The broken neck was an unexpected bonus, and not the maneuver Sven was trying to perform. He continued with his original plan, sweeping his arms across his body and toward each other in a brutal pectoral fly that brought the two zombie heads into a crunching, moaning collision with the head of their zombie compatriot in the middle. The three skulls dented, collapsing and spewing coagulated blood and other unidentifiable, too-dry goop.
Sven let go and let the three broken, crushed heads fall away from him. The three pant-pulling zombies, though dead, were still clutching doggedly at Sven’s track pants.
As his vision grew hazy, Sven crawled backward, holding on to the awareness that there were still more zombies around him. He kept crawling backward, but those damned zombies kept their firm grip on his pants. Reluctantly, and cursing the zombies under his breath, he wriggled out of his track pants, losing both of his cross-trainers in the process. He wanted to rip the zombies limb from dry, rotten, disgusting, putrid limb. And he would have, if he wasn’t dying to take a breath. But he knew he couldn’t breathe there, not yet.
He stood up and got his bearings. The gravel hurt, cutting into Sven’s socked feet, and he felt uncomfortably exposed in his boxer shorts among the zombies.
This would never happen in a zombie movie, Sven thought. Nothing is ever how it’s supposed to be in the movies.
There were only four moving zombies left, and they were blocking Sven’s path around the side of the hibachi restaurant, over to the drugstore.
Only four, Sven thought, and he would’ve spat had he not been holding his breath—the head-crushing maneuver had let out too much of his air already. He danced around the dwindling group of undead and picked up the sledgehammer.
Sven was consumed with anger, and he let it take control of him. There would be no more merciful headshots.
He didn’t see their faces, didn’t see their clothes, didn’t see the people they once were. He just swung.
The head of the sledgehammer found home in the first zombie’s rib cage, tearing through clothing and skin, and launching shattered, splintered bones into the air. Sven pulled on the shaft of the hammer, and as its head pulled out of the rib cage, the zombie’s sternum came with it, strands of dry flesh and sinew offering little resistance.
The zombie began to topple, and without waiting for it to fall all the way to the ground, Sven took a full backswing and connected the head of the hammer with the side of the next zombie’s kneecap. The zombie’s whole leg bent sideways at the knee, and in spite of the wild anger that had overcome Sven, he cringed. He could almost feel the unnatural bend of the leg, and the sight recalled the sound of nails scratching across a chalkboard, as unconnected as that was.
The zombie’s destroyed leg buckled in a series of sharp cracks, and Sven saw a jagged piece of bone rip through the top of the zombie’s thigh. The zombie fell over onto its side, then settled on its back, hands reaching up, trying to grasp Sven’s bare legs.
There were two left standing, and Sven’s lungs were burning now, crying out for air. He sniffed at the air cautiously, and then snorted all of it out, feeling the dizziness rush into him. The taint was there, as strong as ever. He would have to move faster.
Rushing forward, he swung the hammer diagonally and downward. The head of the sledgehammer smashed a zombie’s shoulder, and initiated a series of cracking that ended in the zombie collapsing onto its knees and then falling onto its face. It didn’t even twitch.
He struck the remaining zombie in its stomach with the shaft of the hammer, and ran around the creature while it was stumbling backward, off balance. Then Sven brought his hammer down again, on the back of the zombie’s neck. There was a snapping, tearing sound that was growing familiar, and the zombie fell forward.
Sven relaxed his grip and let his burning muscles loosen, but he didn’t let go of the hammer. He was still holding his breath and beginning to suffocate, but he took a brief look at the fallen zombies still clawing for him and the zombie parts strewn around him, dumbstruck at what he had done.
Then he ran back to the gate and shut it, being careful to lower the vertical bar into its proper place, and put on his shoes. As he did so, he saw he was bleeding through his socks, and hoped that one of the zombies that he had just destroyed was the idiot that decided to forego pavement in this part of the strip mall. It was unlikely, none of them were dressed like they had that kind of power. He considered the track pants for a moment, but there wasn’t time to pry off three pairs of dead zombie hands, so he left them.
Sven looked through the fence at Jane and Lorie and the unconscious boy. Their faces were hard to make out at that distance, and Sven wasn’t sure he wanted to see their expressions. He was sure they had been watching him, except for Evan of course, who even at that distance Sven could tell was out of the game.
He felt ashamed, and it wasn’t because he had lost his pants. Sven turned away and ran around the hibachi restaurant to the drugstore, dodging four zombies that tried to grab him with their gnarled hands. He shouldered the drugstore’s door open, burst in, and fell on his hands and knees, gasping for breath.
In the background, the door bing-bonged a welcome.
Chapter 58
Jane watched Sven dispatch the zombies on the other side of the fence. She had feared for him, but once he passed through the gate, the fear left her. He had become someone else, something else.
It was not the Sven that she knew who fought on the other side of that fence. It was not the Sven she had once dated. It was a monstrous killing machine, a survival machine, a machine that was going to see that she and the two hapless kids they had met would make it through whatever sickness had befallen their city.
While she watched Sven reduce the zombies to pieces, she had a passing thought that she should cover Lorie’s eyes, or make her turn away, or something equally parental like that. She was holding Evan, who was a dead, unconscious weight in her arms, so he was in no danger of seeing the violence. She could tell Lorie to turn away, not to watch, but she didn’t. What was the use? In the world that had dawned this morning, this was the kind of thing that needed to be seen—by everyone, young kids included. There was no shielding Lorie from reality, and there was no shielding herself. The truth had to be faced. Jane had to face it, and Lorie had to face it too.
Once Sven had felled the zombies, Jane turned to Lorie, who was looking toward the gate. Jane heard a clanking sound and turned back to Sven, who was closing the gate behind him. That was good of him to remember. She had no idea Sven could be this resourceful, and so stupidly brave. Then Jane turned back to Lorie and saw what was in the girl’s eyes.
There was no fear in Lorie’s eyes, only concern—concern that must have been for Sven, and for Evan. Jane considered that she herself might be the only one in the group that was terrified. The girl was far braver than she, and the boy probably would have been too if he wasn’t—the boy…
Jane looked down at the unconscious boy in her arms. Was he turning into one of them? Into a zombie? Should she say something? How could they be sure until it was too late? She looked at Evan’s pale, drooping eyelids, and was ashamed that the first thought that came to her—her instinct—was to leave him behind.
But she resisted.
“Get in the car,” Jane said. Lorie obeyed, without a word. Jane placed Evan into the backseat, and was startled by Ivan’s hiss. That made her feel worse about everything. Ivan was right, her instinct was right, the boy was wrong, too much like Vicky had been, but how could she just leave him there? How could she just leave him there to die?
Jane held Evan’s head up as she put a seatbelt around him, then let his head nod down to his chest. It was a terrible mistake, and she knew it.
Then Jane closed the rear door, got into the driver’s seat, and backed the car up to the gate without getting too close. She put the car in drive, resolving to keep her foot on the brake while she waited for Sven to return.
Lorie put a hand on Jane’s. ?
??He’s going to come back. I know he will.”
Jane nodded, but she wasn’t sure. And they were running low on fuel.
Chapter 59
The air was amazing. Fresh, clean, and free of that sickening foulness.
But, Sven thought, what if it hadn’t been, what if it had been contaminated? He would not have been able to hold his breath any longer and he would’ve been...he would’ve been...what exactly?
There would be time to wonder about that later, Sven told himself, and scrambled to his feet. He began to jog down the first aisle. Too quickly, he was in half-darkness, and had to backtrack to the entrance to feel around for a light switch.
He felt around on the wall with his free hand, and when he couldn’t find anything, he gave up. There wasn’t time to search for the light switch. Sven reentered the first aisle, and started on a slow jog back into the dimness, scraping the head of the sledgehammer along the floor as he went, and hoping that the medicine he needed would be in a relatively lit part of the store.
Sven felt a hitch, a tug at his arm, and then he was sprawled face-down on the floor, his bare legs cold against the tiles. The sledgehammer had caught on a shelf-divider at the bottom of the aisle, Sven had been holding on tight, and had been pulled down with the hammer.
Exactly the kind of thing that doesn’t happen in zombie movies, Sven thought, exactly.
Reluctantly, he let go of the sledgehammer’s shaft and slowly, painfully pushed his chest off the floor, settling on his knees. He unhooked the head of the sledgehammer from the aisle, put the head of it on the floor, and used it to pull himself back up to his feet. Behind him, on the other side of the glass door, the four zombies that he had dodged were now congregated, and others were coming up to join them. That was bad.
The zombies locked eyes with Sven, and began to scrape at the door with their undead nails. There were six now, two up against the door and four behind them, vying for a closer spot. Then the four in back were pushing up against the two in front, and—
Bing-bong, the door said, and the zombies were inside.
Chapter 60
Sven, wearing shoes and socks but no pants, began to retreat into the darkness. But what if there was something lurking in the back of the store? What if there were other zombies back there? There was no smell in the drugstore, but what did that really mean?
I should have tried harder to find that damned light switch, he told himself, but now it’s too late.
Moments after the six zombies entered the drugstore, it was filled with their stench. That didn’t surprise Sven. But then the zombies did something unexpected. They didn’t come at Sven in a mindless way—not at all. They split up. Sven hoped it was by accident, and was the result of the six-zombie bottleneck at the store’s entrance that formed when they stumbled in. But what if they were hunting him—hunting him and planning it out?
An image of the Pac-Man video game flashed in Sven’s mind, and that was what he was—Pac-Man. Sven brought the sledgehammer up to his chest and backed up into the aisle. Two zombies were coming at him, and two had disappeared to the left and another two to the right. It all seemed too well-rehearsed. He could hear the four zombies that were out of sight stumbling through the store all around him, but amidst his shallow, ragged breathing, the beating of his heart, and the stumbling, rotting creeps in front of him, he couldn’t place where they were. It was like a house of mirrors except with sounds and shambling, tripping noises coming from all around him.
Sven reminded himself to slow his breathing and made a conscious effort to breathe in very short sniffs through his nose. He had to get out of there, the air was getting worse with every second.
He did the only sensible thing left to do. He charged at the two zombies in front of him. There was no room to swing the sledgehammer from side to side in the narrow aisle, so he raised it and brought it down, aiming for the top of the nearest one’s head. Sven missed, and the head of the sledgehammer grazed the zombie’s forehead, taking off a sheet of rotten flesh and all of its nose. Because of the hammer’s momentum, when Sven missed, he was carried forward in a twisting motion, and almost fell into the zombie he had just grazed. Sven regained his balance, moving backward away from the two zombies just in case they had come within grabbing distance in his moment of vulnerability. He looked up, and in the dim light he saw that the nose-less zombie with the sheared forehead had fallen backward into the creature behind it, and the two were trying to get back on track in their stumbling toward Sven.
He rushed at them again, but this time, instead of swinging the hammer in the tight quarters, he jabbed with it, knocking each of the zombies in its head. There were cracks, twitches, and the zombies fell backward. They weren’t out of commission, but Sven took the opportunity to sidestep past them, being mindful to avoid their biting mouths and grasping hands.
Sven, now holding his breath again, ran to the entrance of the next aisle and searched the visible parts of the store with frantic turns of his head. He had to get what he needed and he had to get out of there. There were no more zombies outside the door and there was no more wretched bing-bonging, but he had no idea how many of the creatures were in the dark store with him, and with every step that he took, he imagined one of the things taking a merciless bite of his exposed calves, quads, or hamstrings. There was a lot to bite, and Sven couldn’t help thinking that him being pants-less was a zombie’s dream come true. But he wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
Jogging across the front of the store, Sven caught sight of two shambling zombies that must have been the ones who had split off from the group of six at the entrance. They were in the middle of the aisle he was looking into, so he ran to the next one, wanting to avoid a confrontation and get out of the place as fast as possible. Then he saw something. It wasn’t what he needed for the boy, but it would be helpful—to him and to everyone waiting in the car.
He took four packages of surgical masks from the shelf in front of him, ignoring whether each package held one or multiple masks. There was no time for counting right then, and the more masks the better. Sven tore one of the packages open, pulled out a mask, and put it over his face.
It helped. Sven was surprised by just how much it helped. He could breathe more or less normally without getting too much of the taint in the mask. The burning in his lungs cooled. Sven threw the open package away and tucked the remaining three packages under his arm. Then he had a thought, and grabbed a fourth unopened package for Ivan. Ivan certainly wouldn’t like having a mask put on him, but it was better than being eaten by zombies. He tucked the fourth package under his arm with the other three.
The packages were awkwardly shaped and cumbersome to carry, and they reduced Sven’s range and ability with the sledgehammer. That could be a problem, but there was no time to look for a bag now.
Sven, masked, a little calmer, and breathing in a steady rhythm though still shallowly, tiptoed to the next aisle. And there it was. For a second, as he stared at the acetaminophen pill bottles in front of him, he thought his luck was turning. Then, as he propped the sledgehammer up against the aisle and reached for the pills, something grabbed his left ankle. Sven fell, both from the pull and from his own surprise, dropping all the surgical masks and sweeping at least ten bottles of acetaminophen off the shelf.
He looked at his ankle, and, sure enough, a set of rotten fingers and the rotten hand to which they belonged were holding fast.
Apparently, the aisle hadn’t been empty when Sven tiptoed into it. A zombie had been lying in wait, and now it had snared its prey. As the thing began to pull at his leg, Sven stretched out his right hand for the sledgehammer propped up against the shelf. It was just out of reach.
Chapter 61
Milt counted the zombies that surrounded him—a ragged mass of fourteen. He then proceeded to commend himself on his rapid counting abilities. Of course, as a former video game designer, math was one of his strong suits. He had always been good at it.
Milt
’s arms were beginning to tire under the weight of the sword, so he carefully leaned the flat part of the blade against the front of his shoulder. Then he took a good look at the fourteen zombies. They were of all shapes and sizes, but it seemed they were nonetheless united in one common pursuit—Milt’s savory flesh. Of the fourteen, three were children—two boys and one girl, eight women, one younger man, and two older men, or older gentlemen, as they were likely to be called, and to call themselves, in the not-so-deep South of Charlottesville, Virginia.
They were shopper zombies, and though still quite piddling in Milt’s eyes, he felt more respect for them than for the looting hooligans he had so effectively made flee only moments before. An enemy—even a zombie enemy—was easier to respect than a gang of thieving scoundrels. Milt looked from black zombie eye to black zombie eye, and he resolved that their stumbling owners would not have even a nibble of the delicacy that was his tissue.
The zombies were closing in at a fast shamble, so Milt began to plan his offensive. He would pick off the weakest ones first, and he decided that the most logical way to go about that was to go from smallest to largest. His sword would build up momentum that way, and all fourteen would fall victim to his mighty blade. Milt wanted to make a quick job of it, because he was starting to grow hungry. He could feel the harbingers of his first stomach rumblings making their way up his esophagus, spurred on by the delicious aroma in the air, which seemed to grow stronger as the zombies drew nearer. There was no time to waste.
Milt picked out his first target—the smallest of the children—a little boy zombie. Little boy green, Milt thought he might call him, for the green tinge of his coarse zombie skin.