Hell on Earth (17 page)

These two were the best-looking zombie couple. The nearest family was disgusting; especially the thirteen-year-old boy (what had been a thirteen-year-old boy). Part of his head was missing. It looked melted, as if a big wad of caramel had been left out in the sun and gone bad on one side.

A thin, bald man looked like a scarecrow with a
laughing skull on top. His right cheek was missing and the few teeth that hadn't fallen out on that side made me think of kernels of uneaten corn or keys on an unpolished piano.

Two zombie Girl Scouts carried filthy boxes in their pale hands. One dropped a box and several fingers spilled out. A man dressed as an undertaker fell to his knees and shoveled the fingers into his mouth where they stuck out like pale worms. A dead priest groped at the attaché case of a dead account executive over a pile of fish left to rot on the floor. The zombie odor was so pronounced that I could barely smell the week-old fish.

“Are you all right?” asked Albert. I nodded but didn't look at him. “You're staring at them.”

Albert's words were like an echo from Fly. My old buddy always gave good advice, like not focusing on any details that wouldn't help the mission. But this was the first time I'd seen so many of these human caricatures this close when I wasn't engaged in taking them apart.

“I'm okay,” I whispered, pulling Albert back in the shadows. “We're doing fine. The stink in here is so bad they couldn't smell out live humans to save their—”

“Lives,” he finished my inappropriate image. “Let's get the lemons and get out of here.”

There's never any arguing with good sense. But as we took another look-see, the zombie density inside the store was worse than a minute ago. “Where the hell are they all coming from?” I asked.

“Probably,” Albert agreed.

The scene was becoming even more surreal. Zombies pushing baskets up and down the aisles, grabbing cans and boxes of junk food (which would take a lot more than the end of the world to go bad). Some of
the zombies were engaged in what seemed to be purposeful activity, moving items from one shelf to another and then back again.

They didn't eat any of the groceries. They seemed caught up in the behavior of the past, as if the program had been so hard-wired into their skulls that not even losing their souls could erase the ritual of going to the grocery store.

And then suddenly the lights went out. Whatever had kept the generator going was defunct. “What do we do now?” asked Albert.

“Take advantage of the situation,” I said. “This is fortuitous. We should have put the generator out ourselves. We can pass easier for zombies if they don't see us. They're too stupid to do anything about the dark.”

If there is ever a Famous Last Words Award, I'm sure that I'll receive sufficient votes to make the final ballot. No sooner had I made my confident assessment than flickering, yellow light filled the store. Dozens of candles were lit. I could imagine Fly saying, in his I-told-you-so tone of voice, “If they can still shoot their weapons, they can do a lot of other things.”

It was bad enough when Fly was right so often in person. Now I was carrying him around in my head to tell me when I made a mistake!

Not everything the zombies lit was a normal candle. Some gave off a heavy smell of burning butter or fat. I didn't want to think about some of the items they might be using for torches.

“I wonder how long before they burn the store down,” said Albert.

“They haven't yet,” I said. “Let's get those lemons and get the hell out of here!” As we went out into the throng, my heart was pounding so hard that I worried
some of the creatures would hear it. Then they wouldn't need to smell us out or see our TV-commercial-smooth complexions to turn us into today's lunch special.

Matches still flared as zombies looked for items to light up. A “Price-Buster” banner suddenly caught fire and went up in flames. It didn't set anything else on fire. For the first and probably last time in my life, I was grateful to be among zombies at that moment. Real, live human beings would have freaked and caused a panic more dangerous than a fire. The zombies didn't care. And of course they didn't bat an eye.

To be fair to Fly, he never overestimated zombies; he just didn't want me underestimating them. For what Albert and I had to do now, we had to count on zombie stupidity. I made my way over to a pile of hand baskets and took one. Albert stuck behind me a lot closer than Peter Pan's shadow.

I passed him the basket and noticed that his hands were shaking. I sure didn't blame him. In fact, I had the strong feeling that he'd be doing a lot better in full combat against the monsters. With his religious background, bodies of the reanimated dead had to be heavy stuff.

If I remembered correctly, and I always do, the Mormons had a more old-fashioned idea of the body. One thing I could give Fly's nuns—the Catholic Church didn't make you worry about what happened to your body in a war zone if your soul was in good shape. The more spiritual the faith, the more popular I figured it would be in the atomic age, where we can all be zapped out of existence in the pulse of a nucleus.

A
lbert's fear sort of made me more daring. After I got my award for Famous Last Words, I'd use it to join Psychos ‘R' Us. This situation was so insane that I started to think it might work.

We turned a corner and saw a zombie-woman sitting on the ground. She had two candles, a bag of charcoal, and a cigarette lighter; four items, two hands. She couldn't decide which two items to hold. So she kept picking up two of them, dropping them, and picking up another random pair.

I looked over at Albert and tried a little telepathy. As usual, the results were nothing to worry the neighborhood skeptics. Since Albert wasn't picking up on my silent message, I stepped forward and waited for my opportunity. The next time the zombie-girl dropped her candle and lighter, I simply reached down and picked them up.

Now that I'd solved the zombie's quandary, she got up and stumbled vaguely down the aisle with the other candle and the charcoal. I started to pass the lighter to Albert, then changed my mind and gave him the candle, which I lit. I preferred keeping the thing that actually made fire.

Playing somewhere in the back of my head were all those old horror movies where the one thing monsters
fear is fire. When I was a kid, sneaking those movies late at night when everyone else was asleep, I never thought I was boning up on documentaries. At least I hadn't used a hammer and stake yet in fighting these bastards; but I intended to keep my options open.

We staggered down the aisle, trying to look suitably undead, and headed for the produce section. We quickly grabbed plastic bags and filled them with the most disgusting remains of lemons and limes we could find.

The limes weren't even a little green any longer; they were dull gray with black splotches. Although the lemons were still yellowish in spots, the other colors were dark and unwholesome. They were the sort of colors I preferred ignoring.

Other zombies began gathering around us and just standing there. Maybe our purposeful actions were too purposeful. Did these idiots have the brains to recognize nonzombie behavior?

I tried to think and look stupid, but that wasn't what was required. Pretending to be
mindless
is much more difficult. I let my mouth hang open and tried to work up a good supply of drool. Albert picked up on the idea . . . the fact I found him immediately convincing shouldn't be taken as a put-down. But, man,” did he look the part when he put on his goggle-eyed stare.

The act seemed to help a little. Some of the zombies left us alone and found other things to stare at. One large black man—what had been a black man-dressed as a high school coach, continued to block our way, staring at the basket of rotting produce instead of us. He started to get on my nerves. When I moved either to the right or left, he shifted slightly . . . just enough to suggest he was willing to block us if we wanted to move up the aisle.

We might very well want to move up the aisle because the crowd was starting to press in behind us, cutting off that avenue of escape. I couldn't remember if we had closed the door behind us when we sneaked in the back. Other zombies could be coming in that way, dead feet shuffling forward, guided by dead brains to regain a fragment of the living past.

A sound came out of nowhere. It was so strange that I didn't even associate it with the walking corpses hemming us in. It was sort of a low mewling sound, coming deep from within chests where no heart beat. A humming, rasping, empty, lost, mournful, aching sound . . . a chorus of the damned calling out to any living humans left in the world, as if to say:

Come join us; life's not so good! Come and be with us. We are lonely for company. You can still be yourselves. The habits of a lifetime do not disappear only because life has spilled out. If you loaded a weapon in life, you can still do it in death; the routine will survive; all that will be burned away is the constant worry to prove yourself, make distinctions, show pride. Judge not; there is no point when you're dead.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to take my 10mm and start firing, and keep firing until I'd wiped them all from the surface of the Earth. Aboveground was for the living! The dead belonged underground, feeding the worms, who still had a function to perform.

The zombies were the pure mob, devoid of intelligence and personality. Staring at them in their own flickering candlelight, trying to pass, reminded me how much I hated Linus Van Pelt, who said he loved mankind, it was people he couldn't stand. Earlier, I read a book by H. L. Mencken, who said he had no love for the human race as a whole, but only for individuals.

Individuals. The whole point of evolution. Individuals.
The only justification for the American revolution, for capitalism, for love. There were only two individuals in this cemetery that used to be a grocery store, and I was one. The other gestured at me that the basket of rotten citrus was full and we should be leaving, if we could find a path through the wall of pale, stinking, shambling flesh.

Albert took the lead. He picked up one of the limes and threw it up the aisle. It was a long shot, but it paid off when an ancient memory reached out fingers like a groping zombie and touched something in the coach's brain. He turned and shambled after the lime like it was a thrown ball.

We followed in the wake left by the big zombie pushing through the crowd. By the time the coach reached the lime, he had forgotten about us, which is saying it stronger than I intend. We were merely a series of impressions, of light and sound distracting the zombie for a brief moment.

The front door beckoned. It was standing wide open, so we didn't have to worry about the power. A fire was burning somewhere down the street, marking the path we would take if we made it outside.

Our last obstacle was the long line at the checkout, believe it or not. A zombie-woman stood at the cash-register, responding to old job conditioning as the others had fallen into the role of shoppers. She stood behind the counter, banging on the keys of the register with a clenched fist. The sight was too much, too friggin' bizarre even after all that we had seen. I laughed. It wasn't very loud, and I managed to choke it off at about the half-chuckle point.

But it drew attention.

Maybe the shred of a brain that still functioned inside the ex-cashier's head was back from its coffee break, but she stopped banging the keys and looked at
me. Then she opened her mouth, disgorging a cockroach that had been making its home there. A gap in her neck revealed the probable entrance to the bug condo.

Then the bitch made a sound. It was a brand-new sound, a kind of high wailing that drew the attention of the others. She was doing a call to arms, and the wandering eyes, listless bodies, jerking limbs, and empty heads responded.

They finally noticed us.

“Run!” I shouted, and I didn't have to tell Albert twice. There weren't very many between us and the door. Albert used his bulk to good advantage, and while he cleared the path I readied the AB-10.

I waited until we were through the door before spinning around to take care of business. Sure enough, some of the zombies of higher caliber followed us through the door. I expressed my admiration for their brain power by answering with my machine pistol.

It felt good to be killing them again. Most of the zombies in the grocery store didn't have weapons, but the ones who followed us outside were armed. I always thought there was a link between intelligence and defending yourself; apparently it even applied at this almost animalistic level. The zombies returned fire.

Albert saw I was in trouble and ran back to me, Uzi ready. “Keep running, it's all right!” I shouted as he took down a pair of Mom and Dads who took turns unloading the family shotgun in our direction. As they collapsed in a heap, other zombies I had shot got back up, fumbling with their weapons. Before they could get off another round, zombies coming up behind them fired, and the bullets tore into the front line of zombies. We booked.

The “Fly” tactic worked its magic; the front rank spun to return fire against their clumsy compadres. By the time we got behind a row of munched cars “parked” by the curb, the zombie melee was in full cry.

A bunch of spinys appeared from somewhere and had their hands, or claws, full trying to stop the melee.

“Good job,” I said in Albert's ear.

“The Lord's work,” he said, smiling. “I didn't know they were such a contentious lot.” He quoted a line, I don't know if from the regular Bible or the Book of Mormon: “Satan stirreth them up continually to anger one with another.”

“You said it, brother.”

We had to get back to Fly and Jill; they'd be able to hear the ruckus and would wonder what hornet's nest we'd stirred up. And it was nearly 2200.

I thought about Albert as we made time. There was a lot more to this beefy Mormon than I'd first expected. Fly and I had done all right when he joined our team, or we joined his. I'd bet on all of us, even Jill.