The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead (10 page)

Next to him, Jenny screamed and
crashed the butt of the shotgun against the head of a zombie with a hairlip and
toupee.  Its head split open and its brains popped out, sliding down between
her legs, as she shoved the monster out the open window.  Only it wouldn’t go
anywhere, stopping halfway through as zombie after zombie on the other side was
pushing up to get in.  She was caught in a shoving war, a stalemate, as the
open head of the zombie dribbled thick, black blood on her chest and its
hairlip brushed softly against her breast.  She pushed with all she had but still
it wouldn’t budge.  She braced her legs against the door and finally, in an act
of desperation, yanked the body towards her, letting it slide over her and
between the seats until it flopped onto the floor in the back.

Three living dead faces appeared
in the shattered window, all of them with their mouths open and their teeth
clacking together.  They climbed in, trying to get to her and Jeff, hungry for
their flesh.

Jeff looked to his left and his
right and threw the van back into drive and yanked the wheel to the right. 
Next to them was a field and it held fewer zombies than the other three sides
of them did.  It was bumpy and overgrown with weeds and dumped garbage.  A pair
of disused railroad tracks ran through the field, disappearing in the high grass
and refuse.  People with pets from his apartment complex used to take their
animals out there to do their business.

The window on his door shattered
and zombie hands reached in to grab him, shaking Jeff from his reverie.  He
spun and hammered them with his left fist, beating the fingers, feeling them
snap under his assault, and pushed on the gas.  The van lurched and rocked and
went forward, cutting down several dead in front of them, the wheels and gears
getting gummier by the second with torn flesh and thick blood.

Jenny, meanwhile, had stopped
screaming and started laughing hysterically.  The three zombies who’d tried to
climb in through the window couldn’t move anymore.  They were stuck.  Each one
of them was male, one skinny with frizzy hair and a balding pate, one shorter
and thicker with a mop of bowl-cut black hair, and the third was fat and bald,
with two big lips that kissed the air like a fish out of water.  She poked
Jeff’s side, her face streaming with tears, and pointed at the creatures, stuck
fast in the window.

“The Three Stooges,” she said. 
She collapsed onto the seat, shaking and giggling. 

A grim smile crossed his face;
they did look like the Three Stooges.  But Jenny, she was losing it, cracking
up.  He had to get them out of there and fast. 

There was nowhere to go, though,
the dead in front of them as they bounded back by the Food Bank and through
another small, wooden fence, were as thick and heavy as a soaked wool coat and
there seemed to be no end of them.  Their faces, some horribly mangled, others
looking like they just woke up from a long nap, stared in at them, their eyes
dead and cold, their jaws snapping open and shut. 

For a moment, Jeff lost himself in
their ocean.

Then the van broke free, surging
forward suddenly across smooth grass and they were into the field.  It happened
so fast that he didn’t have time to slow down, so the van flew straight and
slammed into one of the big mounds of dirt and grass that dotted the field. 
Jeff felt the front axle of the van snap when they rammed the mound and knew
their escape plan was forever ruined now.  They hit it so hard that the Three
Stooges were thrown free from the window with an audible pop and tumbled
backwards onto the grass.  Jenny rolled off the seat and fell onto the floor as
Jeff rammed his chest into the steering wheel. 

They sat for a moment, too stunned
to move.  The sounds of the dead, advancing on them, their feet shushing across
the grass and their moans, growing louder and closer, shook them from their
shocked state.  Jeff opened his door and fell from the van, clutching his
chest.  It hurt.  He didn’t think he broke anything, but he wasn’t sure.  Jenny
was out the other door and around the van and at his side in the blink of an
eye.  He put his arm around her waist and together they stood and faced the
oncoming tidal wave of the dead, only forty yards away from them.

“What are we going to do?” Jenny
said.

Jeff shrugged.  He was out of
ideas, except one. 

“Run,” he said.

“They’ll follow us.”
“I think as long as we keep moving and don’t get pinned in, we’ll be alright,”
he said.

“I have an idea,” Jenny said.  She
ran to the rear of the van and disappeared.  A moan to his left caught Jeff’s
attention and he watched as the Three Stooges, about fifty feet away, all rose
to their feet as one.  They shuffled towards him, their arms held out in front
of them and their jaws clacking open and shut and for a second, it was like he
was in one of those old Abbot and Costello monster movies.  The way the Stooges
jerked and shook and staggered, it was pretty funny.  A wave of giddy laughter
poured over him and he was just about to let it take him, let the whole
insanity of the situation take control, when Jenny bumped into his side and
jarred him from his momentary madness.

She held three long strips of
fabric in her hand, torn from the body of the dead zombie inside the van, and a
book of matches.  She had a crazy grin on her face.

“We need to get what we can take
from the van,” she said.

Jeff ran over and dove into the
back of the van.  There was a crowbar and tire iron, which they could use, some
small cans of food and the package of cooked meats that Jenny had made, the
backpack, a small water hose, and several larger cans of food.  He filled the
backpack with the food that would fit and grabbed the tire iron and crowbar and
ran back around to join Jenny.

She was standing in front of the
Three Stooges, two feet away from their clutching fingers, staring at them, a
slight, wry smile on her face.  Jeff panicked and rushed forward, raising the
crowbar over his head.  He pushed past Jenny and buried the hunk of steel in
the top of Larry’s head, splitting it in two like an overripe tomato.  Brains
and black blood gushed over the crowbar and Larry fell to his knees, jitterbugging,
pitching forward, and slumping, dead forever.

Moe and Curly hardly seemed to
notice.  They reached for Jeff, Moe catching his left arm and Curly grabbing
his waist.  He twisted and slammed his left elbow into Moe’s jaw.  Teeth
crunched and bone shattered on impact and Moe fell to the ground as Jeff, now
out of Curly’s grasp, swung the crowbar and cracked the back of the big
zombie’s head.  The skull popped and the back end of it came flying off, a disc
of bone and blood spinning off into the field like a human Frisbee.  Curly went
to his knees and Jeff jammed the end of the crowbar into that exposed space,
stirring the zombie’s brains for a second and then yanking it out.  Curly fell
on Moe, pinning him to the ground, making it easy for Jenny, who’d backed away
to watch the action, to kill him.  She had picked up a large rock, raised it
up, and crashed it down on Moe’s head.  It splattered like a watermelon tossed
off a skyscraper, brains and bone splashing over the grass, washing it in grue.

Jeff looked at Jenny, a grim stare
in his eyes.  She was smiling, the wryness gone and replaced with sadness.

“I kind of liked them,” she said. 
“If all zombies were like these three, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”
Jeff grabbed her elbow and pulled her away from the Stooges.

“Are you okay?” he said.

She giggled.  He shook her.  The
harder he shook, the more she laughed. 

Jeff didn’t know what to do.  She
was losing it.  He couldn’t blame her.  Hell, he’d been close himself more than
once the last twenty minutes.   

He looked up at the approaching
dead.  They weren’t far off now.  Over to his left there were more dead coming
from the suburbs and stumbling into the fields, their moans mixing with the
whispers of their feet sluicing through the tall grass. 

Now he started laughing.  Jenny
looked up at him and their eyes met and for a second, a desperate insanity
passed between them.  An Indian zombie, with tattered clothing and one eye
missing, grabbed Jeff’s arm.  Where the creature came from and how it had snuck
up on him he didn’t know and didn’t care.  He knocked its grip loose and swung
for its head, using the crowbar like a baseball bat.  The left side of the
zombie’s head squashed inward, the bones cracking and its only good eyeball
plopping out and landing between Jeff’s feet.  It was a hearty blow but it
wasn’t enough; the creature staggered to the side and raised up again.

The next swing took its head off
from the nose up and its body, tongue lolling in the open air, fell one way,
and its head, spraying black blood, went the other.

Jeff had stopped laughing.  He was
back, now, determined and scared and angry and yes, still a bit insane.  But
who could blame him?  The entire world resembled some ring of Hell itself. 
Wherever they went, there was no relief, no rest, just an unrelenting crush of
the living dead.  And now here they were, stuck in a field, with a van that
wasn’t going anywhere, zombies advancing on every side, and his only friend and
lover in the world hysterical and out of her mind. 

He turned to her and slapped her,
hard, across the mouth.  Jenny’s face fell and she stopped giggling.  Pure rage
flashed across her face as she balled her fists up, the strands of fabric
wrapped around her fingers now, and spit on the ground.

“You want to fight?” she said.

He shook his head and pointed to
his right and behind her.  She followed his finger, saw the coming dead—twenty
yards away on one side, fifteen on the other—and dropped her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  She ran to
the gas tank of the van, took the cap off, and tied the three strips of fabric
together, end to end. 
“I saw this on a movie once,” she said.  She was grinning again, but it was
her regular smile, not the crazy one.

“Aren’t you supposed to soak them
in gasoline first?” he said.

Jenny shrugged.  “You got any
handy?”

Jeff snapped his fingers and went
to the back of the van, coming out with the small water hose.  Jenny dug into
her pocket and produced a jackknife.  She cut one end of the hose and the
other, giving them a piece they could shove down into the gas tank.

“You ever siphon before?” she
said.

“Once, when I was a kid,” Jeff
said.  He dropped to his knees and went to work. 

The living dead were coming closer
by the second.  There was a wall of them, thick and shambling, just ten yards
from them, reaching the bodies of the Stooges.  Behind them, the other mass of
dead were eight yards away, their moans louder and their jaws clacking
together, almost in unison.  It reminded Jeff of crickets.

His mouth filled with gas and he
gagged, nearly swallowing it, before he spun and spit the wad out.  He coughed
and stumbled away, his mouth and throat on fire.

Jenny grabbed the squirting end of
the hose, soaked the strips of fabric with it, and yanked the hose out.  She
shoved the strips down into the tank as far as she could and stepped back.  She
produced a small box of matches and lit one, her eyes meeting Jeff’s.

“Ready?” she said.

The closest dead were five yards
away now, close enough to feel, their teeth a dissonance of clattering enamel
and raw tongues. 

Jeff nodded.

Jenny lit the rag.  It went up
instantly.

“Run!” she yelled.

They ran.  Jeff grabbed the
crowbar and scooped up the tire iron he’d dropped by the back of the van and
dug his feet in and tore off.  Jenny was right next to him, passing him, and
sprinting ahead. 

The van exploded.

Orange flames pitched high into
the sky, a roiling ball of fire pitched and tumbled upwards and hissed and
licked the air.  Shards of metal and plastic flew in every direction like
splinters from a fragmentation grenade.   A wave of concussive force blew back
the grass and the zombies and Jenny and Jeff, knocking them to the ground and
sending them sputtering and rolling over the uneven ground in the field.  It
was the ditch they were tossed into that saved their lives as a chunk of the
passenger door sailed over their heads like a missile, barely missing them by
inches. 

Jeff screamed and rolled on the
ground, the side of his shirt on fire for a moment.  Jenny crawled over next to
him, patting the flames and putting the last of them out.  The backs of her
legs were dotted with tiny pieces from the van like she’d been sprayed by a
porcupine. 

The roar of the explosion
continued to echo across the field and against the houses in the suburb to
their right and the long, tall hedgerow on their left.  Their ears rang for a
few moments afterwards, a deep, chiming sound cutting their hearing.

A dozen zombies, caught too close
to the van, were stumbling around on fire, the flames flickering and burning
high.  They looked like living marshmallows, blazing and turning black, as they
wondered in circles, their arms and hands trying in vain to put the fires out.

Another couple dozen had been
severely wounded from the shrapnel.  Some were cut in half at the waist; others
had their heads slashed along with various limbs.  One zombie, a man in a
business suit, had been cut at the neck and his head flopped to the side,
connected by enough veins and skin that it still lived, lolling around and
rolling back and forth like a pendulum on its chest. 

Even more zombies had caught fire
and been injured in some way, but they were far enough away or shielded by
other living dead bodies that they’d come out relatively unharmed.  These zombies
moaned and moved away from the fire while they stared at it in prehistoric
fascination.

“We have to go,” Jeff said.

He crawled along the ditch towards
the hedgerow.  He still had the backpack on and, although it had been scorched
in the explosion, it was still intact.  As they moved slowly along, careful to
keep out of sight of the zombies, he found the crowbar lying a few feet away. 
It had been knocked out of his hands when the van went up and he was glad to
have it back.  The weight of it felt good in his hands.  A few feet further
along and he spied the tire iron.  He risked a glance over the edge of the
ditch, saw the zombies were still engaged with the fiery van, and reached out
and grabbed it.  He handed it back to Jenny.