If you didn’t know what you were looking for, it just looked like some people—one here, a couple there—starting to push or grab at the others, but it was kind of like when a crowd does the wave. It starts somewhere, and it ripples out—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, pushing through the crowd. More and more people, dropping their burgers and grabbing their neighbors instead.
Someone started screaming. An old guy had latched onto a big muscle-y dude’s head with his teeth and the big guy was trying to shake him off. People were jumping up and looking around, confused. More fights broke out, and more and more people started biting one another. A chorus of screams rose from the stands.
Officer Baby Face had grabbed some lady and was trying to wrestle her off her husband, but she was chewing into the guy’s arm.
And then came the sound I dreaded.
“Brraaaaiiiinnnsssss.”
A keening moan, shimmering in the hot Iowa air. The promise of mayhem.
The kids on the other baseball team all turned to look up at the fighting, shading their eyes in the bright sunshine.
Sammy’s dad was standing right beside us, chewing on a burger. I did a double take.
“Where’d he get that?” I asked, but it was too late to do anything about it.
More and more people were running around, moaning and groaning for brains. I saw a guy dashing for the parking lot with two little girls hanging onto his legs, gnawing away. Talk about ankle biters. A mom was chasing her kid, trying to bite him. An old grandpa grabbed a grandma and chomped down on her shoulder.
The zombie plague was spreading, and it was happening fast. Even faster than when people got bit. The zombie meat seemed to change them almost right away.
“We got to get out of here,” Miguel said.
“There’s a lot of zombies between us and the truck,” I said.
At that moment the zombies noticed us down on the baseball field.
“Here they come,” Joe murmured. “Better think of something fast.”
“There’s too many to fight!” Miguel said. “Look at all of them!”
The crowd of hungry zombies had definitely sniffed out the fresh meat of us players down on the baseball diamond. A couple of them were already stumbling down the hill, and it was just a matter of time before the trickle of zombies became a tsunami.
“We’re dead,” Joe said as he grabbed a baseball bat. “Guess this is it.”
There were too many to get through easily. We needed some kind of a plan, but everybody was confused—or, like Joe, they were just planning on going down swinging.
Well, you always said you wanted to be the strategy guy.
I took a deep breath and jumped up on the bench. “Hey, everyone! Listen to me! I got a plan!”
But, of course, no one listened. The players were pointing at the mayhem up on the hill and asking one another what the heck was going on, or saying things like, “Is that your mom biting your dad?” Some of them had walked out onto the diamond to get a better view as they tried to figure it out. But no one was listening to me.
“Listen up!” I shouted. “They’re zombies! I got a plan!”
No one heard me.
“Here, man. I got this,” a voice said behind me.
Otis climbed up beside me and stuck his fingers in his mouth. He whistled so loudly my eardrums almost popped. Everyone’s heads whipped around.
Otis shouted, “Listen up, you all! Rabi’s got something to say. Those people up there are turning into zombies, and we got to get out of here. And Rabi’s got the plan for how we’re gonna do it. So shut up and listen, or I’ll kick all your butts!”
And just like that, all eyes turned to me.
I froze like a rabbit.
“Come on, Rabi,” Miguel whispered.
“Right,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Right.” My voice was still stuck. I tried again, making my voice loud. Trying to make it confident. Like Joe, when he’d pretended on the phone. Pretending to be a leader, so that I could be the leader.
“Okay, guys! If we try to run and we don’t work together, we’re going to get caught, and we’re going to get chewed to pieces, just like all the people up there. We need to get through those zombies and—”
“Who says they’re zombies?” Sammy challenged.
At that moment we heard gunshots. We all looked up. Officer Boone was surrounded by zombies. He fired again—Bang! Bang!—double-tap to a zombie’s head.
The zombie didn’t even slow down. It just grabbed him and started chewing. Everyone gasped as Officer Baby Face went down screaming.
“Any other doubters?” I asked.
In the silence that followed, Sammy’s dad said, “Come on, Sammy. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“You can’t!” I said. “We’ve got to stick together!”
But Mr. Riggoni was already striding away, his son in tow. “He ate the burger!” I shouted after Sammy, but Sammy wasn’t listening; he was running. And I could tell the others were thinking about running, too. Scattering like a bunch of scared chickens. I was going to lose them to panic in two seconds.
Pretend you’re the coach. Act like you’re in charge.
If Sammy’s dumb dad could get people to listen to him when he was wrong, I should have been able to get them to listen when I was right. I straightened up, tall.
“All right, guys! If we’re going to get out of here, we got to stay organized. The one advantage we got over zombies is that they’re dumb. They can’t think their way out of a paper bag. Dumber than Sammy’s dad, right? So if we stay tight, and we work together, we can get through this,” I shouted. “You hear me?”
I heard a mutter.
“Are we going to stay organized?” I shouted.
Otis understood what I was trying to do. “Yes!” he shouted.
“We staying tight?” I shouted.
More guys called out. “Yeah!”
“Zombies got no brains, but we got ours, and we got each other, and we’re getting out of here!” I shouted. “You hear me?”
“Yeah!”
“Okay! Get your balls and bats, guys: We’re playing us some zombie baseball.”
In front of me, I could see all my teammates and their baseball skills. Jason, who was quiet but hit singles all day long. Otis, who could clear a fence when he hit hard. Joe, who swung hard but was always wild. Amos, who had a killer fastball. Miguel, who never flinched from a pitch, and hit like a freight train. Sid Meacham, who could throw a ball from deep right field and get it to third. More and more players. I could see their stats running through my head.
Screams and shouts echoed down from the stands, but it seemed distant to me. All I cared about was fastballs and home runs and singles and sliders, and left-handed batters and right-handed batters. I was organizing them in my head as fast as I could, solving the weirdest math problem in the world, looking for power from my forward players, to knock zombies aside; speed from the backups, who could pop a zombie if someone missed….
“First things first,” I shouted. “Don’t try to kill the zombies! You saw what happened with the cop and the gun. Maybe there’s some way to kill ’em, but we don’t know what it is.”
“So what do we do?” someone asked.
“I’m going to tell you! Rule One: Don’t get bit! Rule Two: Go for the knees! A crippled zombie is too slow to matter! Rule Three: Keep moving!”
The zombies were shambling toward us, smelling a whole team of fresh meat down on the baseball field, and now they were really starting to charge: one, and then three, now a dozen, now…
“They’re coming!” Otis shouted.
I needed more time. Miguel seemed to read my mind. He strode out and nailed a leading zombie in the knees.
Whack! Whack!
The zombie went down, but there were a heck of a lot more behind it. Otis joined Miguel as I scrambled to organize the team on the field. I wished I could have kept my bat, but I wasn’t a slugger, so I handed it off to Jaz Zodrow, who was bigger and b
etter.
“You better not let me get bit,” I said.
He grinned. “Don’t worry. Zombies are way bigger than baseballs.”
“Where are we going?” Sid asked as I got him positioned.
I pointed at the onrushing zombie horde. “Right through them.”
Sid’s eyes widened with fear. “You can’t be serious.”
I glanced over my shoulder; it was worse than I thought.
Wall-to-wall zombies.
Otis and Miguel had given up on holding off the horde, and were bolting back to the safety of the group. I cupped my hands around my mouth. “We’re going to be a wedge! We got a pickup truck up there in the lot, but we got to get through all these zombies first!” I shouted.
“Miguel’s up front! Otis and Eddie are with him! Travis and Tommy, you guys are backup. Pitchers are in the middle. You see someone in trouble, you bean their zombie, hard! Me and Campbell and Steven, we’re on ball duty. We’re going to keep the pitchers loaded, right?
“Remember—we keep moving, we stay together, and we keep an eye on our buddies. Zombies are just dumb meat with legs. We got the advantage, ’cause we work together.”
Miguel hefted his bat. “Good speech, buddy. Let’s hope you’re right.”
“Here they come!” someone shouted.
“Charge!” I shouted. “Show ’em what we got!”
CHAPTER 36
We went up the hill like a fighter jet, a wedge of whistling baseball bats and killer fastballs.
The zombies came down on us like a tsunami.
When we hit, I thought we were going down. A tidal wave of hungry monsters poured over us. I didn’t think we’d hold. Miguel and Otis and Eddie were screaming and swinging like crazy, smashing and slamming zombies aside. Miguel anchored the point, switch-hitting on every swing like he’d been born to do it. Eddie and Otis backed him, swinging lefty and righty, pounding zombies aside and clearing space for us to keep up the charge.
Man, there were a lot of them.
“Don’t fight them!” I ordered as more zombies poured down on us. “Bounce ’em to the side and keep us moving!”
Knee-cracking, head-smacking, baseball bats flying, we bashed our way forward, whacking zombies aside. We fought for every step, gaining speed as we hammered through, charging forward now, faster up the hill, everyone working together—
A zombie got around the side of our wedge and dove in from the rear. I shoved my baseball glove into its face. The zombie bit down, but there weren’t any fingers to chew there. Then Jaz whacked it upside the head with the baseball bat I’d loaned him, and the zombie went down.
“Thanks, man!”
“Nice bat” was all Jaz said as he swung again and knocked another zombie down. A baseball whistled past my ear and clocked a zombie lady who was trying to get at Miguel from his blind side. Another one followed, nailing a zombie that had been about to lunge in on Otis as he tangled with another.
“Keep moving!”
I saw that the other baseball team was taking my strategy, too, charging up the hill to the bus that they’d ridden in on.
“Do we want the bus?” Joe shouted as he whacked another zombie’s leg out from under it with a crack.
“No! Keep moving. We can swing better if we’re on the truck! And there’s no telling if the bus driver’s even alive!”
We broke through the initial wave of zombies and kept hacking our way up the slope to the parking lot.
I could see some people who weren’t bitten were still running around. Some blond girl with long legs was just outrunning the suckers. She scooped up a little kid as she ran. She saw us and angled toward us.
“Let her in!” I shouted.
She hurtled into our midst, gasping. “Thanks!” she said.
The little kid was crying. “Either of you get bit?” I asked.
She shook her head. “From zombies? No way. Soon as I saw the first one try to bite, I knew what was up.”
Joe swung his bat into another zombie kneecap. “You read comics?”
“I play Left 4 Dead,” she said as she scooped up some old lady’s cane and rammed it into a zombie’s eye.
Joe was staring at the girl with total love. I swear he almost got bit. Otis had to whack a zombie in the face, just to get us past.
We kept moving. The pitchers ran out of balls, so I got down with the little kid and said to her, “If you see hard things like bottles and soda cans, you give ’em to us, so we can throw them, okay? Just pick ’em up and give ’em to our pitchers, okay? That’s what I’m doing.”
She wiped her eyes and got to work, picking up whatever she could find. I grabbed a lawn chair and heaved it into some more zombies that were sneaking up behind us, and tossed a bottle to the pitchers. A full soda can clocked another zombie in the nose.
We made it up the hill and across the parking lot, and the zombies… well, they spent half their time trying to eat one another, half their time chasing us, and half their time wandering around in circles, and if you think that doesn’t add up, you’re right—zombies are some confused, stupid monsters when it comes down to it.
We made it to the truck. “Sluggers in the truck bed!” I shouted.
“Aaah!” someone yelled. “There’s a cow head in here!”
Everyone started flipping out. “Get it out! Get it out!”
Joe ran up. “Gimme that!”
He grabbed Bart the Zombie Cow. The head mooed and snapped at him, but he kept his fingers free.
Everyone piled into the back of the truck. Miguel jumped into the driver’s side and started up the engine. The roar of the truck attracted the zombies again, like they realized we were about to get away. They charged after us just as I was shoving the last of the baseball team up into the truck.
“Bats on the outside!” I shouted.
I did a quick count, it looked like we had everyone except—
Where was Joe?
“Hey, Rabi! Check it out!”
Joe was standing in front of the truck, grinning. A zombie came staggering toward him.
“Watch out!” I shouted.
He turned and swung his bat.
One! Two!
Kneecaps.
The zombie went down. Good swings, too. Superclean. Joe wasn’t swinging anywhere near as wild as he did in the games. Zombies had a way of focusing the mind, I guessed.
“Come here!” Joe said, still grinning.
“Will you get in the truck!” I shouted.
“Yeah, in a minute! Check this out!”
I went around to the front.
Bart the Zombie Cow stared at me and bared his teeth, mooing. Joe had jammed the head onto the bumper of the truck, so that it stuck there like some kind of crazed mascot, glowering and snapping.
“MOOOOOoooooooo!” Bart said, clearly mad that Joe had turned him into a hood ornament.
“Awesome, right?” Joe was grinning.
It was the zombie apocalypse and our town was falling apart, but I couldn’t help laughing. I shoved Joe toward the door. “Get in the truck, you nut job.”
We piled into the cab and slammed the doors. Miguel gunned the engine again, and the zombies seemed to redouble their efforts to chew into our living flesh. A huge wave of them charged toward us.
“Drive!” I shouted.
But we didn’t. Instead, Miguel started fiddling with the controls on the truck.
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
“Putting it in four.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked. “Let’s go!”
A light flicked green on the dashboard: 4WD.
Miguel nodded in satisfaction and gunned the engine. We roared toward the wall of zombies as they came in at us.
“Everybody brace!” I shouted, but it looked like Otis had already warned the team in back, because everyone was crouching.
The zombies rushed forward. Miguel floored the gas.
As we hit, I could have sworn I heard Bart the Zombie Cow mooing with delig
ht.
CHAPTER 37
Zombie splatter. Big-time.
We smashed into the horde and the truck jerked and we all bounced off the dashboard. But Miguel kept the gas on, and then that big old Ford F-250 was climbing up and over all those zombies, crunching and bouncing, four-wheel-drive fully engaged, engine roaring.
It was just like a monster truck rally, the way we plowed through zombies. Joe was shouting and cheering, and the rest of the team in the back had their bats out, beating back the zombies that were trying to board us from the sides. The truck smashed through the last of the standing zombies and crunched over the rest, and Miguel floored it again.
Behind us, we left a trail of smushed zombies, like we’d driven through a cornfield and just mowed it down. For a second, you could see exactly where we’d driven, and then more zombies stumbled into the cleared space, and our trail disappeared under a fresh mob of brain-starved undead.
As we peeled out of the parking lot, we saw other zombies wandering around on the streets, too. It looked like Milrow had put their meat out all over the place, because the town wasn’t looking too great. I wondered if all the trucks had delivered meat to our town, or if there were zombie uprisings happening in other places, too.
We roared down Grand Avenue, not pausing for the stoplights. Ahead, a couple of people were being chased by zombies.
“Is that Sammy and his dad?” Joe asked.
I squinted. Sure enough, that’s who it was. They were running, and four or five zombies were chasing after them.
“Should we stop and help?” Joe asked.
I looked over at Miguel.
“We stopping?” I asked him.
Miguel shook his head. “I don’t see any reason.”
I hesitated, then said, “Come on. They’re still people.”
“They say they’re people.” Miguel kept his hands firm on the wheel. “But they never treated me or my family like anything other than dogs.”
“But… they’re people.”
“Just because they walk around and they’ve got two hands and two feet, that don’t make them people. People help each other out,” Miguel said. “Like Otis, right? People don’t eat each other up and throw each other away. Those two? They were always zombies. They just didn’t know it.”