I rationalize my serial theft from the quiet crypts of civilization by imagining myself as the inheritor of all those now dust. Perhaps not me, an old man, a relic, but Ferlita, at least. It is she who stands some chance of seeing our species coming back from the brink, she the one who may lead us back into the light.

The pattern of larceny, once begun, grows easier with repetition. The Kinneys, strange as we were, earned what we took, and were proud of standing on our own two feet. Aside from our trophies, we hated to borrow, rejected help, and bought only those things which we couldn’t gain by direct action. My primary action now is to think of things I can rob from the community chest and ways I can use those items to prosecute a war perhaps only myself and Ferlita have formally declared.

No matter. The extremity of the battles we face must take its toll, and even as we speak for those beyond the veil, we are ourselves diminished. We write small changes on the walls of this this quiet world, and quickly are used down to the nub. Useless soliloquies on my part change nothing, my efforts to make sense of things larger than myself always doomed to end with a series of question marks and frustrated doodles upon the page.

Ferlita comes to me as I sit in the midst of the yard sale pile of bits and pieces I’ve drawn together, looking at the thumb of my left hand, where I’ve lost the nail at last, and now simply have an ugly darkness of soft flesh. I can’t remember how long it’s been that way, or what happened in the first place.

“Have you got a plan, Mr. Kinney, or has your little rubber band snapped?”  She kicks a big plastic bag full of packing peanuts, twirling a road flare between her fingers.

“There’s a plan in the formative stages.”

“I used to have my homework in, like, the formative stages. Never seemed to get any credit for it.”

“You’re a wiseacre some times, kid. Not being Conan or somesuch, it takes an old man a few swings at the ball before he hits one solid.”

“So you’re just gathering up a whole lot of random junk and hoping something’ll come to you?”  She softens her words by shimmying up on the camp table next to me and leaning her head against my arm.

“No, I’ve got the basics down. I just need to ask you a few things before I’m sure.”

“Like what?”  I both admire and abhor the look in her brown eyes. She is what she must be, but I can’t excuse a world in which a little girl has to be so hard, so young.

“Can you ride a bike?”

She nods.

“Riding fast, with stops and starts, and for up to three or four miles?”

“I used to ride all day. No problem.”

“What about your arm?  Can you throw?” I ask her.

She gives me a disgusted look. “Like softball?

“Sure. Like that.”

“Si. Claro.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. One more thing. If I don’t…if I’m not around anymore, are you going to be able to lay low and survive?”

A sudden pain crosses her eyes, but she clamps down hard on it and it turns inward, into places I can’t see. “I don’t want it to be like that.”

“I don’t either, but I have to know that you’ll be able take care of yourself. I’ll teach you everything I can while we’re getting ready, but plans fail, things fall apart, and I need to know that you won’t…do anything hasty if I’m not around.”  I find that it’s hard to get the words out.

“I’ll be careful. I can hide. I can find food. I can go back to how it was if I have to. I don’t want…”  She turns away, putting her small fists against her face. Her breathing hitches, just once. The rest of it is controlled, silent. I can do nothing but put my hand against her spine and clench my teeth. There’s no one to curse, no easy target for my anger.

“Whatever happens,” she says, turned from me, “I don’t want to leave any of them—the smart ones—behind. The super muertos have to go down.”

*****

I haven’t ridden a bike for some embarrassing number of years. Still, there’s two rules I know, or perhaps just made up. One: you don’t ask your troops to do things you won’t do yourself. Pretty sure that’s some rough paraphrase of a real maxim. The second: you assess your enemy’s level of readiness, their response to someone encroaching on their territory. For me, that involves a bike ride.

The pain in my thighs and the aching in my old knees humanizes everything. Still, I’m alive to ache. The bike shorts I found to go along with the bike, a Cannondale with fat tires and more gears than I’ve ever seen, are constrictive, but given the cruel dimensions of the seat, it’s probably a good idea. Just because my wedding tackle’s old and likely without any rational usage, that doesn’t mean that the nerves have died down there.

Bicyling and .45s in a shoulder holster were not meant to converge, as concepts, I don’t think. I can’t find a comfortable posture or adjustment, and finally give in to the idea that the ridge of the magazine will sometimes clip me in the ribs. If I’m not careful, the hammer will get me on the back of the arm. Clumsy as my old body is, I’m often pretty sketchy on “careful”.

Cavendish Petrochemical Labs sits alongside a newly-paved road, the deep blackness and sweet tar smell still cooking up from the surface as the sun sits high in a sky devoid of clouds. There’s high chain-link all the way around the facility, which looks like it must be several acres in total. There’s a big parking lot behind a wheeled gate. The building’s blocky and steel sided. At least ten or twelve small exhaust stacks rise from the rear part of the structure.

Gate standing open and parking lot mostly filled with cars, I guess that a shift was in progress at the time the Flashover hit. This shift, for reasons I don’t pretend I can grasp, went muerto at an astronomically higher rate that the norm. That norm, guessed only through my own small calculations, was something like one or two percent. Not the Cavendish employees. It had to have been way higher. Maybe everyone.

I pedal slow, dawdling to see if there’s going to be any attempt to impede my progress. Or gnaw my shin bones, like the muertos do. My surmise that they use this place as their base camp is just that—a surmise. A groundless guess on my part. There could be…

Nope, I’m right after all. Five, six, shit, maybe ten super muertos explode from the cover of a barberry hedge and start sprinting to catch me.

I think about pulling my .45 and trying to fire over my shoulder, but just pulling one hand from the bars makes the bike veer dangerously. I feel the smooth track of the new pavement degenerate at the edge of the road, the sandy shoulder grasping at the fat tires and trying to pull the bars out of my remaining hand.

To hell with this. I put my other hand on the bars and get my course righted. I pedal for all I’m worth. The way the switchgear works is still a mystery to me, but I try for a higher gear.

“Balls,” I whisper. I’ve got a lower gear now, so that my legs flail around to nearly no purpose. I’m slowing down. I can hear the muertos’ feet slapping against the pavement. They’re closing in.

Heart straining close to redline, I push the switchgear the other way, and the chain hops up onto the big front sprocket. The sudden resistance shocks me up to the hip bone, the speed of my leg’s rotation quartering in an instant. I stand up off the seat like I’ve seen the Tour de France riders do and go for it.

My heart’s hitting so fast that half my vision’s filled with snowflakes and colored fire, but I don’t quit. A wild tendril of humor goes through my mind, imagining them finding me lying at the side of road, heart exploded like a doped horse’s, my flesh already cooling before they can lay a tooth upon it.

I don’t have enough breath to laugh, but I go on. It seems as if a gulf of a thousand years is breached before their footfalls fade away behind me, before I’m safe.

I pull to the side and, devoid of grace or care, fall against the weedy downslope, back flat against the ground, breathing like a bellows. It takes my heart the better part of a half hour to finally approximate its usual cadence.

“So. That’s dangerous,” I reflect, before crawling back to the bike and forcing my body, now in full revolt, to get back on. It takes me nearly two hours to get back to the Suburban, and by that time, one of my calves is in such a fierce cramp that tears are gathering in my eyes.

“How’d it go?” Ferlita asks.

I put my palms against the rear hatch of the Suburban and try to work the knots out of my legs. My clothes are soaked with sweat, my brain foggy and inert. “One problem with my plan, honey.”

“What’s that, Mr. Kinney?”  She hands me a bottle of water, perching on the rusty back bumper.

“It’s too risky. On a bike, anyway. Way too risky. It’s stupid.”

“Tell me what happened, huh?  I’ll decide if I can do it.”

“You’re, what?  Ten?”

“Eleven. I’m just little. And we’re partners. Tell me.”

I do. She grins.

“What?” I ask.

“We can use this. We can totally use this,” she tells me. After a minute, I’m smiling, too.

*****

Enthusiasm turns to trepidation as we churn closer to the actual risk. Bold plans look great on paper, sound great as they arc across the still, safe air of conception. Putting them into practice…that’s something else altogether.

I pace in front of the Suburban, suffering doubts, kicking at the insides of my ribcage with an angry heart. Was half a mile too far?  How fast can Ferlita pedal?  Will they chase her that far?  What if there are others, both before and behind her?

Too many questions. Too much time in which to ask them. I’ve checked my M-14 and its respective magazines of ammunition a dozen times. I’ve checked how my .45 sits in its holster an equal number of times. I’ve done everything but worry about having forgotten to turn off the burners on the gas range at home. If there was a sink nearby, I’d be washing my hands like those folks with mental problems, back when that sort of thing seemed like a bad problem to have.

Then I see her, bent down hard over the bars of her small frame ten-speed, trailing a half dozen running muertos. I can see her teeth, her face filled with an mean little grimace as she makes herself small, helping me get an angle for my shot.

The M-14′s butt plate hits my shoulder and I take aim. The peep sight fills with the snarling face of the lead muerto. Crazy, but they seem to grow more…evilly aware every time I see one. I time the bob and rush of his gait and squeeze the trigger. My shoulder is till tender from my adventures with the Weatherby, but I continue to fire for effect on the muertos.

After three fall and other is spun and deposited on the tarmac with his left arm foreshortened at the elbow, the others leap from the road surface and into the brushy forest.

“What I wouldn’t give…” I begin, but I won’t finish wishing for the simpleton muertos. I knew what we were facing when I came here. It’s them we’re concerned about.

I catch Ferlita’s bars to help her get to a stop, throwing her bike into the back of the Suburban. The action causes cramps to ripple across the small muscles of my torso and lock up one calf muscle. She leaps into the car as I load in the M-14, still trailing vapor from its open slide.

“Mr. Kinney!” Ferlita yells. There’s a sharp, panicked edge to her voice.

I fall backward into the back seat’s footwell, drawing the .45. One of the super muertos had been jogging through the woods, coming around for a flanking rush. He’s right on me. The sound of the Colt is like the end of the world inside the cabin of the truck, but it reduces the left side of the rushing zombie’s head to pink-red pulp. His momentum isn’t checked, and he hits the open aperture, thumping atop me in a bloody, reeking mass of dead flesh.

Something hits the other side of the Suburban. I can’t get up, but I start pushing the terminated flesh with my free hand. Ferlita chirps a curse and I feel her move violently enough to rock the Suburban. I look up, and I see two muertos hammering at the side of the vehicle.

Ferlita’s first shot blows out the passenger side window, and I see her hang her off hand out the ragged opening, pumping shots into the other muertos until the Beretta’s slide locks, barrel exposed and grinning empty.

They’re down. I can’t see them from my prone position. I struggle to extricate myself from the still zombie’s unwanted embrace and barely manage to climb into the driver’s seat. I fire the engine and we vacate the scene in a wash of half-burned gasoline and tire smoke. My leg cramp has grown worse, and I’m shaking all over like someone with a high fever, but all I can do is put my foot against the dead space on the firewall and grit my teeth.

“Shit. That was a piece of cake,” Ferlita says. She’s digging at her ears, trying to get the ringing to go away, I imagine.

I laugh. It sounds like the barking of a jackal coming up from a buried drainage pipe.

*****

We harnessed fire, and that made us as gods on the earth. I jockey a fifty gallon drum of gasoline and plastic packing peanuts onto the huge flatbed trailer, that last of twelve that I was able to fill from the nearby wells. Frankly, the last one I can wrestle onto the trailer. Ferlita hands me up a loop of poly rope a few hundred feet long. I throw a big bowline-on-a-bite around one drum and then pace around and around the whole group until I’m out of line. I hitch the rope hard, and know that it’ll stay, bumps or no. In amongst the fifties, I’ve got three ninety pound propane cylinders, each with an eight inch red dot of paint. Come twilight, Cavendish Petrochemicals is going to have a big problem. That’s my prediction.

I want to ask Ferlita if she’s sure, but she’d just glare at me. She’s said she can do it, and so she’ll do it. That’s her. We’ve got a little car that was still in running order at the dealership. One of those Toyotas that runs on batteries sometimes. It’s quiet, and she can put the seat close enough to reach the pedals. It should work. If it won’t, it’ll be too late for us to lament. We’ll be food for the muertos.

We both get into the Toyota, Ferlita driving. It’s midday, and we crawl past the chemical plant at walking pace, waiting. I flex my hands, hoping that I’ve got enough speed to get this done. They don’t jump when they jumped the first two times. Are they gone?

No. They’re just learning. When the muertos do jump, it’s really close, and they’re coming from every direction.

“Hit it!” I yell.

Ferlita does, and two muertos get a taste of the Toyota’s bumpers. She’s a little shaky behind the wheel, but her nerve always holds. She’s my girl. My partner. We make a little distance on them, maybe three hundred yards, and I tell her to get it stopped.

With the squealing of the Toyota’s thin tires, we’re to a stop. I do my best to leap out, and she pops the hatchback. I hoist the makings of our distraction fire out of the back, my bones and muscles protesting to high heaven. Ferlita is in the center of the road, her Beretta held at rest, red ear muffs on her head.

Four five-gallon jugs of diesel, four VW engine blocks made out of magnesium. One twenty foot length of hemp rope, already soaked with fuel and ready to burn.

I push the rope through the handle of each of the Jerry cans, then into the top of the last one. I stretch it out, all the way out to the edge of the road.

“They’re coming,” I hear. I fish for my lighter and spin the flint. Sparks, but no fire. Again. Same thing happens. I try for a harder spin, and the metal sides of the Zippo squirt out of my hand, tumbling down the embankment at the roadside.

I leap downward, my feet slipping, my ankle twinging. I tackle the spot where the lighter has landed, wondering if I’ll be able to get out.

The sound of gunfire rips open the roof of the day. I force myself up, crawling back to the end of the fuse. I spin the flint sparker one more time, and the flame comes up. I touch it to the fuse, and the bright fire of diesel dances up the fuse fast as you like.

“It’s lit!” I yell.

Ferlita falls back to the Toyota’s door, reloading and spraying a whole clip at the oncoming muertos to check their progress. More than a few already carry some of her lead.

In the moment that we pile into the car, the whole tinder behind us goes up, red-gold flame leaping thirty feet into the air, singing the back of the Toyota, and scaring the hell out of us. We are moving, though, moving out of the conflagration and into the clear air.

“How long will it burn?” Ferlita asks, hands tight on the wheel.

“If the magnesium goes up, quite a while. If not, maybe an hour. Can’t tell. This is the sort of stuff they used to put you in jail for.”

As the view of the fire fades, we can just make out a crowd of muertos forming. Smarter, they may be. The allure of the flames affects them nonetheless.

We circle back to the old Suburban, using an access road through town and sucking up much of the time that our fire might burn.

“This is it. This is the big show,” I say as I get myself ready for it, as I prep my aching body to make the surge into the truck again.

“It’s all or nothing,” Ferlita says back. She puts her arm around my waist and gives me a short squeeze.

I creak my way into the Suburban, now clean of all my important belongings, ready for its road of glory at last.

“Mr. Kinney?”  Ferlita’s standing by the Toyota, a Prius, she’s informed me. For a moment, I miss the wonderful names cars used to have. Imperial. Impala. Falcon. Those were names.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“I…” her face quirks.

“Me too. Me too.”  I pull out, the Suburban working hard to get the heavy trailer moving. She pulls in behind me. I don’t look back at her, for fear of what I’ll see, what I’ll feel.

The smoke from our distraction fire is still coming up in the distance. We roll to a stop at the open gate before Cavendish. Someone has been left to guard the fort, and they appear next to the Suburban. The window’s open, and I fire the big Ruger right into the muerto’s face. The flame front from the pistol soaks the thing’s head, the sudden hit of a high velocity shell cracking the skull like  a dropped pumpkin. It folds up, and I pop the door. Ferlita’s already out, already holding the M1 Carbine that I’ve recovered and made functional again. She levels the little rifle on the other two muertos and three reports end their career on the far side of dead.

I brace the dowel rod against the seat and the old engine roars. I reach up, dropping the transmission into gear and getting out of the way. The Suburban’s tires bark and scrabble at the tarmac, the rear end hopping under the strain, but it gets the heavy trailer moving, and it assumes its collision course with the chemical plant.

“Always was a great truck,” I whisper, as I walk back to the Prius. I get the big Weatherby out of the back as the mighty crash transpires behind me. As I look back, the Suburban is doors-deep in the front of the building, still straining and roaring to punch further, still in frantic, heroic action.

I level the Weatherby on one of the big propane cylinders. The trailer didn’t flip, which was my biggest worry. I can still see a red dot. I think that I should say something prophetic, something clever, at least, but I can think of nothing. I press the trigger. The heat and pressure of the explosion is vast and profound at thirty yards, the flames leaping a hundred feet in the air, a series of smaller explosions blending together like the cycles of a massive engine.

Ferlita goes into the passenger seat, and I rack the driver’s seat back to the rear of the tracks. I drive the little car roughly, and it responds as best it can. I drive in the opposite direction of our distraction fire for about fifty yards, then stop.

We take up our positions on either side of the little car, her with the M1 Carbine and me with my M14. As the supermuertos stream down the road, we fire until our magazines are spent. Those we don’t kill, we maim. Those that we don’t maim, we force into cover and pin down.

In the Prius, we flee the scene before our victory becomes failure. Perhaps it is my imagination, but I could swear I see knife boy, tiny in the rearview, shaking a long blade in wordless rage. We have not destroyed them all, but we have struck a mighty blow. The living may be relics of a time now passed, no more than violent heirlooms, but we somehow contrive to remain. In all our noise and fury, in all the desperate plans and destructive stratagems, we are not yet gone from the brow of the earth.

Epilogue:

Hi. This is Ferlita Sanchez writing this now. I just wanna say that I’m not writing this alone. I have help. There’s someone. Well, I’m going to get to that in a minute. I want to tell you that, in the movies, back when there were movies, they would always stop where Mr. Kinney did. You stop after the good guys win. The music plays and everybody’s name rolls down the screen. You walk out and everything’s sweet. So. If you want it to be that way, you gotta (said it like that on purpose) stop now. I’m serious. The movie’s over. All of Mr. Kinney’s pretty words are done. It’s just my part of the story now, and I don’t have any pretty words. So stop now. Don’t read what I am writing. If you keep on going, I warned you. I told you about it.

*****

Mr. Kinney and me drove a little while after the mess at the plant. I don’t think we was even going in the right direction. We just drove. I wasn’t even that scared right then, but I got the shakes real bad. I didn’t want to, and I wasn’t all sad, but I started crying. I thought of all the cheesy Mexican pop songs they used to play at the beautician shop in Yuma. The guys had always done their women wrong, but they were begging them not to cry. It seemed like all the songs were like that. I imagined a really nice looking boy singing for me not to cry in Spanish, but it didn’t do any good. I kept on. Mr. Kinney just stared ahead and drove, his eyes somewhere far out there. I stopped crying, then got hungry, then got real tired and went to sleep. I don’t know when we finally got back to the bowling alley. Mr. Kinney carried me in, I guess.

A few days went by. We stayed pretty cooped up, since we thought that any of the muertos that were still out there might try something. I started to get real good at bowling. And making grilled cheese sandwiches. We didn’t talk much. It seemed like we’d won, and we didn’t trust it. Mr. Kinney said that he expected Knife Boy, the lead muerto, to come back at us all knuckles. He expected…reprisals…I think that was the word.

I couldn’t do much to make things different. I was having a tough time sleeping, and when I did, I was having a lot of dreams that made me feel like I’d never be able to breathe normal again. We were both all messed up. I started missing my Mom like anything, and my little cousin Raul, and my friend Sammi. All the people that were gone. The people that were just dust. When I was all alone, and it was just the tire spray bottle and the muertos, it was different. With Mr. Kinney, and what we’d done, and thinking about actually having some kind of life again, I was maybe wanting too much. I opened the doors, and all the bad stuff from the world going to hell came in, and I was not dealing.

The only thing that helped was reading. It took me out of it a little. I read these books about this guy who was like a blacksmith, and the stuff he would make was wicked powerful. But man, this dude had some bad luck. He was always getting himself into the shit. If he did one bad thing all year, this girl he was digging would be there, and she would leave him because of it. When I was worrying about these books, it went away a little. It wasn’t so bad.

When there was nothing decent to eat left at the bowling alley, we finally knew we were going to have to take our chances. Hanging around was just making it worse, anyhow. When you’re all messed up inside, you want to move. At least when you’re doing something, you can fool yourself a little. Hiding like a rat in a storm drain just lets you pick away at your own scabs.

We came out of the bowling alley like a SWAT team. We had every gun loaded, and we came out ready rock. My shoulder finally looked like it was supposed to again, and I was ready. Yeah, I got the shakes again thinking about it, but I went through the door, and we made it to the car. Nothing came out. We didn’t see anything.

It wasn’t until we got back to Mr. Kinney’s house that things got bad. He would have ways of making this part so you can see it happening, and have a lot to say about it. I just have to put what happened. Just doing that, and I’m having a hard time. You guys don’t know how long it’s taking me to write this stuff. It’s like you dig a hole in sand, and it just fills in, like you haven’t done anything but push the stuff around.

We got out of the car like we’d gotten to it. Cop show stuff, ready in case the muertos tried to jump us. Again, things looked clear. We got in, and maybe for the first time since blowing up the plant, we started to relax. I know that, somewhere inside my gut, I started to feel like everything was cool. That’s a feeling you need to get rid of, because it always lies.

It was after dark, hours later, and we were heating up beef stew out of cans. The propane that Mr. Kinney had piped in had just run out. The blue little tongues of fire went out, and he went to the back door. He turned to me and said he was just going to duck out and change it. I asked if he wanted me to cover him, but he said that we had to stop living scared at some point. He said it would just be a minute, because he had five cans hooked up to a common line, and he’d just have to turn a valve to get us working again.

And then he never came back. I heard him shout, then something big hit the side of the house hard enough that the pictures of the Kinney people fell to the floor, all the glass breaking up and coughing everywhere. I opened my mouth, and there was scream there inside, but I couldn’t get anything to come out. I reached, and the shotgun was there, because I promised myself that I wasn’t ever going to be more than three steps from the twenty gauge, ever. The back door burst in, and there was Knife Boy, and he had blood on him, and he was running full out at me, and I raised the shotgun and shot, and the booming sounds kept going until I couldn’t hear anything.

Mr. Kinney’s head wasn’t connected to his body anymore when I went to the door, pumping shells into the belly of the shotgun. I could see him looking at me, his eyes open and empty. I waited at the door for a long time, crying real hard, but straining to see, to make sure there weren’t any more. I dragged Knife Boy outside and shut the door. I found a hammer and nails, and I nailed the door shut. It’s still nailed shut now. It ain’t ever gonna open again. I went and climbed into Mr. Kinney’s bed. I lay there until morning. When I closed my eyes I saw him laughing. I saw him telling me some story about how you can switch crank shafts on an engine and make it bigger inside, somehow. Much as I didn’t want to, I saw him, dead and staring. Sleeping was pretty hard. Maybe it always will be now. I guess we’re closer to the dead when we sleep, and I’m not used to the company any more.

It took me all day to bury him, but Knife Boy burned easy when I poured a bunch of booze on him and lit him up. I took everything good and moved back into the bowling alley. I was alone there until Tiffany found me the next spring. It wasn’t until then that I came back to the house and found this story. Now it’s done, ready to be told.

Mr. Kinney taught me to shoot. He taught me to drive. He taught me how to run his big tape player. I guess maybe we taught each other about how to fight the muertos. He made me out to be something amazing, but I was just a kid. Things were tough, and I tried as hard as I could. It almost was enough.

I could have covered Mr. Kinney. The happy ending was right outside my reach, but I could have stretched for it. I didn’t. Mr. Kinney was a good man. I miss him more than anyone.

I don’t know how they hone in on their game. The workings of zombies are too esoteric for me, but I can tell you that within their cold husks, there are, indeed, workings. I bring the Suburban to a halt and pop my door. I reach back into the back seat and bring out the M14, inserting a magazine and ramming it home.

“Doors closed, hands over ears, kiddo,” I tell Ferlita. She puts her small palms over her ears and bites down. I slide the muffs over my own battered ears and sight down toward the hollow in front of my own ancestral house. There are twelve zombies milling about, but recently aroused from their aimless shambling by the sound of my truck’s exhaust.

I flick the safety forward and set myself. My aim isn’t the steadiest, but it will have to do. They’re no more than fifty yards away now, moving forward in their staggering jog. These aren’t the new ones, the ones from the chemical plant. Just average Muertos, as Ferlita calls them. I let go at the first one. I don’t see him drop, because I’m doubled over, tears squeezing out of my eyes.

The recoil of a 7.62 NATO round isn’t overwhelming. It’s a good bump, but not a big deal. Unless you’ve got some broken ribs, that is. In that case, every shot is going to be an act of will, because you know how that grating, knifing pain will shoot through you when you press the trigger.

“Get it together, Kinney. Get it together,” I whisper. I fire again, flinching and missing altogether. I have twenty rounds with which to do the job. Miss many more times, and it might not get done. They’re no more than thirty yards away now, time eking away like dust through my fingers.

I bear down, shooting through the smeared vision and the pain. The world fills with thunder and muzzle flash. Muertos go down, some thrashing, some finally still. The last one falls mere feet from me, its slow blood dripping down the Suburban’s aluminum wheel and pooling beneath the aggressive tire tread. I feel as if I’ve been shaken by the hand of some malevolent giant, as if I’m some angry kid’s doll, and all the world’s frustrations have been taken out on my frail stuffing and old fabric. It’s only the rifle’s butt that keeps me from falling flat, and that accomplishes only allowing me a semi-graceful slump to my knees.

I’m crying, weeping silently in a quiet world that’s filled up with pain and broken hopes. Ferlita stands near me. I see her bottle of whitewall cleaner dangle at the edge of my vision. She says nothing for a moment, then reaches down to my shoulder holster and pulls free my .45. I see her feet disappear. I look up through the vagueness of my pain and despair. She holds the pistol with both hands, just like you see in the shows. She puts a bead on one of the zombies that’s struggling forward without use of its lower half. Nothing happens. She finds the safety. The pistol roars. The Muerto stops. For good.

I have a sudden, perfect remembrance of my own daughter, firing my friend Steve’s target pistol for the first time. She was about Ferlita’s age. Her smile had been so vibrant. She’d kept her best target for weeks, touching the holes closest to the bull’s eye with her thin fingers. All my recent food threatens to come up. I can’t watch as Ferlita puts paid to another of the zombies.

When she returns, the slide is caught back, the rounds all expended. Her little hand is bleeding from slide bite, but she says nothing, only cradling it with her left and waiting. I take the gun and somehow get up. The single remaining zombie gets its ticket punched for good with the front bumper of the Suburban. Ferlita helps me get to the house and sink into a battered Lay-Z-Boy. In the bright afternoon, the world becomes speckled like a bird’s egg, and I nearly pass out.

“That was fine work out there, Ferlita.”

She sits on the couch opposite me. “Are you okay?”

“Ribs aren’t feeling so great, but I’ll manage. I should find something to wrap them with while we’re here. How’s your hand?”

She looks down at the blood speckles on her brown skin. “Stings. That gun’s like catching a fastball.”

“You play softball?”

She nods. “I did, when there were other kids. I liked playing baseball better.”

“What position?”

“First base. I’ve got a good arm.”

*****

By the next morning, I feel good enough to get the snow blade installed on the Suburban. Using it, I push the zombies off the road and into a ditch nearby. I can’t quite hoist a fifty pound bag of quick lime, so Ferlita carries the stuff out to the open grave in a few buckets I have hanging around.

If I felt better, I’d just douse ‘em with a 1:1 mixture of gasoline and diesel and set ‘em to burn, but my house is in a low place between folds of the land, and it would fill with corpse smoke pretty quick. If you’ve ever smelled burning remains, you know what I mean. The sharp smell of the hair, the taste that lingers at the back of your mouth until you can’t remember when it wasn’t there. Anyway, with the new, improved Muertos around, I’m concerned about anything that’ll raise a smoke trail that big. Quicklime will at least keep the smell down some.

Later, we’re sitting at the long dining room table, bowls of bean soup and rice before us. The last of the venison jerky is in there. It’s big times in the post-human world, with two people at the same table and reasonably safe. It can’t last, and we both know it.

“Did you have kids?” Ferlita asks.

I nod. “A daughter. She’d be twenty-eight this August.”

“I bet you were a good dad, too.”

That hits me in the heart. I have to put down the spoonful of beans and breathe for a moment to get the tears to stay in place.

“I don’t know. I did as well as I knew how.”

“Did she still talk to you?  Did she come over on days other than holidays?”

I nod. “A few times a week. Most times, to see her mom, but she’d drop by my work once a week or so, just to say hi.”

Ferlita’s eyes grew wise in her young face. “Then you were a good dad. Good compared to mine, anyway.”

I open my mouth, but decide that it isn’t smart to pick off scabs I don’t have to. If she has something to tell me, she’ll do it when she’s ready. “Maybe so,” is all I say.

“How are your ribs?” she asks, thankfully changing the subject. “You were pretty bruised up.”  She grins. “And furry…like Bigfoot.”  She’d helped me get them wrapped the night before, and though I would have spared her the sight of an old man’s bare torso, it’s hard to minister to your own ribs.

“Hey, thanks. Good to know the Kinneys are about on the level with a forest monkey.”

Ferlita laughs, a sound I hadn’t expected to ever hear again, that simple, unrestrained laugh of a child. It somehow turns the moment bittersweet, and I catch myself wishing for things that can’t be, miracles that have yet to occur.

I think we both know it when we’ve violated some unspoken rule of the apocalypse, and the dinner table grows quiet for the rest of the meal. Even the clatter of the dishes seems muted as we clear away the spread and clean up.

I think of the disapproval of all the female influences in my life as I spread out a stained and oil-spotted towel that evening. Ferlita sits by me as I take down, clean, and reassemble the firearms I used on my recent foray. I explain to her how each one functions, which springs work against what leverage, and other random facts that come to me. It occurs to me that I’ve always been a bit of a minstrel, always spinning tales and keeping up long strands of conversation. I come to know how much I’ve missed those words being audible, and received by another human ear. I realize that I’ve been standing at the verge of a pit so deep and black that, no matter how much of my thoughts and words I throw into it, I can never hear anything hit bottom.

“Your family brought all of these home from the wars?” she asks.

“All except this one,” I say, pointing to the Ruger. “It’s more of a hunting revolver than a war weapon.”

“Is the gun I want a…war weapon?”

“We’ll have to see, Ferlita. I’m not sure if you’re talking about a Glock, a Beretta, or a Sig-Sauer. They’re all featured heavily on the television, or they were, before. I imagine that they’ve all been used in military service somewhere, though it’s the Beretta that our troops have used for many years.”

“Will they jolt my hand as much as yours?”

I shake my head. “Not likely. Those guns, at least the standard police issues, are usually 9mm or .40 Smith and Wesson. The pistol you fired was a .45 ACP. The loads I use have a bit of pop to them.”

Ferlita gets a faraway look in her eyes. “When do we go?”

I gesture to the window. “When it’s light.”

“What about after that?”

“I show you how to shoot, and then we’ll see.”  I can somehow tell that she’ll be okay, that she’ll skip right over the flinching and closing her eyes. Little Ferlita has ice water in her veins.

“I think we’ll have to see if those zombies with the…” she makes a all-over gesture.

“Jumpsuits?”

She nods. “Jumpsuits. We have to see if there are more. We have to get ‘em.”

“That’ll be dangerous,” I tell her.

She sits back in her chair. “We can’t let them wander around. They’re too…”

“I know. Too bad to tame, too numerous to ignore.”

The guns are arrayed on the table, the magazines loaded, the smell of gun oil and powder solvent sweet in the air. We walk into the dim light of the single bulb that burns in the living room. Between the meal and my tortured ribs, I’m having a hard time breathing. The three beers have helped a little, but not enough. I slump into the recliner again, letting loose an involuntary grunt as my torso muscles flex.

Ferlita wanders from place to place, looking at books, family photos, magazines, and all the other junk that I’ve been too…paralyzed to move. “Do you have any music?”

“I do. Have you ever seen a reel-to-reel tape deck?”

*****

It feels strange to simply walk into Hennigan’s Arms and Equipment, but it’s that easy. It was open at the time of the Flashover, and stayed that way. The scent of long-rotten food, probably someone’s lunch, lingers in the air. I prop the steel-barred door open with a box of clay pigeons to let the place air out.

“Wow,” Ferlita whispers. “Look at all of them.”

Hennigan’s has a full supply of every sort of gun, from the smallest .22 Derringer to a .50 caliber sniper rifle. Hunting rifles and shotguns line the walls. Handguns of all sorts lay on the blue felt below hardened glass. Ammunition occupies a whole side of the store, the colorful boxes like afterimages of all the country boys’ birthdays now forgotten.

“Maybe I should have a shotgun, too,” Ferlita tells me, walking forward, easily slipping behind the counter and running her fingers along all the finished wood and blued steel.

“Let’s find you a pistol first, Honey.”

She turns back to me, her eyes narrowing. She blows air out her nose and smiles after a moment.

“Not into pet names?”

She shrugs. “They’re okay. I just…”

I see that I’ve tripped on a painful memory. They abound. No one is whole, no one’s soul anything other than an old road sign after it’s been peppered with birdshot and .22 fire. “I’m sorry.”

Ferlita looks directly at me. “You can call me ‘Honey,’ Mr. Kinney.”

I set my teeth, my heart filling up with things I’d thought to be all the way gone. “Then you’d better call me Randall. Old as I am, I still think of ‘Mr. Kinney’ as being my father.”

Ferlita reaches down, picking up a ring of keys that must unlock the cabinets. She tries a few, finally hitting on the right one, and reaches in, pulling free a Beretta 92. “Found one.”

“That’s sort of big for your hand, but we can give it a go.”

“A war weapon?”

“Indeed. A war weapon.”

By the time we’re done shoplifting from the abandoned gun store, we’ve both got pump action shotguns, and we’ve stripped the place of ammunition in the calibers we use. I lament that .30 carbine is so sparse now, but Hennigan’s has several thousand rounds of .308, .45, and 9mm. I come back in just before we leave and purloin another Beretta 92 and some random supplies I might need down the line. Cleaning solutions, patches, a .30 caliber bore snake. It seems that I’ve broken through my initial squeamishness about stealing from the dead. They are all heirlooms now, taken from the great land of graves where we once existed.

*****

There is a shutdown paper mill twenty miles up the road. I intend to use the huge interior space to muffle the gunfire while I teach Ferlita how to use her new weapon. It’s far from my house, and we’ll only be there for an hour or two, so drawing Muertos to us isn’t a big concern. If they do come, we’ll be very heavily armed and deployed in a defensible hard fortification. It seems safe enough, though safety is always half illusion and half hope.

Ferlita’s eyes are bright, her hands moving nervously on her lap as we drive the distance. High speeds are no longer wise, even when you imagine that you know the road well. Beyond the stopped or crashed cars that were remainders from the sudden violence of the Flashover, which immolated drivers in an instant and left the cars without a pilot, there are also natural hazards. Trees fall across the road. Wind blows debris into the roadway.

In the short months since the bustle of humanity was muted, the animals have grown bold and unmindful of our creations. It is not at all uncommon to see wild horses, packs of dogs, or any native animal hunching on the road. Bears, specifically, have become very successful. They are adept at breaking into cars and houses for food. Feral pets have also provided them with an easy source of nourishment. Even the Muertos (I’m growing more and more fond of Ferlita’s terminology) are a potential meal. Even a black bear has little to fear from the average zombie. Once they associate a human shape with being both food and enemy, however, that requires that you tread carefully.

The Suburban runs shy on gas, and I’m forced to look for a gas station. I know which marks denote premium gas, and I carry a rig that lets me pull gas straight from the underground tanks. It’s just a hand crank, so it takes time, but it’s quiet and robust. Ferlita and I take turns cranking the pump, gradually filling both the truck’s normal tanks and a few auxiliary tanks on the back. We wash up, filch all the good canned and packaged food, and get back on our way.

*****

I’ve always found abandoned buildings to be at once wonderful and frightening. I don’t believe the sensation of walking into all that silent space has ever changed, not from the time I was standing only up to my father’s knee.

The paper mill, Quinland Paper, has been empty for nearly fifteen years. It squats at a slow bend in a river I cannot name, tan paint going to rust, pipes and ducts without purpose, stacks beginning to fall in on themselves. There were those I talked to that, for each place of industry that shut its gates and ceased to produce something, would have a vital, palpable pain shoot through them. I find that, though I had never thought too much about such things when I was younger, I now understand. The silence of a place where hard goods had been made, where people had coaxed valuable products out of the resources of the earth—those silences are like lingering deaths, every one a precursor to this immense death I walk through, and I wonder if it is hell, and if I am Virgil, showing Ferlita the way through the deepening circles of gloom.

Ferlita, within the horrors of her own mind perhaps, or simply content to suffer the silence without reflection, takes my hand and leads me further in. The gear we’ll need fills a duffel bag, and though the wounds to my face and ribs still ache and twinge, I am not so crippled by them as I was a few days ago. I can carry the weight of guns and shells without pain sweat popping against my skin.

Behind two sets of heavy doors, within the sanctum of the paper mill, Ferlita gets her crude training with weapons. She is a rare person, not prone to flinching at the press of her trigger finger. She watches carefully and quickly grasps how her Beretta operates. She is soon able to hit objects under eight inches across with good frequency.

“How come people in the shows are always pulling the slide-thingy back?” she asks.

“Because actors like something to do with their hands, and sound effects guys like the noise of the action taking a bullet into battery. That, and it’s not uncommon for the Hollywood guy who’s cutting the sequence together to have no clue about how a gun works.”

She gives me a thoughtful look, then puts a loaded magazine in the grip of her pistol, releases the slide, and takes aim. An empty soda can we brought in skitters across the floor.

After the Beretta, teaching her how to use the Mossberg 20 gauge is fairly simple. The recoil rocks her little shoulder, but the trials of the apocalypse have forged her into stern stuff. She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t even comment.

“Are you confident?  Can you use these weapons under duress?”

She scrunches up her brows. “Does that mean, like, when things get scary?”

“That’s exactly what it means.”

Ferlita pushes her lips together, hands me her shotgun, and leans against one of the steel columns that holds up the roof. “I figure I can do whatever I have to.”

“I think…”

The titanic sound of the mill’s heavy door giving way comes through clear, even with our hearing protection on.

“Duress?” she asks.

I nod, too intent on loading shells into the shotgun to make a sound. We’ll be under duress in a moment. It’ll be all around us.

*****

The hard rain falls on both the wicked and the just. We are not spared our trials upon this dusty earth, nor are we given reprieve because of what has been done or left undone. The mute horror of the Flashover reaches long, cold, grasping fingers into every crevice. Nothing remains untouched, no deed untainted by what has gone before. In this new conception of the earth, we must fight with all that we have to prove that we have not become outmoded, simply quaint and short-lived reminders of a time gone by.

I push little Ferlita behind me. She has the clip to her Beretta in hand, doing her best to press the 9mm shells in. Her index finger is smashed pale at the end, her eyes bright. The zombies are coming, and I have a strong feeling that they aren’t the normal muertos, but the souped-up version from the chemical plant. Normal zombies are stopped by steel doors. Knife-boy and his pals probably aren’t.

Everything moves slow, time dilated. I drop a 12 gauge shell, and it seems to take an eternity to hit the deck. The first door is already down, and it still had its metal deadbolt. This inner door won’t hold for more than a moment when they get to it.

“Don’t rush. Take clear shots. Aim for the head. If they get too close, you bolt. There’s got to be a way down to the river from here. You leave me, do you hear?”

Ferlita looks into my face and shakes her head. “Not leaving.”

“Don’t be muley. I get to die for you, if the time comes.”

“Uh-uh. If it gets bad, we both run, or we both stay.”

I see that she won’t be moved. Fierce, dark pride shoots through me. She has, simply and without the aid of a special creed, encompassed the warrior’s oath. To stand by a comrade, come what may. All of this explodes outward into my soul over the course of a single moment. “Okay. There ain’t much running in these old legs, though.”

She pushes home the filled magazine, works the slide, and engages the safety, tucking the pistol into her waistband. In a smooth, quick motion, she scoops up her 20 gauge and begins to load from the box of buckshot at her feet. “I don’t want to run anymore.”  The look on her face is calm, her eyes intent, her small teeth biting her lower lip.

The second door explodes inward, pulling the hinges free and hitting the raised metal stairs hard enough to slide half way across the catwalk. A zombie shoots the gap and I take him with the Mossberg. His head caves and he tumbles to the foot of the stairs with the wet sound of a bag full of broken melons. Jumpsuit. It’s one of the souped-up zombies. Not death proof, though.

“Get any of them that get to the bottom of the stairs, or if I have to reload.”

“Bottom of the stairs,” she shouts back as I open up at the next to rush through the door. I get him in the midsection and knock him down, but he’s a super-muerto, and that doesn’t settle their hash. Two more come after and I lose track of the injured one. Ferlita’s shotgun roars beside me. Neither of us are taken down. I can’t spare the sideways glance, but I’m sure she took care of her end.

The shotgun is hitting on empty in a moment, four jumpsuit muertos down. “Cover the door!”

Ferlita pounds her last few rounds of 20 gauge at the door as another muerto comes in hard and fast. The first misses, the second shot blows his foot off. He’ll be ankle biting from here on. Her Mossberg is exhausted and I hear her start taking shots with the 9mm, one per second, like I told her. My old hands fumble with the magnum shells for the 12 gauge, but I get the tube filled again just as the Beretta falls quiet.

“I couldn’t get the last one,” Ferlita shouts, the ear protectors and the sustained thunder of gunfire making our hearing indistinct. I turn to her, and she motions with her chin.

I get the shotgun to shoulder and back on target. Two Muertos have the metal door and are using it like a big shield. They’re most of the way down the stairs now, and another two are shooting the gap with the diversion.

“Catch!”  I throw the big gauge at Ferlita and pull the .45, falling two steps back to get a better angle.

My heart thundering, I make myself hold steady. If there was ever an important shot, it’s now. I take aim on the moving feet and ankles that are the only things I can target. Squeeze the trigger, Randall. Squeeze it easy and hit what you aim at.

I take my own advice. The door topples, the jig is up, and I hammer at the clever super-muertos with the last five rounds of hollow point. It’s enough.

Ferlita puts the big gauge to work, tearing into the two runners as they hit the stairs. They tumble down to the pitted concrete, coming still no more than ten feet from me. The ankle biter on the catwalk rears up and she relieves his shoulders of the weight of his head. I have enough time to really see the carnage, and wish that I had looked away. Even a muerto, even in the heat of battle, there are things that you’d rather not see too well.

I put the spare magazine into the .45 and hold it at the low ready, waiting. A minute goes by, though it seems an eon of echoing and fear and galloping heartbeat. I give back several steps, clearing Ferlita’s position, watching her as she puts the 12 gauge down and starts loading the 20. She winces as she moves her right arm, tears standing in her eyes. The big gauge was too much recoil for her, but she did what she needed to. Suddenly, I start to really believe that the human race might survive.

“That was extraordinary valor under fire, Honey.”

She grits her teeth and says nothing.

“How much ammo do we have left?”

“Just five shots for my…”

“20 gauge,” I fill in.

“20 gauge, yeah. Five shots. Ten more for the Beretta, and, um, three for your shotgun.”

I blow out breath. “Well, I hope they’re not waiting for us out there, huh?”

“Maybe we can circle around and see.”

I wipe my brow. My brain seems to be reeling, useless. Of course we should try to circle around. Ferlita, at least, hasn’t gone into trauma shock.

“Let’s see if there’s a way out down here,” I tell her. We walk through the dimness of the old paper mill, relying on the high intensity flashlight that I lifted from the gun shop for light. The whole place seems haunted and claustrophobic, the light dancing like the reflections of demon images against the wall. If you ever had any inclination to being twitchy, a full-on zombie attack will bring those tendencies to the fore. Ferlita, blessed little girl she is, seems to have no such issues.

“Don’t fire the shotgun any more if you don’t have to. I want to take a look at that shoulder, see if you’ve really hurt it.”

She just nods, her eyes flat now, revealing nothing.

We exit the mill near the river, taking a rusted steel catwalk across a spillway and then disembarking from the abandoned hulk via a long stair made of yellow-painted diamond plate. The nearby environs is overgrown and rough, and we use that to our advantage, coming back around to the front without being seen.

The muertos are smart, and so I’m careful, waiting and watching for nearly an hour. They could be hiding. When we approach the Suburban, I’m ready for any kind of ambush or other skulduggery, but nothing transpires. Just our feet scrunching on the gravel, just the sun slowly falling out of the sky.

The sound of the door closing behind us, putting us safely in the car, is like a toggle switch. I begin to shake and sweat, feeling that I have to do everything from puke to urinate all at the same time. I just lean back and wait, wait for it to be done, and Ferlita slides over, holding my sweat-slick hand, looking up at me while I struggle to get it together.

After a while, I can breathe again. “Belt in, Honey. We’re going home.”

I key the ignition and the engine catches. It still burbles sweetly, the sound of a dream not quite slipped away. The night falls, and we drive through the emptiness of it, the deep, primordial dark pushing at the corners of the headlight sweep.

*****

It is a failing with me that sometimes, as the difficult events of life subside in my rear view mirrors, I become unable to look forward, but only stare at the fading remnants of what was, growing all the more diminutive as the miles stack. I run onward, but blind and hurt, consumed by the hungry mouths of yesterday’s sorrow.

I am a man of simple enough tastes, and a quality tequila, unadorned, has always been sufficient to the purpose of disinfecting these psychic wounds, the sting of the sharp brown liquid enough to finally awaken me to what I still possess, rather than clutching for things I’ve lost.

I remember parts and pieces. The careful cleaning of our weapons of war. The desultory meal of canned stew and dried apricots. The livid bruise on Ferlita’s shoulder, evidence of her bravery and the terrible cost the world forced her to pay for her life. I remember pouring her two fingers of the Cuervo 1800 to quell the pain and blunt the sharp shards of the day. I remember my own indulgence, too many fingers of fire to easily reckon. More than what was required to cauterize the wounds, just less than what it took to scorch the ground to molten glass.

Now, I struggle into the middle of the next day, grasping upward out of clinging verdigris and spider’s silk, entering the painful, confused wakefulness that is the price for a moment’s forgetting. Suffering, to paraphrase Neil Young, the bottle and the damage done.

Ferlita, her eyes too hollow, her face too knowing, looks up from a slim paperback that is already read to the halfway point. “Conan the Usurper”, a book I had to comb through yard sales and thrift stores for years to find. She’s brought in a chair, a tube of Pringle’s potato chips, and her 20 gauge, which leans against the wall within arm’s reach. Her shoes don’t quite make it to the floor, swinging slow as push rods on an oil derrick as she scans the pages.

“How do you like that book?” I ask, finding it difficult to address all the greater topics.

She nods. “This guy Conan’s a bad hombre. We could use him against the muertos.”

I sit up. My stomach quavers, making me hold still for a moment. “Can’t argue with you there. Any hero would do.”

“We’ll have to do, Mr. Kinney. It’s just us. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them—the book heroes.”

“Yeah?”

“This Conan guy woudn’t hide out and wait for something to happen. He’d go right to the heart of it, kick in the doors, and…”

I let go of my air, holding hard against my knees. Of course I have a clear idea what Conan would do. Or Kull, or Bran Mak Morn, or Tarzan of the Apes. “And let the gods decide,” I say, finishing her sentence.

“Right. Let the gods decide.”

I swing my feet out and stand, shaky on my feet for a moment. The floor seems frigid against my soles, all the age and minor injury weighing me down. “You’re saying we should go right at them, come what may?”

She puts the book aside and stands up, hard and straight against the pain I know she feels. She stands, and as soldiers do, delivers. “Whatever happens.”

“We both may die.”

“I know. I’d rather die doing something tough than live in hiding like a mouse.”

I shake my head, not speaking for a moment. Her hands are fists at her sides, her eyes throwing fire as she imagines that I’ll try to dissuade her from her chosen course. “So says the young Joan of Arc, and so do I heed.”

“What’s that mean?”  Her teeth are set, her jaw flexed.

“It means that I’m in, Honey. Right to the wall, I’m in.”

*****

There are no dry runs allowed. We’re duty bound to land a telling blow against the enemy now, even as we test our theories. We are few, but clever. The enemy’s numbers are vast, their resolve unwavering. If we’re to neutralize their greatest threat, the high-functioning muertos like knife boy and his friends, we have to develop advanced tactics. They’re evolving. So must we.

Ferlita had half the idea. I just filled in the destructive element and the tactical considerations. It took us two days to find the materials, then two more days with the arc welder and the chemistry book. It’s not elegant, not how Dr. Porsche would do it, but I have faith that it’ll work. We’ll test small, then we’ll go big.

In the center of the public square, three hundred yards from our position atop an old Rexall drug store, is a lowrider truck. The stereo’s on, playing a band called Godsmack, which was the loudest thing I could find without obsessive twiddling at the record store. The windows are cranked down, the doors wide open. The stereo in the lowerider was clearly designed to keep audiologists in business and to serve as a public nuisance. It’s doing so now.

On the hood, there’s a feral hog, two wild dogs, and a yearling buck deer, all victims of opportunity. They’re eviscerated, the one thing that Ferlita elected not to watch closely, and I suppose the wind is carrying a fine blood smell outward into occupied territory.

One last thing. The whole car is a bomb. Yes. That’s the cool part. We are now approaching our fight with the muertos by using bait scenarios and improvised explosive devices. Progress.

Back in the big before, I had a friend who was a bit of a nut. One of those guys you didn’t necessarily invite to a family dinner. I remember someone referring to him as a “wild eyed lunatic” after one of his little stunts, wherein he started a magnesium fire we had a hell of a time putting out before it caused a forest fire. This guy, whose name was Lamonte Brecht, would tell us all sorts of stories about his exploits. Lamonte’s exploits often involved shooting things, being seriously injured in automobile wrecks, and blowing stuff up. He had the scars to act as bona fides.

One of his favorite explosive chemicals was something called Tannerite. It’s basically ammonium nitrate and aluminum dust. There’s some other stuff in there, too. A little titanium and some zirconium, I think. Anyway, Lamonte loved to mix up some of this stuff, put it into a pop can, and shoot it with his rifle. While Tannerite’s mostly harmless, even fully mixed, an impact as dramatic as a high velocity shell will cause it to go, “boom.”  A half pound will throw a lot of dust up in the air and blow the hood off of a car. A coffee can full, I’m told, will burst a refrigerator into shrapnel.

I’m not one to go low ball. The cab of the lowrider has a hundred pound canister of Tannerite in the passenger seat. The bomb canister is surrounded with a secondary container that contains my hasty equivalent to “grape shot”. Short lengths of chain, nails, scrap rebar…anything I could find. There’s an eight inch target area painted red, the only place that isn’t packed with fragmentary material. The whole rig started life as a forty gallon chemical drum, and suffered the indignities of my poor welding until the current configuration was attained.

I have a pilfered Weatherby rifle chambered for .378 Weatherby Magnum, topped by a Leupold scope that can give up to 22x magnification. My sniper shooting isn’t what it was when I was thirty, but it’s not a difficult shot. The difficult part, as we’re now become aware, is waiting for the muertos to get to the party.

“The big umbrella was a good idea, huh?” Ferlita says, fishing for a compliment. It was her idea.

“We’d be sunburnt by now otherwise.”

“You would be, pale face,” she shoots back.

I hand her the binoculars and roll to my back. “Ouch.”  My body’s aching all ready, and it’s only been a few hours. I figured they’d come sooner. Soon as someone can figure out the thought process of the muertos, they should let me know. It’d save me a lot of time.

“There’s one,” she whispers. “Shit, it’s him.”

“Him?  Knife boy?”

I roll to the rifle, up on sand bags and trained on the target all ready. It’s knife boy, all right. The knives, though, have proliferated. He’s found a heavy weightlifting belt and put it around himself. He has knives of every imaginable sort tucked under the belt, and he’s now carrying what looks to be an actual Roman sword.

“Blow it. Blow him away, Mr. Kinney.”

I shake my head. “Not yet. I didn’t do that much work for one super muerto. That’s not good return on investment.”  For all that, though, the urge to just shoot knife boy’s head clean off is pretty strong. No good, though. I don’t know if that would queer the pitch for the others.

“But…it’s knife boy,” Ferlita urges.

“I know. Let’s get a few of his friends down there, then we’ll frag ‘em. Okay?”

She blows out air and keeps watching. Knife boy circles the truck, far more intent than even super muertos should be. I see that he’s changed clothes, and he’s wearing something on his head. It takes me a moment to figure out what it is, but I eventually see that it’s one of those little hats that bicyclists used to wear, before helmets became the preferred headgear. An odd green and white. I search my memory, thinking of that, thinking of the Bianchi ten speed I had back in the seventies. Knife boy circumnavigates the lowrider like a cop on a television show, bent slightly, on his toes, alert.

“That bastard’s getting smarter all the time.”

“I’m telling you, blow him to hell,” Ferlita tells me.

I take my eye away from the scope and look at her. She’s shaking all over now, sweat on her upper lip. She can’t hold the binoculars on target at this point. Not for a three hundred yard distance. Tears stand in her eyes.

“Shit. Shit. Okay.”  I put my eye cheek against the Weatherby’s stock and make the minor corrections in position that swing the field of vision of the rifle nearly twenty yards way out there. Where is he?  I don’t see him immediately, but I swing the scope around to take in a bigger zone. There he is. The Roman sword is bloody. Knife boy’s face wears a feral grin. He has the carcass of the deer slung over his shoulder, and he’s shagging ass away from the car. I try to get a bead on him, but he’s already under cover, already moving too fast to hold the cross hairs on him.

Hesitate and be lost. Here we are. We waited for the sheep and let the lion get away. I say a lot of things I shouldn’t say in front of Ferlita. She nods and says them back to me. No recriminations and I-told-you-so’s, at least. There’s no need.

“Didn’t work, sweetie,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Maybe we can still blow up some of the normal muertos. I don’t think they run in knife boy’s gang. They may still fall for it.”

“That’s gonna be some cold comfort.”

She shrugs. I shrug back.

“We’ll give it until nightfall.”

*****

I’ll say one thing for our little gambit. It was a hell of a boom. Our roost three hundred yards away was, in fact, about minimum safe distance from which to observe the lowrider’s supernova. That said, never has so much ordnance been used to lay low so few zombies. Three, to be exact.

But boy, were they ever terminated. I found a smoking boot, foot still in it, just slightly over a hundred yards away, standing up as if someone had been standing there and had otherwise been vaporized by some science fiction weapon.

The truck’s gas tank had been topped up as high as it would go, and I’d put another twenty gallons of diesel in the bed in Jerry cans. The fuel burned hot and high for better than an hour, the tires going up with all their sickening white smoke plumes, the black of oil smoke around the outside to round out the industrial disease we’d caused.

We continue to watch, upwind of the worst of it, as all the material and effort go upward into the dark sky. The fire’s now jumped to three of the nearby buildings. It’s unlikely to go further, but the wood of the old town hall, especially, is decorating the night sky with red plumes of fire, every window alight like the empty eye sockets of burning skulls in hell.

“What’d we learn?” I ask Ferlita.

“Plan wasn’t Conan enough. Just bait and shoot would be as good. Way easier to set up, too.”  She puts her eyes back against the binoculars. “Here’s something we didn’t know. They like fire.”

“Huh?”

“Muertos. They’re coming around for the cookout. Hard to see ‘em until they get close to the fire, but there’s a shitload of them down there.”

“Ferlita, I don’t want you picking up every rotten word in this old soldier’s vocabulary,” I chide, not even half-hearted.

She ignores me. I put my eye to the scope. We’re only about half as far away as we’d been at zero hour, and my scope settings require me to aim several inches low now. I don’t have the wherewithal to make the exact calculation in my head. If I see one, I’ll just have to wing it. Hold low and some reverse Kentucky Windage.

My old eyes rebel against the sting and flash of the fire, when intensified by the high power scope. I already have a headache from the blast of the bomb, the waiting, and the fumes of the fire down below. No one ever said that living on would be easy.

I see one, loitering with its dull eyes staring into the brightness of the flames. The pale gray of the muerto’s flesh is given life by the flames, an artificial rouge, but nothing can restore true sentience to their slack expression and imbecilic stance. No creative lighting has that level of magic in it, short of the golden bolt of the divine that wrings new life from mute clay. Nothing the hand of a simple fool like myself can create with bullets and bombs. I gesture for Ferlita to put her ear muffs on, sliding my own maximum suppression plugs in. They don’t fully ameliorate the noise of an ultra magnum rifle, but we take what we can get.

I take the shot, holding too low. The mighty .378 makes my poor sniping count the best it can, blowing a shot put sized void in the middle of the zombie’s chest. It goes down and doesn’t come up. With enough static shock, it seems that even zombies respond to a center-of-mass wound. I rack another round into the chamber, having to take my eye away from the scope to draw back the long stroke of the rifle’s bolt.

With the cartridge sent home again, I search for the next one, and the next, and the next. Come morning, I have but five of my .378s remaining, and my shoulder is as black and blue as Ferlita’s, but the muertos are laying thick and rank upon the ground. In the end, the solution is as simple as fire, though we come to it unawares and through long and foolish bouts of theory.

“You stand right there for a minute, you son of a bitch. You just abide there and I’ll do what ought to be done.”

My old eyes don’t line up a peep sight like they used to. Something about vision when you pass those sweet years of youth by…it just ain’t happy with settling down to giving you equal perception all through the range. I’m breaking down, but as I steady the M14 over the roof of an abandoned and rusting Hyundai, I can still feel the shot. I take a breath and let half of it out. I squeeze, real gentle.

The rifle, the same one that took my oldest brother through Pre-Tet Vietnam, bucks against my shoulder. The zombie drops. I wait, and the waiting is hardest. The hard sweat after the first volley, as you try to anticipate the true nature of the battle. Will it be one shambler? Two? A dozen? A hundred? Thank all the heavens, but I’ve never seen them in hundreds, but I’ve heard. The dim radio signal that comes up from Philly says that, down in the cities, it can happen. I look back up to the top of the long hill, at the rugged service road that’s only one step up from graded dirt. It’s the better part of half a mile. If they come at me hard enough, it’s my ass. I know that. I’m not spry like I used to be. There’ll be no half-mile sprints coming out of these old legs. Maybe a hundred yards. Once.

Another zombie appears from behind the bank building. I take a hasty shot and remove a chunk of shoulder, spinning the thing around. It’s just a teenager, a girl that was probably playing on the chess club before all of this. The second shot explodes her brain case and puts her down for good. I find myself hoping that there’s no pain afterward, that there’s no memory, that whatever made a person what she was isn’t there anymore after the eyes go blank and the hunger takes over. I hope like hell that the zombies are no more aware and sentient after the Flashover than the dust of everyone else, the ones who didn’t make it.

Not that prayers and hoping accomplish much. Not half as much as a bullet, placed well. It’s a quiet world now, and every report of a gun makes it a bit more so. It’s only out of the dead quiet when the last zombie sags to earth that we might rebound. It’s too much to imagine that any of us, the ones who saw the bright tent of humanity fall all around us, will see that day, but it’s not the tasks you finish, it’s the tasks you attack with all the energy you can muster—those are the ones that count.

The town, New Brocklane, disgorges its walking dead all morning. Seventeen of them, in all, and my few poor shots see the M14 hitting on its final shell by the time the culling is done.

Another day’s grim work, another magazine run empty in the cause of bringing the mindless reign of the zombies to a close. For me, another day closer to the time when I’ll have hunted my last, when the power to kill the dead will pass beyond me.

In the waning hours of the day, when the sun fades behind the trees and the strength of old men starts to wane, I find myself driving the roads, clogged now only with the abandoned wrecks of those who met their ash-bound end at the wheel. The mutter of my truck’s exhaust and the groan of its tires are the only song now, the whispered dirge for a world suddenly drained of all that is vital, all that looks and speaks and reckons the impact of all it might do. I know I am not alone, though I am in slim company. For all that knowledge does, I may as well be. The weight of all those who have passed presses against me, the ache of all those I loved as painful as broken teeth. I try to keep every voice, every face distinct and unmarred in my mind, but all that has come before grows hazy with the end of each barren day. I can only go home once more, and immerse myself in all that remains. What roots I have left must suffice to hold me against the great winds that are blowing.

Part One:

My people have always gone to war, and they have always returned intact.  As far back as memory can stretch, it has been thus.  A war would arise, the Kinney men would go out to see that elephant, and we would return, bearing the arms that saw us through the conflict.  This goes back to sabers and long knives.  In the basement of our home, we have these heirlooms, these dusty military jackets and tools of war.

My father told me that his own grandfather once met Geronimo in the Arizona territory.  The story goes that Geronimo squinted at my forebear for some time, finally uttering a grave proclamation and passing on.  When Barrett Kinney, the man in question, asked what the Great Chief had said, they told him this: “The One Who Yawns says that your family line has the Power, and that they will never die in battle.  He says that, like him, you have the blood of the Magic People who dwell forever below the earth.”

I have no illusions that the story is true, and can lay no claim to magic powers.  The closest to magic I have ever been is knowing the love of a good woman and seeing the wonders of nature’s bounty.  Still, evidence suggests that there may be something to the old tale.  No Kinney man I’ve ever heard of has been killed or maimed in wartime.  Closest anyone has come to harm was Maxwell “Weller” Kinney in the Great War, who broke his arm falling off a horse while on leave and wine-addled.

Though no papers have been signed and no declaration read, recent events have, by their very nature, ushered in a time of war.  The momentary fire in the sky differs little from the Pearl Harbor attack in this respect.  Only the scale and nature of the conflict has changed.  As my forefathers did, I aim to take part in this fight.  Like them, I wish only to honor my family and return home intact.  We have never sought out acclaim or hero’s honors.  We are simply duty-bound to do our small part.

The Kinney folk have lived in Upstate New York since the seventeenth century, and we have our share of traditions.  One of those, to an outsider, might be considered a sort of inborn hoarding instinct.  Kinneys don’t throw things away, they fix them.  They don’t get rid of things they can’t store, they build new places to house their collections.  We Kinneys are souvenir keepers.  If we do something, we need a reminder, a touchstone that keeps those events alive in our minds.  In the venue of wars, we tend to spirit away whatever the government lends out to us during the fracas.  As my grandfather often said, “if I have it in hand, I’ll be goddamned if it isn’t mine!”

That inherited attitude has seen us accumulate a variety of weapons over the years, enough to fill my basement, as I became the arbiter of so many old things.  The younger generation, had they survived the Flashover, would certainly have had recourse to their own purloined M9s, M-16s, and M4 carbines.  They, like my wife Jessica and our daughter Marlena, have no more need of such things.  They are gone into the air, and I hope that Jessie’s fervent belief in a better, sweeter life beyond this one has been borne out.  I believe, as I suppose my father did also, that if there is a heaven, it is probably barren of men who have amounted to a fiddler’s fart.  I think that, to prosper and do all that must be done on this world, we lose our grasp on anything that might assure the next one.

Be that as it may, heaven is not my primary concern now, and it has never been.  I am busy with the work of the day.  If society is to re-establish itself, we will have to overcome this zombie problem.  To put it plainly, the Eastern Seaboard is lousy with the walking dead.  While my role in the military was wholly non-combatant, running a motor pool at Nellis AFB near Las Vegas, I still went through the same training regimen, and consider myself a soldier.  An old soldier, admittedly, on the far side of fifty, but those present must wage the war.

As a boy, my first experience with a firearm was with my uncle Clyde’s M1 carbine.  He’d brought it back from Korea, and had many good things to say about it.  In point of fact, it was the later M2 version, which could be fired in fully automatic fashion.  I was not instructed on how to make this happen until much later.  At twelve years old, however, I first put the butt stock of the small rifle to my shoulder and pressed the trigger.  I ventilated many a tin can with that rifle.  I gasp to imagine what the ammunition I blasted through would cost to purchase today.  It was an era, then, when surplus .30 carbine rounds were numerous and cheap.  Since the machine of commerce is broken, everything is now, ahem, cheap, if not numerous.

I only bring this up because I’m carrying that same little carbine through the woods on the outskirts of town, watching closely for any sign of the walking dead.  Everything is close-quarters here, and a light rifle is all that is required.  A backup pistol is also wise.  Though in fine condition, the old M1 carbine could fail, just like any tool.  I carry a Ruger Blackhawk that can fire the same ammunition as my rifle.  A Ruger single action revolver is perhaps the most reliable thing that employs moving parts, so I have good confidence that, upon pulling the trigger, the hammer will fall, a loud noise will ensue, and a hole will appear at the point of aim.  Kinneys don’t purchase firearms, but this one was given to me in return for doing a valve job on an old friend’s Chevelle.  My great granddad could quibble that work for reward counts as “paying”, but that’s a family argument amongst voices who have all gone quiet now, all except me.

While the faculties of your average zombie are not wickedly keen, they seem to be able to hear and see with some accuracy.  Certainly well enough to be deadly to a regular human they can approach.  It is possible that they have some sense of smell, but I have no proof either way on that theory.  I operate on the assumption that they can sniff you out, especially should you have a bleeding wound.  So far as they can be said to make sense, an olfactory sense would be reasonable to imagine.

It’s hearing that I have found to be their most troublesome sense.  The noise of gunfire carries, sometimes for miles.  In most cases, it’s possible to make good your escape from an area before the zombie population can muster to your position, but a single man always has some chance of getting injured, trapped, or running short of ammunition.  We plan and equip ourselves as well as we can, we make preparations for all the likely eventualities, but in the end, fate plays a part.

For myself, I try to never wander more than an hour’s walk from my primary vehicle.  In addition, I locate any nearby places where, should things become grim, I could take shelter or make some sort of stand.  If I’m feeling particularly concerned, I will leave my government-issue Colt .45 Auto and a few magazines of ammunition at one of my fall-back positions.  Today, I’ve got a shoulder rig hanging from a sapling several hundred yards back, along with twenty two rounds of hollow point ammunition.  If that’s not enough to settle the argument, clearly running would have been a better option.

The animals hereabouts are skittish, going quiet or bolting when they hear me.  I’m not after them, not yet, and certainly not here.  There’s plenty of actual wilderness in which to hunt–wilderness that should be clean of zombies.  They seem to draw into groups and move toward civilization.  This could be because no animal would be fool enough to get snared and gnawed upon.  The same cannot be said for the average person, though the delicate flowers and half-wits have long since been culled from the remaining herd.

I see something small, probably a raccoon or a skunk, possibly a cat gone feral, scoot through the brush and seek shelter.  Mostly the movement of the low growth.  I follow my carbine on the slight downhill, picking my steps carefully, moving at a pace that won’t raise much noise or let me miss something.  The younger, more macho guys, I think, do themselves a disservice by running red-assed into things when they should have walked.  Being an old badger myself, I have these biases.

Just as I can see the faint outline of a house downslope, I hear the loose, clumsy footfalls that I’ve come to dream of, hear the weird, toneless grunt of the unliving enemy.  A small shriek, high up there in pitch, clipped at the end, rises from the same place, and the sound of it freezes my blood.  I try to engage that red-assed running, but I’m rooted to the spot, listening, hands numb on the rifle.

Another zombie noise, this time the noise I’ve heard them make after a center-mass shot or some other injury not quite grave enough to bring them down.  Footfalls come uphill at me, fast and light.  I remember my carbine, training it on the upcoming noise.  My finger shakes on the trigger, my eye tracking movement through the peep sight.  I raise my head away from the rifle.  All my body hair has come up in gooseflesh.  I find a target, centering the sight on it, letting the sight picture rise up toward the head shot that is the most effective.  Such a small one…

“You aren’t a zombie, are you, Mister?”

She’s eight, maybe nine.  Her little striped blouse is torn and filthy, her pink shoes coming apart at the seams, only her heart-embroidered jeans holding together through the strain.  A dark skinned child, though not so dark as the grime would indicate, little nose, big eyes, raven hair.  Her accent isn’t local.  She’s alive.  Really alive, and for a moment, I think I’ll start to cry.  I’d imagined that I’d die before I saw another wholesome child, another live reminder that we were once a vital species.  I pull the rifle down off my shoulder and point it to the side and down.  My heart booms with the shock of it.  I nearly took the shot, by God.  Within a half-pound of feeling the trigger break away and let one go.  It’s as close as I’ve ever come to a sin that could allow for no repentance.  As close as I ever hope to come.

“Mister?”

It’s hard to bring words up.  I haven’t spoken to anyone in a while, no one other than my own imaginary ride-along, my self-supplied Sancho as I run uselessly at my many windmills.  “I’m…not a zombie,” I finally manage.

She looks at me, absent emotion, drawn, holding a spray bottle in one hand.  “I got one of ‘em, but there’s two more down there.  They’ll come up this way pretty soon.”

It takes me a minute to get her meaning.  I remember my rifle just as two zombies appear near the side of the old garage, no more than twenty yards downhill.  I slide my ear protectors up from my neck and on.  “Plug your ears,” I whisper.  The zombies catch sight of us and come in a shambling run.

I take a knee and pop one with the first shot.  A part of his skull goes upward and he tumbles a few steps up the slope, going still.  The second one I hit in the high chest, then the shoulder, and finally catch him in the side of the head after the first two knock the forward momentum to a halt.  He slumps, then slides most of the way back where he’d come.

The girl takes her hands away from her ears.  She walks over to them, dispassionately kicking the nearer one in the knee to be sure that he doesn’t move.  She gives me a little nod, then gestures with her chin to the property below.  There’s still zombified bellowing down there.  She says something that I can’t catch because of the ear protection.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Better take care of the other one.  She’ll get on her feet again if we don’t.”

“Stay behind me, then, and keep your fingers in your ears.”

Down below, there’s a female zombie thrashing and clawing at its face, which is torn to bits, the flesh smoking and bubbling as if it were hit with strong acid.  I come within about ten yards and use one shell to finish the creature off.  In the silence after the shot, I push my ear protection back around my neck.

“Any more?”

The girl shrugs.  “Could be.”

“I’m Randall Kinney,” I tell her.

“Ferlita Sanchez.”

“Where do you hail from, Ferlita?”

“Yuma.  Arizona.”

“You’re a ways from your home, it seems. How’d you manage to come so far?”

“Doesn’t matter now.  It’s just a place. Full of nothing, just like everywhere else.”

Up close, I see that she may be upwards of ten, but just petite.  I have a pang of sadness for the world she’ll grow up in, so desolate. To imagine a world where a young girl, alone, would have to come to grips with zombies, is chilling. I try not to consider it, though it is every bit the truth. Truths are often the most horrifying things to consider.

I furrow my brow, thinking about what I’ve just seen, the burned face and agonized crawling of a zombie.  “Ferlita, what’d you do to this’n here?”

She proudly hoists her spray bottle.  It’s a whitewall tire cleaner.  “Good stuff.  Like pepper spray, or water on a witch.”

“How’d you hit on that idea?”  I’m thunderstruck at the notion, myself.  Chemical testing hadn’t ever crossed my mind.

Ferlita shrugs.  “Just tried it.  Started with WD-40, which blinds ‘em for a minute, but not long enough.  Lysol confuses ‘em for a while.  They bump into stuff and walk around in circles.  Fine for getting away, but it doesn’t really hurt ‘em.  This stuff, though…I hope I can find more.”

I’ve seen the brand before, and I’m sure that it’s at every car care place you could find.  I tell her so.  By then, there are signs of more zombies coming to see what all the gunfire was all about, so I take her back upcountry.

“Have you met anyone else?” she asks as I’m shrugging into the shoulder rig for the .45 and stopping to survey the forest for danger signs.  “Like–how many people do you think there are left that aren’t los muertos hambrientos.”

“Not sure I catch your meaning, Ferlita. My Spanish is pretty rusty.”

“The hungry dead, is what I mean. They seem like all you see now. Everyone’s gone, huh?”

I dust my hands on my jeans. “Not everyone. I met a couple Canucks going south right after the Flashover.  They said they were headed to Florida, but I think they romanticized the place from the television.  Florida was plenty weird before all this went down.  Can’t imagine it’d be any different now.  Still, they wouldn’t be talked out of it.  They had this notion that smoking marijuana had saved them from the Flashover, and that pretty much tells me they weren’t of any kind of sound mind.”

She looks at me for a minute.  “What’s a Canuck?”

“A Canadian.  That’s what we call ‘em sometimes. Probably not very nice.”

“Going south isn’t the worst idea.”

“I’ll give you that, Ferlita.  Still, this is the place I know well.  I think I’ll stick around.”  I offer my hand.  “You’re welcome to ride this storm out with me.”

She takes my hand.  Her small hand grips hard, her fingers chilly to the touch.  “I hope you’re not a weirdo.”

I laugh a little.  “No worse than most, I suspect.  My faults don’t include doing anything inappropriate to young ladies.  That’s not to say I’m not a little rough around the edges.”

“You know how to kill…them.  If you don’t hurt me, that’s enough.”

I step in front of her.  My heart is beating slow and hard.  “Did someone hurt you like that in the past?”

She gives me a defiant look, then drops her eyes and steps back, saying nothing.

“I wouldn’t do that.  I promise.  While I’m around, no one’ll so much as raise a hand to you.”

Without looking up, she nods and moves past me.  It takes me a minute to get moving again.  I find that, in my advancing age, a moment gets away from me here and there, when I forget my body and retreat to my mind.  The world’s not made for that sort of forgetfulness anymore.  With a little mental kick up the backside, I catch up with Ferlita.

She looks like she’s been living lean.  There’s more hollowness in her cheeks and more dark beneath her eyes than there ever should be.  Not with anyone, especially not with a young one.  With the dead upright and walking around, a lot of things that shouldn’t be have come to be commonplace.

I dig in my pocket, locating a candy bar.  I hold it out to her.  She takes it, eating slowly and without comment.  The way the sleeve of her rainbow-colored blouse is all ripped and frayed seems to call out with all the agony of a world gone wrong.

“Not far now,” I tell her, if only to have something to say, and in saying something, distract my attention from each eloquent revelation of the broken world.

She follows as I follow the cut marks on the saplings, letting them lead me back to the road.

****

Ferlita hears them first.  Young ears.  Ears that haven’t suffered the indignities of gunfire, bench grinders, and loud music.  She looks back at me and points down the rough-cut edge where they leveled the land to lay in a road.  The brush makes the two-lane indistinct and ghostly, but that’s where the Suburban is parked.  If I strain, I can just here their shuffling feet.

I take a knee next to Ferlita.  “How many, you figure?” I whisper.

“Five, six.  Not sure.”  Nothing shows on her face, but her whole body is shivering.  No shame in it.  They give me the full-body shivers sometimes, too.  I guess that the moment when they stop doing that is the moment you really have to watch for.

“Normal folks or zombies?”

“Muertos. Zombies.”

I figured as much.  Finding a whole band of normal people isn’t something you’ll see much these days.  The zombies have ways of finding each other, though, and seem to prefer the chance to buddy up.  I don’t know why, and I don’t relish the idea of it.  Means that there’s some sort of instinct going on.  Either they’re not quite as dim as we thought, or there’s something…something like what once was still firing in their chilly brains.  Either way, it’s something I can’t know, something I shouldn’t.

“Have you got plenty of your Zombie-Off?”

She swishes the bottle of tire cleaner around.  It sounds like there’s at least half.

“That should be enough,” I tell her.  “You stick here, and I’m going to see if I can do away with them, so we can take the truck and get out of here.  We’ll want to get a good meal into you, get you a bath, and put you in some fresh clothes.”

Ferlita gives me a flat, hard look.

“I didn’t mean anything by it.  Your duds have just about given up, and if you don’t mind me saying, the dust of the road’s sitting fair thick on you at this point.”

“Okay.”  She nudges me forward. “Be careful.”

I find a point about forty yards down from the Suburban before I dig in and start sliding down the rocky verge of the road.  My foot catches, and I go down in a heap, tumbling twice before I get my feet back under me.  I’m bleeding from the nose and teeth from where the carbine smacked against my face on the wild ride down, and I shake myself to get the tweety birds and spiral stars out.

I’ve seen zombies loiter around.  They stagger around in loose ellipses, sort of orbiting some point of interest.  They don’t look any more alert, or any less so.  They don’t feature much in the way of expression one way or another.

These…are different.  I can tell that in the first moment.  It’s in their movements, in the suddenness and surety of them.  Not quite the dexterity of the living, but certainly leaps and bounds above any of the zombies I’ve locked horns with thus far.

That, and they’re in uniform.  Brown jumpsuits, loose fitting, but with a logo I can’t quite read.  Like workers at a big factory.  Or maybe a chemical plant.  There’s little time before they begin jogging toward me, covering the ground faster than I’m prepared for.

I shoulder the carbine and press the trigger.  Nothing.  Something in the tumble I just took jammed up the works.  I shrug out of the sling and throw the rifle down, bringing the .45 out of my shoulder holster.  I pull the trigger, and nothing happens.  The zombies, now spread out wide and hemming me in, are really running.

I remember the slide lock safety, flicking it down and finally letting loose.  The big Colt bucks in my hand until it’s empty, leaving three of five creatures down, two for good.  I damn myself for bad shooting, but things are happening far too quickly.  I jam the .45 back into its holster and begin to pull free the Ruger, but the lead zombie is upon me, smashing me to the gravel with all the stupid force of a linebacker.  The creature’s fists are pummeling me before I know which way is up.  I feel blood burst from a cut over my eye, feel a tooth break off at the gumline, feel my ribs straining under the smashing assault.

Somehow, I manage to throw the thing off and get my hand on the Ruger.  The first shot blows two of his fingers off, but the second hits him in the shoulder, deadening the whole arm.  He tries to leap on me, but I fend him off with the leg that I can still feel.  One more shot finally pips the ace, hitting him, smashing through the cheekbone and everything behind it.  My ear protection has been dislodged, and so the gunfire has blasted my ears into a fog, but that’s so far down the list of complaints that I don’t have time for it.  I get on my feet somehow, and the last of the zombies veers away from me as I point the gun.

I get a deep, empty feeling as I look into his eyes.  There’s something in there.  Something extra. Something more than simple hunger.  Malevolence.  I cock the hammer and take a shot at him, but he jukes and runs a crooked line into the forest at the other side of the road, beating what is perhaps the first retreat for their side in the ongoing conflict. He retreats. Understands the danger of the gun and retreats.

I teeter on my feet for a moment, perplexed.  The zombie I’d wounded is back on its pins, dragging one leg but coming closer nonetheless.  The shaking in my system is so strong that holding the gun steady is fierce work, but two more shots finally end the encounter.  I stand over one of them.  The jumpsuit says Cavendish Petrochemical Labs.  I remember vaguely that they have a plant somewhere west of here.  A plant that employed almost a hundred workers, if the news stories spoke true. I calculate odds in a rough way. From all I know about the survival rate after the Flashover, it seems wildly unlikely that five guys from the same spot would zombie up and form a gang. Seems like something to be concerned with, when I have enough energy to be concerned.

I limp to the Suburban and numbly pull myself in.  My stomach heaves, my head aching with a vengeance, and all the pain that had momentarily been covered by adrenalin now washes over me.  “Shit.  Shit.  Shit,” I whisper.  Ferlita climbs into the passenger side.  I stop my cursing.

“You all right, Mr. Kinney?”

“No, Ma’am, I don’t believe I am.”  I put my head back and close my eyes for a minute.  Before I open them, I feel Ferlita’s small hand wiping blood off my face.

“I watched them.  They were different.”

I fish a bicuspid out of my cheek and set it on the dash. I reach back and get a gallon of water out of the back, pouring some onto a shop towel. I wipe up the remainder of the blood and hold the rag against my cut brow.

“Different? Yeah, I’d say they were. Somethin’ happened with them that left some of the lights on. They’re…” I blow out some air. “They’re a whole different ballgame.”

*****

“Mr. Kinney?”

It’s a quiet voice.  I smile thinking about it.  Like I’m a teacher in some small schoolhouse in the country.  Maybe I’m teaching colloquial English in some distant land.  Lord knows, my English can, at times, be quite colloquial.

“Mr. Kinney!”  The voice is now loud and close.  I feel myself shaken.  “You gotta wake up, Mister.  They came back!”

My eyes flutter.  It’s dark.  I’m still behind the wheel of the Suburban.  I’ve been passed out for a long time.  There are two of the new, improved zombies, grossly feasting on their fallen buddies.  One of them has a big knife.  Tool use.  One of the hallmarks of intelligence.  Swell.  They’re eying us, but seem happy enough to do their thing on the ground.  The one with the knife was the one who high-tailed it earlier.  He steps to one of the other ones, who’s not having very good luck eating his dead buddy’s arm.  Knife boy pushes his pal aside and hacks the arm off at the elbow with a few hard swipes.  Cooperation.  It gets better and better.

“Mr. Kinney?”

“I’m up, I’m up.”  I fish my keys out and put them in the ignition.  I get the old Suburban running and flip the lights on.  The look in Knife Boy’s eyes as he regards us gives me the screaming willies.  I shift into reverse and start easing back, hoping I’ll have enough time to jump out and scoop up the carbine I dropped earlier.

Knife Boy starts running at me, face anything but blank, something like a zombie, but made more terrible with a spark of sentience.  I accelerate, spin the wheel, and do a lousy but effective one-eighty.  I punch it and we leave the scene behind.  I carry more speed than is wise, and a few times only just navigate around abandoned cars and fallen trees in the road.

Ferlita and I are silent.  What we saw doesn’t bear discussion.  Besides, my head throbs, my face is swollen, my mouth’s filled with the taste of blood.  I imagine that I may well have a few broken ribs on top of all of it.

I don’t go back to my house.  Not during the day, and not in the shape I’m in.  Certainly, not with a non-combatant in tow.  We pull into the mostly abandoned parking lot at the side of Farelli Lanes, and I kill the engine.

“Why are we at a bowling alley?” Ferlita asks.

“Cinderblock walls, metal doors, and because old man Farelli put in a diesel generator for reasons unknown.  I only know about it because I tuned it up once for a month of free play.”

Ferlita seems to take that in stride, and we walk to the door.  I’ve reloaded the Ruger and the Colt by now, and I have my hand on the Ruger’s grip as we walk to the side entrance.

We walk into the blackness beyond the door, like the dark of a shut coffin lid above you.  I bend, nearly toppling to the deck as one of my knees tricks out, but managing to scoop up the electric light.  I flick it on, and it pushes the cave blackness back some.  I have a powerful flash nearby, and I fire that up, too, handing the lamp to Ferlita.

“Wait here.  I’ll kick over the genny and we’ll have some lights.”

I walk down the apron at the side of the furthest lane, then through a skinny door and into the machinery behind the lanes.  Every time, the place’s big, mechanical presence spooks me out.  It’s the best, safest fort nearby, though, a defensible position where even the burliest of zombies couldn’t burst in.

I take a minute to consider the new ones, the ones from the chemical plant, and I shake my head.  It’s a little too easy to imagine Knife Boy hoisting a sledge and having at the door until it caves in.  It’s way too easy, but I don’t want to think that way.  I need to patch up, to rest, and to see if I can’t survive this mess for another few days.  If not for my own pride and the family tradition, at least for little Ferlita, who deserves a whole lot better than this.

I move beyond the pin-placers, past the mechanical store room, and through the old staff room, where an old fridge, a cheap microwave, and a cigarette-burned table suffice for comfort.  In the furthest corner room, the generator sits like a giant cast iron toad in the dimness.  I prime it, flip the switch that opens the circuit with the starter battery, and wait for the glow plugs to warm.  When the light on the switch panel turns from yellow to green, I punch the button and the old creature comes to life.

The generator charges a series of 1kw capacitors that I installed a few years back to take momentary power draws, then pushes power out into the building’s circuits.  The sparse lights I left on flicker, then come on clearly.  I switch on the intake fan that draws oxygen from the outside, then close the door.  From outside, the sound is nothing more than a gentle grumble. It’s not cold enough to worry about smoke rising right now.

For the first time, I wonder about the exhaust noise, and if the nearby zombies might be drawn the the chuffing noise of the genny.  If they’re your run-of-the-mill zombies, there’s not much harm in that.  The building’s secure.  If it’s Knife Boy and his pals…still, they are miles away, and if they can track me by some unlikely means I can’t imagine, that’ll have to be that. Can’t worry about things you can’t change. The topic of how “super” these super zombies are will have to be tabled for the moment.

I go back and clean up in the staff room for a moment, then meet Ferlita.  She’s sitting behind lane seven, just about in the middle of the building, thinking thoughts known only to brave little girls in the post-human epoch.  I flip on a few more lights and switch on the griddle behind the snack bar.  I’ve found a bread maker machine that I can work tolerably well, and the processed cheese slices in the small fridge seem more or less impervious to spoilage.

I brush a bit of the buttery substance they keep around for the pop corn machine on the bread, and they make a decent grilled sandwich.  There’s chili in good quantities, and I supplement our sandwiches with that.  Ferlita digs in and eats until her plate is clean.  I’m afraid to give her more, lest it weigh too heavily on her belly.

The soda fountain works, and she has her fill of root beer mixed with orange, which she claims is her favorite.  Sounds terrible to me, but I remember my favorite thing as a kid was peanut butter and mustard sandwiches.

I dig out one of the remaining Miller beers and drink it warm.  My face is swollen, the new gap in my teeth raw, and it requires a tear-wringing effort to move around with my bruised ribs.  Still, we have survived, and it’s enough. You stick around for while, your version of “enough” becomes pretty undemanding.

I turn on the lanes and let Ferlita bowl for a while.  In the back, I go through the lockers.  Tanya Salinger’s locker contains clothes that will be close enough in size to let Ferlita change.  I smell them.  They’ve been worn once, and Tanya seemed to like her perfume strong and thick, but they’ll do for the moment.  The shower off the staff room will do, and there’s a clean towel.  We can seek out better duds for her soon enough.

Ferlita’s eyes are red-rimmed as she finishes cleaning up, and I barely manage a cursory scrub before my body starts to refuse commands.  She takes the sofa in the staff room, and I drag a raggedy old cot just beyond the door.  It’s the middle of the afternoon the next day before we’re up and at ‘em.

*****

“You’re not going to leave me here!” Ferlita turns her small shoulders to me and rolls a ball down the lanes. It strikes the pins with all the force of her conviction, scoring a strike.

“It’s that, or take you into danger such as I wouldn’t be happy to show you, hon.” I slump into one of the fiberglass seats because standing over any length of time hurts too much. I’m somewhere between “treated and released” and “kept overnight for observation”, and there’s no hospital to be had, no painkillers nearby. Just a beat-up old man and a kid. Against not just the run-of-the-mill zombies, but bad hombres who have some level of consciousness.

I sit there, just for a moment, or perhaps for several frames of Ferlita bowling, and think about what could make zombies. Why did they exist? Was there a purpose to them, or was it a galactic mistake, just a byproduct of some other, equally arcane process. If I knew how they worked, I might have a prayer of understanding what could create these new creatures, perhaps not accurately called zombies at all. Wasn’t it part and parcel of zombie-hood that you had no mind, no rationale, no reason? If so, what could I term these new horrors? Ghouls? Revenants? There were creatures of some kind in those books about Hobbits, but I’d long since forgotten what they were called.

I put it aside. I have to. “Well, if you’re going to risk yourself going around with this crazy old man, I suppose we’ll have to get you more of that tire cleaner.”

Even now, she’s got the bottle sitting within a few steps. She’s a survivor, a good kid. I’m lucky to have found her. She makes me remember all the reasons we have to go on, why we have to win. A highly motivated man can do things he has no business doing. That’s what I count on. That’s one of the few things in our favor.

“Will I get a gun?” she asks, holding up a bowling ball between us, giving me a shrewd look.

“If I’m satisfied that you can be safe and hit what you aim at, yes. We’ll need all the shooters we can find, and if you’re willing to go out and risk all, I won’t send you out there without the best protection I can give you.”

“I want a gun like the people use on TV. Like the cops use.”

“I don’t have one of those, sweetie. I’ve only got what our family brought home from war, our family heirlooms.”

“There’s got to be some hanging around. At the police station, or in a gun shop. No one’s going to care if we take something now, will they?” She smiles, turns, and throws another ball down the lanes. It’s a tough split this time. She’ll be lucky to pick up the spare.

I sigh. “I suppose you’re right. No reason to hold you to the same foolish articles of faith we Kinneys labor under.” No reason at all.

“Good. Where are we going?”

“To my house first, and then I suppose we’ll go around to the gun shop and see if we can find you a proper firearm.”

—–

Patrick M. Tracy was born in Maine, but has lived in the Southwest for many years. He works fixing computers in the bowels of a library, but in his off times enjoys strength training, archery, and playing the bass guitar. He has published both fiction and poetry in a variety of markets. His most recent projects can be seen by visiting www.pmtracy.com.

<click>

It’s Rufus Williams again. This is tape six. Well, it isn’t a tape, I guess, but we’ll call it tape six for lack of a better idea. There’s the intro. I’m going to go ahead and get right to it, if you don’t mind.

Guns killed more of us than they saved. No one will admit this, clutching their thunder-sticks in their cold, dead hands. Counter-intuitive, they call it. Doesn’t seem to make sense. How could you be better off without the great mechanical advantage of modern warfare? It’s a leap of faith, but it’s one that could have saved a lot of lives.

Why? Noise, plain and simple. If you touch off a firearm in the quiet of an abandoned town, you’d better be ready to kill every zombie within a two mile radius. I guarantee you, they’ll come a’shambling to meet you. Like they said in school, you can only bring candy to class if you have enough for everyone.

In the early days, I saw a whole platoon of heavily armed men march into Ogden, never to come out. Made a lot of noise, splattered a lot of undead flesh, but they couldn’t bear up under the thunder they’d called down upon themselves. There were just more zombies than they had bullets.

Consequence–more food for the stumbling juggernaut, less living biodiversity in the human genome.

Big guns. Damn, sounds like a good idea. Shock and Awe. Victory by overwhelming force. The right of firepower. Some get lucky with this school of thought, but we’re massively outnumbered, and one slip is all that it takes for everything to go tits-up. Guns jam. The light is bad, and you waste your ammo on shadows and smoke. Surprise. You’re dead.

Not me. I stand back. I watch others take the first steps and learn from their mistakes. Heroism doesn’t come into it. This is survival, and the only sure way to survive is to stay hidden, to kill the ones you have to and make as little noise as possible. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re the apex predator anymore. Maybe once, but the flashover changed all that. We’re strictly second chair while the zombies last. No sense arguing. They don’t.

My feeling is that the zombie won’t last forever. There will be a day when they’re gone, their unfathomable tasks at an end. You can see it. They’re breaking down, decaying. Dead creatures walking around are clearly the exception, rather than the rule. A fatal exception, sure, but they’ll pass. The trick is to keep yourself alive long enough to see that day come around. Living through it is pretty much the trick to everything. I hope this idea isn’t a new one on you.

Of course, I don’t know who I’m talking to here. Maybe you found this recording mixed in with my bones. Maybe it’s hundreds of years after the flashover, and you wonder what the hell I’m even talking about. Heck, you could be our new alien overlords, and this is just an interesting artifact from the human era.

When it comes down to it, I guess it doesn’t matter who I’m talking to, or if I’m just talking to myself. I’m talking. I’m alive. It’s something. It keeps my mind off of the ache in my knees as I wait for my moment.

The bed of an ancient GMC pickup isn’t much of a hunting blind, and I’m not the smallest guy ever, so squatting down, waiting for my prey, isn’t kind on my knees. When I say “prey”, I guess a segment of the listening public will think that I’m on the hunt for zombies, ready to put ‘em down with extreme prejudice in whatever non-gun way I have. You might imagine me to be the dark revenger of humankind, a bitter survivor hoping to bring down every zombie he comes across.

Yep. No. Most times, if you’re smart, you have bigger, more basic problems to contend with. Like eating. Happens that a guy wants something better than pork and beans now and then. Something fresh. There’s a game trail right through this neighborhood. The deer and coyotes come down from the mountains, cut across a little arroyo, and wander around in the overgrown mess of people’s back yards. It’s been a rainy spring, and the foliage is growing to beat the band.

I wait. You get good at waiting, good at letting go of that relentless motion that used to keep the wheels of society turning. It’s not that there isn’t anything to do. Far from that. It’s just that things take as long as they take. If days pass, that’s okay. You hustle when you have to, but other than that, it’s just steady work. One foot in front of the other, so to speak.

A raccoon trots down the game trail, looks back at me, and keeps on. They’re no good to eat, and anyway, I’ve always had a soft spot for the little bandits. All the wild animals have fallen back into their normal routines. They just get all the land we were hoarding back, and so it’s kind of a field day. No, it’s only the domestic animals you have to watch out for. Feral dogs can be nasty, I tell you. Many of them died cooped up in houses in the first days, but plenty of them got out. About half the shots I’ve had to take have been to keep fido from trying to take a chunk out of me. Not like I could have saved ‘em. Not within my power, that.

The cats aren’t strictly dangerous, but sometimes, when you see a tribe of fifty of them, they can set you on edge a bit. They’re important, though. The rodents went totally batshit with all the rotting food right after the flashover. It’s not just old ladies who swallow a spider to catch the fly.

I did manage to let the zoo animals loose, which was dicey at points. Don’t know if the monkeys and snakes survived the winter, but I saw a few of the elephants last week, and the lions are doing just peachy. It’s a strange world, though. When you see that a tiger’s got her den in the foyer of the opera hall, that sorta gives you an idea that we’ve fallen off the chair and we ain’t getting up.

Hell, now there’s one–a zombie. Nah two. Make that three. This close, they’ll smell me when they get downwind, no matter how well I hide. They’re about forty yards out, so I may as well stand and deliver.

Boy, my knees aren’t what they were ten years ago, but I get myself up in the truck bed and pull back the string on my compound bow. Thunk. One arrow away. I smooth the fletching of the next one and nock the arrow before I look up to see the result.

The draw weight is one hundred pounds, which gives you a hell of a lot of juice with a roller compound bow. The arrow is down almost to the feathers in the first zombie’s chest, and the impact knocked him flat. His clumsy hands are slapping at the ground as he’s figuring out how to get up.

I shoot the next one, staggering forward at her best pace and now about twenty yards away. This shot is point-blank, and the arrow passes right through her neck. Must have severed the spine, because she goes down and stops moving.

The third, no more than ten yards away by the time I get the next arrow to the string, is a big S.O.B., and I put one right into the dome of his purple-red, rotting skull. At this distance, the sound of bone giving way and flesh parting is perfectly defined. The big zombie runs into the back of the GMC and falls, twitching, finished. I ease out of the bed and walk around him, just in case he has any impressive full-death throes in him. The first zombie, now crawling toward me with a mouth full of crooked, disgusting teeth, gets a swing from the sharp splitting axe I always carry with me. That sound–well, let’s not dwell on that sound, okay? That one comes back at you when you close your eyes.

The whole thing only takes a moment. I do a cautionary finishing stroke on the other two zombies and pull them into a ditch. Scavengers won’t eat ‘em, but I know they’ll be down to the bones in a week. What gets put off when they walk around for a while comes on with a quickness when they finally fall for good.

I stretch out, check myself over, and hop on the old beachcomber bicycle I’m comfortable on. Again, it’s quiet. I don’t go that far, and it generally carries what I need it to. I’ve rigged a big rack on the back, enough to carry a dressed-out deer if it needs to. Usually, though, it’s just a rabbit, or one of the goats that escaped from their pasture up on the mountainside. Seems there was a billy in there somewhere, because I’ve seen the little ones around, if only from a distance. I’ll need to go down to the sporting goods stores and pick up the last of their arrows. I don’t try to pry them out of zombie carcasses. Hell, I don’t know if there’s something catching in zombie flesh. I’m very sure that there’s nothing particularly sanitary, and that’s enough for me.

It’s a silent world. I get that every time I’m coasting down into the valley on my bike, the cool wind on my face. We forgot how much we’d ruined that, how we were forced to shout against the senseless fury of our machines. We came to fear the silence more than the dark, and even after the fall, so many gripped hard at the call of the juddering diesel and the cracking magnum round. It’s like we had to call out at the top of our lungs, “I still live!” We had to do that all the time, but it’s no good hiding when you’re screaming at full voice. The swells of the background music have gone away, and now it’s just the hesitant monologue of we few survivors.

*****

It’s later now, and I’m back in my place. I’m three floors up, with lots of doors between me and the street. First floor was a Thai place and a nail salon, second floor was a small law office, and then there’s me. This place used to be an art gallery. Lots of open space, wood floors. I put in a kerosene stove and bricked up a few of the windows, pulled up a futon couch, and that’s it: home. Another night of brown rice, canned beans, and some mandarin oranges. Maybe tomorrow will bring something fresh.

“Victory Virginia” Beckman from Denver’s on the radio, saying they just got pelted with snow over there. Nine inches or so, a heck of a spring storm. Virginia’s lamenting tonight. It’s her birthday, and she wants like hell to get her ashes hauled. I hope she does, but I’m not hitting the road. Not until I’m sure I’ve waited out all the storms, anyway. Denver’s a long way, a little too much danger, even though I sometimes shake with the need for human contact. Sometimes the radio lady even seems unreal, like it’s just an old broadcast from before, replaying on some automated reel. I know it’s not. She’s with me, stranded after the fall. Still, with no one to see, no second person to join the conversation, everything starts to slip, feeling like a long and fevered dream.

*****

It’s been three weeks. It’s warmer now. I have a little trailer for my bike, and I can bring a good fifty pounds of supplies in at a time now, no problem. You don’t see zombies around here very often now. Here and there, but they’re getting pretty sad looking. Whatever held them together is starting to subside, I think. Zombies haven’t been my big problem for a while. It’s me who’s the problem. It’s been nine months or so since the last time I talked to another human being. It’s getting hard to remember faces out of the past.

I know Clint Buckston was the quarterback on the football team when I was in high school, but I can’t remember what he looked like anymore. I can’t remember what my wife Jolene’s hands felt like on my skin. I remember her–the way she’d cup her hands around my chin and tell me everything would be fine–but it’s just a placeholder. All the reality is draining out of that old life, before the flashover. It’s all becoming unreal, like a fairy tale I heard as a kid.

Sure, there’s real shit here. I’m living inside the broken teeth on the broken gears of a seized machine out here, and the evidence of what we were still shines dimly in the late-spring glory of the sun. That said, abandoned things grow weird, their purposes becoming cloudy. The world inside the books I read to pass the time seems more vibrant than anything I see when I walk out my door. John Carter of Mars and his Barsoom linger in my mind, brighter than the sun glinting off the wrecked cars on 3rd West. I’d love to say that I’d learned something special about my own human-ness through this, but I haven’t. All I know is that I’m alone, and a man alone begins to lose his rationale for fighting on. Unseen, I don’t feel real. I feel like a dream of the older, forgotten world, ultimately unimportant and fleeting as the quiet earth knits its wounds.

*****

It’s midsummer. Here I am again, although less of me. Man, did I get sick. Just the flu, but I thought it was going to do what the zombies haven’t been able to manage and kill me dead. It’s a reminder. I’m one misadventure from the brink. An ill-timed broken bone or unlucky sickness is all it would take to wipe me out.

As it is, the bike rides aren’t as easy, and I’m still a little shaky on my feet. Had to find another bow, one with a draw weight I could manage. I’ll get back to feeling better, but it’s a slow road. Must have dropped fifty pounds, sweating and raving with fever. You hit forty, it gets harder to bounce back from that.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone for so long. I know there were others. I guess I hunkered down so deep that everyone thought I was gone. Gone, I guess, amounts to the same as dead at this point. Still, a city this big, you’d think that there’d be a few other holdouts, just waiting for it to all blow over. If there were, I surely would have seen their fires and heard their machines. I’m always up in the foothills, waiting for game, scanning the horizon–shoot, sometimes I’m just moving around to make the days go by, just to get the strength back in my body.

I find that I talk so tough about knowing there are other people out there. I make it seem as if I’m sure, that it’s a given that the survivors are thick on the ground, just waiting to join up and build a new society. What do I know, though?

How many of us are left? How many, really? Talking about living humans west of the Rockies, are we talking dozens, hundreds? The light parts of my head tell me that it’s thousands, but the darker whispers say I’m fooling myself, telling myself bedtime stories. Every lonely day lets that dark voice echo a little louder.

*****

Minor second thoughts about those zoo animals. The elephants, who must have tangled with some zombies here and there, have taken to charging at me whenever they can. That, and one of the lions was looking a bit too longingly at my flank steaks the other day. Ah, well. A man needs something interesting to think of in life. I’d rather be trampled or turned into lion food than, well, other things I could mention.

Ran out of kerosene last week. I’m sure there’s some more out there, but I don’t know where to look, or how long kerosene keeps, or anything like that. If it gets important, I guess I’ll learn. For the remainder of the warm season, I can just ride around and snake propane from people’s back yards, and that’ll make it easy to cook. I guess charcoal after that. In the meantime, I’m gathering fallen wood each day, laying down a little store for winter.

It may come down to the point that I’ll need to start chopping down trees and so on, but I’m thinking that won’t be until next year. By then, I don’t think I’ll have any zombies to worry about. They’re already rare, and the ones you see are in pretty sad shape.

The radio lady from Denver says that she’s having the same experience, the zombies getting rare and shaggy. Victory Virginia. She’s my only contact. I think about what she would look like, how her skin would feel, how I could…well, that’s more info than you need, but it goes to show you that you fall in love with whatever’s available. For me, it’s just a disembodied voice over the radio, and the songs she plays. In a dead world, she’s the only spark of substance I’ve got.

I find myself clinging to that, waiting in the dead of night for Virginia’s broadcast to start again. Used to be that she’d run 24/7, and it’d just be music when she was out and about. She had to start closing down, and she only runs eight hours a day now to save fuel. Those other sixteen hours seem to drag on forever, I tell you. I’ve actually and honestly prayed for the sound of her voice to come back. It always does, and she keeps a brave face on things, and for that I bless her.

Every day, I get closer to taking that leap, to going and seeing her. It’s only the fear that keeps me from doing it. Not the fear of the road anymore–that’s gone. I’m just scared that it wouldn’t be what I hoped, that I would just be some stranger, some rough looking old fart wanting more than she could give. I guess it’s just one fear trading places with another in the twilight, and none of it matters.

*****

I hear something. Something–an engine. I know it is. Holy shit, but there’s someone coming this way! Get your shit together, Rufus. Pants on, fly zipped, shirt tucked in. Whew, but my heart’s racing. I better get down there. They got no reason to think I’m here, me all cuddled down and sleeping until noon because I read until my candle was down to a stub.

Damn, but I…I was starting to doubt everything. Down the stairs, Rufus, just one at a time. No sense blowing your old knees out before you even leave the building.

Unlock the doors, bring out the bike, straddle. I’m pushing, my body burning all over. It sounds like a motorcycle. Makes sense. Good mileage, good maneuverability to get by wrecks and so on.

Heart’s in my throat. They’re just around the corner. Dropping off the bike. Here I go…

Hey! Hey! I didn’t think I’d…whoa, now. Take it easy!

<Distorted sound of several guns going off, then a low thud. Gasping noises.>

Rufus’ Voice: (barely audible) What…what happened?

<Unintelligable voices, running footfalls, getting louder.>

Female Voice: It was just some guy! Jesus, Marcy, just some poor dude, and you…

Second Female Voice: I didn’t…I thought it was…

First Voice: He’s gone now. You wasted him. It’s over.

<Sounds of movement, as well as scratching footfalls nearby the microphone. In the background, hitching sobs.>

First Voice: What’s he got there? Looks like a voice recorder…

<click>

Marcy puts the digital voice recorder down on the small table. This was his room. It smells like a man, and his cooking, and contains the comforting warmth that has gone away from the world. She walks to the window and gazes down at the street, the rusting cars, Jo-Anne next to the bikes. Everything is blurred. She can’t imagine that she has any tears left to shed, but it seems there are always more.

Jo sees her, waving her to come down to the street. She shakes her head. There are five more recordings. She knows the end of the story. Her trigger finger was the end of the story. She needs to know it all now. Marcy slumps down, not quite ready for it yet. She flips on the radio. The DJ from Denver is spinning “Lights Out In London”. Marcy closes her eyes, and it’s lights out here, too. It’s lights out everywhere.

End

Author Bio: Patrick M. Tracy lives and works in Salt Lake City. When not fixing computer for the local library system, he indulges his passion for fiction and poetry. Find out more about what he’s been up to at pmtracy.com.

Given the ability to forget the past, to de-conceptualize the future, and live only in each moment, the tragedy of the flashover would lose all its poignancy.  We could stop skulking in the ruins of our own dreams, hating those hopes that turned into a rusted shroud of burning iron upon our brow in that moment when society disjoined, when the fertile tapestry of our culture vanished into dust.

The ghost towns are haunted, our former flesh turned to a gibbering, shambling mockery.  We are eaten by our own crude doppelgangers daily, we few, sad remainders, and our dream are unquiet with the thought of being the very last, the final notes in a symphony cut short in mid-crescendo.  Our voices have been muted, our expressions just songs that will never be heard by another ear, felt in another’s heart.  We are neurons firing into dead tissue, our deeds naught but the pointless twitching of bird with a broken neck.  And still, we find ourselves unable to stop moving, to surrender to the sepulchral stillness all around.  It isn’t in us, that capability to abandon a losing game.

I could tell you many things, many terrible truths about the bad times after humanity’s fall.  I could teach you the ways of running, of the breath caught forever in the throat as one forces himself to silence, hoping to hide a moment longer from the walking damned as they crave for his flesh.  I could paint the pictures drawn in blood, alluding to the stench of rotting meat still motile, of blackened teeth clamping down on the livid flesh of those still breathing, of the horror within the blank eyes of our enemies.

The still photographs, were there artists enough left to appreciate such things, would be grand enough for a showing upon the fine walls of the museum.  Whole traffic jams trapped in silent congress, the burnt-out opulence of Cadillac husks standing pale in the midday gloom, a herd of elk drinking from a algae-green public fountain in the city square.  Whole skylines washed clean, for there is no smokestack left to belch its filth into the upper air now, even the small and lingering fires long doubted.

There is a certain beauty in the death of us, something terribly sad about the prosaic remnants of what we built, now unmade by lack of grid power and the absence of foot traffic.  All our miracles of innovation are but empty husks and discarded tin cans without a critical mass of souls to power them.  They are ours, and without us, they are nothing.

Perhaps because humanity always took itself too seriously, this unceremonious end, this absurdity of being eaten into extinction by our own dead, seems almost proper.  It’s as if the gods of irony have finally turned their eyes upon us.  Even while the jarring recoil of an old war-issue Browning Automatic Rifle assaults my shoulder and the bodies of the shambling crowd burst into deep red bloom, I find a laugh at the back of my throat.

All the realists, all the moral philosophers, all the brimstone preachers waving their accusatory fingers at their assembled congregations, and here we are, firing until the ammunition is exhausted, finally no more than cave folk afraid of distant thunder and clenching the sturdiest of our prey’s leg bones as we fight to stay awake.

These are the thoughts I have carried, carried as I burned Houston, carried as I walked the streets of Austin like a character in a video game, destroying every unwholesome tomb of flesh that yet grumbled for surfeit.  These are the songs I have sung to myself as the diesel wound and the tires cried upon the broken asphalt of our forgotten kingdom.  These are the songs now ended.  Inchoate rises this tide of awful flesh, and I have run my last, squeezed the trigger my last, given over to the sinfulness of these flowery words my last.  I give you leave to turn away your glance, stranger.  I would not wish the sight of my demise on anyone.

This is David Allen Wexler, signing off.

Author Bio:

Patrick M. Tracy grew up in Maine, but has long-since grown accustomed to the arid heat of the Southwest.  He graduated from Northern Arizona University with a degree in English.  Consequently, he became a computer technician in a library, which serves to support his writing habit.  Learn more about him at http://www.pmtracy.com.

There were no sirens, no honks from the street, though it appeared there’d been a massive accident, and several cars were pushed out of line. An SUV was actively burning, but no one was doing anything about it. Morris swallowed, took a big sip of his coffee, and put it down. He had to see this.

At the window to the shop, he looked out onto the street. He’d never felt so odd. There was just…no one there. Not a single person. He let himself out. The morning commute provided an abundance of cars, now bereft of their human payload and in various postures of “crash”. Many still idled as they protruded from store fronts or clung together in a knot of twisted of sheetmetal. No blood on any seat, no irate motorists threatening violence or lawsuits. Just the eerie whisper of unquiet engines.

“What the hell?” Morris asked. The sound of his voice rebounded, loud and frightened in his ears. The deep wrongness of the scene hung on him like a concrete veil. He went from one vehicle to the next, looking. Any clue would be fine, but he needed something to cling to, some brief and scanty explanation. None was forthcoming. He turned off ignitions if he could. The burning SUV appeared to be in no danger of setting anything else ablaze, so he let it pass.

Approaching an Olds from the 80s, his heart jumped in its chest. Someone was in there, thank God. He reached for the driver’s side window, rapping against the glass. The person in there, a big guy with a thready red beard, swung his head to look. Morris didn’t care for the vacant, glassy look in the guys eyes.

He wondered if the guy had a concussion, maybe a fractured skull. He did have a welt high up on his forehead, and the Olds hadn’t come through the events of the morning unscathed. Morris stepped back, a tickle of warning coming up his brain stem from the old, animal parts below. Things were not hunky dory with the pilot of the Olds. Unable to quantify this flesh-deep feeling, Morris held still. The door opened and the guy lurched out, movements imprecise as a drunk’s.

“Dude, are you okay?” Morris asked. A small part of his mind registered the stupidity of that question. Of course he wasn’t. In no stretch of imagination was anyone okay, himself included.

The guy didn’t reply, nor did any evidence that he’d heard cross his face. Without preamble, he reached for Morris, clenching his damp, soft, huge hands around Morris’s throat. The awful strength of the man’s grasp instantly shut off Morris’s air, and his vision pulsed in weird rainbow waves like oily water.

Shocked, he hung there, nearly hauled clear of the ground, for just a moment. The instinct to survive shot fear and adrenalin into his veins, however, and he lashed out, kicking his assailant in the groin with all his strength. Looking directly at the man’s glassy eyes, he couldn’t detect the slightest hint of a response. Morris, who’d taken Judo for a while, desperately chopped at the man’s elbows and wrists, trying to break his grip before he passed out.

Fists clenched, Morris pounded on the guy’s left arm until the smothering grasp on his neck weakened. He slipped away, putting two cars between himself and the homicidal driver. Morris tried to shout at his attacker, to ask him what the hell the idea was, but all that came out of his bruised throat was a wheezing noise.

The red haired motorist plodded forward, following him with dispassionate, thudding steps. Morris sprinted twenty yards and turned back. The guy still followed him. He looked around, finding a sizable chunk of asphalt. He threw it at his pursuer, hitting the guy in the left leg, but that didn’t seem to even register.

“Like a fucking zombie,” Morris wheezed to himself. Suddenly, looking around, he became concerned that he’d lost his mind, that he’d fallen asleep on the john and was having a bad dream. It was tax season, and his had swerved sideways into a nightmare of bookwork. He hadn’t been getting enough sleep…

He touched his throat, raw and swollen. Every breath stung his damaged larynx. No, this wasn’t a dream. He didn’t have dreams with strong sensory stimulus. Not that it wouldn’t have been cool. All those horny little vignettes about Susan Millman in school would have been a lot neater if he could have felt what he pictured.

He probably would have never worked up the courage for a real girlfriend, had he been able to cup a breast or put his lips to the tender spot below an ear while dreaming. Probably a good thing not to have those abilities. Society would have never flourished if people did.

Morris jogged further down the road, opening up enough distance between he and the shambling Olds driver. Where was everyone? It seemed like it was just he and the walking stupid back there. His coffee started turning to acid in his stomach and the pain in his throat wasn’t dying down at all.

A latina woman in Jiffy Lube coveralls that announced her name to be “Inez” appeared to his left. She had the same dead, cheer-down expression as the guy from the Olds. She surged in his direction, arms pinwheeling. Morris tried to push her away, but she was strong. She grabbed his hand and tried her best to get his fingers close to her mouth. Her teeth, pearly white and even, clacked together like the clappers that started and ended a scene on a movie set. With a blank-eyed avidity, she tried to feed herself his fingers.

Normally amiable, Morris totally lost his sense of humor. He punched Inez from Jiffy Lube in the face with his left hand. He felt teeth rock back, felt flesh give under his knuckles, but she only staggered and released her grasp on his right hand.

With his good fist back in his possession and with its full complement of fingers, he sent it out with all his force, catching Inez on the chin hard enough to knock her to the pavement. Where any normal person of her size would have been knocked cold–Morris wasn’t a wimp, and had been in more than a few fist fights in his day–Inez, sullen and expressionless as ever, started to rise. No spray of bright blood, but only a trickle of dark and motor-oil thick junk decorated her chin below those wrecked teeth.

“Fuck this,” Morris rasped, kicking Inez in the arm she was using to brace herself up. The elbow joint hyperextended, the wet popping sound of ligaments letting go giving him the willies. He turned, the Olds guy almost on him, and got the hell out of there.

He didn’t stop running until the pain in his side was too searing to keep on. He found himself in a residential area he wasn’t familiar with. He hadn’t really paid any attention to where he was going. He’d lost his shit, forgetting his car, everything. Not that his car would have done him much good. Most of the busy streets were filled with crashed vehicles, burning heaps of metal, and other impassable obstructions. A bicycle would be the way to go, or one of those moped-scooter deals.

Morris didn’t see Inez or Olds guy at this point. He sat down on the curb in front of a sprawling bunglow-style house from the late 70s, holding his head in his hands. “Man, this is all wrong,” he said to the dusty tarmac between his feet. He said it several times, though his protests didn’t bring about any kind of paradigm shift in the situation. He heard a strange moaning sound, and the scrape of a shoe nearby.

A kid, no more than thirteen, was advancing toward him with an aluminum baseball bat. Morris rolled out of the way just in time to avoid getting the full end of a swing that would have sent a ball down the right field line. The kid’s eyes were equally as vacant as Inez’s had been. Morris suddenly had a perfect-memory remembrance of W.C. Field saying, “Get away from me kid, you bother me.”

Caught between horror, laughter, and plain exasperation, Morris rolled to his feet. The kid was a bit more agile than the adults had been, and he was friggin’ armed. Morris looked around for anything that he could use as a weapon. All that he came up with was the mailbox. It was a 4×4 painted off-white, topped by a desert-themed mailbox with a roadrunner on it. He put his back into it, ripped it out of its post hole, and swung it straight down, like an axe splitting kindling. The mailbox shattered as it hit the kid’s head, and he went down.

Morris stepped on the kid’s wrist and pulled at the bat, trying to get it away from the boy’s grasp. He was rewarded for his efforts by getting bitten on the calf and punched repeatedly in the backside. Dancing away, though, he had the ball bat, and felt good about himself.

It occurred to Morris that it didn’t auger well for the day when his first big triumph was pummeling a pint-sized, homicidal weirdie with a mailbox.

“Any day without zombies…” he breathed. His voice was finally starting to come back a bit.

The kid was up again, and the mailbox incident hadn’t done anything for his looks. One eye had collapsed, and the jelly of his eyeball rolled down his cheek. Morris found that, under the thin paint of being the office manager at Lamb Data Entry, he was capable of not giving one rat’s ass about this kid, and whatever had put the tombstones in his eyes.

Morris swung the bat. Hard. The jolt of a cranium beneath the aluminum bat stung his hands. Down, the kid kept struggling to stand. Morris kept swinging the bat until the kid’s head completely popped, the mush of his ruined brain spread across the lava rocks of the parking strip.

Out of breath, not wanting to look at the mess of the kid’s shattered skull, Morris swung the bat over one shoulder and walked further into subdivision. After about a block, he had to rest his palms against his knees and throw up. Sweat popped out all over, and he had to sit down, his back leaning against the side of a Buick Skylark from the late 90s. He blew air out, his vision becoming indistinct. “Man, this is all wrong,” he told the barrel cactus nearby. The plant didn’t appear perturbed. Then again, the zombified remnants of civilization weren’t trying to eat it, either.

Morris knew that, if he ran around town like a dill weed for long, he’d end up as a food item. He didn’t know how this had happened, or why, or if it was happening all over, but those were secondary questions, questions too big to address right now. He just needed a plan. He needed something to get him through the day, and then the night.

“I’m gonna need guns for this,” he told himself. “Big guns.”

*****

The human mind is adaptable. Morris had heard people say as much from time to time. He’d never had any axe to grind one way or another on the topic. Seemed like you could get over some things, other stuff really got to you. People could learn to live with all sorts of crazy shit–except when it drove them batty. Everyone had their breaking point.

Morris supposed that he hadn’t reached his yet, though he’d lost his composure here and there. He thought that he could have probably done a lot worse. Getting throttled to death or eaten, or both. He was far from rock bottom. As the morning stretched out and noon seemed like a hundred years away, he wandered the abandoned streets of the subdivision, looking for tools to help him survive.

“No hitting bottom just yet, little brohim.”

He’d been able to find a bicycle after only a few minutes and one incident of breaking and entering. Now mounted, he rode with the aluminum bat protruding from between his thighs, its thick end stuffed into the upward-facing water bottle carrier. He had seen a few more zombies, but the speed of the Trek bike had been enough to get away.

Though his mind recoiled from the consideration of people becoming zombies, he had to admit that the term applied. No sense in deluding himself. It was the apocalypse, and these were, indeed, staggering flesh-cravers. They weren’t exactly like the George Romero zombies, but they certainly weren’t according-to-Hoyle people anymore, either. “Zombie” was as close a terminology as he could find at the moment.

By 11:30, Morris was tired and hungry. The smoke from a lot of unchecked fires lay thick across the city’s skyline. The power was still on, but he wondered how long that would last. If the population was as decimated elsewhere as it was here, many of civilization’s amenities were going to get scarce.

He wheeled into a Safeway grocery store and rode up and down the aisles on the Trek. The strange, guilty pleasure of doing something he’d have gotten in trouble for as of 8:45 this morning was unusually sour on his tongue. Someone had said that hell was other people once, but Morris thought that he could do with a little of that hell.

He scanned the dry goods section, not really paying attention. He felt safe. Hey, it was a Safeway, right? In a moment, he felt the impact of a body against him, sending him sprawling into the shelving. He felt a long cut open up on his arm, and bruises were driven into his flesh as the bike went all wrong and he was pummeled by the inertia.

Someone landed on top of him, raining slow, hard punches down on his head and shoulders. One hit the back of his skull and drove his face into the shining floor tiles. He felt a bone in his nose give way, and the wet, full feeling of blood leaking out of his nostrils drove Morris to stand. His mouth filled with hot copper and salt, choking him with his own crimson life.

He threw off his attacker and moved away, holding his face. Blood now splashed down to his chin and against his business casual shirt. He turned, seeing a Filipino guy of at least fifty. He had a pot belly and wore a Hawaiian shirt. His eyes were as hard and unresponsive as polished flint.

The Filipino zombie came for him, mouth chewing on air, hoping for flesh. Morris reached for the nearest thing–a jar of dill pickles–and threw it with all possible velocity. It slammed into the guy’s face, shattering and sending pickles and brine all over the place. The zombie swayed on its feet, but didn’t go down. Morris grabbed cans of olives and other nearby items, pelting the zombie with them until it sagged. He edged closer, grasping the ball bat, and put a messy end to the Filipino guy’s trip into the land of the shambling cannibals.

Shaky, out of adrenalin, and bone-weary, Morris grabbed a packet of dinner napkins from aisle nine. With napkins and duct tape, he bound his lacerated forearm. He touched the bridge of his nose, feeling where the bones weren’t synched up. He squeezed and straightened, sending a blast of fresh agony through his head that nearly knocked him to his knees. Putting the bones back in order hurt far worse than the initial disarrangement.

Morris cleared a segment of the cold case with uncaring abandon, then lay back in the chill, trying to staunch the flow of blood. He swallowed blood until his stomach quavered and threatened to eject it all. Finally the platelets did their work and the blood clotted. Morris’s eyes eclipsed. The cool of the refrigerated case calmed him. If zombies came for him…well, let them come. He couldn’t go any longer.

After dozing for a short stretch, Morris roused himself and drank a bottle of chocolate milk. He managed to find the staff restroom in the back. It had a shower stall, and he made good use of it. He picked a t-shirt out of the left-over bin on aisle twenty-one. Better than the blood-laced button-up he’d been wearing. It said “Shamrock Power”, and was marked $5.99. He considered it a fair trade for services rendered, and didn’t feel he needed to pay.

The staff break room in back had a microwave and an electric fry pan. Morris treated himself to strip steak and a microwavable noodle side dish. By the time he’d eaten his steak and drained a twenty ounce Pepsi, it was nearly 2:45. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like he’d been attending Fight Club. Frequently. And losing. Still, alive and beaten was better than dead and pretty. The bruises would heal.

“Firearms, motorized transport, and a safe place to crash. That’s what I have to find,” Morris enumerated. Though he hadn’t resorted to such archaic measures for years, he cracked open a local yellow pages and started looking around for what he needed.

*****

The little Kymco scooter fired right up. After the rider had disappeared, or been vaporized, or had been whisked off to heaven with the pious, or whatever the hell had happened, the little guy had run down a grassy gulch at the side of the road and fallen on its side. Morris couldn’t see any damage. Even the brake levers were straight.

He rode it back up to the edge of the road, then pondered the best method of carrying his ball bat–his whompin’ stick vs. the weirdies. Couldn’t very well leave that behind. After some experiments, he found that he could use his belt to affix the bat to the scooter. He’d have to find a better solution, but it would serve for the moment. Now, off to find the proper ordnance for weirdie control.

He made a conscious decision to call them weirdies from that point forward. At least it made him smile. They said that, in war, you had to dehumanize your enemy. Here, he had to humanize it a bit, if only to blunt the yawning minefield of questions regarding the universe and its nature. Weirdies didn’t bring up all the uncomfortable questions that zombies did.

The bicycle had been nice, but being able to squirt away from the lingering weirdies at better than forty miles an hour was a real boon. Besides, the wind in his face revived him a little. The pain of all his injuries weighed heavily on Morris, but he knew he had to keep plugging along. He just wondered if he’d be able to move at all, come morning. Assuming that he made it to morning.

His scooter came to a halt in front of Fuller’s Firearms. Every window had heavy wrought-iron bars, and the front door was an all-steel security model. Morris hoped like hell the place had been unlocked when the apocalypse hit, because he doubted he could get in by force or craft if it was locked. He grinned for a moment as the door knob turned.

Inside the cool confines of the gun store, he looked around, taking it all in. It was a wonderland of firearms. Pistols, rifles, shotguns. Sorts of guns he’d never seen, and he watched a lot of television. Along one wall, there was a colorful profusion of ammunition boxes. There were knives in spinning cases. A variety of holsters and other accouterments filled one quadrant.

At the back, a hallway led into the back of the store, where there was a full indoor shooting range. He opened the door to the range and looked down the shooting lanes. The number 25 appeared at the end of them. He guessed it was 25 yards. Morris hadn’t shot a gun since Junior High, when he’d gone with his uncle to shoot cans with their old pump action .22. He’d always meant to get back into it. It had been great fun, and he’d been a fair marksman for a little dude, but there had never been that fabled “right time”. Now, as the song said, “here’s that rainy day”.

Morris went around and locked all the exterior doors. He didn’t want weirdies wandering in and somehow getting smart enough to pick up an AK. With all the hatches battened, Morris started to look around. He thought about what sorts of weapons would be the most effective against the weirdies. They were tough, and hits that would put a normal person down seemed fairly ineffective. Particularly, blunt force didn’t seem to make much of an impression, unless it broke a bone or mutilated a joint.

From his experience with the ball bat, you had to essentially smash their brains out to get them to stop. Yes, shooting their legs off would probably suffice to allow you to get away, but if you didn’t want to contend with a maimed weirdie later, it was probably advisable to apply maximum cephalic carnage.

Morris touched the graceful lines of a hunting rifle, the heavy breach of a double-barrel shotgun, the business-like harshness of an assault rifle. In the pistol case, he caught sight of one of the massive handguns they liked to show in the action movies. Desert Eagles, they were called. He put his hand around one and pulled it out. It was staggeringly heavy, and the grips were so big around that he felt as if he could only get a tenuous grasp on the weapon.

“Nope. Too huge,” he muttered.

He tried a few rifles. Many of them didn’t have any sights. He guessed that they needed scopes, but he wasn’t sure he could install one. Anyway, he wasn’t looking to hit the weirdies from a thousand yards. He just needed to be able to clear them out when he was moving around town. Whatever he chose had to be portable, simple, and effective.

Morris came down to a group of possible candidates. He had several handguns, a small combat rifle that appeared to be based on a pistol, and a combat shotgun. Where he could, he skimmed the instruction manuals for these weapons. The revolvers seemed simple enough, and he’d watched enough cop shows to understand the basics of how the shotgun and automatic pistols worked. He searched for ammunition for his preliminary picks, finding a dizzying array of choices. He grabbed an assortment and stacked it near the weapons. He also grabbed a few knives that looked interesting.

The longer Morris stayed in the gun store, the more it seemed to him that it would make a perfect base of operations. He would have to get plenty of food, of course, but since the place was secure and filled with weapons, it seemed ideal. He’d need to make several trips with supplies, though. The scooter wouldn’t carry that much. If he wanted to get started with that project, he’d have to get moving tonight.

The pistols would be easiest to carry on the scooter. Morris wrapped the guns in a towel and took them back to the range. He found a pair of ear protective muffs and some man-shaped targets behind the clerk’s desk. He pinned up several targets and ran them out to the nearest range, seven yards. He tried the .44 magnum revolver first. He’d always been a huge Dirty Harry fan, and remembering the part about the .44 blowing a punk’s head clean off sounded promising.

He took aim and pulled the trigger. What followed was a terrifying noise and a fearsome kick that left his hand buzzing, much as it had when he landed a good clout with the ball bat. There was a clear hole in the middle of the target’s head. After the first shot, though, Morris found that he was flinching, a little overawed with the revolver’s noise and recoil. He flexed his wrist and put the .44 down as a bit too much gun for him, at least in a pressure situation. He didn’t have time to acclimate himself with something that intense.

Next up, he had an old-fashioned .45 auto. He loaded the magazine and inserted it. The sound of the .45 was a big, cheerful boom. The kick, while still significant, was light compared with the .44. He was able to put five of the eight shots in the head. On the last shot, the gun’s slide stuck back, showing an empty chamber. He put the pistol down, nodding. Not bad.

He did notice that it had somehow taken a chunk of skin off of his hand. It was oozing blood, a shallow but stinging injury. He was concerned that all the guns seemed to hurt the shooter a bit when they went off. Still, it seemed like the .45 would do the job. The ominous size of the neat, round holes in the paper made Morris feel that any skull that they collided with would be in grave jeopardy.

The 9mm Beretta didn’t kick much, but the noise was an unpleasant crack that the muffs didn’t fully erase. Morris found that his shooting was erratic with the 9mm, but he wasn’t sure if it was the gun or just a twitchy hand. The trigger seemed sort of heavy, and he felt like it complicated the process of holding the gun steady. Finally, there was an old-west style gun made by Ruger.

It was in .45, but the “Long Colt” style, rather than “A.C.P.”. The difference was clear as he held the two sorts of ammo side-by-side. The automatic ammo was sort and squat, with a different type of lip on the back, while the Long Colt type looked more like the .44. He hoped that it wouldn’t be as painful to fire, though.

The old-style gun was easy to aim, and cocking the trigger made all the westerns of his youth come back. He fired, and found that the kick was mild, the noise no higher than the .45 auto had been. He put five of six shots in the target’s head, though one wasn’t a really solid hit. The mechanics of the old gun were really easy to understand, and he felt that it would be easiest to use if things got tough. Since it also didn’t injure him, he declared it the temporary winner.

With an old-west holster and ammo belt, a loaded .45, and a backpack to carry supplies in, Morris revved away on his little Kymco scooter, evening beginning to shroud the landscape of the deserted and burning city.

The smoky sky, awash with deep red and purple, covered him with the odd light of a fallen world, and the emotion nearly overcame him. The light of his little scooter’s headlight became indistinct and blurry as he road back toward the Safeway. The cars, caught like dinosaurs in the midst of some sheetmetal Ragnarök, had mostly fallen silent. The few that still idled, Morris broke their windows out and switched them off.

“Probably fix global warming, at least,” he mused. The awesome revelation that everyone he’d ever known was gone, that he was possibly the only whole person on a silent planet full of zombies, came to rest on his shoulders. Morris sank down next to the oversized tire of an F-350 and tried to make himself breathe. Two weirdies shambled around the edge of an old Skylark nearby. Gritting his teeth, Morris forced himself up.

He drew his .45 and stepped closer, perilously close. He cocked and fired right into the nearest weirdie’s face, blowing it to bits. It fell like a bowling pin. He turned, a low, primal roar building in his throat, and shot at the other. The first shot hit it high in the sternum, smashing in a fist-sized area of its chest. It kept coming. Firing again, Morris blasted away its cheek bone. Finally, from only a few paces away, he shot its forehead away, sending it to the ground. His body shook all over.

He knew he couldn’t take vengeance on the weirdies for all that had happened–it wasn’t their fault. Still, it felt good to act, to fight, to control something, if only the booming report of an outmoded revolver. Perhaps, though, its time had come back again. The west, he thought, had never been so wild as this.

It took the last two shots to shoot his way clear of the following group of weirdies. Morris holstered the empty revolver and sped away on his scooter. In his rear view mirrors, he saw the accumulated shadows of a group of at least nine more. The final two he’d capped were crawling on the ground, broken inside but still animate.

Their buddies, hungry and deprived of the sweeter flesh, fell upon them and started ripping flesh free. He looked away, putting the throttle to the stop and heading for Safeway. He’d have to reload, but he didn’t want to chance it until he was in the clear. They were teaming up now, and big groups were dangerous in a way that ones and twos could never be. He’d have to be careful, even packing heat.

*****

That night, he managed only one trip, carrying three gallons of water underneath the seat and a whole backpack full of no-prep food like Power Bars and Yoo-Hoo. He had to fire a few shots as he rolled through, but he got back to Fuller’s intact and locked himself down. He laid down all the camo vests and jackets, all the trap shooter t-shirts, and anything else soft. He rested his head on a sand bag that seemed to be for target shooting with a rifle.

He had four ibuprofen tablets in his system, and he was as tired as he’d ever been. It was almost noon on the next day before he rolled up and forced himself to stand.

Morris ate a few nutrition bars, drank a Yoo-Hoo, and splashed water on his face. He had deep, livid bruises under both eyes, scratches on his face, and a prize fighter’s nose. He looked almost as bad as a weirdie himself. He stretched, washing out the deeper wounds. Popping more ibuprofen, he replenished the open loops on his ammo belt and took a look at the revolver, wondering if it needed to be cleaned. There was a little hint of powder on the business end of the cylinder, but he thought it was probably okay. Likely as not, he’d be putting it to work again soon.

He tested the combat shotgun in the range, and with the ammunition marked 00 Buck and 000 Buck, it worked really well. It pretty much peppered the head on the target from seven yards. Aiming was really only of the “general direction” level. That was fine with Morris. It took a minute to load it, but it held nine shots, so that wasn’t too bad.

He tried the little Beretta rifle, and it proved to be very easy to shoot. He moved the target out to the full length of the range and found that, if he held the rifle tight to his shoulder and took his time, he could put every bullet in the head. It only carried eight shots, but he had two magazines for it, so that was sixteen.

Morris put the rifle in his backpack, cinched it up tight, and tucked the shotgun behind his back. It was a little tenuous, but it would hold while he rode the scooter. With his cowboy revolver, a shotgun, and the little rifle, he decided to go hunting. If he could kill off a bunch of the local weirdies, he wouldn’t have to worry about them getting up to no good when he wasn’t ready.

At the door, he paused, the chicken inside him making it hard to go on. He understood that fortune favored the bold, but the bold also died by misadventure with some frequency. Morris leaned his head against the glass, closing his eyes. When he opened them, he found that there were five weirdies shambling toward him from across the street.

“Shit,” he whispered. “Damn. Son of a bitch.” Out of curses for the moment, he pulled the shotgun out and set it against the inside of the door. Digging in, he found the rifle, inserted the magazine, and took aim. It took all eight shots from the Beretta’s first clip to drop the five weirdies. He reloaded in time to see that there were several more approaching. The Beretta spat its lead and fell silent, yet there were still more coming for him.

They were crawling out of the woodwork, whatever that meant. Morris switched to the shotgun and blasted down six weirdies with its full load. The final two weirdies took every bullet in the Ruger, and sweat poured from Morris’s face as the last one fell, nearly close enough to touch. He ducked back inside Fuller’s and bolted the door.

“Jesus. Jesus. Holy mackerel.” Mechanically, he started to reload all the guns. “If Morris won’t go to the weirdies, move the weirdies to Morris,” he droned. “Thanks, uncaring supreme being. I needed that.” His voice sounded strange and distant, all sounds muffled in the crawling, cottony realm of partial deafness.

His hands shook, and the profuse sweat took a long time to recede. Looking outside, there were several more weirdies, now at work chewing on the flesh of their fallen comrades. Morris felt his gorge rise, and only just made it to the bathroom in time to empty his stomach into the toilet.

He was crying and snotting and shaking all over, his every impulse offended by what had become of the world. For a moment, he felt like he was going to lose it, like the next bullet was going to go up his nose and end the show right there. They never showed that part in the movies or the cop shows.

Yeah, they had to go to counseling or whatever, but they didn’t tell you how hard it was to swallow the idea the people wanted to kill you, and that you had to kill them first. They surely didn’t make mention of anything like what he’d just seen. The images of heads burst open, of arms shot away in a mess of bone fragments and ropey muscle. No, the censors wouldn’t have gone for that. No way.

“I’m probably gonna have to get drunk,” he mused. First, he had to smoke the rest of the weirdies. His gut and heart ached, set hard against the need to pick up the shotgun again. He had to. He couldn’t have them loitering around out there, eating the dead all day.

Perhaps too late, he put the ear protectors on, going out the door in a hail of buckshot. It was dirty work, and the smell of the street became unspeakable as the warm sun baked the bodies. The noisome stench of pierced body cavities and liquefied brains jolted the senses.

Through that day, Morris had to go out five different times, each time blowing away at least a handful of weirdies. He was literally knee deep in the dead by twilight, his shoulder so sore from repeated shotgunning that he could hardly move his arm.

Though he stunk from fear sweat, gunpowder, and puke, he didn’t have the energy or the requisite courage left to go back to the Safeway that day. He washed up as well as he could in the sink and fell into the pile of woodsman’s clothing. In the deep parts of the night, he could hear the weirdies outside, moving, feasting. Utterly exhausted, he ignored them. The morning would have to be soon enough. It would have to be soon enough for the booze, too.

*****

The morning of the third day, Morris had to shoot down the better part of a dozen weirdies outside his door. They kept coming, drawn by something. Perhaps the noise, perhaps the smell. He didn’t know.

More confident with guns now, he found that an AR-15 with a thirty round clip was equal to the task. The bullets were small, but they’d pop skulls like a champ if you did your part. Amidst the cool morning air, thin wisps of steam rose from the rifle’s barrel.

Pushing the ear protectors down around his neck, he surveyed the scene. The whole area suffered the barren, hollow silence, the woeful aftermath when the thunder of guns fades away.

The carnage at his front door had become unacceptable by now, looking like an open mass grave. With his trusty shotgun and friends, he went in search of some recourse to the problem. Nearly a mile away, he found a huge bulldozer in the middle of a block where all the buildings had been knocked down and the land flattened for new development.

Those plans, of course, were doomed to never see fruition. The minds who’d thought them up were gone, either disappeared or erased by the tombstone agenda of the weirdies. All the things that had mattered so much and been fought over for so long now couldn’t stack together to reach the height of a dime.

While coming to grips with the ‘dozer’s complicated controls, he shot down four weirdies. A numbness, a dull acceptance of the facts of his new existence crawled up his spine and bloomed like dead flowers behind his eyes. He fired up the ‘dozer. It belched black smoke, and with a rattling cacophony, it pushed its way through crashed cars and everything else.

It relocated piles of dead weirdies without complaint, and Morris learned that if he didn’t look too closely at the pummeled remains it piled, he was fine, and his lunch would stay put. Armed with the ‘dozer, he managed to push a clear lane through all the wreckage between his various destinations by day’s end. Weirdies made their appearance, but they couldn’t climb a moving dozer. Some of the slower ones he crushed to puddles of red beneath the tracks.

Taking possession of a Toyota Prius with only superficial damage, Morris whispered back and forth between Fuller’s and Safeway until his immediate needs were met. That night, he found a way up onto the roof, a sealed and whitewashed tar expanse. It was nearly all flat, and he set up his charcoal hibachi there, cooking ribeye and washing it down with a six pack of Amstel.

From his high vantage, he could cap any varmint weirdies that shambled by. The smoke from the big pile of them down the road still filtered skyward, now alone on the horizon, as most of the car fires and isolated areas of burning had now smoldered to a halt. Morris guessed that this was how the world ended, at least for the people. You could watch our going as the fires subsided, behind us the empty eyes of broken windows. In silence and charred earth, we retreated forever, our collective strivings meaning so little in the end.

It was too hard to look inward, though, to ache for the afterimages of the world that had been. Better, at least, to remain in the grasp of objective reality. Better to turn one’s attention to the tasks at hand.

It was hard not to notice that, after a few days of short rations, the city’s dog population was starting to get pretty frisky. He shook his head. He supposed a little dog-on-weirdie violence couldn’t hurt him too bad. He’d probably have to watch out for the packs that were forming, though. They’d go back to feral and see him as a food source in another few weeks.

“Ah, the good life,” he muttered. He sat back in his folding camp stool and watched the stars wink on in the heavens. A bright yellow moon rose, three-quarters full. He didn’t know if it was waning or waxing, but without television or the radio, he’d damned well find out. He’d have time to read all those books he’d been hoping to get through, too.

He’d need a few hobbies to keep himself sane. The grim work of staying alive couldn’t do that. Morris just wondered if every word, every image he looked at would remind him of the world that was. It would hurt. Every idle thought would be tinged with pain, but maybe that was a good thing.

Much as he didn’t want to face the raw surface of a planet gone quiet, he had to imagine that there were others out there. Morris needed to believe that he wasn’t the last man standing. He had to hang onto that, the idea of a world of people, rather than an empty place haunted by fetid mockeries of human form.

As he nursed the last of the Amstel, a rolling blackout moved across the city, all the street lamps dying out in a wave, as if blue cloth were being thrown across the whole valley. Even though he’d known it had to happen, it put Morris’s heart in his throat.

The awful stillness, the unleavened darkness…he trembled with a cave man’s fear of the dark. He got up, looking out of the darkened domain where he seemed to be the soul survivor. His eyes could still pick out features in the moonlight, but the shadows hung deep in every alley, next to every mangled car.

The easy days were over. This part–the surviving–would be a bitch. He’d have to go out there, finding a place where he could do more than sweep the streets clear of weirdies and hide in a forlorn gun store. Somewhere out there, by the side of Eden’s desolate highways, he’d have to carve a niche for himself. Maybe he’d be alone at first, but he had to believe that someday, he’d find a friend. Someday, he’d look into another pair of eyes that wasn’t filled with tombstones.

All our guns have eaten their fill and fallen silent. The two concrete-cutting Husqvarnas run dry of gas and sputter to a halt. The guns have perforated the dull flesh of the oncoming hoard, the rough, dull gore of the wounds fading into the rocky soil of Hellas. The saws have torn through flesh and bone, simple tools made holy in this last of our struggles.

Miklos, our buddy from college, the guy we came to Greece to see, is dead and masticated, feeding the undead urge of the mob below. I saw his eyes as they carried him away, already parted out like a zebra among lions. I saw him silently beg for my aid, then know that all was lost, finally knowing nothing. Before the end, he finally saw us as we are, finally knew that one big secret we always kept.

Today, alone on an earth groaning with the empty-eyed dead, being a werewolf doesn’t seem so strange as it once did. So what, right? One little legend being partially true, when you weigh it against the reality of the Flashover–it’s like holding a candle up next to a roaring inferno. That revelation we held so hard within us is now no more than an afterthought. Leaves you, like the song said, disempowered and twitching.

Still, if you’re going to have this sort of thing, this Spartan stand, I guess Greece is a good place for it. Edwina snarls next to me, her machete sheering the heads from two walking corpses. Warwick kicks one zombie in the chest, his big werewolf foot burst out from the toe of his hiking boot. The corpsie bastard’s ribs cave in and he rockets back, taking a dozen others down and down the steps. The whole quadrant becomes a morass of struggling zombie flesh as they roar and strike out at each other. The truly inanimate churn down beneath the simply unliving as the battle continues.

The animate, mindless dead surge and gurgle below us. I hoist a free segment of old stone from a shattered column and toss it down into their midst. It hits edge-on, rolling and spinning through them. The sound of bones breaking like straw wafts up. The plangent chorus of death stink rises ever higher, tangible on the tongue. Devouring each other, tearing at rotten and giving flesh, they bunch and surge forward again, phased by nothing, tireless, insectile in their pure need and unending vigor.

Sweat and blood, our hoarse breathing, the inevitable slap of chill flesh upon our flanks as they try and try again to pull us down. In this, our one great moment, we find so little joy. Built to take pain, formed for the kill, we are yet beholden to this implacable enemy, the thick and coagulated blood in their veins like rotten ketchup, unreal. They are things without place, without meaning, without any clear purpose.

At first, we howl, but as the carnelian sky fades to the Stygian darkness of night, we know that this is, for us, the underworld. Our great strength becomes our flaw, the self-evident noose with which to ensnare us forever. We are doomed to contemplate the meaning of our inhumanity, the paltry monstrosity we represent, when held up against this implacable enemy.

We roll the dead and broken corpses of the re-slain down this Parthenon hill, growling our hoarse, remaining life down at the unending hoard, daring them where no daring is required, for what is the second death? It is nothing, an event unmarked by a single tear, and we are merely keepers of a gate before an empty castle, for all of human life has failed, even the American on the shortwave fallen into silence.

Edwina’s machete slips from her grasp. In a worthless attempt to snatch it back, she is suddenly amongst them, and they are tearing at her thickened hide with all their mindless resolve. I hear her cry out, hear the sound of her arms breaking, her flesh parting before their green and noisome teeth.

Warwick, who has always loved her the most, throws himself into the fray. For a moment, his terrible ferocity clears a space, and they are shoulder to shoulder, her barely able to stand, bleeding from a dozen wounds, bent with injury. I hurl the final boulder down, hoping to win their freedom, but nearly beyond real hope, the leaden numbness of battle rising up from my core.

I howl for them to return, howl my defensive cry out into the arches of the night. For one last time, they answer me, and then the swirling maelstrom of dumb flesh swallows them up. I fight for a time, fight for many more minutes with a steel fence post filled with cement. The clinging pitch of despair burns bright at the loss of my last remaining pack-mates, but all emotion ebbs away in the rising of the hazy moon.

When my hand cannot grip a weapon another moment, when the aching in my muscles is so vast and complete as to make standing under the weight of my own flesh too much to bear, I fall back. I keep falling back, for we have this one last present for the stumbling hoard, this one parting gift. Few enough people who survived the Flashover had the knowledge to make it on their own. It’s clear now that we didn’t. Warwick, though, was a nuclear scientist, and he knew enough to build us a shortcut to the next world.

“Look down on me now, O Mighty Zeus. I light this bonfire and put my own flesh upon your altar. I give over the brave death of heroes to you, and bring such thunder that it will shake Olympus. This land has become a realm of the dead, but where is Hades to hold sway? Though I am not of your people, see that I have faced death in hopes of defending what was once your greatest pride.”

This I mutter. The scraping tread of the unliving hoard comes ever closer. I have just a moment more to think, to make sense of this life. I find it odd that, for all our ambitions, all our desires, all we want at the apex and omega of our lives is the absence of pain. From great thoughts and unleavened pride, we are distilled to a simple solution, a simple hope for comfort. In my own moment of extremity, I can’t fathom what that could mean. I arm the device, flip the toggle switch, and touch the green, pulsing button. For just a moment, the brightness of the Elysian Fields touches my skin.

——

Author Bio:

Patrick M. Tracy is a published poet and fiction writer who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. A graduate of Northern Arizona University, he works at a local library as a computer technician. This “real job” allows him to continue chasing his dream of becoming vaguely famous and cashing in on the weedy allure of a novelist. For more information, check out his website at pmtracy.com

Hey there, living listeners.  It’s Big Dave here, broadcasting live from the fortress of ass-kickery at Radio Zombie Free Denver.  Yeah, I know I’ve been off the air for a while, and I bet some of you faithless heathens probably thought the zombies lunched up on me, but I’m back, kicking out the tunes, anti-zombie rhetoric, and inane observations at a newly-beefy one hundred thousand watts of AM fury.  I’m on AM bands 800 and 1320, FM 99.5, and Short Wave One where the BBC used to live.

Yep, as you may have guessed from the above statement, Big Dave got the coal-fired gennie station up and smoking, and he’s using most of that sweet, sweet alternating current to bring the news of hope to your ears.

Remember, it’s our solemn duty to whip all the undead ass we can manage, while still keeping safe the holy skin of our backsides.  Whether you believe, like I do, that it was some government experiment gone all fuck-nuts wrong, or if it was divine vengeance, or a friggin’ comet hitting Timbuck-three, what we’ve got is an overabundance of empty-eyed corpse-gnawers wandering around.

Are we going to go tits-up and let ‘em ruin us for good?  Uh-uh.  We’re going to arm up, lock and load, and make sure that the few of us who still remember how it was before the flashover don’t watch the last vertical horizon go dark beneath the pile of chilly zombie flesh.

Now, you say, “Big Dave, you make it seem like it’s so easy.  We’ve been tryin’, and they got us outnumbered a hundred to one.”

Hey, man.  I know.  I feel your pain.  If some of my on-air cues ain’t up to their previous smoothness, it’s because I only got seven fingers collectively, two of which are still pretty swollen up and useless.  Now, I ain’t asking for sympathy.  I know many of you out there in zombie land have it worse than me.  I’m just saying that, despite my stature as the first, maybe only post-apocalypse radio star, I’ve had to knuckle up and do my share of shouting, scrambling, screaming, and zombie hacking.

I’ve got more than a little of it on video, but alas, Big Dave’s technical credentials don’t stretch so far as to allow him to get a local TV station back on the air.  If someone finds their way to the RZFD premises, however, I will be glad to share the humorous clips of zombies encountering my newly-crafted electric fence for the first time.  I tell you, even on a bad day, watching eyeballs pop out of skulls and hair burst into flames puts a smile on a live-earther’s face.

Anyway, that’s enough blabbing for now.  I’m going to spin some tunes for y’all for the next hour, non-stop, commercial free, unedited, and generally aggressive as I am without my morning tequila.  This is “Kill ‘Em All” by Metallica—the old version with “Blitzkrieg” still on there—’cause…well, shit, because that’s our holy order of ass-kickery, ain’t it?

Like I always say, glad to be here, good to still be alive.

<The above-mentioned music CD plays, uninterrupted and in its entirety.  After the music stops, the radio is silent for approximately two hours and thirty minutes.>

(Slurring his words somewhat, Big Dave returns.)

Live-earthers…(throat sounds) Big Dave apologizes for the interruption of service just then.  Just…just when we was getting back up and running, huh?  Anyway, I’m gonna play “Rust in Peace” by Megadeth, cause it was always one of my favorites, and I gotta collect my thoughts.

What I…what I mean to say is…some heavy shit came down on Big Dave during the break, and he’s getting a grip on it, so he’ll be talkin’ at ya after the music stops.

Glad to…well, you know.

<The indicated compact disk plays in its entirety, followed by six minutes of radio silence.>

Hey, there, live-earthers.  Big Dave here, talking at ya from the Rock in the Rockies, the Whip-ass in the West, Radio Zombie Free Denver.  Sorry again for the spotty service, but we’re having one of those zombie containment issues here at the station, and it’s been a sort of long afternoon for Big Dave.  I think I might have a concussion, folks, so if my blabbering makes less sense than usual, that’s probably the reason why.

So, let’s go to the news desk, which looks suspiciously like my own desk, and to Big Dave The News Guy, who bears a striking if unfortunate resemblance to yours, truly.

Allrightythen, folks.  Time for your daily news and weather.  We’ve got chilly conditions up here on the mountain, with highs in the 20′s and lows overnight down in the high single digits.  In other words, if you got a brass monkey hanging around, he’ll have probably frozen his balls off within the last few days.  In the forecast, we’ve got whatever nature throws our way, and no real way to figure it out, since the meteorologist turned into a zombie after the flashover and I smashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.

Now, onto the news.  We’ve got six dead corpse-chewers down near the station’s rear entrance, brought down by the grace of Big Dave’s old Smith & Wesson, as well as a few whacks with a fire axe that was handy.  The electric fence, sadly, shorted out and blew out a whole node of the RZFD power grid.  For now, it appears that the three bales of razor wire that Big Dave strung out is keeping the corpse-chewers occupied.

As for injuries, Big Dave’s got a not-so-mild concussion going on, which makes him barf from time to time, as well as thinking of his child sweetheart, Suzy Miller, who could play doctor with the best of them.  Other than that, he’s got a sprained thumb, a big cut on the back of his arm, and what he suspects is a high ankle sprain.

Alas, yet another day goes by with no blips on the radio, no brave travelers coming to visit Big Dave.  Ah, well.  I still believe.  I know I’m not the only one out there.  Perhaps there’s someone else nearby, but he don’t like rock and roll.  Well, fuck him, then.  Big Dave’s only interested in those of stern moral character and a fondness for Steppenwolf.  The band, I mean.  The book by Hesse…well, that’s fully optional.

(Loud crashing in the background can be heard.)

Folks, I’ll have to put on a looped tape of my very favorites.  Sounds like our lingering, hungry friends have come back once more.  Hope you enjoy the tracks, folks, and hope I’ll be back with you here directly.  In any case, this is Big Dave, reporting live from RZFD, the fortress of ass-kickery.

Glad to be here with you, happy to still be alive.

(Sighs)  See you around, folks.

(Just before the tape loop begins, there’s a loud set of explosions, possibly from an automatic weapon.)

<A six hour loop of classic rock and pre-1995 heavy metal plays through a little less than twice with no interruption.>

(A female voice comes on, quavering slightly)

Hello, folks.  My name is Virginia Beckman.  I was a private, first class in the Marine Corps up until the flashover.  Signal corp, mostly, so I sort of know how to use most of this equipment.

I’m sorry to report that Big Dave sustained critical wounds in a recent battle with the zombies.  I arrived just as a large group of them attacked the station.  I just want to say that Big Dave fought bravely, and died a hero.  If you’re like me, his voice, his funny comments, and just the fact that something alive was coming over the airwaves kept me going when I was just about ready to give up.

If you’ve got something to toast his memory, now’s the time to raise a glass for Big Dave.  If there’s a reward after this life, here’s to hoping that he’s enjoying his right now.

(The quiet sounds of crying are audible for about ninety seconds.)

So anyway, I’m putting the “Easy Rider” soundtrack on, ’cause I think that Big Dave would have liked it that way.  Rest in Peace, man.  Rest in Peace.

Again, this is Virginia Beckman, broadcasting from Radio Zombie Free Denver.  They may be able to kill some of us, but they can’t kill our ideas.

<The aforementioned soundtrack plays, the first of thousands of hours of live broadcasting done by Ms. Beckman.>

——-

Author Bio:  Patrick M. Tracy was born in Maine, but moved to the Southwest at twelve years of age.  He attended Northern Arizona University, where he graduated with a degree in English.  A published fiction writer and poet, he currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he fixes computers at a library to support his writing habit.  For more information, please go to pmtracy.com

She turned back, away from the burning horizon. “You know what really gets me?”

Vincent came to her, putting his hands on her shoulders. She leaned back against his chest, her dark hair cascading against him. A few weeks before, she’d been a high-powered young lawyer, on the fast track to big money and a mansion on the hill. He’d been a janitor, barely making the rent and alimony payments. Vincent wins, world loses. More at eleven. “What gets you, hon?”

“They still feed the dead.”

Vincent looked down. He’d been trying not to all day. The blank-eyed hundreds stood very still, waiting for their turn at the soup line. They would step up, hold out their tin cup, and walk away with their vegetable beef, sipping slowly. Orderly. The complete calm of the soulless. Some of them, far gone already, shambled like the old horror movies suggested they would.

They needed fuel enough to move their masses of necrotic tissue around, fuel enough to do whatever incomprehensible task that kept them shambling. If they dropped their cup, chances were they’d soon slump down and start to rot. No one could say whether their jobs had been completed or left undone. You could see the mechanism, but never the purpose.

“Feed ‘em or fight ‘em, Drea. We already saw how that went. We’ve got the guns, but they’ve got the numbers. I just hope we don’t run out of vittles before they cull down to a reasonable number.”

“Do you look at their faces, Vin? Can you bear it?” She turned around and held him tight, burying her cheek against his chest.

He breathed out. “Yeah. I do, but I don’t like it. I don’t like seeing people I used to know. I know that whatever was Dave Jenkins in real life—he’s gone, but something is still walking around in his skin, wearing that damn blue suit of his, still smelling like Aqua Velva, beneath the death stink.”

“I saw…” she started. “It’s just that, I mean, it’s everybody, Vin. Even the people I didn’t like, even that reporter who made me look like an idiot on the news last October. It’s hard to come up to that sandwich board and eat, you know?”

Andrea never cried. This was the closest she’d ever come, and she kept it together. Vincent felt the dampness start at the corner of his eyes. “It’s a lot of goodbyes I never got to say. Even Martina, much as we fought…we loved each other once.”

“Big Dave’s Radio Free Denver said that maybe only one in a hundred people survived Day Zero. He said that there’s no rhyme or reason for why one person zombied up and another was fine and another just turned to ash. How could that be? I mean, there’s this light in the sky, and then…silence.”

Vincent kissed her on top of the head. “Don’t know. No one does. Much as we study some things, I don’t think we’re big enough to see all the way around them. Nobody’s admitting to anything. If anyone’s responsible, or if anyone responsible survived their big experiment, they’re not talking.”

“The radio’s been quiet for days. Even Big Dave Ohlfest’s gone dark. I wonder if they got him.”

Vincent shrugged. “I hope he just lost power. He was a pretty cool dude. That second night, when we were all listening, hoping for a pulse…” Vincent broke away, brushing at his eyes. He walked to one of the other windows. The mountains out to the east were the same, untouched, indifferent. His heart thrummed. He didn’t know if it was hate or hope.

“When they’re gone, do you think it’ll be over? Is this all there is? I mean, what the hell are they doing?”

Vincent’s voice shook, but he kept it together. “I hope it’s not just the beginning. I hope, whatever’s keeping the dead ones moving, it’s something we won’t ever know, won’t ever have to understand. I hope it’s just…just fucking random, like some cosmic power cord got pulled out of the power socket.” Vincent didn’t try to brush away his tears anymore. If Andrea wouldn’t cry, he’d cry for her. “One thing’s for sure. The planet’ll be happy to shake the dust of us off its back. No more factories. No more cars. No more hole in the ozone layer. We’re out of the world killing business.”

She put her hands on his cheeks. “There you go with your silver lining again, Vin.”

He coughed, blinking the blur away from his vision. “I’m a naturally positive guy. What can I say?”

“You can…” Andrea started. A commotion rose up from the capital’s front lawn. Screaming. Gunfire. That constant, A-Flat tone that all the shambling dead make when they’re restless and looking for a fight.

“Come on, hon. Looks like it’s back to fighting.” Vincent picked up his Mossberg shotgun and two boxes of ammunition. At least it would be a break from the silence, a break from having to think of the reasons and the consequences. A break from having to think about anything.

Andrea turned pale, sweat popping on her forehead. She lifted the MAC 10 from the desk that had belonged to the governor and slipped a magazine into its grip.

“The sound’ll bring them up the hill, you know. We’ll be fighting them all afternoon now.”

Vincent’s smile seemed like a pale sunset in winter, even to him. “Don’t pout, sweetie. We’re all janitors now. Someone made a big mess and we have to clean it up.”

——

Author Bio: Patrick M. Tracy was born in Maine, but moved to the Southwest at twelve years of age. He attended Northern Arizona University, where he graduated with a degree in English. A published fiction writer and poet, he currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he fixes computers at a library to support his writing habit. For more information, please go to pmtracy.com