Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose Read online

  I want to save her.

  Rose

  I hear him coming up behind me, solid footsteps on the hardwood floor, and I remember how he held me close to him, and how I could feel him shaking against me, like he was falling apart too, and I want to live. I want to live and I want us to live and I do not want to have to face someone else I love and pull the trigger.

  I do not want to watch him crawl out of the dirt covered in blood and blackness and run to nowhere, run and run and eventually fall to the ground and let them take me. Because there is no way I can do this forever, if there is barely any way to for me to imagine living from one minute to the next, to keep myself from waking up and screaming and falling and screaming again, watching them come after me, the monsters in the graveyard dirt.

  I lean over the edge of the window, almost falling out of it, as he comes closer, and I look down. There are too many to fight or scare off, what looks like a hundred, clustered around the house, filtering in slowly through the single broken window, and I cannot hear them coming up the steps yet but I know that they are there, and they are coming, and there is no way out.

  I close my eyes and try to calm down, but all I can hear is the loud thrumming of a heart that doesn’t want to stop beating, and suddenly I think of him, hands brushing a streak of blood from my lip, and I don’t want to die, and my breath comes faster and faster, and I can’t breathe again.

  I feel a movement behind me. “What’s that? Over there, by the tree line?”

  He points, and I follow his finger. Something metal gleams in the tall grass. A pickup truck.

  It might be rusted out completely, the engine missing, the tires flat. It might not even be a truck. It almost certainly doesn’t have any gasoline.

  But in spite of myself, my hands start to steady, and I can breathe. I take in slow gulps of air; the pounding in my ears recedes like a tide.

  “I have an idea,” he says. He walks over to the bed and starts stripping the sheets, knotting them together.

  It’s useless, there is a one in a million chance of us getting out of the house, much less of the truck actually starting. This sort of escape only works in action movies or with the very lucky, and I am neither of those things. This isn’t going to work, we shouldn’t even try—they are coming and maybe it’s time for us to just surrender to the inevitable, let them overtake us, because I am so tired and stopping doesn’t seem like such a bad idea right now.

  My hands start to shake again, and my breathing quickens, but I grab a sheet and start adding to his chain.

  “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” he murmurs.

  Gideon

  We wait until almost all of them are inside. It takes hours, and that makes it worse, watching them slowly filter in. I’m casting up foolish prayers to the sky, begging the moonlight not to reveal more of them, lured by the scent of live flesh and the congregation of their fellows.

  They start banging on the door after the first hour, and the vanity has started to splinter by the time they are all inside.

  She insists upon going down first, even though that means that she will be waiting at the bottom of the house, practically defenseless apart from a handgun and a couple of knives, against a hundred of them.

  “I can hotwire a car really fast,” she says. “I can get there first and see if it’ll start, and then I can drive over to get you.”

  “And what if it doesn’t start?”

  She swallows, fixing me with a steely gaze. “It will start.”

  I pretend not to notice the way her hands shake.

  She climbs down with less care than I would, practically leaping from one knot to the other, landing with a roll on the ground and sprinting towards the gleaming hunk of metal.

  Nothing follows her. I let out a breath.

  I wait and watch, but I can’t tell what she’s doing from this far away. All I know is that no one has attacked her. If they had attacked her, she would be screaming.

  Finally, there is a loud coughing noise, and the engine roars to life. I strain my eyes at the surrounding trees, the lawn around the house, the dirt road, searching for what I know is coming. It will bring every one of them within a hundred miles.

  I wait five seconds. Ten. No one comes.

  Then, out of the woods next to the truck, a figure emerges, shuffling towards the truck in a dirt-stained red hoodie.

  I grab the rope and start to climb down, but I am heavier than she is, and it takes all of my concentration to keep my grip on the knots. My arms ache with the effort—even with my training, I’m not good at holding my body weight.

  When I get to the ground, I start sprinting.

  She is screaming before I am half way there.

  The certainty hits me like a train, almost knocking me over. I try to force it out, focusing on the uneven ground beneath my feet and the rhythm of my breathing, but that only seems to stamp it into me with every tread, an endless pattern repeated over and over.

  I. Can’t. Save. Her.

  Rose

  Hotwiring the car takes longer than it should, given how often I’ve done it. Or maybe it’s just that I have someone waiting on me, someone whose survival depends on my sparking the wires together and getting this broken down truck to work. It’s throwing me off, the boy with the blue eyes who wouldn’t let me do this alone, who held me while I fell apart, who may have been the only reason I didn’t let the zombies overtake me. I inhale and exhale loudly, relaxing my shoulders. After a while, I go where it’s just me and my hands and the car, and everything moves smoothly, no jolting remembrances, no wondering about whether he’s okay, whether he’s worth this, whether I should take him with me, when at any moment now—

  The engine sputters, then rumbles to life. I whoop for joy, and the burst of happiness returns me to myself, as if turning the car on flipped a switch inside me, too. It’s been a while since I’ve driven a stick, but my feet still remember how to hold the car in that sweet spot, pushing the clutch down, hovering over the gas, letting my body get a feel for the car. I inch the car forward, looking for him, his dark silhouette against the window.

  Then the world splinters and punches me in the side, and I fall into the passenger seat. The car stalls to a stop, shuddering and clanging, dying all over again.

  I grab my pistol and turn toward it, reaching toward me from the passenger side, and it is wearing a red hoodie, and its eyes are big and black, but that doesn’t have any effect on the way he looks at me, fear and utter disbelief.

  Ben, my brother, my addicted, broken, bully of a brother, who is looking at me now like it is all my fault. It is all my fault.

  I take a deep breath and tell myself to squeeze the trigger, but my breath cuts off before my chest can expand, and he is reaching toward me like a drowning person grasping for a life raft, and his cold, clammy fingers close around my left wrist, viselike and strong. My hands open and the pistol falls down on the seat between us.

  He is going to eat me, right here, turn me into one of them, and I cannot shoot him. His eyes are black but he still has that scar across his chin and his hair still sticks up at the back like it always did, and his hoodie is almost brown with dirt and blood, but I would still recognize him anywhere.

  It feels like pulling my own skin off, to bring my other hand up, to dodge away from the mouth that is coming closer, to reach into my holster and draw out something that gleams silver for a moment before I plunge it into his throat. I let out a scream the way I promised myself I wouldn’t.

  His face is blurred now, and I stab him over and over, cutting and slashing through rotted, bruised flesh, until his head falls into my lap, mouth open in that same expression, and the slime of his brains trails across my jeans.

  My hands do not feel like part of me—they feel cold and prosthetic, and it surprises me when they move at my will, picking up the head by the hair and throwing it out the window like a used banana peel. The wires spark together again and the car shakes into being, throwing off the way my own body has be
en shivering and shuddering, and suddenly I am completely still and in control, shifting the truck into gear and rolling out of the grass perfectly, switching to second and trundling forward.

  The boy is running at breakneck speed through the tall grass, and he looks at me through the windshield. His eyes are filled with fire and warmth, and I flinch my gaze away. I almost shift into third and leave him, but before I can do it, he pulls the door open and leaps into the passenger side.

  I don’t look at him until I get onto the road, the road that I was running along endlessly, desperate to get away, the road I am now driving on, cold and numb, the car underneath me rumbling and stuttering.

  He is looking at me and smiling, but I do not care, and I do not smile back. My hands are not shaking, but I am so cold, and my body feels so heavy, weighted down with millstones.

  “We are not going to die,” he says, and I feel the stone doors of my heart clang shut.

  My mouth tries to imitate his, but my cheek cramps up and twitches.

  “We are not going to die,” I confirm, but the words feel like sandpaper, scraping against my mouth, and I want to add his name, but I can’t remember it, and he is looking at me as if from the other end of a long, dark tunnel, squinting at me in the weak moonlight.

  I am so hungry.

  August

  Run

  The sun is making its way across the sky, and I walk on, amid endless fields of nothing. It’s ten miles to Chinook from our campsite, just far enough to be within easy striking distance of the raids, the horrors that come sweeping in on the midnight hour, as if people with blood pouring out of their eyes and tearing the flesh from your bones aren’t enough.

  The fields drag by on either side, monotonous and endless, and I wonder if I am reading the signs correctly. There is no one keeping up the roads, and no one checking to be sure whether things really are where the signs lead, and what if I’m walking in the wrong direction? All that surrounds Chinook are ranches and stretches of tall trees, gates and barbed wire fences, and even though I’ve lived here my whole life, it all basically looks the same in every direction.

  Forward, grass, fence, gate, and back, fence, gate, and the gray road that I walk along now. It feels like it’s been hours since I got onto the road, and my legs feel like someone is squeezing them tight, and the sun beats down on me, hot and relentless, intensifying the moisture in the air that has left me drenched in a sweat shower.

  I won’t make it much farther without water.

  Occasionally, I hear something, and I dart into the sparse cover of a ditch. Or a tree, if one has been allowed to grow where I am. The zombies usually don’t congregate in rural areas--there isn’t a consistent enough food source--but it doesn’t mean there isn’t someone, just waiting on the edge of the road for me to come by. One of the Jackals, the people that have taken the pleasure out of the chaos, who refused to rise up against a threat, and just created a new one instead. Became dangerous and terrifying and therefore safer than almost anywhere else.

  Every twelve steps, I check inventory of my weapons. “Knife…. Gun…. Knife,” I whisper as my hand grazes across the items sheathed in my belt. I repeat it like a mantra, and my voice sounds distant and weak, farther and farther away the longer I walk, but I stubbornly refuse to stop my ritual.

  My mouth is so dry that the words come out with choking coughs, and I see a spot of blood forming at my heel where a blister has formed, but I walk on, repeating over and over. “Knife, gun, knife.”

  I have been walking for too long. I should have been there by now, but there is nothing in front and nothing behind, just fields and fences and gates and the dark gray road, and I feel goosebumps start on my skin. My heel throbs with every step, and I utter my words like whispers into the slight breeze that comes across the road.

  I start counting the gates that leads to farms or ranches, but I give up after I reach 100. The sun is higher in the sky, and it feels like heat is coming up from the road too, so that I burn from the top and the bottom, but I am also shivering, and my teeth are chattering, and I force the words out through teeth that feel as though they are going to break apart from chattering.

  “Knife… Gun…. Knife.” My fingers brush the handles of the weapons, and I try to grip one, but my fingers seize up in pain before I can, and I stumble, causing a flare of pain in my hip.

  I close my eyes as tight as I can, and I do my best not to cry out, but the pain is excruciating. My body is seizing up, I’m freezing, I’m sweating, I’m going to die out here on this endless stretch of nothing road, die and have my carcass lie there for the vultures to pick at, the crows and carrion birds, the receivers of the spoils of my war.

  Ben and Turk will come across my corpse and laugh.

  As the pain in my hip fades, I consider sitting down to rest, but I am worried that to sit down is to never get up. To sit down is to die.

  I tighten my stomach and push the words out of my mouth, trying to force past the chattering in my teeth. “Knife…. Gun…. Knife…”

  I know that I should be looking up, turning constantly, watching for the zombies waiting on the edges of the road, listening in case Ben and the others decide to pull a raid, to take me back and do to me what they have been wanting to do since I stumbled in the campsite, sobbing and calling for my big brother.

  I should be listening for the sounds of their truck, but everything is drowned out by the harsh and ragged sound of my breathing, the whispered and stuttered words that I force out of my breath every ten steps, the heaviness of my soles as they slam against the pavement. I can see only my feet, my right ankle slowly growing a red stain, and the three feet of pavement in front of me.

  My teeth are chattering again, and I bite my tongue hard enough to draw blood. I clamp my jaw shut, feeling the muscle in it twitch and tighten, and I can’t talk I can’t stop shivering I can’t hear anything and I can’t see anything and I am going to walk here until I collapse on the side of the road and die.

  ***

  I think I’m dreaming when I first hear it, like some kind of hallucination from on high, too many years dozing in the back of church pews, listening to an old man with spectacles and a soporific voice drone on while my mind raced with thoughts of homework and boys and my brother’s empty space in the pew next to me, frustrated and desperate because what the Hell does stoning a whore have to do with me, right here, right now, watching each week and year bend my mom’s shoulders deeper, checking Jonathan’s eyes anxiously for redness, for shadows and darkness creeping in? How the Hell is church going to help with any of that?

  It’s singing, loud and off-key, a huge group of people:

  Then sings my soul

  My savior, God to thee

  How great Thou art

  What kind of idiots sing this loudly, when any noise draws them closer?

  The realization reawakens my deadened limbs. A trickle of energy flows into my hands, enough to stop them shaking and clear the blurriness that has begun to creep in at the edges of my vision.

  It must be almost noon now, and I’ve made it to Chinook. I somehow wandered into the town square without noticing the change, and it’s only now that I see the blacker asphalt, the shadows of the buildings on either side, that I realize the road had become progressively more well-kept, but I’d been too far gone to notice.

  The church is where it always was, exactly in the center of the town square. Where the courthouse would be, if Chinook was the type of town to assume the superiority of law over Christ.

  I can still hear them, except now some ambitious soul has decided to layer over it all with a falsetto, so her voice screams over all of theirs:

  O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder

  Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;

  I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

  Thy power throughout the universe displayed

  And suddenly I’m angry, rage clearing my vision and flushing my skin. I’m not shaking any more, my fi
sts are clenched and it takes all my self -control not to let out a scream of frustration. The falsetto voice screeches louder, and I want to cover my ears, the sound is grating and they’re so loud.

  They’re going to call them all down on us and I’m not strong enough to run again and they’re going to get me killed, turned into one of them in praise of the rolling thunder that didn’t strike down the first kid rising from the Earth, the awesome wonder that watched in silence as flames rose to the sky and I pulled the trigger on my mom and Ben laughed while someone screamed in the tent, and how can they still praise something when it has proven over and over again that it doesn’t exist, and even if it did, it’s more likely a devil than a god?

  I used to believe all of this. I used to be one of those people, utterly faithful and reverent, in the front pew feeling a swelling in my chest as the music rose all around me.

  But that was before. Back before Dad got hit by a drunk driver who careened off into oblivion, never stopping or caring that a man was dead and his family had to struggle on for years without him, not bothering to take responsibility for the way my brother was twelve when it happened and by fourteen was lighting up with stoners behind the middle school, because it hurt too much to face the world head on. Not there to explain to a four year-old who would never know who his father was. And when the years went by and that drunk driver never materialized, and I watched Ben shatter and mom nearly break apart too, trying to keep us all together, Jonathan growing up faster than anyone should, I’d decided that the only reason to go to church was to make Mom happy.

  I didn’t think there was anyone up there who cared, because if there was Dad would still be alive and that drunk driver would have felt the fiery vengeance I’d been reading about in stories since I was a kid.

  But I’d started to come back to my faith, started to rebuild the crumbling ruins that had fallen when the police officer knocked on a door that day, hat in his hand, and some part of me knew what had happened before he even opened his mouth.