A Zombie Novel by
Teel McClanahan III
Modern Evil Press
Phoenix
ISBN: 978-1-934516-56-0
Copyright 2009 Teel McClanahan III
Some Rights Reserved.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Cover image Copyright 2009 by Teel McClanahan III
Published By Modern Evil Press at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1-934516-05-8 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-934516-56-0 (eBook)
“a zombie novel”
Trouble In Traffic
The sun slowly approached the horizon as the outskirts of Denver rose up over it to greet them and the truckload of zombies they had hauled halfway across the country already.
“The turnoff for the 470 should be coming up in a few miles,” said Russell from the passenger seat.
“Come on, man, we’re almost there,” insisted Carl. “If we go straight through Denver we save half an hour. Rush hour is over by now. We’ll be in and out in no time and off the roads that much faster.”
“If you’re getting tired, just say so. I can drive the last leg for you.”
Carl took another swallow from the energy drinks they’d both been drinking all day. “I’m not about to fall asleep, Russell, I just don’t see why we have to make things so difficult.” Even sticking to the posted speed limit, the truck was rapidly approaching an old Winnebago that puttered casually along in the right-hand lane. Carl checked his mirrors, signaled, and cautiously moved the truck into the left lane to pass. “I’m not suggesting we drive recklessly or do anything that could get us pulled over, just that we spend a little less time on the road.”
“Are you questioning the Sergeant’s orders?”
“This isn’t about orders, it’s about common sense.”
“Exactly. I have enough common sense to know that taking hundreds of zombies through the center of a densely populated area isn’t a good idea. Which is why the Sergeant ordered us to drive around them.”
“We didn’t drive around Omaha.” Carl watched a little red sports car come up fast behind him, and wondered whether the Winnebago had sped up to keep him from getting by. It felt like they were barely inching by the old, lumbering RV.
“Omaha’s not big enough to have an expressway built around it.”
“Don’t know why they call it an express when it takes longer.”
“When there’s traffic in the city it’s faster to go around. I thought you had experience driving trucks.”
The little red car had caught up with them and was stuck behind them, angrily weaving back and forth between the two lanes as though doing so would get them to pass faster. Carl tried to ignore it, stuck to the speed limit, and continued to gradually pass the Winnebago. “I’m driving the truck, aren’t I?”
Russell sighed. The Winnebago trundled off the highway at exit 21. Before Carl could begin to move the truck over, the sports car that had been buzzing around behind him shot past him on his right, only to get stuck almost immediately behind another pair of cars. The sports car began again to weave back and forth between lanes behind the cars that were keeping it from treating the highway like a raceway. “It wouldn’t get us finished any sooner, anyway. If we get to the camp ahead of schedule we’ll still have to wait our turn to be unloaded. You’ll be sitting in that seat the half-hour you think you’d be saving.”
“At least I wouldn’t be driving.” Carl swallowed the last of his energy drink, taking his eyes off the road for only a second or two to tip his head back for those final drops. When his eyes returned to the road ahead of him he lost another second in disbelief before reacting. He was hurtling toward something terrible.
At least four cars Carl could make out were being smashed, turned around, turned over and worse, all on their own strange trajectories. The little red sports car was doing barrel rolls as it soared over the rest of the carnage, flipped like a tiddlywink into the air. His right hand still clutching the empty can, Carl pulled the wheel hard with his left, swerving the truck away from the unfolding pile-up while tossing the can Russell’s direction. With both hands he tried to maintain control of the vehicle as it dropped off the road and into the median. The forty-five-thousand pounds of dead flesh in the container trailing behind them was reluctant to make such an immediate course correction.
As narrowly as the rear corner of the trailer missed the out-of control sedan spinning after it into the median, Carl’s ability to avoid oncoming traffic on the other side was very nearly enough. Nearly, but not quite, enough. The force of the impact with a speeding pickup was all that was needed to get his trailer to tip over. To tip over and to break open, spilling his cargo all over the road and the median in a spectacle that no one would survive to describe.
* * *
Melvin Spall looked anxiously at the setting sun in his rear view mirror, then back at the traffic in front of him. He was only a couple of miles from his exit, only minutes away from Barr Lake under normal traffic conditions. Mel could almost feel his blood pressure rising as the possibility of giving Stacy this one final sunset at the lake was taken away from him. They had never run into traffic on their way out to the lake before, not stand-still traffic.
There were no cars moving on his side of the road, and no cars at all on the other. In the distance he saw what might have been smoke. They inched forward a few feet. He looked at the sun again, fat and orange behind them. “Looks like we’re going to miss our sunset.”
“Do you think there’s been an accident?” Stacy was leaning back and forth in her seat, craning her neck, trying to see around the cars blocking their way.
“Have to be a pretty bad one to stop traffic in both directions,” replied Mel. He wasn’t thinking about the accident. He wasn’t thinking about people who might be hurt or trapped in wrecked cars. He wasn’t thinking about how beautiful Stacy was and how improbable that someone half his age would have chosen him to be with. He wasn’t thinking about his wife and his children and yet another family dinner he was missing out on.
As Mel sat in traffic, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and giving the sun a dirty look, he was second-guessing himself. He was thinking that maybe he shouldn’t stop seeing Stacy, after all. He was thinking that maybe the traffic keeping him from returning to the site of their first date to break it off with her was a sign. He was thinking that maybe he should leave his wife after all.
“I think I see people getting out of their cars.” Stacy was leaning forward and up, straining against her safety belt, trying to get a look at what was going on. “Maybe we should turn around.”
The sun was touching Denver in the rear view, and Mel’s heart was learning just how easy it was to change allegiances, back and forth and back again. He leaned somewhat to the left and saw what she was talking about. There were definitely people out of their vehicles up ahead, and almost certainly a bad accident. Mel fingered the switch to lower his window, then leaned out for a better view.
The smell of smoke hit his nose as the vision of an injured victim became clear before his eyes, and Mel was sure it had been a serious crash. As he stared at the bloody, torn clothes of the man shambling along in the distance, he tried to remember why he’d planned on leaving Stacy. Then he saw another victim, and another, stumbling along the median or in the road, all in bad shape. He didn’t know why the injured were walking around; they should have remained where they were until paramedics arrived, but they seemed intent to wander aimlessly about. He couldn’t think of a solid reason for ending the affair, nothing urgent, nothing immediate. One of them appeared to be limping along on a broken leg; Mel could clearly see a raggedly shattered bone jutting further from the flesh of its thigh with each awkward step. Bile rose in his throat.
Mel saw a few drivers, those nearer to these wandering traumas, leave the safety and privacy of their cars to try to offer assistance. He heard shouting, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. He’d been seeing Stacy with an almost monotonous regularity for over a year. He could tell that the tone of the shouting had changed once the injured had been reached by their would-be saviors, and not for the better. He couldn’t decide whether the regularity and ease with which he’d been having the affair made it feel comforting or boring. From where Mel sat, it appeared that the people who had been injured in whatever accident was up ahead had begun to attack those who had approached them to offer help, swinging at them, grabbing at them, even biting them.
Mel didn’t know whether he wanted to stay with Stacy or to leave her, but he did know that she wouldn’t want to see this. He’d learned early on not to take her to horror movies, and whatever it was that was going on in the traffic jam ahead of them was more disturbing than any special effects he’d seen on film. “It looks pretty bad up there, hon. Some people got pretty hurt in the accident. I’m going to turn around, but I don’t want you to look, okay?” Stacy nodded, even as she sat down into her seat and put her head down into her hands, covering her face. Sometimes she reminded him of his eight year old daughter, the way she hid herself from the things she didn’t want to face.
As he pulled his SUV carefully out onto the median, thankful that after sixteen months of deliberation he’d decided on a model with true four-wheel drive, Mel couldn’t decide whether he found it endearing or disheartening that he was dating someone who reminded him of his own child. Glancing over at her as he crossed onto the empty lanes that would take them back toward Denver, Mel was sure he must be imagining the scene playing out in the distance beyond her still-covered face. It didn’t make sense to him that anyone, even people who were in shock after a horrific accident, would so violently attack those who tried to assist them.
The last glimpse he had of the carnage as it disappeared from his view reminded him only of a National Geographic special showing predatory animals hunched over and feasting on their bloody prey. He tried to convince himself he must have seen it wrong, that it was a group of heroes leaning over someone injured in the crash to help, but something in his mind wouldn’t let go of the idea of predators eating prey. As he made his way back into town, apologizing to Stacy for their failed lakeside rendezvous, the enigma of what he’d seen totally distracted Mel from making any decision about his wife and his mistress at all.
After dropping Stacy off at home, the rest of the drive to his own driveway flashed by in an instant, as too-familiar drives so often do. The less-than-warm welcome Melvin received from his family made him question yet again why he’d been considering leaving Stacy and staying with Frances.
“You’re early,” his wife said without looking up from clearing the table after dinner. “I didn’t make you any dinner. You should have let me know you were on your way.”
“Sorry, dear.” Melvin tried to help clear the table, but she batted his hands away and did the work herself. He gave up, walking toward the kitchen empty-handed, saying, “I guess there was some sort of accident out by the airport that shut down the freeways. The client we were supposed to be meeting with over dinner is probably still stuck out at DIA, waiting for the roads to clear up, from what they told me.” Melvin knew the accident he’d seen wouldn’t have stopped traffic headed to or from the airport, but he was also pretty sure Frances wouldn’t look up the particulars. He opened the refrigerator and stared indecisively at its contents. “I’m sure I can find something to eat, dear.” As she noisily loaded the dishwasher without saying another word, Melvin had the impression Frances wasn’t really even listening to his excuse. He grabbed a random, unmarked container from the fridge, shoved it in the microwave, and hoped random chance would work out better than half an hour deliberating over leftovers.
The rest of the evening was simply a falling into step with their regular routine, and Melvin and Frances barely spoke two words to one another as they put their children to bed and later put themselves to bed. If Melvin had needed to make a decision about what he’d seen on the road that evening, it would have plagued him for days or weeks or more, going back and forth and over and over every detail and option he had to consider. Instead, free from having to choose, the entire horrible and disturbing scene had been wiped completely from his mind long before his head hit the pillow, and he dreamt pleasant dreams that night.
Breaking News
“Is this footage real?” Sunny wanted to look away from the shaky footage being played for her, but couldn’t. “This can’t be real.”
“The police commissioner and the mayor won’t confirm or deny anything but what they gave us in the official statement, but videos like this one have been popping up all over the net.” Ted clicked over to the next video, and the next, as he spoke. “We’ve had over a dozen people try to sell us their videos, and dozens more just emailing their videos straight to us. Our servers are on the verge of crashing. If this is a hoax, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people in on it, and all of them here in Denver.”
Sunny tried to keep from gagging as she watched someone get torn limb from limb on the grainy, low-light footage spooling out on the monitor. “How do we report this? Do we stick to the official statement? People won’t know what they’re facing out there.”
“We have to report the truth. We have to play the videos. Show them.”
“I don’t care how bad it is out there, you can’t broadcast that footage the way it is. We’ll lose our license.” Sunny was looking Ted hard in the eye, mostly to give herself a break from the carnage on the screen. “And we can’t say it’s zombies. I mean, obviously it’s zombies, but we can’t say that. No one would believe us.”
“But it’s the truth. Look at that!” Ted pointed to a close-up shot of a being that could be nothing other than the walking dead trying to gnaw its way through someone’s face. “Zombies. Roaming the streets, eating people. Eating people, Sunny!” Ted looked at the city’s official statement as though it had somehow brought the dead to life on its own, and read from it incredulously. “This isn’t just the ‘risk of contamination from an unknown biological threat.’ It’s zombies. Simply telling people in the suburbs to evacuate isn’t going to prepare them for what they’re going to be encountering out there, and getting everyone else to head to the stadium is just going to get everyone killed faster.”
“You don’t seem to be handling this very professionally, Ted.” Sunny placed a hand gently on his shoulder, to try to reassure him. “We have a duty, as journalists, to remain calm. If we look like we’re panicked, then the public will panic, and a lot more people are going to die. We have to put on a brave face, Ted. We have to set an example.”
Ted recoiled from her touch, turned, and walked away, still raving, “Oh, I’ll set an example. You’ll see. I’ll show everyone what they ought to do,” and he disappeared into his office and closed his door decisively.
Sunny shook her head and turned back to the monitor. She began sifting through all the footage they’d received, looking for a few seconds here and there that would show their audience what to expect without showing too much. She knew the footage was going to be airing throughout the morning, and that her cut of it and her performance would probably be rebroadcast over and over again, to audiences across the nation - perhaps across the globe. Sunny wasn’t about to let Ted’s panic attack ruin the future of her career in broadcasting.
When she heard a single gunshot ring out from Ted’s office a few minutes later, Sunny stopped worrying about how to barricade him in and keep him off the air. Instead she focused on crafting the perfect message and delivery for maximizing survival of Denver’s citizens along with her own chances of getting an offer from national.
* * *
Eyes closed, clutching desperately at holding on to a few more minutes of sleep, Melvin reached out and hit the snooze button on his alarm clock. The phone continued to ring, even as he pressed the snooze button again and again, until Frances reached over past him to answer it.
“Hello?” Her voice belied both her grumpiness at being woken and her frustration at Melvin’s failure to answer the phone himself, all in that single, short word. “What are you talking about, Marge? There’s no news on at 3:30 in the morning.” Melvin tried to pretend he was sleeping, but the phone’s cord was stretched right across his face. “Alright, alright, I’m turning it on.” Frances hung up the phone without saying goodbye, and grabbed the remote from the bedside table.
The television sprang to life, bathing them in its blueish glow. Frances clicked around until she found the news report Marge had called her so frantically about, and turned up the volume to hear what all the fuss was about.
“…not to panic. They recommend that citizens avoid contact with anyone who appears to be infected or injured. As you can see in this shocking footage, attempting to assist those who have been effected by this unknown biological threat only puts you -and your family- at risk. Let the police and the paramedics do their jobs while you focus on getting your loved ones to safety.”
“Are you sure you have the right channel, dear? This is probably just some late-night horror flick.” Even as he tried to dismiss it, Melvin sat up straighter and carefully watched the snippets of footage rolling by in sharp contrast to the bright and peppy morning news anchor beside it on the TV.
“Of course it’s the right channel. That’s Sunny Preston. We watch her and Ted Seaver report the news every morning on Good Morning Denver. Now shush.”
“…evacuation plan. As you can see on the map, I-76 is still shut down, and while traffic is slowly making its way Eastbound on I-70, citizens with residences East of downtown are encouraged to head to Mile High Stadium to be screened and quarantined. Checkpoints have been set up on I-25 both North and South of Denver, and on I-70 both East and West of E-470. Traffic is moving slowly, but please remain in your vehicles with the windows up and the doors locked until you reach the checkpoints. Abandoning your vehicle on the road only puts other citizens at risk. Before you leave your homes, know your evacuation route and stick to it…”
Melvin and Frances watched on with bleary eyes as Sunny continued to dole out information about the government’s ill-conceived evacuation plans and the ‘unknown biological threat’ that she knew -but refused to say- was zombies. They continued to stare at the screen as Sunny’s message began to repeat, starting from the beginning “for those of you just joining us.” Melvin tried to convince himself that what he’d seen in traffic the previous evening was unrelated, that he hadn’t come within a few car lengths of being exposed to this ‘unknown biological threat’. He wanted to say something, to relate what he’d seen to Frances, but because of the circumstances that had put him so close to harm’s way, he kept his mouth shut. He wondered if anyone had called Stacy.
Several minutes later, after they’d watched Sunny go over the evacuation map a second time, Frances was about to turn off the set and get ready to evacuate, but Melvin put his hand up and said “Wait.”
“What, now? We’ve seen all this. We need to get on the road and—” Frances’ jaw dropped and only a dry croaking sound escaped her throat to finish her sentence. She dropped the remote.
On the screen, Sunny was being attacked by what she had referred to as the ‘contaminated’. She appeared to have been so focused on her performance, on keeping her eyes bright, shining, and fixed on the camera, that she hadn’t seen the monster coming for her. It was on top of her, gnawing on her, before she even began to scream. In a scene more brutal, violent, and explicit than anything her edited footage of the attacks had shown the viewing public, Sunny began to be consumed greedily by her own cameraman. In their struggle, the pair were thrown to the ground, their struggle continuing out of sight, the empty set and sounds of violence being broadcast without interruption. Melvin and Frances continued to watch in horror until Sunny’s kicking, flailing, and screaming from just out of frame was replaced by only the relentless sound of a zombie noisily eating its prey. Evacuation instructions continued to scroll by along the bottom of the screen. Anyone who tuned in too late might not know what the sounds being broadcast over the image of the empty studio represented, but Melvin and Frances knew. Frances was still frozen, jaw agape. Melvin reached out to the remote that had fallen from her hand and switched off the television, then watched her closely to see how she would react.
“We’ve got to wake the children,” she said finally. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Suddenly Frances was out of bed and frantic. She was pulling down luggage from the top shelf of the closet, digging through the dresser drawers, trying to operate somewhere between packing thoughtfully for a vacation and trying to grab the bare essentials on the way out of a burning building. Melvin was more calm, though not because he had any more surety about what they would need or where they would go; he was simply used to operating indecisively, and calmly got dressed as though for any other day while his wife rushed back and forth and all around him, trying to make decisions that might effect them for hours, days or even weeks. She spoke quietly to herself as she did, mumbling, “if we end up stuck at the stadium, we’ll be freezing, but if we can get out of town we can drive to mother’s place in Albequerque and we’ll need warm-weather clothes. What about shoes? Do you think we’ll need running shoes to get away from those things, or…”
Melvin went out to the kitchen and began making sandwiches. He didn’t know whether they’d be able to get through one of the checkpoints and away, or get quarantined and stuck at the stadium, but he figured that within a few hours it would be breakfast time and they’d all be hungry, wherever they were. Melvin couldn’t remember whether his daughter preferred ham or turkey, or what kind of cheese his son was always refusing to eat, so he just made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for everyone. He packed them into a cooler with some apples and a couple of juice boxes, then went to wake up the children.
When he got to their bedroom, both Mike and Maddy were sitting up in bed, rubbing their eyes, awakened by their mother’s frantic packing of their cute, technicolor bags.
“What’s going on?” asked Madeline.
“Are we going somewhere?” asked Michael.
“You’ve got it, kid,” replied Melvin, “We’re going on a trip. It looks like Mom is packing your bags, so you two just have to get dressed, and we can go.”
“Where are we going?” asked Michael as he climbed out of bed and stumbled over to his open, half-empty dresser.
“What about school?” asked Madeline, still sitting in bed, her head following Frances’ frantic footsteps back and forth across the floor of the room.
“No school today, Maddy. Now come on, get up.” Melvin lifted Madeline up out of bed and carried her over to her dresser. “What do you want to wear, today? It’s going to be pretty cold outside, so we’ve all got to bundle up.”
“I’m tired,” complained Madeline, “Why do we have to go so early?”
“It’s like a race. Everyone in town is trying to go, and if we wait too long, we won’t be able to.” Melvin set her down out of the path of Frances’ still-frenzied and mumbling form. “So hurry up and get ready, okay?”
Madeline nodded, and started digging through what was left in her drawers, looking for something nice to wear in case they won the race. She knew winners were always on TV after a race, and Madeline didn’t want her friends at school to make fun of her for wearing the wrong outfit on TV. Michael was already dressed, and didn’t seem to mind that no two pieces of his multi-layered outfit matched in the slightest. “Good job, Mike. That sure looks like a warm outfit, to me.”
“And fast, huh dad?”
“And fast. Now don’t forget your shoes.”
Michael looked down at his feet, then back up to meet Melvin’s eyes, then smacked his palm comically against his forehead, shook his head, and began searching the room for his always-hastily-kicked-off shoes. Melvin didn’t know where his son got his sense of humor from, but couldn’t help but find it endearing. He got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed and all over for the tiny, missing footwear.
On the Road
“You can go.” Officer Smalls waved the car through, and by this point in the night he wasn’t surprised at all by their squealing tires and rapid getaway. These people didn’t have anything to hide, they were simply running for their lives, trying to get away from the massacre while they still could. He clenched and re-clenched his fist and grimaced in pain. His arm hadn’t felt right since that first contaminated citizen had bitten him. With a stiff movement, he waved the next car in his line forward.
“May I see your license, ma’am?” The driver of the car, who had been warned by bullhorn-weilding peace officers for the last half-mile about what to expect, handed her license out to him in an instant. Officer Smalls liked it when things went smoothly. He gave her license a passing glance as he asked her, “How many people are traveling with you this morning, Ms. Levesque?” He could see a teenage boy in the seat beside her and a toddler in the car-seat in the back. He shined his flashlight directly into the boy’s eyes.
“Just my two sons, officer.”
The woman sounded nervous, but so had everyone else who had come through the checkpoint since the Mayor had issued evacuation orders. “Have any of you come in contact with the contaminated, ma’am?”
“You mean the zombies?” The boy wasn’t nervous. He sounded excited at the prospect of encountering the walking dead.
Ms. Levesque’s head snapped briefly, angrily, at her son. “No, officer. We haven’t seen anything but what they showed on the news.”
Risking his mother’s wrath, the teenager couldn’t help but ask, “Have you seen them? This is so cool! Zombies. In my town!”
Officer Smalls handed the license back and waved them on without going through the rest of the questions he was supposed to ask. “You can go,” was all he said as he struggled to stay upright. Suddenly he was feeling extremely light-headed, and there was a pain in his gut. A pain like intense hunger, but beyond that in a way that made him nauseous. The next car in line pulled up next to him, a hand already extended out the driver’s side window, offering a license. This driver was in a hurry.
Officer Smalls put one arm out and steadied himself by leaning on the top edge of the car. He was looking straight down at the impatient arm holding an out-of-state driver’s license. An offering to him. For a moment it was as though he wasn’t sure what was happening, or what he ought to do. His vision became unfocused. If he hadn’t been leaning on the car, the officer would probably have stumbled, perhaps even fallen. Then he remembered what he was supposed to do, and reached out to take the driver’s offering.
Another officer had begun approaching when he’d noticed Officer Smalls leaning over a car for longer than he usually took with anyone, thinking there must be something suspicious about the vehicle. Before the second officer realized what was going on, it was too late. With a firm grip on the driver’s arm, Officer Smalls sank his teeth deep into its flesh and tore back with all the strength he had. Screams and blood erupted like a fountain, but Officer Smalls didn’t mind. As fast as he could swallow the first mouthful of flesh, another arm was being stretched out toward him as though in offering and he gladly bit down on it. The second officer had been reaching out to stop him, but had only given him something else to chew on.
More and more people began to see what was happening, and to react. People waiting near the front of the lines tried either to make a break for it or to turn around to escape the zombie cops. Police officers were shooting haphazardly; at unchecked cars trying to flee, at Officer Smalls, and a few out of total panic, without any clear targets. Cars crashing into one another, fires erupting, people abandoning their cars to flee on foot, people dying and contaminated people returning to life turned the freeway checkpoint from a bastion of order to a maelstrom of chaos in a matter of seconds. Anyone more than a few car lengths away couldn’t really see what was going on, but all who stayed there went from waiting for a chance to be saved to waiting in line to be consumed by a new and violent epicenter of the outbreak.
* * *
“You two finish your breakfast while I put the luggage in the car, okay?” Frances had insisted that they all eat breakfast before leaving home, and after seeing that the look in her eye hadn’t altered a whit since they’d switched off the news, Melvin didn’t argue with her. It hadn’t slowed them down too much, since Mike and Maddy were racing each other every step of the way, now. Melvin liked it that they got along so well, even though the two of them couldn’t be any more different.
He peeked outside before opening the door, and didn’t see anything unusual. It looked just like his front yard at four in the morning on any other day. Still, Melvin was cautious. He opened the door quickly, lifted the two big bags outside, and shut the door again as fast as he could. From his front step he hit the remote keyless entry button on his keychain, then picked up the luggage with both hands and ran to the back of the SUV. As though he were actually in the race his children played at being in, Melvin sped through the motions of opening the back, securing the bags, and locking the car again.
From the driveway, Melvin saw his neighbor apparently buckling his son, little Stevie, into his car seat. He waved quickly, shouted, “Morning, Steve!” and turned to run back inside without waiting for response. Melvin assumed Steve would be just as stressed out as he and Frances were, and wouldn’t want to stop and chat. When he was inside again with the door shut firmly behind him, Melvin saw that breakfast had been finished and everyone was ready to go.
“Everyone ready?” They nodded. “Good. Frances, I didn’t see anything… amiss outside, but let’s not take any chances. You get Mike and Maddy buckled in as fast as you can, while I get the rest of the bags in the car. Okay?” Everyone nodded again. Melvin got down on one knee in front of his children. “Mike, Maddy, this is part of the race, too, so I need you both to get in the car and get ready to go as fast as you can, okay?” With the cutest little looks of absolute seriousness on their faces, Melvin’s children nodded to him again. He couldn’t resist ruffling Mike’s hair as he stood, receiving a “Daaaad” of consternation in response.
Melvin peeked out front again, said “Here we go,” and opened the door. He hit the remote again as the others ran to the car, locked the door behind them, and grabbed the last of the bags. Madeline was in her seat, buckled up, and had her door closed before Melvin even reached the back of the SUV. As he loaded the cooler and the kids’ bags into the back, he noticed that Steve was still leaning into his own car. He shut his rear gate and asked, “Still having trouble with the straps on that car seat, Steve?”
Which was when Steve came running out his own front door with a pistol in hand. Whoever was leaning over little Stevie in the back seat of Steve’s car, it wasn’t Steve. “Frances, we have to go, now,” Melvin said forcefully, running around to the driver’s side door. Steve started shooting at the figure leaning into his car, which was the first time it seemed to notice anything but little Stevie. Melvin could see that it was one of the undead, he could see the blood drenching its face, its neck, its whole front like a great, red bib, and he could see what was left of little Stevie, strapped into the back of Steve’s car. Melvin raised his voice even louder, to be sure he was heard over the poorly aimed gunshots ringing out only a few feet away, “NOW, FRANCES, NOW!”
Melvin leapt into the driver’s seat. He slammed the door shut behind him with one hand and slammed the key into the ignition with the other. He heard another car door close and his wife screaming “Go, go, go!” and Melvin sped out of his driveway without looking away from the road in front of him to see whether everyone was in the car. He was reacting faster than he could ever have thought things through, or decided what to do. It wasn’t until the sound of gunshots abruptly ceased behind them that Melvin looked in the rear view and saw Steve being overcome by the monster that he’d mistaken for the man.
After turning a corner and putting that carnage out of sight, Melvin’s pulse began to slow down a little until he noticed that his wife wasn’t sitting next to him. Her seat was empty. He looked over his shoulder and was relieved to see Frances, looking shell-shocked, in the back seat with the kids. He realized she must have leapt in and shut the door when she’d heard the gunshots, more worried about getting away from danger than her own comfort. “Do you want to move up front, dear?” he offered.
“Don’t stop the car,” was all she said. Her eyes were unfixed, staring into the middle distance, and rarely blinked. Melvin kept driving.
It wasn’t until he’d been driving for several minutes that Melvin realized he didn’t know where he was supposed to be driving. He and Frances hadn’t had a chance to discuss it before they’d left. From everything he’d seen, he doubted it would be safe anywhere near downtown Denver, but the nearest road out of town was the I-76. The blockage of which, he realized, was probably where all this madness had begun. Melvin couldn’t make up his mind. He couldn’t decide what to do, where to go, or how to protect his family. He felt assured by the scene in his neighbor’s yard that they’d done the right thing by fleeing, but beyond that was a fog.
By allowing his hands and feet to steer the SUV without a real destination, Melvin soon saw that he’d brought his family to the street where Stacy lived. It had been automatic. As he passed by Stacy’s home, Mel couldn’t help but stare at her darkened windows and wonder whether she’d already left or she hadn’t been alerted to the danger. In the rush to get his family ready to go and out the door he hadn’t been able to call her, himself. For most of a second, Mel considered stopping to save her and his foot let up on the gas. As they came up next to Stacy’s unlit house though, Melvin’s head turned far enough that he saw Frances in the back seat. Their eyes locked. His foot pressed down hard on the gas. His hands took the next turn.
When he turned his head back to face the road, the first sign he saw was for the Eastbound I-70. He pretended, even to himself, that this was where he’d been heading all along and soon they merged into the apparently endless line of vehicles that all shared the idea. Melvin got in line, got in a lane, and idled slowly forward with his fellow evacuees. Long before the sun began to lighten the horizon ahead of them, Michael and Madeline had fallen back to sleep.
After Melvin saw he’d burned a quarter-tank of gas to travel less than a mile and still wasn’t to the freeway’s on-ramp, he thought he might have made the wrong decision. He began second-guessing himself. He tried to calculate how long it would take to get out of town at their current rate of travel. He tried to remember how many people the stadium could hold. He planned out various routes that might be clear to get to the stadium from where they were stuck in a seemingly frozen line of traffic. He thought he saw people out of their cars up ahead. He thought he saw something that reminded him of—
Melvin pulled the SUV out of traffic, driving up over a curb and across a sidewalk to do so. He crossed an empty parking lot, turned down an alley, and found an empty street to take him away from the line of cars he’d realized were merely waiting for death. The sudden activity seemed to rouse Frances’ attention, and before she could ask he said, “I’ve changed my mind. We’ll head to Mile High Stadium. It’ll be safer, there.”
In the growing daylight, Melvin could see that Denver already looked half-dead itself. There were cars abandoned on nearly every road, some wrecked, but most left with a door open and an idling engine as though their owners had expected to return to them after only a moment. More shocking than the cars left on the roads were all the cars that weren’t there - Denver’s normal morning traffic was missing; the only roads that were clogged were the ones leading out of town. Most shocking of all was the pedestrian traffic that grew denser and denser the nearer Melvin drove to the center of town, and he stayed as far from them as he safely could.
The sidewalks, the roads, even people’s yards and city parks, were populated by the walking dead. Perhaps one in three were feasting on the recently deceased. Not even a single person he saw appeared to have survived the night. Melvin hoped they’d reach the stadium without incident, and without his children waking up to see the horrors taking place all around them. He hoped there were survivors there, someone to protect them. He hoped he’d made the right decision.
Go With the Flow
Sarah heard someone at the window, and fumbled frantically to get her sweater back on over her head, whispering “Gotta go,” as she clicked the webcam off just before being discovered.
“What are you doing in my bedroom?” asked Johnnie in the most accusatory whisper he could muster.
“What are you doing sneaking out in the middle of the night?” Sarah replied with appropriate snark. They continued to argue in a loud whisper.
“I’m not sneaking out, I’m sneaking in.” He shut the window behind him.
“You know what I mean.”
“At least I’m not doing a striptease on the internet. Your sweater is on backwards, by the way.” Johnnie pulled his own sweater off over his head.
Sarah quickly reversed her sweater. “It wasn’t a striptease! Bert and I were just… chatting.”
“Sarah, you were half-dressed when I got here. That’s the strip. And you’re doing it over the internet; that’s the tease. Strip, tease.” Johnnie shook his head, adjusting his desk lamp to examine a large, fresh set of tooth imprints on his upper arm. The wound was rapidly bruising.
“Hey, at least I don’t have to worry about Bert leaving marks on me this way. You and Francis are getting pretty kinky.”
“He prefers to be called Frankie, and no, Frankie didn’t do this.”
“Frankie? As in ‘Frankie and Johnnie’? You do know Frankie kills Johnnie in the song, right?”
“Yeah, but I’m not cheating on him, am I?”
“Until you meet someone new. How many boys have you been through this semester?” Johnnie shot his sister a look so cold that only the most emo of his friends could have matched it. She couldn’t help but flinch away. “So if it wasn’t Frankie, who bit you?”
Johnnie poked and prodded at the wound, making faces of exaggerated pain. “Some crazy homeless guy. I was on my way back home, taking the shortcut behind the bowling alley, y’know?” Sarah nodded. “And this bum jumps out from behind a dumpster and just attacks me. He must have been totally out of it; he didn’t say anything or try to grab my wallet, he just kept growling and snapping his teeth at me. I thought he was gonna take a chunk out of my arm.”
“How did you get away?”
“I’m skinny, and I spend half my free time ‘wrestling’ with twinks and jocks. I’ve out-wrestled half the varsity wrestling team.”
“Eww! I don’t need details.”
“Suffice it to say, I know how to come out on top, and this guy was no wrestling star. As soon as I was out of his grip I started running, and when I looked back he wasn’t following me. For all I know he’s still there, waiting for someone else to walk by so he can take a bite out of them, too.”
“Gross.”
“Do you think he had rabies?” Johnnie was still poking at his bruised arm.
“You’d better hope not. You’re supposed to be in your bed sleeping, not hanging out behind a bowling alley getting chewed on by bums.”
“And you’re supposed to be in your bed sleeping, not sneaking into your brother’s room to expose yourself on camera for all the world to see.”
“It’s not all the world, it’s just Bert, and I wouldn’t have to sneak around if Mom and Dad would give me my own computer!”
“You think Cuthbert isn’t recording all your little webcam sessions?” Johnnie made sure he pronounced her boyfriend’s name with special emphasis. “You think he isn’t showing you off to all his buddies from down at the country club?” He rolled his eyes. “Like coming from a good family makes him any less of a guy?”
“He prefers to be called Bert, and he’s not like that!”
“All guys are like that. Was doing this stuff over the internet his idea, or yours—” Johnnie’s head snapped toward the door, his voice lowered to a much gentler whisper. “Wait, did you hear that?”
“What time is it?”
“A little after two.”
“Shoot. I’d meant to be back in my own room by now. Dad’s been getting up every night at two and puttering around, lately.”
“Puttering around?”
“Eating, watching TV, sometimes just wandering around the house. I assume he has insomnia or something.”
“Is your window unlocked? Maybe you can sneak around.”
“I only leave it unlocked when I sneak out that way.”
Then they both heard a noise on the other side of the bedroom door. The sound of laughter. Applause. He’d turned on the television. Sarah breathed a sigh of relief. “Good luck,” Johnnie whispered as his sister snuck out into the hallway.
“You too. You’d better hope that doesn’t get infected.” Sarah shut Johnnie’s door silently behind her and tip-toed back to her own room. Both teens were asleep within minutes, and they each got about an hour’s rest before being woken by hard, harried knocking at their bedroom doors.
“John! Sarah! Wake up! Get dressed! We’re leaving in ten minutes, with or without you,” their father shouted to them through their doors. Johnnie could tell by the tone of his father’s voice that he was serious, and was out of bed and dressed in seconds. If the house were on fire they wouldn’t have had ten minutes, but the tone of his voice was certainly as serious as a fire.
Johnnie grabbed his messenger bag, made sure everything was in it, and ran out to see what was going on. His sister and his mother were already standing, slack-jawed, before the big flat-screen in the living room and Johnnie was soon doing the same. As he watched Sunny Preston giving her report as though this were any other news day, Johnnie absentmindedly put his hand on his arm where he'd been bitten.
“What are you all standing around for? We’ve gotta get out of here. Are you ready?” Johnnie’s father burst in through the front door as though he’d been expecting them outside already.
“Where are we going?”
“The National Guard are set up at the stadium. I trust them more than I trust our chances out on the open road.” He switched the TV off and headed back to the door. “Now. We’ve got to go now. The stadium holds less than a hundred thousand people. We don’t want to be turned away.” He didn’t wait to see whether they were following; he just ran out to the already-idling car and jumped in.
A few minutes later, Johnnie’s father was telling the guard at the entrance to the stadium that none of them had encountered the contaminated, and Johnnie tried not to touch the throbbing wound on his arm as the guard shined his flashlight at him in the backseat. Sarah had been trying to get him to say something about it since she’d seen the news, but he kept giving her that look that turned the blood in her veins to ice. Johnnie’s intense stare kept Sarah quiet as they were waved through into the stadium’s parking lot and their father declared “Nothing to worry about, now. The National Guard will protect us, here.”
Johnnie was neither the first, nor by far the last, to hide their zombie-related injuries in order to get into the stadium. He was simply the first of them to turn, not long after the sun had come up.
* * *
The sun had fully risen over the horizon by the time Melvin reached the trafficades keeping him from getting within a couple of blocks of Mile High Stadium. Again Melvin found himself glad he’d invested in a capable SUV as he drove up onto the sidewalk to get around the barrier. As soon as he did so, two humvees and a dozen uniformed gentlemen carrying firearms seemed to appear out of nowhere to stop him. Being the first living people he’d seen since leaving the traffic jam trying to get out of town, Melvin was happy to be stopped at gunpoint by them.
He rolled down his window and addressed them, “My family and I are looking for someplace safe to go. The I-70 is totally—”
One of the men cut him off, “Don’t you have a radio in that thing?” Melvin nodded, though he hadn’t turned it on all morning. “We’ve been at capacity since 4AM, sir. No room. You’re supposed to stay in your home. I’m going to need you to turn around.”
“They’ve already got to my neighborhood. They ate my neighbors. It’s just my wife and I and our two small children,” and Melvin hit the switch to roll down the rear window so the soldiers could get a good look at his family. He didn’t want to have to try to come up with a new plan, to make a new decision about what to do. “Surely you have room for us. We brought our own food. Can’t we work something out?”
The soldier’s face remained unsympathetic, and the others he’d arrived with were keeping a diligent watch on the street behind them, refusing to make eye contact with yet another family being turned away from the promise of their protection. Shaking his head, the young soldier was about to turn them away a little more forcefully when his radio squawked and spoke his name. Melvin looked back over his shoulder at his wife, still near-catatonic, while the soldier spoke indecipherable jargon into his radio. The brief conversation seemed to take minutes, as he awaited a judgement against him.
“If you’re willing to turn over your vehicle to us, we’ll let you in.”
“You want … my SUV?” After spending a year and a half in search of the perfect vehicle, Melvin was wary of letting it go. “Don’t you have humvees and … I don’t know, tanks?”
“We’re lining up civilian vehicles to create a secure perimeter, and we need vehicles that fit a certain profile. Trucks, vans, SUVs, and other large vehicles.” He leaned toward Melvin and lowered his voice a little. “Honestly, sir, if your neighborhood has already been taken over by those things this is your best chance. We haven’t heard a word from any of the outbound checkpoints in over half an hour, so there’s no getting out. As far as civilians are concerned, this is the last safe place in Denver.”
“You aren’t giving me much of a choice.”
“You want to save your kids’ lives?”
“Fine, fine, you can have it. Where do we need to go?”
The soldier gave a hand signal as he spoke, “Get your family out of the vehicle and Private Torres will escort the four of you to the stadium and be sure you aren’t stopped by any other patrols.”
“Wait, you’re going to make us walk?” Private Torres tried to open the back door next to Madeline, but found it locked. “It’s got to be half a mile to the stadium from here.”
The soldier Melvin had been speaking to raised his weapon slightly; not enough to be aiming it at them, but enough to remind them it was there. “Unlock your doors, please, sir. No need to make this difficult.”
“You can trust us, sir. We’re the National Guard.” Private Torres spoke without a hint of threat or irony in his voice. Melvin reluctantly unlocked the doors.
“We’ve got some stuff in the back—”
Another soldier was already pulling Melvin out of the driver’s seat, preparing to drive it away. “Only what you can carry, sir.” Melvin ran around to the back of the SUV and pulled his kids’ bags and the cooler out just in the nick of time. His SUV, the humvees, and all but one soldier were gone as quickly as they’d first appeared. Melvin tried to keep his wits about him, tried to put on a brave face for Mike and Maddy.
He handed Michael’s bag to Frances, and knelt down to strap Madeline’s bag onto her back, almost glad his inability to decide between luggage and backpacks for his children had led him to luggage that could be worn as backpacks. “Are you ready for the next part of the race, Maddy? We’ve got to get to the stadium. Everyone’s waiting for us.” She nodded, still half asleep.
He looked over to see that Frances was just standing there, holding Michael’s bag, staring at the space their car had filled moments ago. Without missing a beat he shifted over to where Michael was standing and, taking the bag from his wife’s ineffectual hand, strapped it on his son’s back. “How about you, Mike? Are you up for a foot race? This nice soldier is gonna make sure we keep pace. Do you think you can keep up?” Michael nodded excitedly, even as he yawned.
Melvin stood, turned to his wife, and took her by the hand. “Frances?” She turned her head in his direction, but without seeing him at all. “Frances, we’ve got to walk the rest of the way.” He couldn’t tell if her head was nodding acknowledgement or just bobbing, part of her trance. Holding her hand in one of his and grabbing the cooler with the other, Melvin nodded to the soldier and they all started walking down the middle of the empty street. Frances stumbled along, her eyes glazed over and her face expressionless. If not for her lack of appetite for the flesh of her family, she might easily have been mistaken for one of the zombies they were trying to escape.
As they moved along from checkpoint to checkpoint under the watchful eye of the National Guard and what remained of the Denver Police, Melvin got again to thinking. Seeing how his wife was coping with being safely escorted to and then through the safest part of the city, Melvin wondered where Stacy was, and how she was coping with the situation. He wondered whether she was still alive at all. He wondered if he’d made the right decision when he’d driven past Stacy’s place without stopping. Twelve hours earlier, Melvin had changed his mind about ending his affair with her, and now he was considering whether he should have endangered his marriage to try to save her. Then they reached the stadium, and he saw that they really were at capacity.
Invesco Field at Mile High could comfortably seat about seventy-six thousand fans during a football game. Melvin had attended a game or two since its opening and knew what that many people looked like. As the entered the stadium and Private Torres left their side, Melvin estimated that there must be two or three times as many people crammed into the place that morning. The stadium seats were full, the field was full, and all the stairs, the wide corridors, and every horizontal surface a person could get to seemed to be occupied by terrified refugees from the zombie outbreak. It took Melvin’s family nearly forty-five minutes to find a place to sit down, out on the edge of the grass. When they did, Frances was still in a daze, but Michael and Madeline had been having fun leading her around, each holding one of her hands.
When they’d finally settled into their few square feet of grass, Melvin told them, “Now you two be good and watch Mommy while I go to the bathroom. Don’t let her wander off, okay?” They smiled and nodded, never letting go of their mother’s hands. He looked Frances right in the eye and thought there was a spark of understanding there, that he was leaving her to watch the kids for a few minutes, and he didn’t wait around for her to give a coherent response. Melvin trusted that Michael and Madeline would be safe as long as they stayed with their mother.
As soon as he was out of sight and out of hearing range of his family, Mel took out his phone and tried to call Stacy. The first ring was a relief that the phone networks were still functional. The second ring was a relief that Stacy’s phone was on; it hadn’t gone straight to voicemail. The third ring was okay. The fourth ring was a little worry. The fifth ring was a sinking feeling in his chest. After the fifth ring Mel heard a click, but no greeting.
“Hello?”
Mel thought he heard the sound of an engine roaring to life.
“Hello?”
There was a distant, hard thump. A crunch. The sound of squealing brakes.
“Stacy? Are you there?”
A loud, close sound, as though the phone had been dropped, and then Mel’s phone beeped to let him know the call had been disconnected. He hit the green ‘Send’ button twice to redial, and it didn’t even ring; it went straight to voicemail. He hung up and tried again. It went straight to voicemail again. Mel tried a third time, and heard the annoying tones and nasal voice of a pre-recorded operator telling him all lines were busy and he should try his call again later. He hit ‘End’.
Mel stared at his phone with anger, fear, and contempt, willing it to work, willing Stacy to call him back, to be all right, to be alive and more aware of her surroundings than his wife. Mel was seriously beginning to second-guess his decision to save Frances without regard for Stacy’s well-being. In the long moment Mel stood there staring at the phone in his hand, he felt ready to rush out into the streets of Denver, to find his young lover, and to do whatever it took to save and to protect her from this and all other threats to her safety in the world. Then his phone rang.
“Hello? Stacy? Are you okay?”
“Mel? Where are you?”