rolling by.
“Why what?” said a voice from behind him, and Rob spun quickly, his hand falling to his holster.
A man in his fifties was standing behind him with a boy of about ten, both of them wearing cowboy hats. The man idly held a Winchester rifle in his hands, more-or-less not-exactly pointed at Rob’s gut, while the boy had a small .22 caliber Ruger pistol in a hip holster. Rob smiled and moved his hand away from his gun.
“Was just asking God why this happened,” Rob said, shrugging, scanning the area for the sudden appearance of the walking dead.
“Get an answer?” the man asked.
“Nope.”
“Need any help?”
Rob shook his head. “Nah, just picking through the bones one more time looking for stuff that might’ve been overlooked. You?”
The man tapped the brim of his hat with his pointer finger and made a brief nod. “Just passing through. You be careful, there’s a horde of about ten-thousand dead-ones out by Westheimer Airport. No idea why, but they’re strung out like they’re waiting for something to come and land.”
“Thanks,” Rob said, watching as the man and boy walked down the street, each of them turning their heads to constantly scan the properties lining the street, looking for the undead. They turned a corner and Rob was alone.
He walked up onto the disheveled patio of The Library and sat down on a chair. He ate a Power Bar, drank some water, and stared around at the world. He wished there were some way to charge his iPod so he could listen to his Life Sux mix, a playlist he had started when his last long-term pre-zombie-apocalypse girlfriend had broken up with him. He’d edited it many times since then, adding two other short term girlfriend specific songs to the mix, but the playlist had long since morphed into a general purpose “bad day” mix: until Barbara Zane had come into his life, he hadn’t had a girlfriend in more than a year. The women who had originally inspired its creation never crossed his mind when he listened to it, and today would have been a perfect day to listen to it while drinking a six-pack of beer, seeing as it would likely be his last chance to drink beer as an alive human.
His calf throbbed with a dull warm pulse, and he looked down at the bandage. Not everybody got zombie-itis that got bit, did they? Someone had to be immune. Someone had to be resistant. Somehow, there had to be at least a natural chance that the disease didn’t get passed on to the bitten, right? Some people could survive an infection, he thought, because not even the plagues in Europe in the Dark Ages killed everyone. Right? Some people survived. Somewhere, someone had to be working on a cure. Right?
“Not in this town,” he said under his breath, looking around for anyone who might be in earshot.
The town was quiet, though. Only bird noises and the sound of the wind. If there was anyone in the country - the world - working on a cure, nobody he knew had any knowledge of it. There was nobody on the roads, nobody roaming the land, nobody with knowledge of anything outside a day’s walk of Norman, Oklahoma.
Nobody but maybe that man and kid in the cowboy hats.
He sat up in his chair and realized he had been crying, and wiped the tear streams from his face. Shit, he thought, two people passing through town and he hadn’t bothered to ask them anything about the outside world, or even if they were from somewhere farther away than a day’s round-trip. He left the bar’s remains and walked in the direction of the cowboy hat duo, feeling a dull ache forming in his calf, as if he were succumbing to a cramp, tightening up, becoming less limber. He shook it for a second and increased his gait.
He turned onto South Flood Street and began walking north, the last point he had seen the cowboy-hat-wearing man and boy. There was nothing on the road aside from a few abandoned cars and the skeletal remains of either the previously living or the dead undead. He walked cautiously on the side of the street until he reached the intersection with Main Street, which was clogged with defunct vehicles, abandoned by owners long-since dead or undead. Nobody who fled lived, so far as he knew. Anybody who had ventured out in search of a safer haven had either been killed by zombies, become zombies, or been killed by the military or law enforcement in the last ditch attempts to enforce curfews and quarantines.
Nothing had worked. Somehow, the zombies always got through, and only those who had hunkered down had survived. And not all of them, either. Rob looked up and down Main Street: the storefronts were all cracked open, long since looted and pillaged for anything and everything. He had been among those doing the pillaging and looting back after it was obvious neither the police nor National Guard were coming back.
He suddenly felt faint, a hot flash coursing through his body, the taste of vomit at the back of his throat. He pulled a water bottle out of his backpack and drank deeply, the luke-warm water doing nothing to cool him down. How long had it been since he’d been bitten? It had been late morning then, and now the sun was setting. Where had the afternoon gone? He looked around Main Street again: this had been a bustling city of more than 100,000 before the zombie plague, and now it was empty. Where were the people?
His fevered mind told him they had gone somewhere, that a hundred-thousand people don’t just vanish or turn into zombies that vanish. And, there weren’t that many corpses in the town, though they were everywhere. Maybe there was an escape?
He stumbled through town for several blocks, increasingly feeling like he was drunk. He was losing his balance and his ability to see clearly. The world was taking on a fog-like shroud. He felt almost good in the same way as a late-afternoon beer buzz at a barbeque cook-out. After a while, he stumbled onto the grassy lawn of Wells Andrews Park, and he stared around at the high grass and didn’t realize it hadn’t been mowed in months. But he knew where he was, and for no reason he could know he made his way to the amphitheatre. He was burning hot, and he had run out of water on the way. But he wasn’t thirsty. Or hungry. Just ... sleepy.
He made his way into the amphitheatre and walked up into the seating area, not looking for anything, no longer aware of anything, just trying to find a spot to sit and sleep it off. He found a spot in the lower left-third of the seating area and plopped down unceremoniously. He wriggled out of his backpack and stared up into the sky, the sun nearly set, the sky filled with a riot of violets and indigos, still waiting for the arrival of the stars. After a moment, he saw the first star and shivered. He could feel the sweat on his body pooling. Nothing was right. He was drunk. Mightily so, and everything in him said “sleep.”
And so he closed his eyes for the last time as a member of the living.
Get the entire collection of 20 stories - Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse
About the Author
William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.
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