Interviews, Profiles, and Reviews
July 15th 2010
59.
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
“Jesus,” Sasha said, “there’s too many of them. We’ll have to go back and find another way ‘round.”
“No. There’s no time,” Tim said. He watched the mass of droolers swarm over each other, climbing over each others’ backs, pulling and tugging at one another. They were jockeying for position, trying to get at something he still couldn’t see. It was big, whatever it was. Maybe as big as a car.
“So we mother-fucking make time. I ain’t going into that, not even with all the bullets in the world.”
Tim squinted into the darkness. There was something—something red underneath the mound of bodies. Not the red of blood but the color of metallic paint. The kind of paint used on cars. “I wonder—” he breathed.
“What? You wonder what, man?”
Ice cubes clinked together in Tim’s stomach. He started to look up and around, peering through the low light looking for street signs. He was afraid he knew what he would find. “Oh, shit,” he said, because he’d been right.
He knew this intersection. Of course, the last time he’d seen it had been in broad daylight. He’d also seen it from above, looking down through the lens of a camera onboard a helicopter. He’d seen it on CNN, and then again on digital video disc in a hangar at SeaTac.
This was the intersection. It was no more than five minutes from his house. It was the place where Karen and Jake died.
He was almost completely certain that the droolers packed into the street in front of him were climbing over and around his own car, the one Karen had used to try to escape the chaos. The one that had failed her at exactly the wrong time.
This was it, then. He’d come back to the place he’d started from. He had finished the journey. He scanned the crowd of droolers for Phil Nero’s face, but didn’t see him. He winced and looked again for Karen but she wasn’t there either.
As had happened before he felt life compressing, narrowing down to a single sharp point. Everything else fell away. He felt as if he were racing down a tunnel at incredible speed looking at the single point of light at its end. He felt like iron blinders had come down around the edges of his vision and he could see nothing but the rising and falling throng of bodies.
He climbed off the bike.
“What the fuck, Kempfer? Where are you going?”
“I have to see,” he said. He didn’t bother to explain further. “You can wait here for me if you like. You can leave if you want to. I don’t know if I’m coming back.”
“You’ll get yourself killed, you idiot! Don’t you take another step.”
Tim shook his head and pulled the gun out of his pack. It felt flat and cold in his hand, like a tool. Like something you would use to achieve a very specific end.
“At least let me help,” Sasha said, grabbing his arm.
It felt like the icy surface of a frozen lake cracking open. Suddenly he recovered himself, looked around and saw things the way they were again. “Yeah…” he said. “Yeah. Listen. I have an idea here but you have to really trust me. Do you?”
“Of course not.” Sasha stared at him. She was breathing hard, he saw, and he wondered if she was scared too. Of course she was, he decided. The fear wasn’t his alone. “What’s the idea?”
He smiled coldly, then lead her back up the street, away from the pile of bodies. He took her as far back as the drooler handcuffed to the street sign. “I almost got killed a while back. A drooler almost bit me. I shot him, just in time, and got his blood and spit all over me.” He stepped closer to the drooler, who was silently lunging for him. He leaned back as its loose hand swung out at him. As the drooler spun around, recovering from the wild swing, he stepped in and blew its brains out, splattering himself with its fluids. Just like before.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Sasha told him.
“Don’t—that might change your smell and ruin the effect.” The yeasty stink of the drooler’s infection filled his nostrils and his throat, making him want to gag too. He grabbed the dead drooler’s face and hauled it upward again, smearing black spit over the palm of his hand. “Come here,” he said.
Eventually she did. He wiped the drool across her shoulders of her fur coat before she could jump back.
“It dries out after a while and then it’s useless,” he warned her. “We need to move fast.” He lead her back to the throng, pressing in closer this time until a couple of them looked up and sniffed the air, their vacant eyes rolling in his direction. Behind him Sasha moved in, though not as fast, her nickel-plated revolvers out and in her hands. Tim drew his own gun and stepped closer. The droolers looked up one by one—and then looked away, their attention turning once more to the car they hid with their bodies. Tim tried to push his way in through their arms and heads and legs. Individually they were quite weak and he was able to haul them away from the car, but en masse they resisted him like a brick wall.
“Get the fuck back,” he howled, suddenly desperate. He kicked and scratched and dragged at the bodies, but even as he got them to move, even as he shoved them away they just scrabbled and fought to get right back to the car.
A heavy grunt sounded from the mass and Tim jerked backwards, uncertain what was going on. He saw Sasha yanking droolers off the car, one by one. Helping him. “Don’t waste time looking at me,” she shouted, grabbing another one and throwing it down in the street.
Tim nodded and went back to prying the bodies off the car. He could make out its shape clearly now and he saw he’d been right. It was a red Nissan Sentra. When the license plate was uncovered it had the right number.
A drooler grabbed his arm. Not in an aggressive way—it just wanted to get back to clawing at the windows. He started pushing it away and then he recognized the sweater it was wearing.
It was Karen.
Sasha reached for Karen’s arms to pull her away. “Stop,” Tim said, staggering backwards.
Karen was infected, like all the rest. She was horribly wounded where Phil Nero had bit her but she didn’t look like she was in any pain. She didn’t look at him. She wouldn’t look at him, even when he called her name again and again.
“You know her,” Sasha said. It wasn’t a question. “You do what you got to do.”
Tim nodded. It was what he owed her. This isn’t Karen anymore, he told himself. It didn’t help. “I’m so sorry, honey,” he whispered. Then he brought up his gun and shot her right through the head.
His arm thrummed. His body shook. This was too much—he was going to vomit. He was going to die on the spot of sheer heartbreak.
And then nothing happened. He didn’t die and he didn’t throw up. Had he come so far, he wondered? Had he become somebody who could do that and not even flinch?
He’d done her a favor. Maybe he just understood that, deep down. He’d done right by her. Maybe it was just shock. He’d done the only thing he could do for her anymore. Maybe he was just so exhausted, so ready to stop, that even this atrocity was just one more step on his road.
There was another one ahead of him. He had to see. Jake.
He pushed and struggled and shot his way through the crowd. Finally he managed to get the droolers off one of the windows. Finally he managed to look inside, into the back seat.
Jake had managed to unbuckle himself from the car seat. Tim had thought that would be impossible but desperation must have given the boy great strength. Once he was free, though, there had been no place for him to go. He’d been too smart to open the door, of course.
The flesh of Jake’s lips was dry and broken, pulled back from grey gums. His eyes were closed as if he’d fallen asleep.
His chest rose and fell with shallow breaths.
“It can’t be,” Tim said out loud. He stepped back away from the car and the droolers shoved around him, desperate to get back into position. They wanted the food trapped inside. They wanted to eat his son. His still living son.
“It can’t be,” he said again.
The floor of the car was littered with empty Poland Spring bottles and boxes of cookies, empty wax paper sleeves torn open so that Jake could lick out all the crumbs. Bags and bags full of canned food sat in rows next to Jake.
“She must have been stocking up—Karen—when she heard the news, she must have gone right to the grocery store. She must have bought months worth of food for us, in case we couldn’t get out. Oh, my God, Jake—Jake had plenty to eat and drink. He was always such a smart kid, he figured it out, figured out what he needed to do—”
“He’s alive?” Sasha asked, incredulous.
“Barely. He’s sick, it looks like. Oh God. I’m going to throw up. For real this time.”
He dropped to his knees. Everything was suddenly so complicated. His narrow focus, his need, his revenge, made less sense. And more.
He vomited copiously. Then he looked up.
Phil Nero looked back.
September 5th, 2007 at 7:55 am
wow
September 5th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Oh yes, the best of all possible worlds!
Iced his wife, his child to rescue and the reason for all of this less than two feet away. Man, this is going to be a doozy of an ending.
Good work, fella.
September 5th, 2007 at 8:02 am
I’ll say it for all of us with kids, YOU’RE A BASTARD. Painful to read, truly.
September 5th, 2007 at 8:17 am
It’s a good thing that I am at work or I would bawl like a big baby.
I am with Meek on this one…..
September 5th, 2007 at 8:35 am
I’m with Meek too…if it were my son I would have dropped to my knees as well…Bring it home Dave….bring it home…
September 5th, 2007 at 9:26 am
I don’t have kids, but I do know that it would have ripped me apart to have to shoot my wife even if she was infected. I have really enjoyed this story, and I know that this is going to end just right! Great job Dave.
September 5th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Um, wow. The story has just been cruising right along, a few good twists and turns … and now, BOOM. Tim shoots his wife, sees his still-living son, and meets Phil Nero … all in the same chapter! Are you trying to give me a heart attack, Dave? From 60mph to Mach 1 in a single chapter?
And yeah, I have a few kids. Young kids, right around Jake’s age, probably. And this chapter is painful, but also powerful. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to see my son alive again after assuming that he was dead. I believe I’d probably go berserk and start shooting every drooler in sight….
September 5th, 2007 at 9:51 am
aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
oh my god i can’t even comment i’ll have to come back later
September 5th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Wonderful, very touching… me like this
September 5th, 2007 at 10:29 am
I have to echo August: Bring it home Dave, Bring it home!
September 5th, 2007 at 10:35 am
okay, i’ve gone for coffee and regrouped, and now i feel up to commenting.
Come on friday, come on happy ending! *crosses all her fingers and toes*
seriously tho, are you TRYING to kill us?? i don’t think i have ever been so close to dying from heart failure while reading a story. That was one of the most intense things i’ve ever read, i’m not even exaggerating. God, what’s tim going to do now? he’s just knackered his drooler-foolin sense… and i bet he’s run out of bullets as well. gahhh, i don’t think i can wait for friday. Please let Jake be okay. I’m really scared he’s going to be traumatised beyond repair after all this and it’s not going to be happy at all.
… it’s quite freaky how emotionally wrapped up you can get in a story.
September 5th, 2007 at 11:16 am
…hmm, shooting the wife, now I have no problem with that, in fact I think I recall some drool on her this morning as she slept, hmmmmmmmmmm.
September 5th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
This just keeps getting better and better!!
September 5th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Oooooh, man! You gave me chills. Great stuff!
September 5th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
ok. just breathe. phew. goddamn. i had said a few chapters earlier that it as the point of the movie where i start yelling at the screen. now is the point where i grab the person next to me and start making whimpering noises in an attempt to keep my popcorn from coming back up with the anxiety. Now you smell like food and you’ve only got a few bullets left… better think of something quick Tim, or this one isn’t going to be a happy ending. Eek!
September 5th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
very nice thank you sir
may we have another
September 5th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
What a great chapter!!! This has been a hell of a story and I’m sad to see it coming to an end.
September 5th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Painful to read, but great, hope you got another zombie thriller coming our way Dave, I love this story, can’t wait for more!
September 5th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
I had a feeling this was how it would go, but it’s still a jackhammering experience. And with Sasha there, I could see a very depressing outcome on the horizon, but I’ll keep my mouth shut. See you Friday, and thanks for another one!
September 5th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
the best chapter by far
awesome
makes Tim’s whole journey worthwhile after I thought his revenge was pointless to the extreme
thanks Dave
September 5th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
Well, with any luck Sasha will stay clear of the droolers as long as she doesn’t get any vomit on her (hope she has a strong stomach).
Of course, even if he does manage to get Jake out of the car, he still needs to get him out of the city, and then what… a lifetime in prison?
September 5th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Nice, very nice. And just as well Sasha is there as this opens the door for the “live bait” to lure the droolers away from the car on the bike for just long enough for the other person to get in and drive it.
And given that I’ve got a daughter, if she was in there, I’d do anything to get her back and this would be my plan, short of finding a big supply of bullets or a poison mannequin.
September 5th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Woohoo! I thought so! Hooray for binge eating!
September 6th, 2007 at 12:42 am
lol, I figured it was a crashed helicopter they were climbing over.
way to go Dave! finish this in style!
September 6th, 2007 at 1:29 am
I hate such false people like you, JD.
JD comments Chapter 58:
“I’m a litte bit morbid, but I hope it is the cornstarches…AND I hope that the droolers broke the car glass and ripped his son from the car seat, and he finds his wife, Nero, and his son eating the cornstarches…then he has to kill them all! Then suicide…I’m just sayin”
JD comments Chapter 59:
“I don’t have kids, but I do know that it would have ripped me apart to have to shoot my wife even if she was infected. I have really enjoyed this story, and I know that this is going to end just right! Great job Dave.”
September 6th, 2007 at 1:32 am
People, you’re forgetting something. Lots in the tention I guess. When they vomit, the droolers will be able to understand that they are not droolers.
Quote:
“HE VOMITED COPIOUSLY. Then he looked up.
Phil Nero looked back.”
Ouch.
September 6th, 2007 at 11:00 am
awesome book I started reading last night at work… and now you leave me in a cliff hanger??? I can’t wait for the next chapter
September 6th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Okay, you got me, Dave. I’ve been sponging off of your free online stories for a while now, but you finally got me. I ordered the Monster trilogy from Amazon, and I hope some of that money goes into your pocket.
Now … get writing! I can’t wait for Friday! Write, darn you!
September 6th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Dave, all I can say is, wow. A realistic old-fashioned zombie story, with great characters, bloodshed, great “set-pieces”.
How on earth will you follow this one up? Perhaps with more stories set in the PZ/infected universe?
September 6th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
I agree with a previous comment Dave,
Bring it home.
- Jeff Bakersfield, CA.
September 6th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Zombie eater….you just wrote the final chapter. I’ll put my money down on that being exactly how he gets the boy, Tim and Sasha outta there alive. There’s no other way that I can see.
Good job Dave, more drooler action would have been nice but still a good story.
Crank up another one soon or be eaten alive by your readers would be my guess
September 6th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Nope. Tim draws them away with all his vomit. Sasha gets the kid out. Tim gets cornered and shoots himself safe in the knowledge that his son will live.
and fade out.