Eden (Zombie Novels) Page 2

  When most of its skull contents had pooled on the hardwood around it, Harris stepped back and looked over the scene. He bent and wrenched the machete free from where it was lodged in the unmoving nasty’s trunk.

  Vittles poked his head out from under the entertainment center, then shot like a bolt into the kitchen, out of sight again.

  Harris was breathing heavily as he scabbarded the blade. He took up the shotgun and reloaded it from the bandolier. Two more zombies were stumbling over each other to get through the doorway into the house. Harris put them both down, thumbed more shells into the shotgun, took one last look around, and made his way outside.

  The firefight in the street was intense. The wall had been breached and hundreds of the undead stumbled about. Eden’s denizens fought back, firing their assault rifles on semi-auto, always aiming for the head, conserving ammo, keeping it together as they set about their grim task.

  Julie sat in a window on the second floor, sniping at the undead with the AR-15.

  It looked like their house had been the first one hit, which meant that the break had to be nearby. Harris stood in his doorway and fired the shotgun, pumped it, fired, pumped and fired until he emptied it completely. The zombies were close enough that each shotgun blast scored a head shot.

  There was a scream and a zombie came at him full speed. Harris raised the shotgun and clobbered it over the head. The thing puddled on the steps to his porch. Harris drew one of the twin 9-mils and sent a single bullet into its skull.

  He closed the door to the house and buttressed the shotgun against it.

  Harris worked his way down the street toward the wall, both 9-millimeters filling his hands. He waited until he couldn’t miss, walking right up to each undead and firing. One thing he had learned fast about shooting a gun: even in close quarters, most of your shots missed. What seemed to him now like a lifetime of fighting for his survival had steadied Harris’s hand. His aim was true.

  Pop. One in the temple, the thing went down. Pop. Another through the mouth, the back of a skull lifting off. Pop. In one ear, out the side of a head. And so on.

  “Howya, Harris!”

  It was Bobby Evers, his neighbor in Eden. Bobby had a flamethrower and was hosing the undead down with a withering stream of fire. Evers and some other men and women were in a line, making their way toward Harris and his house. They herded the zombies back toward the wall before them, advancing in a staggered enfilade. They covered one another as they reloaded. Such tactics had been drilled and practiced.

  Harris dropped the mags in the 9-millimeters, sliding home fresh ones, nodding in Bobby’s direction. Neither Bobby nor any of the others were fully dressed, but none of them was wrapped in a bedsheet either.

  A steady stream of rifle fire came from above. Julie paused only to switch magazines. She concentrated on the zombies outside the shepherding gunfire and blaze, those lurching about wildly, some alight and flailing, screaming in their immolation.

  Julie tried to lead one zombie that was lurching about like a caterwauling torch. A round from the AR-15 pocked the asphalt; another disappeared into the flaming mass as the thing reached the sidewalk. A third round kicked up cement dust from the walk. The zombie collapsed burning, draped over a fire hydrant, wailing the whole time until Julie breathed, sighted afresh, and placed a fourth round into the region of its flaming head. It shuddered once and slipped off the hydrant, gobs of its melted body clinging to the casement of the discharge pipe.

  One by one they collapsed in the street and on sidewalks to burn and smolder silently.

  Harris and Evers found the breach. When the wall around Eden had been constructed—before Harris or Julie or even Bobby had arrived—the residents had failed to build gates. They were more concerned with keeping the dead out and had no intention of ever leaving their haven. When those first inhabitants ran out of food, foraging missions had been led through the sewer system. The monsters outside their walls seemed unable or unwilling to navigate the miles of extensive tunnels beneath the city streets. After several unfortunate, jarring incidents, and after much arguing and discussion, the walls of Eden had been rebuilt, revamped this time to include gateways.

  The break-in had occurred at one of the doors. The wall itself rose twelve feet above the street. Though some of the undead remained extremely agile, none could scale it. This particular gate was a heavy-duty security door salvaged from a Home Depot. Before the world had gone to shit, people who lived on these blocks in this outer-borough neighborhood would have installed such a door to protect themselves from crimes like burglary. That was long before anyone had to worry about the reanimated dead being hungry for human flesh.

  Harris and Bobby Evers reached the door together, and found it unlocked and wide open. They would have looked at each other but they were preoccupied, Harris squeezing off round after round, Evers dousing the undead with flames. Some undead dropped while others were driven back outside, past the gate.

  With his 9-millimeter out, Harris made a mad dash for the door, the machete loosed and hacking at undead heads and outstretched arms. He severed limbs and cleaved skulls, firing the .45 in his right hand, allowing for the recoil that jerked his arm up with each shot.

  Thrusting the machete like a rapier before him, Harris drove it through the jaws of a particularly rotten undead. The blade lodged and the beast was propelled back, through the gate, and out into the no-man’s-land beyond where thousands of its kith thronged. Harris slammed the door shut, leaning his full body weight against it.

  He pressed himself against the door, waiting while Bobby Evers slipped out of the flamethrower harness. Evers retrieved the crossbar from the cement as a zombie, charred black, reached for him. The fingers of its hands had been fused together in a blistery welding. The Irishman brought the crossbar down on its skull twice. By the time the steaming mass stopped twitching on the street the crossbar was in its proper place and the door was secured.

  Evers, his back against the door, slid down to a seated position. He was huffing, his asthma catching up to him. Harris stepped back, mopping his brow with a forearm, contemplating the morning’s events and their implications.

  “Looks like you done lost your machete,” Bobby noted.

  “Looks like,” Harris agreed, panting.

  “The fookin’ gate, Harris.” Bobby said what was on both their minds. “Go way outta that! How in the hell did this happen?”

  Harris didn’t always understand Evers’s brogue. He stooped down and picked something up from the ground.

  The gunshots within Eden’s walls slowly petered out. Those still alive within were finishing off those who were not.

  “You’re a fookin’ mess, Harris. You okay?” A look of genuine concern was on Evers’s face. Harris looked like something that spent its days crawling around the floor of a slaughterhouse.

  Harris knew Bobby was one of the good guys. Harris never doubted Bobby.

  “None of it’s mine,” Harris lied, referring to the blood all over him.

  Bobby nodded. “By the way, grand outfit.” The Irishman winked.

  “Harris!”

  Julie was coming down the block, her hair pulled back and kerchiefed. She was cradling the black rifle and the .357 holstered on her hip looked huge on her lithe frame.

  Harris hugged her, ignoring the muck and gore and guns, and she hugged him back.

  “Julie.”

  Once in their bathroom, the door locked, Harris set about cleaning and inspecting himself. The plumbing did not work and hadn’t since before he’d moved in. Jugs of rainwater in the bathtub facilitated his cleanup. The communal baths erected on the opposite end of the block had hot water. Julie’d gone there, direct from their embrace.

  Harris didn’t care to be seen as he peeled out of the damp, bloodstained bedsheet, letting it fall to the cool tiles.

  The bite was on his upper right arm, almost at his shoulder. It wasn’t even such a bad bite: the skin was broken, but only just. His kid brother had been
attacked by a dog once when they were young. One bite—way worse looking than this—but his brother had been fine. A shot from the doctor, a few stitches, a hug from Mom, Dad tousling his hair, and James was good as new.

  Harris understood it wouldn’t be this way for him. The rules had changed. He knew what this bite meant.

  If I ever get bitten, Buddy once told him, and I can’t do it myself, you do it for me, okay?

  Harris sighed. He had always figured it would end like this.

  If I can’t do it myself. The only hint of weakness Buddy had ever let on.

  He’d told Buddy to be quiet, not to talk like that. But Buddy had persisted. Buddy always persisted.

  Promise me, Harris. You put one in my head if I can’t do it myself. Promise me.

  To shut the other man up, to get them off the topic, Harris had promised he would.

  Harris looked at himself in the mirror. It is always strange, he thought, to gaze at oneself in the glass, to see oneself as others do, and not as we imagine. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t cut his hair since . . . Since it all began. How long ago was that? A year and a half? Maybe more? Time no longer meant what it once did.

  You don’t shave or cut that hair of yours, Buddy had told him, you’re gonna wind up looking like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes.

  Harris had taken it as a compliment. Raquel had always thought Heston was hot in that movie.

  Skull fragments were entangled in his hair.

  Harris was feeling old. He was forty-four now. Perhaps it was time to feel that way, at least once in a while. He was already feeling a bit unwell, not quite himself. How much that was due to the bite as opposed to the circumstances surrounding the bite—being jolted from sleep by undead cannibals ferociously attacking him and the woman he loved—Harris could not discern.

  He knew what would happen, what was bound to happen. What had to happen.

  Harris would turn into one of those undead things after degenerating. He’d come back as something that would try to eat Julie and Bobby and anyone else it could. No matter how much they begged, no matter how much they implored and cried about what had been, the thing he would become would ignore their words and feast.

  How would Buddy respond if he were here now? What would the big man say to him in a situation like this?

  If it’d been Buddy injured like this, Harris had no doubt the man would have gone off on his own somewhere and eaten a bullet.

  The skin around the bite was discolored, purple.

  You da man. Buddy would have clapped him on the shoulder—the other shoulder. They’d have gone for a walk, Buddy’s idea, and as much as it might hurt him to do so, Buddy would have raised his silenced 9-millimeter when he thought Harris was unaware and dispatched him to whatever came after this life or the nothingness in its absence.

  And Harris could not have blamed him.

  For the first and only time, Harris was glad Buddy wasn’t around at that particular moment, because there was one thing he knew he had to do.

  Harris reached down and picked up the object he’d found outside, next to the door in the wall. He’d known what it was as soon as he saw it, known whose it was.

  The door in the wall had been unlocked. Someone had let zombies into Eden. Purposefully. The lock on the door to his and Julie’s house had also been broken open. Someone had meant for them to be the next human Happy Meal for the undead parade.

  Why? Harris had his ideas. Who? Who, he was more solid on. There was little doubt there.

  Harris flicked the wheel on the Zippo lighter he’d found, watching the blue and yellow flame flare up and catch. It was Thompson’s Zippo lighter, the one the nineteen-year-old fancied and carried everywhere.

  This Harris knew.

  2.

  Joey, don’t forget,” Joy Noddings reminded the tenth-grader as he left her algebra class.

  “What’s that, Ms. Noddings?” Joey was a good-looking kid, popular with the girls.

  “Do your homework.”

  Joy knew Joey wouldn’t do his homework. Joey didn’t do homework.

  “Fo shizzle.” He was still good enough to go through the motions, to act like he cared. Maybe he did.

  Joy Noddings was in her first year of teaching high school, fresh from a master’s degree program. The Hillcrest Alternative School had taken a chance and hired her to teach math.

  The school was small, with a dozen staff members serving thirty children labeled emotionally and learning disabled. Though the small school was located in the upscale New York City suburb of Bedford Hills, the student body itself was quite diverse. Hillcrest had earned its reputation as the last stop for students who couldn’t cut it on the main high school campus across town.

  The staff provided a more therapeutic setting than what was available to these kids at the regular high school, where over sixteen hundred students packed the halls. The main campus was an institutional setting where the traditional Hillcrest kid found herself, more often than not, in trouble.

  Still, Joy was surprised that Hillcrest had taken her on.

  Nervous at her interview, she’d gone home doubting herself, wondering how badly she’d bumbled the questions. To this day she was convinced that she owed the job to the good graces of Hillcrest’s principal. He was at least a couple of decades older than her. An attractive man, the type of guy who would be described as “distinguished” in a few more years. Joy admired her principal, especially his tough-but-fair demeanor with the often trying students of Hillcrest.

  She also appreciated his professional attitude. Joy was used to drawing looks and the occasional catcall from the men on the corner waiting for work. She was relieved that her principal never crossed any lines with her, as opposed to her colleague in the math department whose eyes immediately went right to her chest whenever they encountered each other. Her principal wasn’t that way at all.

  Ed was the boyfriend Joy had been dating for going on three years now. Ed was a nice enough guy and Joy figured she’d probably wind up marrying him when he asked. She honestly believed there was no one better out there. Her principal was married anyway.

  Three years with Ed already and when was he going to ask? Joy found it ironic that even after she’d made up her mind to settle, she’d still had to wait for the man to whom she’d resigned herself. Propose already. Maybe settle was too harsh. Ed was a good man; he just lacked an edge she’d been drawn to in other men.

  Four months into her first academic year at Hillcrest, Joy fit right in with the rest of the staff, some of whom had been with the program for years. Although rewarding, the job was challenging because of kids like Joey. Her students, who had so much to offer, could sit attentively in class, absorb information and use it to pass exams—even state exams at the end of the year. But these same students were unmotivated and rarely, if ever, turned in assignments. They never cracked a book at home nor made any attempt to capitalize on their God-given gifts.

  Still, Joy knew that without Hillcrest, many of them had no hopes of graduating. They’d fall through the cracks. No child left behind, right?

  Fourth period was a free one, her prep period. Joy considered going upstairs to the staff office. There were a couple of parents she needed to call. It seemed Alex was continuing to take his meds in the morning, meaning he spent most of his first three periods off-the-wall, driving his teachers nuts. The kid needed to take the medication before he went to sleep. Joy had had had this conversation with Alex’s mom more than once.

  Shanice, on the other hand, persisted in wearing clothing that was way too revealing—belly shirts and spaghetti straps. The kid caused a distraction in Joy’s seventh-period math skills lab. Joy thought back to when she’d been in high school—not that long ago really—when you wore a belly shirt if you didn’t have a belly. Today these girls wore whatever they wanted, no matter what they looked like.

  Joy decided she’d put off the calls and walk across the street to buy herself lunch at the deli. She hadn’t had anythi
ng to eat since a protein shake before she left her apartment that morning. Joy was thin but shapely, and worked hard to keep herself that way, so that she could wear belly shirts when she was out with Ed. A turkey breast sandwich wouldn’t be so bad.

  Boar’s Head skinless with American cheese. Yellow.

  Joy locked her classroom door, walked down the hall, and admonished a few stragglers to get to their next class before they were so late they received cuts from their teachers.

  Out on the street, it was a beautiful early November day. There’d been a brief cold spell at the end of October. Ed always wanted to keep the window open when he slept over, claiming that he “breathed better.” But Joy usually prevailed, eventually closing the window, despite his protestations. October’s cold had been followed by a brief return of warmer weather; close to sixty degrees when it should have been much cooler. A late summer’s last hurrah.

  The sky was beautiful, blue, limpid for the most part, with some puffy cumulous clouds over in the distance.

  Joy walked down the street toward Gary’s Deli. Hillcrest was located in downtown Bedford Hills, right in the middle of the shopping district. Quaint little stores, a dog groomer’s, a judaica, a consignment shop.

  One of the draws of the Hillcrest program, from the students’ point of view, was the off-campus rule. Once they’d earned the privilege with good behavior, students were allowed to spend their lunch break eating in one of the local delis or pizzerias, checking out the latest arrivals at the video game store, or browsing the CDs at Borders. It was to be hoped that they wouldn’t make use of this privilege to go off and smoke weed.

  Weed. Joy smirked. Buddha, ganja, astro turf, hay—between the kids and the rap music Ed liked to listen to, she heard new names for it every day. The low-level dealer she had dated her freshman year in college called it Baby Bhang. No one called it weed anymore.

  Gary’s Deli was adequate, but Walter’s two blocks down was better. The extra two blocks were not something Joy felt she wanted to commit to. Gary’s was competent enough to put together a turkey and American sandwich on whole wheat with lettuce, tomatoes, maybe a little mayo. But not too much; better the light Hellman’s. She had spin class at the gym tonight.