Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse (Issue #2 | September 2015) (6 page)

He wished, for the first time in his life, that he owned a sleeping pill. To his surprise, a long hot shower worked just as well, and without the hangover in the morning. He could believe that the evening's events had been a nightmare as he drove toward Bob's house.

Until he turned a corner and saw Helen, unmistakable even under the blood, shuffling toward Bob's house...and it occurred to him that his Camry might be more useful than Bob's wife's pistol, if only people would understand. He gunned the engine. Helen turned to face him, not with a smile or a scream but with a snarl, as if in slow motion.

“Slow Motion: Day Two

The Slayers”

Story #7

By

Priscilla King

Sometimes, after his wife had left, Ray used to think he wanted to take Helen out. The emergency dispatcher had better than average judgment. And diction. And looks. And a husband. Now she had the virus, the worse-than-ordinary-carrion odor...and she'd killed the old piano player last night...and she was shuffling purposefully toward his best friend's house.

Ray calculated. He was a precise enough driver to run over her on the sidewalk, but there'd be less zombie gore contamination if he could lure her into the sleepy residential street.

He rolled out into the middle of the little unmarked intersection and lowered the passenger side window. "Hey, Helen!"

Her eyes didn't seem to focus, but she did turn toward him. She ought to trust him. They'd got on well, been friendly in a doctor-to-dispatcher sort of way. He'd have to back and roll up that window fast. He waited while she approached the car...uh-oh...on the driver side.

"Hey, Ray," she croaked. Her dead eyes never blinked. Her hands moved as if her arms were on strings. The hand that plopped on his window had dirt and blood caked on it, under the nails, in the creases of the knuckles.

Then the hand shot through the window and clutched his throat. While he shifted gears, the other hand came after it, and as the car shot backward the zombie dispatcher came with the car.

Instinctively he braked, while the car was still in the road. That gave Helen a chance to leap forward, applying more weight, drooling putridly on his jacket.

Must not allow blood to make contact with blood. Probably best to avoid skin contact,
he thought. Part of his mind was ready to reel off what the Center for Disease Control knew about the virus so far...worst features of AIDS, rabies, and mad cow disease...but at the same time his left hand was restraining her wrist, and his right hand was feeling around for something heavy...well, there was his laptop. He was glad now that he still had one of the older models with the big clunky battery.

Helen was trying to get the balance of her weight into the car, but hadn't done it yet. Ray shoved back, feeling her feet hit the ground. She pushed, and he pushed. Helen had been a tall, strong woman while she was herself. Ray didn't have much of an advantage in weight or strength. But he had some. He was glad that pushing was apparently distracting what she had in the way of a mind, now, from biting him.

Wedging the laptop between her face and his, Ray slammed the laptop into Helen's face, full strength. That got her out of the window.
Now!
The Camry always started easily; now it shot backward. He stomped the brake, shifted into forward gear, hammered down on the gas again. Too bad about the laptop, but this was the ideal angle for the thing that had been Helen. It fell straight ahead of the left side tires.

The trouble with people like Helen was, they were already living, or at least not dying, with more injuries than any body could survive...and still be human. You had to reduce the remains to small, scattered pieces. He'd seen how that worked last night. He backed over Helen again. Then he drove over her, forward, again. Then he backed again. Then forward. Then back. Then the police arrived.

Ray went with the Police quietly. Asked whether he wanted to go to the hospital or to jail, he said, "Hospital, please." At the hospital ("Doctor Ray! What on Earth...") he considered saying that he didn't know what had come over him. Then he realized that, for safety purposes, the truth would work just fine.

"She had the virus," he told Dr. Sean in Psychiatric. "She's a zombie. She ate an old lady last night. Part of one, anyway."

It felt good to get that said, although he wasn't sure Sean had really heard all of it, before the nurse came around with the injection. Ray took it gratefully and was disappointed to find out, after lying down in the observation room, that it was not an effective sedative. Not, at least, for him.

He was wide awake, wishing the observation room had television, when his friend and mentor, senior surgeon Bob Bentley, came in to authorize his release. His
immediate
release.

"Why'd you do that?" he asked as he buckled himself up in Bob's car. "Not that I'm complaining..."

"But aren't we entitled to a nervous breakdown after last night?" Bob finished, and they shared a mirthless nervous laugh. "You'd be entitled to have one, if you really want one. Carol thought about it, this morning, when you took Helen out. She convinced herself that, if there are more cases out there, a locked ward might not be the safest place. Anyway, she might be feeling a little shocky, but she's not out of it the way the real psych patients are. Know what I'm saying? And neither are you."

"I wonder how many more cases there will be," he said.

Driving home, Bob turned on the radio. They heard a few notes by a classical string quartet, a commercial, then the annoying voice of a popular talk show host. "And now, are we witnessing a real live zombie apocalypse? Mavis from Connecticut? Your thoughts?"

"Well, here in Connecticut there's been a...a..."

"Another reported case, Mavis? You mean another attack?"

Mavis screamed.

"Let's see whether Mavis comes back before we take another call. Recap, folks: we're getting reports of what sound like zombie attacks in Miami, in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., in Fort Worth, Texas, and in some place called Corbin, Kentucky, wherever that is..."

"Home of Colonel Sanders!" The radio cut off as the car stopped. "Carol wants you to stay with us for the duration, if you don't mind. Kind of stick together and watch each other's backs."

Ray didn't mind that, any more than he minded seeing that every trace of Helen had been freshly scrubbed from the street. He thought he felt like curling up on a couch and watching television, and the Bentleys had a particularly inviting guest couch, in a guest suite that was separated from their living quarters by an indoor swimming pool, with high-resolution digital TV.

He flipped on the TV with the remote and tried to relax but he remained tense. During a broadcast of a game that had been played last week, the announcer mentioned that a Dallas linebacker had tested positive for the virus. When Carol brought over a freshly baked pizza balanced above a huge salad bowl, she observed that it was a good time to be a vegan. Ray would have liked to admire the way the nutritionist found comfort in her kitchen, but instead found himself remembering every burger or chicken sandwich he'd eaten during the past month, wondering whether animals got the virus too; he'd heard a theory that it had spread to humans from animals.

The six o'clock news reported an outburst of unexplained mass violence in a parking lot last night. Then Ray saw his Camry rolling back and forth over the sausage-like sludge that had been Helen, as apparently recorded from a house nearby. "The attacker, who surrendered to police," Ray saw himself surrendering, "was identified as Dr. Raymond Telford, a cardiologist. He was released from a local hospital in the custody of another doctor. Telford reportedly believed that the victim was a zombie."

"That's scary, isn't it? We want to remind everyone out there, if you see something that appears to be a zombie attack, don't be a hero. Call 911 for help."

"Yes, even though some persons with the virus are behaving like 'the walking dead,' like the man who killed and cannibalized a caller to the talk show this morning...a new experimental vaccine offers hope..."

Ray changed the channel and watched music videos until a live game came on.

"That's Ted Stanton in the number 33, filling in for Terence O'Hara, who was hospitalized last week with the virus...urgh."

"Holy...cow!" The view of Number 33's face was replaced by a view of the sports broadcaster punching a big, slow-moving assailant. Presumably the broadcaster had expected the assailant to dodge or block. The assailant did neither. The broadcaster's fist landed right in his eye. The eyelid sank in as a clear stream trickled down the man's face, before the blood started to flow slowly and steadily from above and below the eyeball, all the while he was smashing the broadcaster's head against the wall.

Fortunately for the broadcaster, the wall was a stage wall that caved in easily. Less fortunately, the assailant fell on top of him with a crack that might have been a rib. Then the camera shifted up to focus on a corner of the ceiling. The sound broadcast thuds, gasps, words that would normally have been bleeped out, and then a crash.

At that point Bob came to the door. "Seen enough?"

"You were watching the game?" Ray was surprised. Doctors didn't get to watch a lot of games, even if they wanted to.

"We were watching the six o'clock news," Bob explained. "They were talking piously about 'persons with the virus' and hoping that a vaccine would help. Then one of the newcasters suddenly said he'd had the vaccine himself, and talking about it seemed to be making him feel strange. Then he grabbed another one and bit her face, and they hauled both of them out to a hospital. Nobody was a hero. Somehow I don't think any insurance is going to be paying out for any un-heroic reactions to this situation. I think only the heroes have a chance to survive. Want to be one of them?"

"No," Ray said. "No, I want to be a nice, quiet cardiologist, enjoying a nice, restful evening in my own home, with my own wife..."

"What wife?"

"The one that ran off with that guy in Palm Springs. That's my point. I don't
want
any of this to be happening. Since it is, I don't want to sit back and watch it on television, even more than I don't want to be a zombie-slaying hero! So I'm in."

"So is Sean," Bob said. "So is his wife. We're going back to the parking lot in their car, if you want to come along."

"I'd rather drive my own car."

"The one everybody just saw on the six o'clock news?"

Ray conceded the point. At least the Buick had room for four adults and four different kinds of axes.

Despite the yellow tape around most of it the parking lot was not quite empty. It never was. Students from the nearby college often parked vehicles there at night. The parking lot had not been completely scrubbed, so even if there had been such a thing as fresh zombie odor, Ray thought, he wouldn't have been able to detect it. The four slayers sat in the dark, locked Buick, hoping they looked, to the students, like some more students in search of privacy.

They saw other students. A boy and girl pulled into the parking lot, parked, and walked across the street toward their school, laughing and talking. Did zombies laugh?

Two big football players and two cute little cheerleaders piled into one SUV.

Old Mr. Harris shuffled past the parking lot with his stick and his dog. If he'd ever been tempted to
like
a patient, Ray thought, Mr. Harris would have been the one. After a double bypass surgery from Bob, Mr. Harris had become Ray's success story. Seventy-five years old, with the clean arteries and slow steady pulse of a teenager, he always shuffled because he'd had a broken knee. He couldn't be a zombie.

The SUV rocked in a suggestive manner. Sean and Dianne giggled.

A late evening shopper jogged back from the shopping plaza. Did zombies jog?

A shriek came from the SUV. A back door popped open, and the brunette cheerleader popped out, squealing, "You're disgusting!" with one cup of a front-hook bra sticking up out of her shirt.

Were zombie slayers supposed to distract themselves by even watching that sort of thing? If the girl wanted sympathy, Ray thought, she ought to run further and faster than that. Did she want sympathy? Attention, more likely.

Her date didn't seem to be in much of a hurry to grab her as he climbed out of the SUV, fumbling with his fly. "There's nothing disgusting about it. I had the vaccine!" The girl trotted away, in no hurry.

The air smelled worse. "That's him," Ray said.

They piled out of the Buick. Even slaying a zombie, Ray thought, should be done as humanely as possible. He aimed for the back of the lout's neck. Another axe took out the guy's knee, so Ray's axe connected directly with the skull. Finishing the job, separating the small pieces of the body so that they couldn't reanimate themselves, was mere, well, hack work. Not much worse, Ray thought, than cleaning a trout. Except for the smell.