The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead (11 page)

The ditch ended after thirty yards
and they came to a halt, keeping their bodies low to the ground so they
couldn’t be seen by the zombies.  Jeff knew they could probably sense their
body heat and track them, but he figured the burning husk of the van would
distract them long enough for he and Jenny to get away. 

He rolled onto his side and looked
down his body at Jenny, who was at his feet, lying still. 

“Are you okay?” he whispered.  She
nodded.

“My legs hurt,” she said.  “I
thought the strips would burn longer.”
Jeff grinned.  “It was a good idea,” he said.
He settled his head on the dirt and took a deep breath.  They’d been running
for what seemed forever but had only been a few minutes, really. 

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

“I don’t know,” he said.  “I guess
stick to the original plan.”
“We don’t have a car anymore,” she said. 

“We walk, I guess,” he said.  “We
can try and make it to the Marina and take a boat.  We could drive it along the
coast until it runs out of gas.”
“I’ve never driven a boat,” she said.

“Neither have I,” he said.

They lay in silence and listened
to the crackling flames and the moaning dead for a few moments.

“It should be just like driving a
car,” Jenny said.  “I mean, if it had a motor.  If it was a sailboat, we’d be
fucked.”
“That’s a good idea,” Jeff said.  “We should check, at least.”

Something soft and wet brushed his
cheek and Jeff, who’d been laying on his side, rolled over and looked up.

A zombie face leered at him.  Jeff
yelled and slung his hands up just in time as it fell over into the ditch, its
teeth clicking together.  His fingers found its forehead and ears and he
grabbed them, holding its mouth up and away from his cheek even as its body
slammed on top of him. 

It was fat and bloated and stunk
of gas and rich earth.  Its skin was blotchy and greasy from decomposition and
Jeff had a hard time keeping his fingers on its head because they kept sliding
in the slick, rotting skin.  As it was, the heavy weigh of the creature knocked
his breath out and was threatening to crush him.  Its hands clawed at his
shoulders and face, lacerating the flesh.

A wild cry filled the air and Jeff
felt something slam through the zombie’s body as its eye popped from its socket
and filled his vision.  At the other end of the eyeball was a tire iron covered
in bits of brain and bone and dripping with wet, black blood.  At the end of
the tire iron was Jenny, standing over the body, her hair hanging down in her
face, a savage expression of triumph on her face. 

She yanked the iron out and the
zombie fell heavy and hard on Jeff.  He squirmed from underneath it and got to
his feet the cries of the dead filling his ears.  He and Jenny turned to see
the entire field, full of zombies, lurch towards them.

“We need to go,” Jenny said. 

They sprinted towards the hedgerow
forty yards ahead of them.  It was long, traversing a good quarter of a mile
going north/south and was eight feet tall.  They would either have to go
through it or over it or around it.  When they reached the bushes, they stopped
and both of them bent, breathing hard and out of strength.  They were spent,
utterly empty.  Jenny reached over and leaned on Jeff as they looked behind
them to see the dead still pursuing them, a buffer of thirty yards between
them.  Behind the zombies, the van continued to burn, its flames reaching up
and kissing the sky, its smoke choking the nearby area. 

Once they caught their breath,
Jeff took the crowbar and jammed it through the bushes.  The end struck a
chain-link fence on the other side, clanging hollow.  He ran the crowbar up
until it cleared the fence, marking it as five feet tall. 

Behind them, the rising moan of
the zombies filled the air, mixing with the smoke, the wind thick with death
and suffocation.  A plastic bag blowing across the field slapped the side of
Jenny’s ankle and clung there like a wet sock.  She bent and peeled it off,
holding it out so that it caught the slight breeze and blew away. 

“We need to go through,” Jeff
said.  “It’s a couple feet thick and there’s a fence on the other side.”
“I’ll go first,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the advancing dead.

Jeff smiled.  “We’ll go together,”
he said, walking a couple feet down and finding a small divide in the tight,
weaving plants. 

They plunged in, the branches
tearing at their faces and arms and clothes, cutting and slicing and
shredding.  More than once Jenny’s hair got caught and wound in the twigs but
she pressed forward, her hands—she’d tucked the tire iron down the back of her
pants—searching for the fence.  She found it and her fingers scrambled over the
surface until they reached the top.

Dead fingers found hers and she
jerked her hands back as a zombie’s mouth chomped down, crunching the cold hard
steel of the fence rather than the warm softness of her hands.  Jenny screamed
and fought backwards as the zombie leaned against the fence and reached for
her.  She couldn’t see it through the bushes but she could smell it and now she
could hear it, groaning and hungry. 

It wasn’t alone.  As it moaned,
dozens of other joined in, their sad song mixing with the zombies behind Jenny
and Jeff, advancing slowly but surely, only fifteen yards away now.

Next to her, Jeff heard what was
happening and pushed his way back out of the thick hedges, grabbing Jenny and hauling
her with him.  They squirted into the open air from where they’d come, their
bodies a map of tiny cuts and scars. 

They were nearly boxed in,
hedgerow and zombies beyond it behind them, over a hundred walking dead
shambling in front of them, the closest only ten yards away now, a shifting,
moaning mass.   Their teeth clacked together, hungry for the promise of a warm
meal.  Jeff stared at them and understood there would never be any place safe
on this earth as long as they existed.  Despair and hopelessness mixed inside,
taking his strength away.  Jenny's hand found his, their fingers intertwining,
and he felt the desperation leave him, if only for the moment. 

“We go around,” Jeff said.  He
grabbed Jenny’s hand and they ran south, away from the road and the zombies. 
They skirted the edge of the hedge, keeping it within arms reach in case they
had to try and get through it again.  The zombies on their right, the ones that
had drifted into the field following the van’s accident, the ones from the suburbs,
turned as one and pursued, walking slow but determined.

Minutes later, the hedge dropped
in height and was only as tall as the fence it grew around.  On the other side
was an empty parking lot and an empty building.  It was two stories tall, made of
brick, with tall windows the height of an average man dotting the outside.  The
shades were pulled on each of the windows so Jeff couldn’t see inside, but he
knew better than to think of taking refuge there.  The windows wouldn’t hold
and the dead would surround the place, making it a death trap.

Jenny bent down and massaged her
left calf.

“It’s cramping up,” she said.

“We need to keep going,” he said. 
He grabbed her by the elbow.

“Okay, okay,” she said.  She
jerked her arm free of his grip and hobbled past him to the opening.  He
followed, checking the progress of the dead as they kept pace behind them. 
They were forty yards away now, which was good.  It meant he and Jenny could
walk and keep a good cushion between them and the dead as long as they kept up
a decent pace.

Jenny screamed and fell back from
the shortened hedgerow.  Jeff ran to her side.

On the other side of the fence,
dotting the parking lot of the office building, were dozens of zombies, all
shuffling towards them, their teeth clacking together.

“Goddamnit!” Jeff fumed.  Couldn’t
they get a break?  Everywhere they turned it was a zombie jamboree.  His eyes
flickered up past the walking dead to the city of Oakland on the horizon, smoke
billowing through different parts and spreading, and he wondered if they might
be the last people on earth.

“Let’s go,” he said.  He boosted
Jenny up over the hedge and followed.  The zombies in the parking lot were a
short distance away—twenty yards—but were closing in.  There was no time to
think about things or plan any action.  It was time to just act.

When he got on the other side,
Jeff ran directly for the nearest office building, crowbar in hand.  Jenny
stuck to him, keeping close, her tire iron pulled out and ready.  They reached
a window and Jeff swung the crowbar, shattering it.  Glass flew everywhere as
his weapon got stuck for a moment in the drawn shades.  He pulled it out, used
it to clear all the spare, jagged glass still stuck in the window, and climbed
inside.  Jenny was right behind him.

They stepped into a conference
room with a long table and a dozen chairs.  It was empty and cool and dark. 
Jeff ran to the wall and flicked on the lights and leaned for a moment,
catching his breath.  Jenny joined him, both of them resting until the first
zombie appeared at the window.

Jenny charged across the room and
buried the tire iron deep inside the creature’s skull, shattering the bone and
sending its brains spilling across the floor at her feet.  Its body dropped
away and to the side as another zombie and then another filled the window,
their dead faces leering inside as their teeth clacked and their mouths moaned.

“Come on,” Jeff said.  He opened
the door next to him.

“What are we doing?” she said. 
“We can’t hide here.”

“No.  We’ll stand here and we’ll
wait until some of them get into the room.  When they do, when they get a good
sense that we’re in here, we’ll run out and shut the door and go out the
entrance.  Hopefully we’ll draw enough in here so we can put some distance
between us and them,” he said.

Jenny stuck her head out into the
hallway.  It was empty.  She reached to her left and clicked on the switch on
the wall, lighting the entire area.  No one and no thing moved.  Along the hall
were several doors, all closed, and at the end was an open doorway that led
into a lobby.  Through there she could see the glass front of the building and
its reception area.  Outside, a couple of zombies in business suits lingered,
staggering and drifting, like pieces of trash blown by the wind.

At the window behind them, a
zombie slid inside.  It was a man, or used to be, and wore a torn and tattered
baseball uniform.  The hat was on backwards and its face was a dull gray and
missing its nose.  It was followed by another zombie, this one in a suit and
tie with its chest cavity opened no heart inside.  And then another came and
another.

Within moments, there was a dozen
zombies inside, lurching towards the humans, their arms reaching out and their
mouths snapping open and shut. 

“Wait,” Jeff said.  He watched
them as they came, as relentless as the waves on the ocean.  The baseball
zombie was only four feet away now, its fingers scratching the air in front of
it.  Jeff pushed Jenny into the hallway and slammed the door shut behind him. 
Jenny ran down the hall but Jeff called her back.  She jogged over as he stood
at the door, listening to the zombies on the other side.

“We stay here as long as we can,”
he said.  “They’ll come in through that window and fill the room, attracting
all the others.  That should buy us enough time to slip out the front.”

Jenny ran down the hall to check
out the front as Jeff waited by the door.
The din of the dead filled the hall and the building.  It was a terrifying
sound, a mixture of moans and clicking teeth and fingers and flesh, bent
against the wooden walls, scraping and tearing.  It was the sound of
fingernails breaking and bones cracking.  It was the sound of death coming for
them.

Still, Jeff waited.  Even as the
door bulged and threatened to break with the sheer numbers of the living dead
on the other side, pressing their empty and lifeless bodies against one
another. 

Jenny tugged Jeff’s arm.

“It’s clear.”
They ran down the hall, into the lobby, and through the front doors which
were, oddly enough, unlocked.

They spilled out into the smoky
air, the gift of a burning Oakland, into an open courtyard with benches lining
their left and right, making a horseshoe, and a city street running
perpendicular to them.  No zombies were in sight.   

Jeff and Jenny ran to the street
and crossed, going down another road that led to a  shopping center just up
over a small rise.  Here and there, dotting the spaces between the buildings,
were the walking dead.   There was maybe a dozen or so, all spread out and
effectively useless because Jenny and Jeff were moving at a half-jog, putting
distance between them and the zombies.  They ran through the shopping center,
passing creatures who stumbled past parked cars and pushed empty shopping
carts.  They saw the humans and left what they were doing, lurching after
them. 

Jeff and Jenny kept moving, going
parallel to the shopping center and down a road that led to the Marina.  They
kept in the middle of the street, maintaining a good distance between them and
the dead, who followed along, out of range to be a threat but never ceasing in
their pursuit.  

It was hard to believe that just a
month ago people used to take walks out here, cars used to drive by, the
buildings were full of bustling, energetic people trying to make ends meet, and
there were geese, drifting over from the Marina, honking and looking for food. 
The geese were long gone now, and so were the people, all replaced by a segment
of hell itself. 

The Marina loomed ahead.  It was
full of docked boats, their sails all tucked away.  No zombies were nearby that
they could see. 

They stopped and assessed the
situation.  They both were breathing hard, their lungs gasping for a good
breath, fatigued from the running and the fighting and the smoke in the air. 
At that moment, Jeff would have traded just about anything for a breath of
fresh air.