Zombie Ever After Page 14

  Luckily, at that moment, Donovan caught a glimpse of a dirt road to his right. Abruptly, he spun the steering wheel. The path ahead appeared free of zombies, at least as far as Donovan could make out in the gloom. The truck started to gain speed. The zombies grabbed at the door handles and clawed at the people in the truck bed.

  Someone screamed.

  Donovan looked in the rear view mirror. Zombies were clawing at one of the woman, biting her as they yanked her off. She was swallowed by the munching crowd.

  Donovan gunned it. They moved along well now, and more importantly, away from the monsters. Donovan only hoped the road he’d chosen was not a dead end, no pun intended. He considered using the whole bomb setup on this smallish zombie cluster right now as a last resort. He realized, however, that the blast wouldn’t have saved him and the other folks. They’d have gone down with the ship, so to speak. But he’d use it up ahead, if he had to, if they ran into any more trouble.

  For now, Donovan hoped and prayed with everything he had that they would escape. To the city where the bomb might make a real difference. Where exploding it might compensate for the deaths of Tenton and the others they’d left behind.

  Nothing remained for him to do now except drive. And pray. Which was a problem, as Donovan didn’t know the name of the saint who warded off the undead (although he was confident one existed). So, instead, he mumbled some heartfelt but generic prayers and wishes to keep them all safe—Cathren, too, wherever she was. He threw in a few requests to St. Christopher because he was traveling now and hoped to be doing so again, soon, with Cathren.

  Suddenly Donovan remembered a truckload of saints. He prayed to Saint Anthony of Egypt, for the purification of the world from evil. He prayed to Saint Anthony of Padua, to save the nonbelievers. He prayed to the Archangel Gabriel that Divine Love would conquer the world. To Saint Michael the Archangel that those who were under the influence of Satan might be saved. He even prayed to the patron saint of archaeologists, St. Helena. Why not? he figured. Archaeologists dealt with the dead all the time. But that was all Donovan had, draining his full knowledge of the saints from Sunday school. He was surprised he remembered as many as he did.

  More importantly, he hoped the saints were taking requests today.

  Chapter 47

  As night turned slowly to a grayish morning, the truck packed with survivors from the New Earth farm arrived downtown without further incident. The streets, once crawling with zombies, now stood empty. At least of living things. Bloodied corpses lay scattered around, as though they’d been dropped from a zeppelin. Donovan understood they only had a small window before these corpses started to reanimate. Regardless, the bodies here didn’t represent nearly enough of the enemy to warrant detonating the bomb just yet.

  “We need to stop,” someone called to Donovan from the back of the truck. The folks riding on tubs of destruction bounced along in various stages of snoozing and waking. It had been a hard, dazed night.

  Donovan’s goal: find the biggest herd of zombies available and blow them to pieces. The goal of his passengers was far more basic: find some place to go to the bathroom. Even at the end of the world, there were still some things more important than personal safety. At least for a few, specific minutes every day.

  “Okay,” Donovan said, “let me scout out a safe place first.”

  Did anyone care about cleanliness, neatness, even sanitary conditions anymore? Bushes would do in a pinch. They lived in a different world. Nonetheless, he knew of a city park half a mile up the road. The place had bathrooms, and they had been clean back before the apocalypse began.

  They pulled up to the park which appeared to be deserted. Donovan wouldn’t trust that on a good day, and this was not a particularly good day. He had to take the chance, however, with a dozen or so folks jonesing for some porcelain. Plus, he could use a moment to himself. Donovan pulled as close to the public bathroom as possible and stopped.

  “All right, everybody,” he said. “Let’s give this a go.” Donovan grabbed the machete and stepped out. Jamming the blade behind his belt, pirate style, he strode to the back of the truck.

  “Be aware while you’re away,” he said. “And make this quick. We’re vulnerable here.”

  Various occupants of the truck bed nodded in agreement as they jumped out. Some said, “sure,” and “yeah,” and “right.” Then off they went.

  The group dispersed, agreeing to meet back at the truck within five minutes. They also agreed not to separate; that is, no person left alone at any time. Except Donovan, of course.

  While the rest of the group was inside the public bathroom, Donovan guarded the truck. After a bit, it occurred to him that zombies couldn’t drive. He figured the vehicle would be safe enough while he dashed to the toilet for just a sec. Plus, he didn’t want to stay in one spot longer than necessary. The undead seemed to sense it somehow. Donovan pulled the keys out of the ignition as a precaution anyway. He also locked the doors.

  He dashed into the men’s room and back as fast as nature would allow. He managed to be, somehow, the first one out. He was not, however, the first one to the truck.

  Donovan was right: These sons-of-bitches had a sixth sense about humans not in motion. The truck, in less than two minutes, had been surrounded by a group of them. Fuck. They had no guns, no escape route, and now no big bomb.

  He mentally kicked himself, even though he knew he couldn’t have done anything had they shown up while he was guarding the truck. That’s when he noticed something. True, these guys around the truck shuffled about, hunched over and slow-moving. But none of their body parts appeared to be missing or rotting away. These weren’t zombies, he realized after a moment.

  These were fossils.

  Now the problem with fossils, unlike zombies, was that they were unpredictable. With zombies, there were no surprises. When they saw someone, they went after them. But fossils? Who the fuck knew how they were going to act? Sometimes they would run away. Other times, they’d go for murder with whatever weapons they carried. Kitchen knives and carving forks. Rakes, shovels, pitchforks. Muskets, rifles, and the occasional blunderbuss.

  Donovan stood a few yards from the truck, observing them. The fossils teetered where they stood, eyeing him back. They adjusted their thick glasses, shifted on their canes and walkers. One fossil took a sinister hit of oxygen from the squeaky canister he pulled behind him.

  At last, the New Earth women and children returned in pairs or small groups until they met up with Donovan. They joined in the staring contest.

  East of where they stood, a familiar, low groaning—almost indiscernible—wafted toward them. The zombie death whine.

  The hair on Donovan’s arms pricked up. He shuddered and scanned the cityscape around them. A couple of the girls whimpered. The fossils did nothing except continue to eyeball Donovan’s group with their watery eyes. This was not going to end well. The zombies were coming from the east and they’d be here in a few, short minutes. Fossils in front of them, blocking their access to the truck, to both its usefulness as an escape vehicle and as a zombie bomb.

  Donovan had no choice. He snatched the machete from his belt and, with a rebel yell, dashed toward the pack of fossils. Said fossils, meanwhile, continued to gawk, not comprehending that Donovan was an immediate threat. Nor the zombies in the distance as an imminent one.

  Chapter 48

  His work done, Donovan returned to the group, the machete back in his belt. Instead of slaughtering crazy people, glass eyes and false teeth filling the air like smelly confetti, he’d only needed to rattle their cage. They took off for the hills as if the lunch bell had rung at the all-you-can-eat buffet.

  Donovan waved to his charges. “Come on,” he said. “It’s safe.”

  No sooner did those words leave Donovan’s lips than the undead arrived. They still made their moaning noises, like a zombie version of the seven dwarves’ marching song.

  The women moved first, picking up the small ones or grabbing the ha
nds of the older children. They reacted quickly, but not quickly enough. Donovan pulled his machete back out.

  Here we go again, he thought. The same thing, but different. Rather than chasing off a handful of fossils, he would need to decapitate a lot of zombies.

  As the initial band of zombies slunk around the corner toward the little group, Donovan stood his ground, ready to meet them. A thought dawned on him, ever so slowly: this zombie parade was much, much bigger than the twenty or thirty zoms he’d originally estimated. The undead lumbering their way numbered over a hundred already. And Donovan had yet to see the end of the parade line.

  This was it, the mother lode: the biggest assemblage of undead anyone had ever witnessed or read about.

  “Get out of the truck!” he screamed counter-intuitively. “I know that seems wrong, but leave,” he continued shouting. “Run as far away from here as possible. I’m going to set off the bomb!” Donovan pointed up the road, a relatively low San Francisco hill.

  For some reason, the woman and children considered Donovan their leader, which worked for him. They ran. Several of the undead became distracted by their departure. They’d have to get past Donovan first, though. Or to be more precise, his truck of explosives.

  Donovan started connecting a few of the wires that had jostled loose to set the bomb up to blow. Not an easy task, with the zombies getting closer by the second. Then he had a realization: How the hell was he going to get out of there before the bomb exploded?

  Shit. He wasn’t.

  This required a new game plan. Donovan dashed back to the front of the truck, hopped in, and started her up. He backed the old Ford back up the street, another two blocks away from the zombies. The road, which rose on a slight incline, would to give him a bit more distance from the undead.

  This would be tricky. Timing would be crucial, and he had no time to lose. He engaged the emergency brake and set the truck in neutral, engine running. Donovan hopped out and ran to the back of the truck.

  In a few minutes, he had completed the complex wiring, which fortunately for Donovan meant simply connecting a handful of color-coded wires as Tenton had instructed him. The cheap alarm-clock-based mechanism was all that stood between a world filled with zombies and a world filled with blown-up zombie parts. Donovan prayed the damn thing would work and set the alarm for ten minutes ahead.

  He leaned closer to listen and made sure the clock was ticking. It was. That was the good news. The bad news? He hadn’t noticed the second stream of zombies pouring out from the opposite side of town. Donovan had to give these guys props for waging a smart, two-pronged attack. They were learning. He didn’t have time to analyze their strategy, however, as the first members of the preliminary column of zombies were almost upon him.

  That’s when Donovan realized that, in order to make it easier to work on the wiring, he’d put the machete on the ground, back by the public bathrooms.

  Double shit.

  Chapter 49

  Donovan managed to slip out of the death grip of the first wave of zombies and hopped into the truck cab. He slowly released the emergency brake, and as the Ford started to roll downhill, he jumped out.

  Donovan tumbled, then got up and ran like hell.

  Up ahead, he spotted the New Earthers, who now trudged along, emotionally defeated. They appeared to be all right physically, though. In a minute or two, Donovan caught up with them.

  “We won’t be able to run away from this, the explosion will be too enormous,” he told the women. “We need to find transportation—fast.”

  “No more working vehicles exist, you know that,” said one of the women, near tears. “No cars, no trucks, no motorcycles. Not even a horse to ride or pull a wagon.”

  She was right. What they did have was no chance.

  This was the end, Donovan thought, they were done. But the funny thing about meeting your Maker was, you had no idea when that moment would be. Only He (or She) did. Donovan’s meeting would need to be rescheduled for a later time, as it turned out. How did he know this? Simple. A vision of wings. Not angel wings, and not in the air.

  No, the wings were closer to the ground. And attached to a plane.

  This plane stood with just one “slice” of it visible through an open garage door. There were three other similar doors along the same wall, but those were all closed. Donovan had no idea how big the plane would prove to be or how many people it could accommodate, but he did understand one thing. That flying machine was going to carry all of them the hell away from danger whether it was built to do so or not.

  He knew the likelihood of finding any transportation was a thousand-to-one. Of finding a working, fueled plane, more like a million-to-one, or higher. Who had left it? Why hadn’t anyone else found it, especially if it could actually fly? What was a plane doing right in the middle of San Francisco, anyway? In any other circumstance, Donovan would have thought the whole situation was a preposterous deus ex machina. But here, now, with the end of the world upon them, he didn’t care about any of that. He’d take whatever life was offering. And right now, it looked to be the best offer he’d ever gotten.

  “Follow me,” Donovan shouted, waving them forward. Donovan had faith, though he didn’t know why, that this plane contained fuel. He held the insane idea they’d get the thing off the ground, into the air, and far, far away in the small amount of pre-explosion time remaining. Less time than Donovan would have liked, but again, he’d take it.

  They got to the hangar and stepped inside. The interior was immense, much wider, higher, and longer than Donovan had imagined when he’d spotted it from the outside. The place was clearly a tinkerer’s delight. Along with thousands of parts in open containers and boxes filling metal shelves, the workshop held vintage cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and this one plane. This one giant, rusty, ancient old plane, its sides tarnished and faded. It filled the rest of the available space. The words, Dragon Rapide, were stamped on the fuselage, below the cockpit window. Donovan strode up to the craft. He grabbed a wing strut and swung himself onto the wing to peer inside. Everything was as expected, and in good shape. The chrome logo on the wood-grained dash read “de Havilland.” He’d never heard of the thing, but it would do in a pinch.

  Donovan’s natural inclination was to start up the plane right then. A rotten idea, though. He didn’t want to alert the undead about the escape plan until everything was ready to go. A roaring plane inside a building with no way to maneuver it out was not a viable strategy.

  He signaled to the group, and they opened wide the remaining doors. When they were done pulling them to the side, there was an opening about fifty feet across. This was one amazing little hangar someone had created for themselves underneath the colorful houses of San Francisco.

  They took the chucks out from behind the two wheels and had to push with all of their strength just to get the heavy, blue, 1930s-era biplane rolling out of the barn. Fortunately, the hangar was perched at the top of a small hill and the plane, with a little persuasion, pretty much rolled itself slowly down the short driveway and out into the street. It came to a stop with its nose pointed down the hill slightly, not enough that it continued to roll, but enough so that it would be easy to straighten out once (and if) the engine started. Donovan hopped into the cockpit and hoped for the best. Five flying lessons a few years ago had better prove to be enough.

  The dashboard appeared both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Donovan had learned on a modern aircraft. This baby was vintage. He recognized the stick, the starter, and the rudder pedals, as well as the altimeter. He’d have to trust that his limited knowledge of flying would transfer somehow to these rudimentary controls. He cranked the propeller, calling out “contact!” while letting out the throttle.

  The plane sputtered, then nothing. They were either out of gas or out of luck. Probably both. They had probably less than five minutes to take off and get away. Otherwise, they’d be toast (or some other zombie-preferred breakfast food). Tenton had told him the bom
b his people created would blow up a three-block range. If the thing worked. And here they were, sitting ducks less than two blocks from ground zero. The debris would fly for another mile or more outside this radius, Tenton had said, including straight up into the air.

  “I’m going to try again,” Donovan shouted. The women didn’t respond. Instead, they stared down the road, bodies and eyes frozen. Donovan swiveled in his seat to see what was going on. Zombies. These damn things 1) didn’t ever give up and 2) travelled much faster than folks gave them credit for.

  “Get in!” Donovan hollered. The New Earth women were awakened from their trances by Donovan’s holler. After first giving him some uncalled-for dirty looks, they scurried toward the plane, children in tow or following closely, depending on their ages. Donovan pulled the throttle again. The engine sputtered, coughed, hiccupped, burped, and farted. Nothing. The machine went dead. Donovan slapped his hand to his head. So much for postponing the meeting with his Maker.

  Then the impossible happened. Courtesy of that Maker or perhaps courtesy of dumb luck, the plane’s engine let out a loud cough. Black plumes of smoke billowed out of the two prop engines on each wing as if they were barbecuing ribs.

  Then the engine started. And ran.

  And stayed running.

  “Time to go!” Donovan bellowed above the joyous rumble of the engine. He left the cockpit and ran to the side door, reaching down to help folks get onto the wing and onboard.

  Passengers sat in every available seat in the eight-seater, the littlest of the children sitting on laps, the biggest of the kids sitting in the aisle between the seats. The only available seats were the pilot’s and the copilot’s up in the cockpit. The copilot’s seat was filled with tools. Donovan buckled in and started the plane rolling down the hill toward the zombie horde. Both the plane and the horde gained terrifying speed by the minute.