Comedy of Horrors
By William Young
Published at Smashwords by William Young
Copyright 2012 by William Young
Plano, Texas - Day 90
Jessica Heatherington stared down the barrel of her H&K P30 pistol and watched the final zombie collapse to the ground, it's head split open by the weapon's .40 caliber round. Behind her, her teenage daughter Belle was breathing out tears in Morse code, fear of imminent death having paralyzed her after the three zombies had broken down the front door of their home and sauntered in. For a few moments, there was no sound but Belle's sobbing and the scrabbling sounds of Bob Crighton on the tile of the foyer as the last moments of his zombie death-life eked out of him.
Jessica looked over her shoulder at Belle and saw her daughter standing still, her arms slack. Jessica wasn't sure what she should do: smile, shrug, nod? The imminent danger was over. But Belle needed some assurance that only a parent could give, and Jessica couldn’t rely on the age-old stock admonition: monsters were now real, so she couldn't very well say they weren't.
"Everything’s going to be okay. Throw some clothes in a backpack and get ready to go, we have to get out of here now," Jessica said, her voice chirpy with adrenalin.
She turned and looked at her daughter. "Come on, we need to get moving. It's not safe here anymore."
"Dad was right."
Jessica winced inside. Just days ago, her ex-husband had tried to convince them to come with him out of the city, that it wouldn't be safe once the plague got into town. But she wouldn't listen to him, telling him the police and government would keep them safe. He, on the other hand, had never made her feel safe. He had always been too cautious, too uncertain. He was a poor handyman, unskilled with automotive repairs, and as far from an outdoorsman as a Texan man could be. On the other hand, he knew how to cook, could pair wine with a meal, and could talk pop music and current literature with anyone in the most obscure details. He was a whiz at cocktail parties.
Which is why she had divorced him after starting an affair with Bob Crighton. Crighton was raised a country boy, hunted and fished, followed college and pro sports, and could fix anything. He was the consummate man’s man. He was now lying on the floor of the foyer with a bullet in his neck. Bob had said everything would be fine if they stayed put, that the government would handle it, and then had gone out to fish the day before and come home with bite marks on his left arm.
Now her ex-husband Ken Heatherington was safe in their cabin near Lake Bridgeport with her dog Beau, a safe full of weapons and six months of canned goods. He always said you had to be prepared for the worst, but she had always taken that to be the insurance salesman inside of him talking. The boring, nine-to-five working, bicycle-riding, online-poker loving "I prefer single malts" man that with whom she had grown bored during sixteen years of marriage. She had wanted something more than his routine ordinariness, and Bob Crighton had been sitting next to her on a barstool one night while she was out with her girlfriends and had provided the spark she thought needed to get through the second half of her life with the happiness she felt she deserved.
But that spark had faded after a couple of months, and she had found herself trapped in a new relationship with a balding, slightly-less-than-bright "nice guy" with his own ex-wife issues. When Jessica had found out that Bob's marriage had ended because he had cheated on his wife, Jessica had realized the mistake she had made in filing for divorce, but pride wouldn’t let her admit she had been wrong and apologize to Ken and ask for another chance. Ken had settled into his own new single life in the cabin, having sold his insurance business back to the company and written a novel, the dream he had always talked about over weekend cocktails but never begun. Now, Ken had an agent in Manhattan who told Ken he was certain he could sell his manuscript.
When the plague had started spreading across the nation several weeks earlier, Ken had urged her to let Belle come stay with him, but Jessica had refused because school was still in session and Bob had convinced her "the plague" was just a media scare story. When people had started wearing surgical masks around town, she had wondered what the hell was going on, remembering stories she had seen on television from years earlier when people in Asia had gone nuts over some bird flu scare.
When the plague hit Dallas last week, Ken had driven in from the cabin and begged both of them to come with him. He had traded in his Acura for a used tan GMC Hummer, which he had left idling in the driveway of their home in the cul de sac of Melanie Lane.
"Just grab a bag and stuff it with some t-shirts, underwear and jeans," Ken had said, "and get in the truck. I need to get you guys out of here before the government shuts down the roads and quarantines everybody. You’re not going to be safe here."
Jessica had stood in the foyer looking at her ex-husband and thought for a moment that he knew what he was doing, so assured, self-possessed and calm. Had he always been this way?
"Mom, come on, let's do it," Belle had said from behind her. "We can always come back if it turns out to be nothing."
Jessica had almost said yes.
"No, honey, we need to just stay here and let the authorities take care of it," Jessica had said.
But the authorities hadn't taken care of it. Just like Ken had said, they'd closed the city and quarantined everyone to their houses. At first, there were constant police patrols, the city government even using fire engines and ambulances to drive through neighborhoods and use bullhorns to keep the people inside their homes. She hadn't seen any authorities in two days now. She'd woken up before dawn that morning and found Bob not sleeping next to her and made her way downstairs to find the back door open and the patio furniture overturned.
By mid-morning, some of her neighbors had loaded up their cars and driven off, but she and Belle had stayed indoors and watched cable news, trying to make sense of the coverage of the plague. None of the anchors or reporters actually used the word "zombie," but the images of the infected people certainly made them out to be such creatures. And then the power went out and she and Belle had no way of finding out what was going on in the world other than looking through the windows of their home.
Bob showed up before sunset the next day, his pajamas covered in blood and mucus, two other infected people with him, a twentyish man in a Quick Lube oil change uniform, a barbed-wire tattoo curling up from his left arm and around the bottom of his neck, and a middle-aged blonde woman wearing a lab coat and a torn skirt. Jessica watched them come onto the lawn and try to open the front door of the house before they started circling the house, trying to find a way in through the other doors.
Jessica got her pistol from the safe in the bedroom - it had been a gift from Ken on the last wedding anniversary they had celebrated (she had gotten him a silver money clip with his initials engraved on it) - and told Belle to stay in her bedroom. She had fallen asleep on the couch after watching Bob and his new pals shuffle off down the road, but the splintering of the front door this morning had awoken her and Belle at the same time, and each had run to the foyer to investigate.
And there was Bob with a crowbar, blood-infused drool trickling down his chin, staggering into the foyer in his pajamas and bare feet. He was pale, too, as if the blood had been drained from him. The look in his eyes was a mixture of sleep and hate. Curiously, she thought she heard him moan "brains" as he lurched into the house, the other two groaning behind him as they filed in.
"MOM!" Belle shrieked from the stairs as the zombies approached.
Jessica raised the pistol and put a round into the wall of the house, the recoil of the pistol surprising her. She pointed it at Bob again and squeezed the trigger, the bullet piercing his chest and staggering him momentarily.
“Shit,” she said under her breath, trying to remember all of the things Ken had tried to teach her about shooting.
The zombies moved through the foyer and she took several small steps backward, now looking through the sites of the pistol at Bob’s head. She pulled the trigger and sank a bullet straight through his mouth, splintering his neck bone and collapsing him to the floor.
Jessica stepped back a few more feet, paused, and fired four more rounds before at the other two, watching with fascinated horror at the eruptions of blood from the backs of their skulls. Her ears rang from the gunshots. Bob wasn’t dead, but all he seemed able to do at the moment was move his head slightly as blood pooled out of his neck on the floor.
"Move it, Belle, we've got to see if we can get to your father," Jessica said.
She felt weird having said those words. She now realized she needed Ken, needed him in a way she never knew she had needed a man before: he would know what to do. But, then, he had always known what to do, she had just never wanted to do it his way.
"Five minutes and we're out of here," Jessica said. "Get moving."
Twenty minutes later, she and Belle were backing the Toyota Land Cruiser out of the driveway. The sun was up and the sky was littered with a scud layer of clouds below a high overcast sky. A few tendrils of black smoke reached into the air from the direction of downtown, but she wouldn't be heading that way so she shrugged off the significance. Minutes later, she braked the truck to a stop at the corner of Sailmaker Lane and Mission Ridge Road: a five-car pile-up filled the intersection and automobile fluids pooled out around the vehicles.
"Shit, that's Claire and Pete's Benz," Jessica said as she looked at the cars. She put the car in park and popped out onto the street. "Stay inside. I'm gonna see if anybody's hurt."
"Mom, don't," Belle said.
Jessica walked up to the black Mercedes station wagon and looked in through the open driver's side door. It was empty, the air bags deflated. There was luggage still in the back and a small black clutch purse sat on the middle of the front seat. She moved away from the Benz and around a Toyota Prius that was crumpled under the nose of a Ford pick-up, the eco-car's front windshield shattered by the truck's bumper, a white air bag dangling from the steering wheel.
A cocker spaniel was wedged under the front passenger side wheel of the truck, and Jessica wondered if the crash had been caused by someone trying to miss hitting the dog. She looked around at the nearby houses of the neighborhood: all was quiet. Nobody was in any of the cars and the chirping of birds mingled with the hush of the breeze.
And then she heard a weird stutter-thumping on the pavement and turned to see five blood-stained people skip-hopping toward her. Lurching, almost, but attempting to run. Their arms pumping, spittle foaming out of their mouths, their faces a mixture of rage and intense concentration. It took another moment for her to realize they were coming for her, not toward her before she started running to her own idling vehicle. She could see Belle's look of incomprehension as Jessica closed on the car, her daughter's eyes wide and flitting between her and the group behind her. Jessica banged into the side of the door, yanked it open and slid inside.
Moments later, the five deadened people slammed into the side of the car and began pawing at it. The electric locks slammed down as Belle hit the button.
Jessica turned and regarded her daughter. "Good idea."
One of the men on the outside pulled at the handle on Jessica's side, jerking it violently and leaning his head against the window, his face filled with a somnolent rage, spittle flecking the glass, bloody drool pooling out of the corners of his mouth. His left arm looked dislocated and his clothes were soaked in a mixture of mucus and vomit.
"Mom! Drive!" Belle shouted as a pair of twenty-something women pounded at the passenger side door her daughter was staring through.
The car peeled out, spinning the infected assault group to the pavement as each lost whatever grip it had on the vehicle. Jessica drove across the lawn of a house, snapping a mailbox off at the base before losing control of the truck as it jumped over the curb on the end of the lawn and skidded sideways across the street, slamming into a UPS truck sidled up to the curb.
Jessica's head banged into the window. She rubbed it for a moment, trying to regain her wits. What was going on in the world? She turned and looked at Belle, who was staring through the various windows, her head swiveling quickly.
"Mom, they're coming after us, we've got to go," Belle said, careening to look over her shoulder. "Mom! Go!"
Jessica turned her head and looked through the rear window at the five-some she had just left, each of them again skip-running toward her vehicle. She took her foot off the brake and touched the gas pedal gently, easing the car forward, not wanting to panic and floor it again. She drove through the neighborhood slowly, alert for other panicky motorists and new groups of infected individuals, unsure of which to be more fearful.
The drive down Colt Road chilled the blood in her veins and let her know that not everyone had remained calm in their homes to wait for the authorities to deal with the situation. The shops in the strip malls near the intersection with Spring Creek Parkway were all busted open, the parking lots littered with abandoned burnt cars and a scattering of bodies. The Wal-Mart Super Center bled smoke into the sky. Belle turned the car radio on and tuned through the stations, all of them set to the emergency broadcast outgoing message.
"This is the emergency broadcast station. All citizens are urged to remain in their homes during the outbreak of influenza in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth region. The virus is highly contagious and causes those infected to become extremely aggressive and dangerous. Remain calm and indoors until local officials contact your neighborhood with the all-clear and tune to this station for further updates. This is the emergency broadcast station update for today."
It was the same message on every station, a message as vague and unhelpful as could be.
"They give better updates for thunderstorm warnings," Jessica said absently.
"What's going on, Mom?" Belle asked.
"I don't know, honey, I don't know," Jessica said, steering her way around a car crash and onto the parkway. "Let's just get to your dad's and figure things out."
The intersection with Highway 289 was a nightmare littered with smashed vehicles. Jessica pulled the Land Cruiser over to the side of the highway and stared at the mass of cars, suddenly unsure about whether it would be smart to try to drive around the dead vehicles and down the roadway. The parkway she was on had been lightly traveled for the short distance she'd been on it, and she'd seen almost no traffic in the neighborhoods before then.
Everyone, it seemed, was bugging out of town at the same time. Probably, she thought, since yesterday or the day before, and she wondered how long some of the people on the highway had been sitting in the traffic jam, going nowhere, slowly.
"Let's see if the Dallas Parkway is any better," Jessica said, steering around an abandoned car and back onto the road.
"It's going to be like this everywhere, Mom," Belle said. "We should go the back roads."
"We might have to, but let's just check and see first."
It was even worse there. Tractor-trailers were jackknifed in the intersection. Sedans and hatchbacks were crumpled into each other like lovers embracing in their final moments. Four-wheel drive trucks and SUVs were abandoned in the fields around the gigantic intersection. A recreational vehicle was upended onto its rear end, the front windshield pointed to the sky, it's tires all blown out, a pair of police cruisers crunched nearby.
And everywhere, bodies.
"Jesus Christ, the world is ending," Jessica said. She looked up into the sky at the low scud clouds moving quickly beneath the high gray overcast.
There was an explosion of glass behind her and the Land Cruiser was suddenly catapulted forward, the tires squealing for a brief moment against the pavement before Jessica's body jerked against the seatbelt and her foot slipped off the brake pedal. The world moved in slow motion, and Jessica watched as an abandoned mini-van spun across her windshield and T-boned the nose of her truck, the quick pop of the airbag suddenly cushioning her as the truck settled into the mini-van.
For a moment, she was confused, the punch of the airbag having knocked the sense out of her. But as the air seeped out of the fabric she found the brake pedal and moved the gear lever into park. She looked over at Belle, a bead of blood forming at the base of her left nostril, her eyes focused on infinity.
"Belle, are you okay?"
Belle's head lolled for a moment and she rubbed her palm over her forehead, blinking reality into place, trying to recognize the world around her.
"Belle?"
Belle nodded slowly. "I'm okay, Mom."
Jessica looked quickly through the rear window of the Land Cruiser and saw a smashed up yellow Ford Mustang near the spot she had just been in, a thin line of white smoke oozing from the beneath the bent-up hood. She slipped out of the truck and stood in the intersection and regarded the damaged car: how had the driver hit her? She was sitting in the middle of the road in plain sight. She walked toward it and the driver's side door creaked open, a thirtyish man with long thin blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail and a wispy mustache staggered out of the vehicle. He was pale, ghostly, and his eyes turned uncertainly in his head, as if they were not capable of fixing on reality. He moaned and turned his head to look up into the sky, his head wobbly as if he were drunk.
"Are you okay?" Jessica said, taking a few small steps in the man's direction, just enough to make sure her voice traveled the distance between them.
Her voice caught his attention and his head lowered, wavering on his shoulders as he tried to concentrate on her. His eyelids kept dipping down, heavy with sleep. He took a step and nearly fell over.
"Help me," he said softly, his voice thick as if his tongue were swollen.
He tried another step and bent down to the ground, holding himself steady with a palm on the asphalt. He made a desperate little pitchy noise in his throat, a gasp of accepting his fate, and curled onto the ground. Jessica turned in place, staring at the tableaux of devastation around her: this is how the world ends?
Belle popped out of the truck and stared at the mash of vehicles in the lanes of the intersection, then looked to Jessica with a bewildered expression. "Now what do we do?"
Jessica wanted to shrug, wanted someone else to tell her what the next step was, but the world provided only an approaching green Subaru that slowed to a stop a hundred yards shy of the intersection and turned around, driving away.
"We gotta get a new car," Jessica said, eyeing the Enterprise Rent-A-Car sign in a parking lot on the north side of the interchange. She looked at the Land Cruiser and thought of the supplies in it and shook her head. "Get your backpack, honey."
They walked off the highway and into the parking lot of the rental agency. Everything appeared in place, as if in the final moments of order and clarity in the world, nobody had thought about needing to rent a car. Where would you return it to after the apocalypse ended, Jessica thought, and smiled. The door to the office was locked, but Jessica smashed the glass pane with a rock and undid the bolt from the inside, unafraid there might be an armed employee of some sort waiting inside. Everyone had abandoned their posts and fled in the last few days, but judging from the major roadways, few had made it far.
"Try and find the keys," Jessica said. "I don't care to what; we'll drive anything."
After several minutes, Belle pulled open a cabinet door and stared at a collection of keys on pegs, each with a small laminated paper tag attached.
"Found 'em, Mom."
"Grab one."
"We really don't care?"
"No, honey," Jessica said, "just grab a set and we'll walk through the lot clicking the clicker until we hear a horn. We don't have time to find anything specific; we need to get out of here."
Walking through the parking lot, Jessica felt relief. Soon, they'd have a new set of wheels and a new plan to drive on the back roads as much as possible, at least until out of the urban network. And they'd retrieved a half-case of bottled water from a backroom in the rental agency, a boon to replace some of what they'd had to abandon in the Land Cruiser. Not that they'd need much for the two hour drive to Lake Bridgeport, but it was nice to have. Ken would be proud of her situational awareness. Jessica clicked the button in her palm again and a horn sounded two short blasts off to her right. She turned her head and saw the parking lights blinking on a Nissan Altima. She smiled at her daughter.
And then frowned at what she saw in the background. The sound of the horn had alerted a pair of overweight, jeans-and-flannel shirts-clad bearded truckers that she and Belle were there. At least, what else could have caused them to suddenly stand up from behind a row of cars and turn around until their glazed-over eyes pointed at her and her daughter? The two men began shuffling toward her, a relentlessness to their motion. They were nowhere near as fast as the crowd in the intersection a while earlier, but they were no less fixated on her.
She pulled her backpack off and rustled the pistol out of the front pocket. The two walkers were still 40 yards away, way outside her shooting ability. Shit, she thought, if only she'd let Ken take her to the range any of the times he'd tried. But she'd lost interest in Ken by the time he'd given her the pistol, and spending "quality time" with him - shooting pistols, Scrabble-playing or drunken fucking - had become something she'd avoided. Now, when a monthly trip to the range would've come in useful, she found herself staring through the site of the pistol trying to remember what Ken had told her about shooting and wondering what Bob Crighton had ever brought to her life. Orgasms, but she'd had those off-and-on, depending on the guy, since losing her virginity to Walter Stubbs at a party in her junior year of high school. She had never understood why orgasms were so important to men.
She squeezed the trigger at what she figured was just inside twenty-five yards. Missed. Shit. The two truckers lurched forward drunkenly, assuredly. She put the sight on the middle of the left-one's chest, breathed in, paused, exhaled slowly and pulled the trigger. The zombie staggered back, coughed up some blood, and shook it's head as if it had been poorly insulted at a cocktail party. And then came toward her. She sighted on the zombie’s head and fired again, missing. They were now inside twenty yards. She fired again and missed.
“Shit,” she said, holding the pistol at full arms length and sighting again on the undead man’s head.
She pulled the trigger back again and heard a click.
Empty.
Fuck.
She'd forgotten to reload the magazine. She rummaged through the bag and quickly realized she had forgotten to bring the spare magazine or the box of bullets. She stared at the gun in disbelief, a lump of metal, now. Useless.
"Mom, we gotta go," said Belle from behind her, her voice chock-full of fear.
Jessica nodded and stood up, dropping the gun into the bag and zippering it quickly. "Let's get to the car, quick."
She turned to look for the Altima as Belle started walking when Jessica heard a weird slapping off to her left: a skip-hopping rage-faced twenty-something man in a torn-apart blue business suit, a yellow tie cinched way too tightly against his neck at an angle that suggested it had been wrenched by someone. Fifty yards behind him a gaggle of slow-moving shufflers were moving toward her. She dropped the bag and sprinted a dozen steps directly into a rental agency clerk covered with blood, mucus oozing from his mouth. She bounced off of him and the key clicker went skittering across the asphalt as she spun her arms wildly to regain her balance and remain upright.
Jessica could see Belle turn at just that moment. The look on her daughter's face was pure horror, her eyes wide, her mouth forming an O.
"The key," Jessica shouted, and saw the movement of her daughter's eyes as Belle caught sight of it sliding on the asphalt toward her, but nowhere near her.
The rental agent groaned something and stepped toward Jessica when she was hit from behind and wrapped up like a Dallas Cowboys quarterback getting tackled in the backfield by a Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker who had correctly gauged the snap count. The air burst from Jessica with a gasp and she could feel the bite of teeth on the back of her neck as she was pushed into the side of a gray sedan.
"Mom! No!" were the last words she ever heard as her face was pressed against the driver's side window and she stared into the car at the steering wheel and dashboard, her left arm suddenly pulled out of its socket as another pair of teeth tore into her.
She felt warm wetness spreading over her shoulders and down her chest and back, could hear the grunted rage of her attackers as they bit into her again. A moment later her legs were lifted up and her jeans were being shredded from her body. She knew she was moments from death and something in her made her stop struggling and wait for it. She thought of Belle for a moment, a flash of an instant really, praying Belle had gotten the key and was driving away, then momentarily remembering holding Belle on her chest moments after she was born. Then she remembered meeting Ken for the very first time at a tailgate party before an OU-Texas football game tailgate party, drinking beer and laughing with him. He seemed so easy-natured then, so full of confidence and optimism that she spent the entire day with him. And then most of the rest of her life.
Those were a good memories.
Author’s Note: This is the eleventh in a series of short stories that are being released weekly throughout the first months of 2012. The stories are not in chronological order, but they are in an order. Most stories are being released at no charge, so support the author by purchasing those that are for sale.
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.
Also by William Young
The Signal
The Divine World ( Smashwords.)
Monster (Smashwords.)
Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse
Death Takes a Holiday - Day 1 (Smashwords.)
Days Go By - Day 132 (Smashwords.)
Killing Country Music - Day 117 (Smashwords.)
Waiting for the Great Leap Forward - Day 159 (Smashwords.)
All Hell Breaks Loose - Day 21 (Smashwords.)
The Lazarus Question - Day 11 (Smashwords.)
Gold Guns Girls - Day 209 (Smashwords.)
The Undeath of Rob Zombie - Day 199 (Smashwords)
The Third Time is the Harm - Day 654 (Smashwords.)
What Are Little Zombies Made of? Day 596 (Smashwords)