Death Sense: A Century Z Book Read online

  “That’s not true,” Karen said, “I have somewhere remote we can go. We have to head out into the woods, I think, if we’re going to survive, and I have a little place there.”

  Meera wasn’t enthusiastic about Karen’s suggestion. She felt something akin to security within the house, a big house in an exclusive suburb near the university. The house was stone with a high, stone garden wall. They could only see over the wall because the big garden sloped downhill from their window. The suburban road outside was empty.

  “I haven’t seen any of the infected today,” Meera said.

  Karen just pointed, off down the road. There was a tree in one of the neighborhood gardens that spread over the wall, making a shady spot right where the wall turned a corner. There was a man standing there, at the corner, in the shade, where someone coming along the street would be less likely to see him. And there was something else about the man, even at a distance they could see that he was terribly thin, and he was standing so immobile, almost like a statue.

  “I stand corrected,” Meera said.

  “You can stay, if you want,” Karen said, her voice dropping to little more than a whisper, even though there was no chance the figure could possibly hear her. “I’m not forcing you to come with me. I just-”

  Meera put her hand on Karen’s arm.

  “I’m coming,” she said, “of course,” and reached down for a baseball bat that was propped up below the window.

  “Great,” Karen said, though her face fell at the sight of the improvised weapon. “I am fervently hoping that we won’t need that. If we don’t get out of the car, I don’t think they we will be in danger of being infected.”

  ~

  A couple of hours later, after filling the car with a few essentials, Karen got in the driving seat and Meera climbed in the passenger side. Karen used the remote to open the garage door and the garden gate, so they could drive away from the house without having to get out of the car, while Meera threw the baseball bat on the back seat. Karen very lightly pushed the accelerator and rolled quietly down the driveway, letting gravity pull them out instead of the car’s noisy engine. It didn’t help them remain undetected. The figure under the tree immediately turned its head to look in their direction.

  Meera had a good view of the creature now, and saw that it had been a man, dressed in the smart casual clothes of an executive taking a day off work to be with his family. Before becoming infected he had undoubtedly, she thought, lived in one of the surrounding upscale houses. Karen was glancing in her driver’s mirror, and she sped up a little bit, but she was still well within the speed limit for the small suburban road. The infected man was coming after them, but neither Karen nor Meera felt particularly worried that its shuffling steps would be fast enough to catch them. Meera was still nervous though, glancing over her shoulder repeatedly at the receding figure.

  “What are you doing,” Meera hissed, “There are no police anymore. You can gun the engine.”

  “I’m conserving fuel,” Karen said, “I don’t know if we will be able to refill the tank. But that’s okay, we can get to my country place on just one tank, if we are careful with the gas.”

  “Okay,” Meera said, her voice still a little stressed, “But that infected guy is still following us.”

  “I’m not worried,” Karen said, glancing in her driver’s mirror again, “They don’t run.”

  Meera was turned around now, elbow over the back of her seat, as she stared at their shambling pursuer. The infected man was soon left behind, even though they were driving at a sensible speed through the streets. It took a few minutes to get out of Karen’s upmarket district, and into an area of town more popular with university students. Among the housing they saw a very short row of small businesses. There was a general store, a laundromat full of giant, orange, coin-operated washing machines and dryers, and a place that stayed open late to sell alcohol and snacks. All three buildings had their display windows bashed in.

  “I can understand the place that sells booze and snacks,” Meera said, “but why loot a laundromat?”

  “I’ve got a terrible craving to stop and see if that place has any cigarettes,” Karen muttered.

  “No way,” Meera said, rolling her eyes, “There might be infected inside. We said we weren’t going to get out of the car.”

  “Okay, okay,” Karen said, with a sigh, “No unnecessary risks, we’ll just keep driving till we get to my place in the woods.”

  They had come to a slightly bigger road, a thruway built on concrete columns to carry it over any obstructions and out of town. Karen dropped down a gear and drove up the on-ramp. This road was the route she used to take to her job, lecturing at the university, and she remembered hating having to merge with the heavy morning traffic. That wasn’t a problem any more. The only vehicle moving on this elevated road was them, but that didn’t mean they were alone.

  “What a mess,” Karen said.

  “What the hell happened here?” Meera asked.

  There were cars all along the right and left side of the road, some of them parked but most looking like they had been shoved aside and left at any old angle. There was a single clear track through the chaos of metal and Karen headed down it, in the direction that would take them to her country retreat.

  “This does not look good,” Meera said, as they cruised slowly between the cars on their left and right.

  “Don’t worry,” Karen said, “There’s plenty of room for us to squeeze through, and we only have to go a couple of junctions before we’ll be out by the coast.”

  “All right, I guess,” Meera said, but the tone of her voice sounded far from convinced. “Do you think there might be infected among the cars?”

  Karen didn’t answer but she sped up a little. With so little clearance either side of her car, because of all the abandoned vehicles to left and right, there was a limit to how fast she could drive. The clear lane was only just wide enough for their car to pass in places. Then, up ahead, it was cut off completely. Karen slowed to a gentle stop, accompanied by some hissed curses, while Meera swore loudly beside her. There was a military vehicle up ahead, parked directly across the road, and the clear lane had disappeared, becoming just a jumble of parked and abandoned vehicles.

  “Can you see a way round?” Meera asked.

  “Nope,” Karen replied, sharply, “and I doubt we could successfully reverse back through all that mess.”

  “We said we weren’t going to get out of the car,” Meera reminded her.

  Karen didn’t reply, instead she warily got out. Meera followed, climbing over the gear stick to get out the same door as Karen because there wasn’t enough room on her side. She glanced over her shoulder, looking for any sign of the infected between the cars.

  “Look at all this,” Meera said. “So many cars, all deserted now.”

  They made their way through the cars to the military truck that was blocking the road. It wasn’t much different from a normal truck, at least to Meera’s untrained eye, except for the green color scheme and bigger wheels. Meera moved her hands on the grip of her baseball bat, making sure it was secure, then she went to the cab. All her attention was now on the truck in front of her as she reached up for the door handle and yanked on it. It came open and she jumped back.

  The cab was empty, and she let out a sigh of relief, then climbed in.

  “Can you see the road ahead?” Karen asked. “Is it clear?”

  From her vantage point up in the cab, Meera now had a good view of the road on the other side of the truck, “Yeah, it’s pretty clear.”

  Karen climbed up into the truck’s cab with Meera and saw for herself that the road ahead was clear enough for them to continue. Except for the small fact that their car was stuck on the wrong side of the barrier.

  “I guess the army must have set up some kind of road block,” Meera said.

  “I wonder why they abandoned this truck,” Karen said, her eyes going to the back of the cab. There was no window to
the rest of the truck from inside the cab.

  “Do you think there are zombie soldiers back there?” Meera asked, as she noticed where Karen’s eyes were looking.

  “What? No. We would have heard them,” Karen said, and looked under the steering wheel. “No keys... Doesn’t matter, though. I don’t think I can drive something this size. Can you?”

  “Drive a truck? No,” Meera looked longingly over her shoulder at their car.

  “I guess it’s obvious what we have to do,” Karen said.

  Meera nodded, her face suddenly determined, “We’ll have to walk, at least a little way.”

  ~

  Karen and Meera had been walking now for twenty minutes, after leaving their car behind at the checkpoint. Karen knew the route well, and the town they lived in wasn’t big. Even so, she judged it would take them a good forty-five minutes more to get through the suburbs to open country, but how long it would then take to reach her house in the country she wasn’t sure.

  “Damn,” Meera said, “I was really hoping we would be able to drive all the way to your place. How long is this going to take on foot?”

  “I don’t know,” Karen told her, “it doesn’t take long in the car, less than an hour. I’m pretty sure we can do it in a day, and I have stuff there. Some food and there’s a bottle of gas for cooking and heating.”

  “That sounds good,” Meera said, looking apprehensively around the empty streets of the town.

  “Whatever we do,” Karen said, “we have to be out of here before nightfall.”

  There was a long road ahead of them, a long straight road with four lanes for traffic and a central reservation. There were boxy developments at each side of the road, a mall here, a small office suite there, and the sky was overcast. Ordinarily it would be just another vista of North American urban sprawl, but today it looked different. Usually the road they were walking along would have fast moving traffic going in both directions, but today it was completely still. There were a lot of cars, but they were all bunched up in the direction leading out of town. Some were overturned, one was burnt out and still smoking and another was smashed into the wall of a convenience store and buried in the rubble it had brought down on itself. The road was completely blocked and impossible to drive down, in some places it was blocked both heading into town and leaving town. In one place a bulldozer had been used to clear a wide path through the cars, and the huge yellow machine was still waiting at the side of the road, ready to be used again.

  “There would be no way through here in a car, anyway,” Meera said.

  “I don’t know,” Karen said, casting her expert eye over the destruction. “I might have been able to pick a way through.”

  “Okay,” Meera said, “it’s kind of an academic question. We’re on foot now, and we’ve got to keep moving.”

  Karen didn’t have to reply, her actions were the only answer she needed to give. She was already striding ahead, along the long, wide stretch of road, and Meera had to scamper to keep up. They saw dead bodies, here and there, slowly putrefying in the open air, but surprisingly few of them. There were nowhere near enough corpses to account for the drivers of all the cars.

  “There aren’t many people lying around,” Meera said, “considering. Do you think that means the others got away?”

  “Not necessarily-” Karen started to answer, before shrieking and jumping to the side.

  There was a driver in one of the cars, and her head had moved. She had a beautiful, auburn head of hair, sculpted into one of the latest styles, but the face below was ruined, the skin dry and sagging, the teeth elongated and protruding at the same time as the flesh of her gums had shrunk back. One of the most hideous aspects of her face was that there was still a dab of makeup to be seen here and there. There was some eyeshadow, some eyeliner, and worst of all, lip gloss. Her window was open, and she reached an arm out, her nails had grown to the length of talons, each still with a dab of mauve varnish on it. Her reach was long and Karen had to dance to the side to avoid it, so far and so fast that she stumbled to the asphalt, grazing her knee. The woman in the car groaned in frustration, a terrible sound from a desiccated and ruined voice box. There was no seat belt and her car didn’t look damaged, but somehow she couldn’t get out to continue her lunge at Karen. Instead she slammed herself stupidly, again and again into the car door that was keeping her in her seat.

  “It’s one of the infected,” Meera whispered, as she helped Karen back to her feet. “Are you okay?”

  “I didn’t break anything,” Karen assured her. “I don’t have osteoporosis yet. Just a bit of a fright, and I’m a little shook up, is all.” She looked down at the rip in her trousers and the grazed knee that could be seen beneath. “That does smart,” she muttered, “but we have to keep moving.”

  “Yes we do,” Meera agreed, as they backed away from what was left of the unfortunate woman in the car.

  “Okay,” Karen said, after they had walked another ten minutes along the road, “that way. There’s a shortcut. We just go through that mall and join the road on the other side. It’ll take us directly out of town to the north.”

  “Great,” Meera said, “the sooner we are out of town, the better.”

  ~

  They had to cross a small bridge over a storm drain to get over to the mall Karen had pointed out, and Meera couldn’t help looking back as she went over it. She saw between the cars on the road they had just left that there were three figures moving, but the way they were moving was strange, they were just shambling slowly forward. Even though the three figures were on the road they had just come along, she hadn’t noticed them at the time. Had she just not seen them among the cars, or had they just arrived? She quickly turned her head away. What did it matter after all? The important thing was simply that they keep moving, nothing else than that.

  After the bridge they were in one of the mall’s parking lots, crossing it directly across the middle. Usually at this time of day the place would be full, with cars cruising around like sharks, never stopping, always looking for an empty spot to park in. But today it was empty, apart from a handful of vehicles, all neatly parked in different bays across the expanse of concrete. It was an unsettling sight, and only emphasized how there was very definitely something wrong. The whole scene was overlooked by a housing development, at least ten stories high, maybe more, that was shading one half of the parking lot in deep shadow.

  The main doors of the mall were bashed in with bodies piled around. There had also obviously been a fire inside because, although the brick expanse of the exterior was mostly unmarked, wherever there was a window or a set of doors, livid black soot had been left in streaks reaching upwards from the aperture. It was obvious from these stains that an inferno had burned within the building. Apart from the corpses at the entrance to the mall, there were others scattered here and there all across the parking lot.

  “It’s like a war zone,” Meera muttered.

  “It’s hell,” Karen replied, pausing a few seconds to catch her breath and survey the scene. “I usually go through the mall and do some window shopping, but that doesn’t look like a good idea today. We’ll go round.”

  They continued to cross the parking lot, weaving a route that kept them as far from each corpse as possible.

  “Something is badly wrong if bodies aren’t being buried,” Meera said. “It’s an invitation to disease.”

  “For disease to spread, there has to be somebody left alive to catch it,” Karen said, darkly. Then she saw a gun, just lying in the middle of a parking bay. “What the…?” she exclaimed.

  “Should we pick it up?” Meera asked.

  “Do you even know how to fire one?” Karen asked, an eyebrow raised.

  “No,” Meera admitted, “but…” her words trailed off.

  They both stood there, staring at the unfamiliar object for a while, until Karen happened to look up.

  “Oh fuck,” she gasped.

  There was one of the infected shambling acro
ss the parking lot towards them, and another emerging from the entrance of the mall, trailing clouds of billowing soot and embers after it. They had both been in the fire within the mall and were burnt to the point of unrecognizability. Neither had any hair, or clothes, or even a lot of their soft tissue. Lips, nose, sex organs, had all been burnt away.

  “How can they still be moving?” Meera asked.

  “We have to go back,” Karen said, ignoring her question.

  “No can do,” Meera said, “there are even more of them back there.”

  “Oh fuck!” Karen hissed, her voice a little louder than before.

  “Look, there are only two of them,” Meera said, “and they aren’t moving super fast. I think we can get round them.”

  “Okay,” Karen said, “let’s go.”

  They both started running, Meera on her younger legs a little in advance, trying to run round the first of the oncoming zombies, without it intercepting them.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Meera wailed, as she was running, but she was pretty confident she could evade the shambling creature’s clutches.

  Karen, just a few steps behind, wasn’t fast enough. The zombie was almost on her, and she couldn’t get round. Karen looked over her shoulder and saw one of the zombies from the road behind them that was already shambling onto the little bridge she and Meera had come over, cutting off their escape. It was a particularly fearsome one. Having been a large man in life, it was still tall, and it had a lank beard and biker boots. Emaciated arms emerged from a sleeveless top, heavily tattooed, with a leather bracelet hanging loose from one wrist now, even though it had likely been a tight fit when the man had been alive. Karen was caught in an agony of indecision, unable to go forward, but with no way to escape behind her either. She turned back to look at the burnt zombie, coming right for her, and saw that the soft tissue of its eyes had been blackened and burned, leaving them smoky, black orbs.

  That was when the shot rang out, echoing from the walls of the shopping mall. Karen saw the burnt flesh of the zombie’s shoulder jump as the shot hit home. Then there was a second shot, and the creature’s head snapped to the side with the impact. It instantly crumpled to the ground. More shots rang out, and the zombie on the bridge fell. Then the shooting continued, and the other one that had come from the mall was put down. Meera and Karen instinctively froze and ducked when the shooting had started, and now they were staring wildly at each other, wondering if they were going to be next.