his voice a monotone.
“Not the size of your dick if her silence this morning means anything.”
Vasily smiled. “I’m going to guess it’s not a bag of dry dog food we can moisten with rain water.”
Fyodor laughed out loud, a belly laugh he hadn’t experienced in many weeks, and he realized that mirth and happiness were not lost in the new world of the zombie apocalypse, that a friend could still make you laugh with a comeback quip. Nikita was jumping off her toe-tips, pointing to her side, the smile on her face wide, a jubilant look. Whatever she had just discovered changed everything in her life, made it somehow better, made it worth telling Fyodor and Vasily about.
And then three runner zombies erupted from around the corner and tackled Nikita to the ground, one of them immediately biting into her shoulder at the same moment Nikita’s last dying impulse was to squeeze the trigger on her shotgun. Fyodor watched in amazed horror at the blood spatter across the face of the zombie as the blast from the shotgun sent it skittering from her hand across the sidewalk, the shot pellets briefly pinging off the wall of a nearby building. If she screamed, it was drowned out by the blast of the gun, and, anyway, an instant later she was inert flesh on the sidewalk being torn apart by the undead.
The two men glanced at each other briefly before raising their weapons and firing on the walking dead, a round from the Desert Eagle splintering the head of a middle-aged male zombie while Vasily’s shotgun bursts swept the other two off Nikita’s body and into the gutter along the sidewalk, where the body of a young man twitched for a few moments as the death seeped out of his living corpse. Fyodor walked quickly to Nikita’s body and knelt down, slipping his pistol into his waistband and grabbing the idle shotgun from the ground. He stood up, aimed at the girl’s head, and disintegrated it with a blast from the weapon.
“What a waste,” Fyodor said, looking down the roads connected at the intersection, scanning for the inevitable arrival of a shuffling horde of undead. He had no idea why gunshots attracted them with such intensity, but it was a fact of modern life that they did.
Vasily took a few steps down the road to where Nikita had been pointing and stopped. His shotgun sagged in his hands at what he saw.
“You’re not going to believe this, Fyodor,” Vasily said, “but somebody blew a hole in the side of the bank since we were last through here.”
Fyodor walked up alongside Vasily and stared at the crumble of rubble at the back of the bank, the interior of the bank’s vault exposed. Fyodor walked up to the edge of it and looked into the shadowy darkness. Coins and cash were scattered everywhere amid the broken masonry, a small fortune for a person in a modern 21st Century nation. Fyodor turned and looked over his shoulder at Nikita’s body and then glanced at Vasily.
“Probably the most cash she’d ever seen in her life,” Vasily said.
“It’s not even good for toilet paper,” Fyodor said.
“Or eating.”
Fyodor laughed flatly. “We better get out of here before more dead show up.”
Just then they heard the booming of another round of artillery fire, the sky above them rent apart by the projectiles as they burrowed through the air. Several seconds of silence passed before the explosions reverberated back to them. Vasily and Fyodor turned and faced each other.
“The army’s retreating,” Fyodor said, letting the words hang in the air. They both knew what that meant.
“We’re going to need more vodka and another girl,” Vasily said, nodding down the road, his voice flat, the words emitting only facts.
“This world can kiss my ass good-bye, but it’s going to do it on my terms,” Fyodor said, the two of them listening as another round of artillery shells sluiced through the air, “when I’m drunk and laid.”
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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