Pariah (15 page)

The sidewalk traffic wasn’t any better. Dabney looked out the side windows and saw donnybrooks everywhere. Store windows were being smashed both accidentally and on purpose. Some just gave when too many bodies pressed up against them, causing explosions of cubed glass, like geysers of diamonds. Mixed in with the hysterical humans were these new bloodthirsty monstrosities. Across the hood of a car jutting diagonally half in and half out of its space a woman was being disemboweled and devoured by a trio of dead-eyed freaks, her fluids splashing onto the asphalt. Dabney fought the urge to open his door and try to help. Help what? She was dead. And
if what they were saying was true—and he believed his own eyes, so yes, it was—whatever was left of her when the threesome were done eating would get up and join them. A quartet. Now multiply that over and over, ad infinitum. All up and down the avenue similar scenes were happening.

And no one stopped to help.

The few cops that remained were looking out for their own welfare, and Dabney couldn’t blame them. Pop-pops erupted from all over, some of the bullets downing the cannibals, others ricocheting off hard surfaces. A slug pinged off a lamppost and put a dime-size crater into Dabney’s windshield, small fissures radiating from it. Dabney took a hand off the steering wheel and pressed a finger to the spot, feeling cool air passing through a tiny hole. He hoped the integrity of the windscreen would maintain. Just long enough. He had to get home. He fished out his cell phone again and tried to call, but nothing doing. All circuits were tied up.
Please try again
. There was nothing to do but keep pushing northwest.

Something heavy slammed onto his roof and Dabney felt as if his blood stopped circulating for a moment and a vacuum formed in his lungs. A body rolled down his windshield and under all the noise of chaos he heard that twinkly crackle of the glass straining under the body’s weight. If the windshield broke, those crazies would get in and get him. With mere inches between his and the next vehicle, Dabney accelerated, then reversed, bumping both cars to his front and rear. The body rolled off his hood, its smashed face casting a dead glare his way as it dropped out of sight under the van. The door of the car to his front flew open and the incensed driver starting walking back toward Dabney, slapping a five-cell Maglite flashlight against his open palm. Dabney couldn’t believe it. In the eye of the shitstorm this moron was going to give him grief about a tiny bumper thump.

“What the fuck, dude?” the guy said, glaring at Dabney. No one was in his right mind. No one. Dabney checked his door locks.

As the guy neared, another blood-drenched cannibal scrambled over a motionless car and sank his teeth into the Maglite guy’s throat. Dabney’s mind raced even as all around him remained stationary. His thoughts came rapid fire:
Okay, now that asshole’s definitely not moving. His car is stuck in my way. Can’t reverse. Can’t move forward. He was gonna kill me. In all this, he was gonna kill me. I gotta get home. Look at this shit. On the sidewalk it’s more spread out. I’m near a hydrant. There’s a gap. I’m near a hydrant. That guy was gonna kill me. But now he’s dead. I gotta get home
.

Dabney bit his lip hard, then yanked the steering wheel hard to the right and bulled his van past the hydrant onto the sidewalk.
Fuck it
, he thought.
Everyone out here is gonna die, anyway
. There was little to contradict that thought, but even as he rationalized his decision to mount the sidewalk and plow through the pedestrian pandemonium he couldn’t help but vacillate between
I’m committing vehicular manslaughter big time
, and
I’m performing euthanasia on an epic scale
. There really was a fine line between mercy killing and mass murder. And did it count as murder if they came back to life? Dabney could lose sleep over that ethical conundrum later, if he lived that long.

Bumps, thumps, screams, and percussive squelchy crunching sounds were the soundtrack to his trek north, his shallow hood being battered and spattered. As his windshield wipers strained against the profusion of blood and viscera, a stream began to leak through the small aperture. Bodies bounced off the front grille. After fifteen protracted minutes he ran out of wiper fluid and the blood began to congeal, even as it was slicked back and forth. Visibility was nearly nil.

“God dammit,” Dabney keened. “God dammit.”

Tears flowed down his round cheeks. This was wrong. Everything about this was wrong and fucked-up. What was he thinking? He’d left the house to install locks and window gates. Panic was good for sales and of late sales had been slow. He needed the year-end business. He shook his head. How had he let this happen? All kinds of folks—mostly white and willing to pay extra for rapid emergency service—had phoned. He smelled cash. But for what? Greed was a sin, sure, but stupidity should be the eighth deadly sin, because it was going to get him killed.

Traffic ahead actually eased a bit. He could see patches of gray-black asphalt through the havoc. He hit the accelerator and surged forward for a few glorious, optimistic seconds and then
WHAM!
A westbound Volvo sprang forth from the side street and spun Dabney’s van. His blood-caked windshield imploded, covering him in wet fragments of safety glass. Unseeing and startled, his foot slammed down on the gas and his truck plowed into the front of a building, the engine sputtering and then silent.

With both ears ringing, Dabney wiped the blood, sweat, and tears from his eyes and saw a large confederacy of cannibals coming at his vehicle. The accident had smeared several all over the pavement, but there were so many. More than he’d seen anywhere else. These weren’t cannibals. These things weren’t human. They looked human, but they weren’t. Not any more. Some had been gutted and dismembered but here they came nonetheless, dripping gore and spilled innards. People didn’t do that. The news was right.

These things were dead but still moving around.

And hungry.

He tried starting the engine again. No use. He looked at his crumpled hood and saw steam jetting out. He had moments before the ravenous mass outside reached his van. He clambered out onto the hood and climbed onto his roof.

Over the tinny roar in his ears he heard voices. Though the front of the building he’d crashed into was boarded up, there were people calling out from the windows above.

Hands reached down.

He was saved.

And getting home was no longer an option.

“Hey, where’s Eddie?” Dave asked.

Ellen was flabbergasted. “
You
don’t know where he is?”

“No. I haven’t seen him today. I can’t believe he missed the rain.”

“That is pretty odd,” Alan said, glad the ape hadn’t been there to ruin it.

“Now I’m worried,” Dave said, looking it. “I knocked on his door on the way up. I just assumed he’d follow and once I got up here I got all jazzed and forgot about him.”

Without dressing, Dave went back into the building and ran down to Eddie’s door, which was unlocked. He stepped into the apartment and called out a couple of times, going from room to room, leaving puddles. Eddie wasn’t there. He then tried his place with the same result. On each landing he pounded doors and called Eddie’s name to no avail. He wasn’t around. The elation from the rain dance burned off quickly as worry set in.

“He’s not in the building,” Dave said as he stepped back onto the roof. The others were all there, except Ruth who’d hobbled
back to her apartment in disgust. Abe still sat naked on a low wall, basking in the waning precipitation. After being distracted for a moment by how long and low the old man’s testicles hung, Dave stalked off in search of his comrade, unsurprised that no one offered to help.

Working his way north, the first building Dave tried was the one directly next door. Dave gave the stairwell door a few yanks but it remained locked tight, the norm since they’d thrown together this tattered kibbutz. The next building the stairwell door was unlocked and blackness waited within. Dave poked his head in, reticent to venture into the strange building. Maybe it wasn’t as secure as theirs. Who knew? It all depended on how well the slapdash exterior fortifications had held up and if the former occupants of the building had bolstered them from within. No, if the zombies had gotten in they’d have made their way to the roof by now. In the back of his mind Dave remembered the front door was secure, but that gloom yawned like a hungry mouth. Maybe just Gerri lurked down in the dark. The Wandering Jewess’s absence at the rain party didn’t disturb Dave at all. She was a ghost; what did ghosts need with rain?

“Hello?” Dave called. “Eddie? You there?”

No answer.

“Eddie?” Dave shouted. The sound reverberated off the walls. Dave was in no mood to go spelunking in an unfamiliar building. Not naked. He wondered if he should go back for his clothes. It had stopped raining and like the moisture on his body, his jollity was evaporating. Any dampness now was fresh perspiration. After a few more tries, Dave gave up and moved on to the next building, which was the one he and Eddie had resided in previously. Maybe Eddie had gotten homesick or something. Maybe he needed something they’d left behind. Eddie did periodically make trips over there to mine their old digs for abandoned artifacts. The stairwell
door was blocked, as ever, but he pounded on it a few times anyway, to no avail.

Holding the handrail because of the wetness, Dave stepped onto the fire escape and carefully walked down to the top floor. Both windows were closed and locked, gated inside. He went down to the next landing and tried the left window. It had no gate but was locked. The right one was locked and gated. According to Eddie, gates were for pussies. “I’m not paying to live in a cage,” he’d declared. “Faggots wanna live like zoo animals, that’s their problem. I’d like to see some nigger come through our window and try to steal our stuff. I’d Luima the shit out of him.
Literally!
” Then he’d laugh and glare at their unprotected window as if willing someone to breach it. That was then, of course. With the zombies, everyone kept their gates locked, even though the likelihood of one getting up a fire escape was pretty negligible.

On the next landing the right window was gated, but the left—theirs—slid open, vulnerable as ever. About a year earlier he and Eddie had crouched in silence out here, stifling giggles as Eddie videoed the couple next door doing it. It wasn’t that they were that great looking, but it was still exciting. Eddie would play that tape often; he called it his “hunting trophy.” Dave stepped into the dark apartment. The sky had turned colorless but was bright, so his eyes adjusted quickly.

“Eddie?” Dave called again.

“Don’t come in here,” a husky voice responded.

“Eddie?” Dave ignored the admonition and raced into the apartment, tripping over a pile on the floor. His knees hit the bare floorboards hard and he yelped in pain, then rolled onto his side to massage the injured joints. Both were abraded and wet with blood. He clenched his eyes shut as he rubbed them, stars swimming inside his closed lids. “Ouch, Jesus.”

“I told you not to come in here.” It was Eddie’s voice, but he sounded different.

When Dave opened his eyes he looked directly into another pair, only these looked glassy with indifference. He blinked a few times, then jerked bolt upright and scooted backward away from the unblinking visage.

“Gerri!” he yawped.

Though dim, there was sufficient light to see that Gerri was dead, yet still she clutched the husk of her late Yorkie.

“What happened to Gerri?” Dave whispered.

“I did.”

“Whattaya mean, Eddie? What happened here?” Dave stood up and looked down at Gerri’s body. It was folded in half at the waist and pearly gelatinous spume speckled her rangy bare buttocks. One of her flaplike teats spilled out of her torn housecoat. Her neck was twisted at an unnatural angle and blood leaked from both nostrils and the corner of her mouth. Purple hand-shaped bruises clasped her shoulders. Dave looked up from the cadaver at Eddie, who from the waist down was bare, blood smeared on his hands and across his groin.

“Why don’t you have your pants on, Eddie?”

“You’re one to talk.” Eddie said.

“What did you do, Eddie?” Dave asked. It was a formality. It was obvious what he’d done.

“I was wandering around, y’know, burnin’ off some rage. I decided to visit the old crib, grab some copies of
Sports Illustrated
—like that one with the chick with the seashells on her boobs—and anyhow, who’s sittin’ on our old couch but the Wandering Jewess. Some rat was bitin’ on her ankle and she’s just sittin’ there, so I stomped the little fucker. See?” He pointed at its furry remains. “So I ask her if she’s okay, right? I tried a little, what was your
special
word?
Tenderness
. Anyway, one thing led to another. Listen,
with a harpoon of cum built up you don’t think so straight, bro. Pussy is pussy. I needed to get it in there and this bitch was all there was. Zotz is bonin’ the merry widow, D. Doesn’t leave much for the rest of us swingin’ dicks.”

“Was it consensual?”

“Guy does one year prelaw and he thinks he’s Alan Dershowitz.”

“Jesus Christ, Eddie.”

“Hey, least she died with a smile on her face.”

On Gerri’s dead face was a rictus grin nobody in his or her right mind would describe as a smile.