Zombie Killer Read online

Each one had a story. People loved them. They were fathers, husbands, sons and daughters. How awful everything was.

  Jack had pushed his father into a sitting position, braced by Jack’s back and his strong legs. Jill snatched the hands, and instinctively the zombie bent forward to bite, but wasn’t limber enough to make it all the way. The teeth closed and opened, over and over, a full foot away from her flesh. Somewhere inside of her, she knew it would never stop, never get tired, sore, bored, or discouraged. Open, shut. Over and over. She felt a shudder.

  Fat Zombie was past the fork in the bushes now, almost free to stand and leave. Jack leaned him over on his side, and he was lying now bent at the hips, and Jack stood up to see how to proceed. He had his back turned as Jill tried to let go of its hands, but Fat Zombie grasped her wrists and wouldn’t let go. He began pulling her closer, straightening his legs and rolling now, like a crocodile, pulling her close and twisting her underneath. Jill panicked and tried to yank away, but the creature’s thick, claw-like fingers held her fast. A small cry escaped her throat – although she wanted to scream, her breath seemed frozen inside her, and her voice wouldn’t work. After all, she thought, after all I’ve been through. I’m dying. Now.

  From her blind side came movement like the rushing of air and the creature went flying out into the weeds, away from both her and the bush. It rolled once and regained control of itself, beginning to come upright slowly to face the unseen threat. Jill saw that Jack had rescued her again, saw that his face was a mask of anger, rage, and saw the lifted iron bar come spearing in with the full force of Jack’s uncoiling muscles behind its thrust, piercing Fat Zombie’s skull.

  Jack’s father lay inert on the grass with the bar standing grotesquely up from his skull like a flag planted on the moon, and Jack looked down with realization dawning of exactly what he had done. He wore a look strangely inhuman, with something of regret, but no sadness, more a – confusion? The look reminded Jill of a dog confronting a strange object, turning its head from side to side.

  Jill stood slowly herself, unwilling to intrude on Jack’s pain, but feeling the need to console him. She made her way slowly to his side, and gently put her hand on his arm. He didn’t indicate any recognition of the act.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “What was he like?” she asked.

  Jack took a moment to answer. “He was scary. He beat me and yelled, threw things, scared the hell out of me when I was little. I believe he hated me too. He never had a cause, but there you are – you don’t need a cause. Maybe when Mom died he just wanted to be alone, and he couldn’t with me. Maybe that was it.”

  Jill touched his arm gently, with only two fingers and the thumb, and stood there. There was nothing to say. Jack looked down at the still thing lying there. Then, as if he had come awake, he stepped forward, away from Jill, pulled the bar from his father’s head, and turned to leave the inanimate creature behind.

  Great drops of rain began falling, small missiles from the sky, pelting through the leaves of the tree and hitting with aggressive force on their heads and shoulders. Jill quickened her step and trotted over to the tree house ladder, but Jack walked a measured pace which seemed not to notice the deluge. By the time he reached the tree house, he was soaked. Jill noticed the rain had washed streaks into the dirt on his face, but there were more pronounced streaks from his eyes where he had been crying. “I didn’t let him down, you know, I always stood by him,” he said. “When he turned into a zombie he was actually a better man. He was always around. I liked that. I could almost love him then.”

  The next day when she woke up Jill felt refreshed, better than she had felt in a while. She stretched without sitting up, luxuriously feeling the sheets against her skin and wondering why Jack had such civilized bedding. Remembering the dirt on his face, she realized he didn’t use the bed himself or it would have been filthy. It was a mystery. She looked around for a place he might normally sleep, but the room was practically immaculate – there was a rococo love seat set next to a nightstand with an oil lamp on it that looked like it would still work. There was no sign that Jack had ever sat on that love seat or read beneath that lamp.

  She went out of the room and found the tree house empty, and the hour somewhat later than she had expected – the sun was already hot, and the day was very bright. She looked over the railing, but there was no sign of Jack, although from a machete, a husk, and a fresh wet spot she guessed he had opened a coconut on the stump below.

  Near the sink, she found a note, written in a scribble scrawl that seemed entirely appropriate to Jack Phillips, instructing her that he was off hunting, and would be back sometime later. He directed her to a pan near the sink, some oil, and two fresh eggs. She was very grateful, but imagined a world where there was toast, butter, and jam.

  Cooking the eggs reminded her of her husband, Mike, and the times on the boat, when he would cook eggs for them both in the morning, and make coffee, and of course, toast. The pain of the memory caused her to hug herself unconsciously. She felt so alone in the world now, but then her hand drifted down to her abdomen and she smiled faintly. She had talked about Mike to Jack last night, as a way of sharing in his grief. She almost told him about the baby, but decided not to bring it up yet. She had asked Jack if he had any vitamins, carefully though. She was thinking of the pregnancy – the available food was one sided nutritionally, and she didn’t expect it got much better. She heard a rooster crowing and that solved the mystery of the chicken jerky, the “stew,” and the eggs. Jack’s was a very functional life, one he seemed capable of sustaining ad infinitum.

  As strong and protective as he was, as adept at providing, Jill still didn’t think Jack was someone she would have picked as a mate – yet here he was, “the last man on earth,” and when faced with the reality one tended not to be so picky. In truth, she was beginning to find him endearing. How would he receive the news that she was pregnant with another man’s child? What was he capable of? He had killed his father, but he had done that impulsively, to protect her. Could it be that he realized she was his last hope too, or was the killing just a reaction? She finished her eggs, wiping up the yoke with her fingertip, bursting with questions, lacking any answers. She didn’t even know where Jack was.

  Jack strode purposefully, feeling the lump in his back pocket – the pictures he’d “borrowed” from Jill. They were of her husband, and Jack hoped to recognize him, even partially decomposed. He didn’t want her to know he was out reconnoitering for her husband, because that would be too much for her to deal with.

  He laid awake all night listening to the rain, hearing it stop, listening in the dark, hearing her breathe. He knew that there was no possibility – her husband had not survived. He also knew that one day, if they stayed here (and they would), they might come upon her ex-husband, and she might make the emotional decision, the wrong decision, to keep him alive, just as he had for fat zombie. Jack suspected Jill’s husband had been a good man who, unlike his father, would only suffer in comparison with the dead thing he had become. Jack couldn’t allow her to see him like that – stalking, preying, wanting even to kill her. He could not allow it.

  So he had risen early and went out to find the man, to determine what had happened to him. Because he cared, to the point where he was willing to go place himself in danger to protect the girl from even emotional harm. Jack was a man of action, and if this girl would ever be his, he had to answer the question of what happened to her husband. And so, as he walked down the road in the early-morning dew, heading to zombie central and possible death, he went with a mental certainty that this was the right thing to do.

  The way there was silent in the early morning, and he could almost make himself think that there was nothing frightful around – nothing to be concerned about beyond the slight possibility of a mugging, like in the old days. But he certainly didn’t believe that, and was wary as he walked along the street. It was less than a mile, about twenty minut
es of cautious walking time from his tree house to the edge of hell. It could have been an eternity. The difference between his relatively safe jungle and the perilous city was distinct and shocking – at the tree house danger only visited occasionally. In the city, there was no hiding place for a living being, and fighting was not an option, because there was not one enemy but dozens. Jack made his way silently down the street and sooner than he liked, he arrived at the increasingly inappropriately named Miracle Mile.

  It was beyond this that he was to travel. Jill had said that she and her husband had been on the dock at Vizcaya, and that meant his remains or his zombie would be somewhere near that location. Jack had learned by his father and by observation that zombies didn’t stray far from their location unless led away by prey. If Jill’s husband was a zombie, he was unlikely to have found any prey. As far as Jack knew there was nothing bigger than a raccoon left anywhere nearby except himself and Jill. That meant he was likely to attract a lot of attention, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. Now that the easy part was over, he had about an hour’s worth of zombie-infested city to cross.

  The sun was up