat at Joe's head. I was running, bouncing; it was only a glancing blow, and I was sure that it wouldn't be enough to keep Joe's still-pearly whites out of my throat. But the wrench was sturdier than I thought, and even without a solid force behind it, it managed to break through his skull and exit the other side, with something I hesitantly identified as brain matter trailing behind. Joe fell to the ground, and his moaning stopped.
"Good shot there, Ty," said Ginger, who was now all but pushing poor Charles in front of her. Jay burst open the exit door, flinched as it nearly knocked him on his ass on the rebound, then waited for the three of us to catch up. This was probably a seldom used exit, as it led into some heavily forested path of the campus that I hadn't known existed. The path was skinny, with a large, vine-covered chain link fence on either side. I wasn't too sure that I liked the thought of being boxed in if even one living corpse appeared at the other end of this walkway, but there was no turning back now.
"Jay," she said calmly, "find something heavy that we might be able to block this door with- and quickly!" she added after the pack leaders of our mob of pursuing zombies came into view around the far-off corner of the hallway.
Charles eagerly seized the opportunity to catch his breath, falling to his knees as he floundered through the doorway. "What is going to be heavy enough to stop a horde of those things?" he said wheezily.
"You, maybe," said Jay. Charles was seventy pounds overweight. For a moment, I thought Jay was being serious, and for an even briefer moment, I considered it.
Ginger stared daggers at him. "Now's not the time, Jay! Grab that bench over there-"
"It's made of solid rock!"
"The one next to it, the metal one. We can wedge it, prop it on the door."
I think she was about to ask me to help him when she noticed that I was still staring at Joe. He was my first kill.
Ginger placed a maternal hand on my shoulder. "Don't write his eulogy, Tyler. I need you focused on the task at hand. Step out of the way, help Jay with this bench."
I did, but not without one last look at Joe's letterman jacket. I couldn't be sure, but I think he was a senior. Two months from a graduation that he wasn't going to attend.
With a groan from Charles, our group went on it's way again, albeit at more of a jog than a sprint. Ginger kept her eyes behind her, set on the makeshift barricade we had set up. I tried my best to keep my attention forward, but a loud clash craned my neck to spare another glance behind. The bench rattled dangerously against the doorknob, but it held fast. I wasn't sure if it would hold long, but nonetheless we slowed our pace to a jog, and then a fast walk as Charles failed to match even the more leisurely run for our lives.
I thought of Joe, face down in front of the blocked door with a mob of hungry ghouls standing on his ass.
My thoughts were quickly brought back to the situation at hand. One lone zombie bashed furiously amidst the vines and weeds covering the chain link fence. He wore a very expensive-looking jacket and tie with a loud, simple pattern that said, "I'm important, and I know it." He was severely wounded; a gaping tear in his torso showed the world his bits and pieces, and he was missing his left ear and most of his left eye. His left arm ended in a stump, covered in blood that looked fresh. I wasn't an expert, but I could guess that this guy had died and un-died very recently. He pounded and raked furiously at the chain link fence, searching desperately for a way to get to us.
"Heh, dumbass," said Jay. "The thing is too stupid to look for a way around."
"He'll find one soon enough," said Charles, still winded even at our moderate pace. "I'm guessing the fence will end before the library."
It did. We could see the fence abruptly end, just before the path reached the back yard of a large house, probably the president's. I couldn't see the library, but that didn't concern me as much as the gate we were almost upon; I cursed the brainiac that opted to put a gate so far near the edge of the fence, much less one that led strait into a tree.
"He's following us along the fence," said Charles. He pointed to the gate. "He's going to get through there! Do something!"
I couldn't tell if he was talking to me, but even if he was, what was I going to do? I looked to Ginger; even though she was easily the smallest of the four of us, she appeared to be our leader. We didn't wait long for her to say something.
"Don't worry about the gate," she said. "We'll make a run for that house when we reach the end of the fence. The door looks like it's open."
Open, and off its hinges. But it was better than nothing, and Ginger knew what she was talking about; Mr. Important didn't seem to acknowledge that the gate was there and simply kept banging and clawing, following us along this desolate woodland passage.
We heard our bench barrier fail behind us, and Joe's lifeless eyes watched as our mob -now more than thirty members thick- raced to get first dibs on these four students. The end of the fence was now less than twenty yards away.
Ginger turned very serious. "Listen to me. All of you. Five feet from the fence, we are going to start running. As fast as we can, without looking back." She looked at Charles, who was seventy pounds overweight and already exhausted from the most physical activity his body had seen in years. I remembered a saying from middle school: You don't have to out-swim the shark. Just the person next to you. It should have been funnier.
I was almost immediately ashamed. Even so, it was not friendship, but simple logic that pushed the thought from my mind. Charles was a curve-ruining Biology major, a full year ahead of anyone else in his class in the pre-med program. I wasn't expecting him to find a cure, but he could at least help us better understand the situation. Ginger was the resident psychologist at the university medical center, and, though I believe psychologist roughly translates to "fake doctor," I was almost sure that some if not most of the regular people we encountered -ourselves included- were going to be in need of a shrink. Jay could bench 325 pounds and had already proved himself a proficient zombie-tackler.
I was a music major, and an average one at that. Unless music really could soothe the savage beast, it would make the most sense for me to be the shark bait. I hoped the thought hadn't crossed anyone else's mind.
Ginger was saying something else, but the adrenaline pumping through me drowned her out. I had just remembered that the university president was a certified NRA member. He went hunting every weekend provided that our football team wasn't playing a home game, and was rumored to have shot an intruder on his property on more than one occasion prior to his reign in office. Despite a strict no-firearms policy on campus, I just knew that the guy had racks and shelves filled to bursting with shotguns and deer rifles. I had never fired a gun in my life, but suddenly I knew no sweeter a sound than a spent shell cartridge ejecting from a freshly operated firearm. We might not even need to make it all the way to the library; if the ammo held out (provided that at least one of us knew how to work a firearm), we could make our stand right here.
I thought Ginger was still talking, and for the first time it annoyed me. Surely there couldn't be anything more to say! The plan was simple: run, get inside, fortify, fight. It was then I noticed that we had stopped running, and she was frantically trying to stop us. Ginger was 5'3" and a buck even, trying to hold back three desperate, full-grown men. I almost loved this woman, but if she stood between me and safety, chivalry would fly out of the window. She pointed up, and I realized that it was not my adrenaline that muffled her words.
Three fighter jets, each one looking able to out fly God and all His angels, were screaming toward us.
I saw Jay's fist punch the air above him, and he let out a howl that pierced through the roar of the jets' engines. Charles dropped to his knees, from exhaustion and gratitude equally, and Ginger waved pleasantly, as if to an old friend. The moment felt surreal, and I imagined that if I ever at some point were to fall victim to drugs I'd have something to reference. Perhaps it was this feeling of detachedness that allowed my mind to stay clear enough to see two black dots released from the bowels of the jets, like pigeons over a statue.
"Run!" I shouted and pushed pass my friends towards the house. My breath once again left me, my legs caught on fire again, and the stitch in my side was replaced by a staple, but I ran faster than I ever had before. Power Suit Woman, Mr. Important, Joe, and even the library were all but forgotten as I quickly covered the distance to the bashed-in entrance of this once lovely estate, and I dared not look back to see if the others were bothering to follow. I spared enough time to hope they were.
All of a sudden I was in a spacious living room. I acknowledged the existence of a
big-screen television, a expensive suede couch, and some sort of potted plant that looked far too large to belong indoors. I also noted a corpse sprawled out in the floor, facing the doorway, right about as I tripped over it. I was sent flailing wildly down a hallway in a half-tripping, half recovering state, where my legs were keeping pace with my unbalanced body, but no more. My momentum didn't ebb as I crashed through the door at the end of the hallway, down an unexpected flight of stairs that I descended on my face more than anything else. At the bottom, I could smell mold and mildew, and the air was very cold. It was a basement, I presumed. I craned my neck, sending a wave of pain down my shoulder that felt too low, but didn't take my eyes off the one source of light made by my entry through the closed door. Three figures, one small, one large, and one round launched themselves after me, and then the sky reigned fire down upon Joe and all his brethren.