Mama always told me, don’t get mad, go stalker. They’ll fuck themselves up in the end. So when Barbara cut my towline and left me to the mercy of the current on our Down-River rafting trip, I didn’t fume, and I didn’t mutter. I just doggy-paddled my ass to the bank, took the hundred out of the waterproof pocket balanced between my breasts (because Mama told me a girl should never be without ready cash) and sauntered my way to the nearest highway.
I caught up with them at the Sandy Beaches Resort and Casino. The staff gave me nervous looks (everyone looked a little jumpy, I’d heard rumors about party-crashers or something in the area) but they kept bringing me stiff drinks and gave me a wide berth, and that was fine by me. I watched my prey from three tables away, disguised in a different way each night, drinking my tequila and plotting my revenge as Barbara made a complete ass of herself hanging off Vic, like he had ever actually been interested in her.
On the second night, Charlie out-stalkered me. While I was wearing the stupid French beret, sunglasses, and drinking something bubbly to disguise myself, Charlie practically scared the crap out of me.
One minute I was glaring and planning my revenge, and then next Charlie was just there, standing at my shoulder, his long, sorrowful face looking down at me from his beanpole height. “Candie.”
I almost fell off my chair. “Goddammit, Charlie, you almost frightened me out of my underwear. What the hell are you doing over here?”
He laughed for second, and then the humor fell off him like water off a duck. “I could ask you the same question.” He pulled out a chair and seated himself, folding up like an accordion. “You blew us off, and now you’re watching from afar.” He smiled tightly, and the lines in his face deepened. “You got the hots for Vic too and didn’t like hanging out with the competition?”
I laughed. “Like that bitch is any kind of competition.”’
His face stiffened, like the wrong answer had made his face shut down. “Yeah. Barbara could never hold a candle to you.”
“Seriously, Charlie, you can’t tell anyone I’m still here.” I reached over and grabbed him by the hand, linking our fingers together. I’m willing to break bones when bastards take liberties, but I become a touch person around my friends. Hell, you should see me hanging off Vic when he’s pretending to be some kind of hunk. But I only hold hands with Charlie. I don’t know why, but our palms touching, our fingers weaving together felt right. I leaned forward, and stared him in the face. He looked down at me, straight in my eyes, not down my cleavage. I like that about Charlie too. “I’m bringing that bitch down and you cannot blow my plan of attack, Charlie Vaughn.”
Charlie looked down at our hands. “You have a plan of attack, Candie?”
“Well, no.” I pulled my hand away. “But I’m not going to figure one out if she damn well knows I’m coming.”
“So you want me to keep my mouth shut, hiding the fact that you’re still alive and following us.” He smiled morosely at me. “Even to Vic? They all think you’re vanished upriver, to be eaten by hell-knows-what. “ He flashed me a grin, but it came out as bitter and sharp. “There’ve been funny rumors you know, about monsters in the night.”
I shook me head. It’s hard to respect people who get too excited about rumors like that, unproven, undocumented. “Party crashers with a bad sense of humor. Look, Charlie, just don’t tell him, okay? I want to do this right.”
He laughed, shortly, jerkily. “Candie, you’re one crazy-ass girl, but I’ll do what I can. No promises. Vic and I are twins you know. We’ve got this deep emotional bond, you see, and he can tell when I’m lying. It comes from being practically the same.”
I grinned seductively at him. “Charlie, you and Vic are nothing alike.”
His face tightened again. “Yeah.” He jerked himself up off the chair, moving like a stiff old man. “Nothing alike. Have a good night, Candie. I hope this does it for you.”
I turned around to smile at him, but he had already done the sneaky thing and vanished back to Barbara’s table.
All the bubbles had vanished from my drink and the table felt lonely. I had nothing but a sour taste in my mouth and a vague feeling that I had lost something that could have been important.
I almost lifted my hand for another drink, but lowered it again. Mama always said you should never get sloshed while feeling sorry for yourself. It just makes you stupid. So I fell back on my old energy sources and tried to bring my mind back to scorn, vindictiveness and revenge, anything to keep my mind off whatever the hell just went wrong with the world.
Finding anger was pretty easy when I looked back at their table. All five looked uncomfortable. EveDoyle (actually Evelyn Myer and Doyle Harrison, but they’d been a united, finish-each-others-sentences sort of couple for long enough that they answer to the united moniker) were curled up as close to each other as separate chairs would allow while watching their surroundings in between not-so-subtle kisses. Vic tried to simultaneously eat, smile, and make conversation, while Barbara ignored everything but his deep brown eyes and tried make it clear that if he wanted her (not likely) she was his. She got more and more forceful about the fact the more she drank. And Charlie watched his brother in his elegant avoidance dance and gradually drank less and less from his glass while the frown lines around his eyes deepened steadily.
Let me tell you something about Vic and Charlie Vaughn. They’re twins, both tall, lean, with dark hair and chocolate eyes a girl could drown in. Vic (short for Victor) is the pretty boy. He keeps his hair neat and oiled back, his face clean-shaven, his pricy clothes perfectly pressed, and there’s always a ridiculously sweet smile on his face for friends, strangers and cute girls. He goes to the gym every day; he’s a bouncer and bartender at the Russian Gentleman’s Club.
Charlie (long for Charles) wears his hair however it ends up when he rolls out of bed, shaves irregularly, slouches and works in the rare books section of the research library. He’s good with kids, dogs, and wrathful experts in obscure languages, and wears whatever the hell he found in the top the dresser drawer, regardless of color or line.
We’ve been best friends since kindergarten, and Charlie and I are used to women going to ridiculous lengths to get into Vic’s pants. We’ve laughed about it, gotten drunk because of it, and sometimes fought off the horny honeys before Vic got his eyes clawed out when the situation went too far. But this was the first time some crazy girl had tried to take me down to get to Vic, and I wasn’t going to stand for it. Least of all when it was ass-shaking Barbara. This just shows me not to invite someone on a trip just because they won’t leave you alone.
Barbara moved in for that I-just-want-a-kiss-on-the-cheek-oops-got-your-lips thing that a thousand girls have tried to pull on Vic, and I laughed to myself while he smoothly turned his head just at the right second so she ended up frenching his jaw. She put and hand on his shoulder and he nonchalantly adjusted his leather jacket, avoiding her. She tried to scoot her chair closer, and he slid just a little bit away. It was like watching a man work very hard to keep a boa constrictor from getting purchase around his neck or torso. Every motion was slow, deliberate, but there was an air of desperation that made me want to bring in a hunting knife and do some beheading.
But as I watched them, I couldn’t find enough anger to go through with it. Charlie didn’t even glance at me. Not once, he just watched his brother and looked more and more sad. When we were kids, we got teased, for our names, our families, and our appearances. We laughed with each other, hung out together, and beat the shit out of bullies together. We were supposed to be together now. Not me hanging out two tables away while a vindictive bitch groped one of my best friends. I should be right there next to Charlie getting ready to manhandle anyone giving Vic hassles. Sometimes I forget that I’m not my mother, that stalker wasn’t my style.
I was just about to reevaluate my plan, screw up my courage, and go confront them (Charlie would cove me, I know) when the (second) most horrible thing possible happened, and I lost the chance to come out with any kind of honor.
Barbara, thwarted one too many times at getting Vic to feel her up, tossed up her trashy, cheap dyed job blond head, nostrils flaring, and ended up looking straight at me, three tables away.
Her eyes widened. Her nostrils flared. Even from a half a sound barrier away, I could see the words on her lips, the holy shit incredulity coming off her. Charlie winced, and Barbara somehow sensed the movement because she wheeled around and glared at him. Her fists clenched, her back straightened and her artificial breast practically bounded in rage. EveDoyle separated, their heavily blackened eyes widening in surprise, and they looked in my direction, too. Evelyn’s face lit up, relief and happiness filling her face completely. She waved. Doyle raised his eyebrows, then looked at Barbara and his eyes narrowed while he did the calculations. He’s a lawyer, when he’s not pretending to be a Goth vampire-wannabe. Vic just looked confused at Barbara’s outburst, while Charlie sat quietly, but angrily, under her assault.
She was making motions with her hands and I could tell she was screaming at him, saying something probably devastating about hiding me, or some such. You could tell she had completely cracked. And I could understand the sentiment (getting Vic to respond in any way when he doesn’t want to can be maddening, I’d tried teasing him enough) but that was no reason she should be ripping into Charlie.
But then she turned to me, and I swear that bitch looked crazy enough to eat silverware and spit out werewolf-killing nails. She was practically incandescent with rage, and I felt for one horrible moment that I was going to die right there. I’d been just drinking, no meals, so I didn’t have so much as a soupspoon to defend myself. Instinctively my hand went to me purse, but it wasn’t there and I remembered that all my usual defensive measures, down to the Goddamned pepper spray, had been on the float when she cut the line.
I was going to die.
Luckily for me, the first most horrible thing possible happened.
Barbara took two prissy, wrathful strides in my direction, and someone from the hallway screamed, “Oh God! Zombies!”
We both turned, temporarily distracted from our imminent battle to the death, not expecting much, and saw the first of the undead shambling through the doublewide doors.
“What the fuck?” Barbara said.
Vic turned, Charlie turned, EveDoyle stood in one smooth motion and most of the people in the restaurant began scattering and screaming. The zombie looked up, its dried eyes tracking nothing, but I had the understanding that it could sense all the terrified living creatures running from it. And that it wanted them. I heard a noise right next to me, right next to the table where I had been sitting, and I wheeled around, staring. And there I saw another one, no more than six feet away that had stumbled through the window. The man hadn’t been dead long, maybe a few hours, maybe a few days (I’m not really an expert on decomposition) but the yellow puss seeping out of the bite marks around his throat made it clear how he had gone. While I stood, almost paralyzed, the walking corpse noticed me, turned, and lifted his face.
His eyes had been clawed out. Maybe they were tasty. His bloodied mouth gaped, and he took his first shivering breath, a long drawn out Ahhh, as though he was taking in the living, terrified scent of me. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think. I just knew, suddenly, that it wasn’t Barbara I should be worried about any more.
Someone was saying my name. Maybe EveDoyle. Maybe Vic. I didn’t even have the courage to turn my head. It might see me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Barbara looking around wildly, Charlie getting up very slowly from his seat at the table and moving toward me, the steak knife from his dinner palmed in his hand.
All around the room, the zombies moved slowly, until they saw something movie, something terrified, and then they charged. A shambling zombie is laughable. One charging forward is terrifyingly swift.
I‘ve never realized before how much of my confidence came pepper spray and the fact that I could break a kneecap in two moves. Would a broken kneecap even slow down something that rotted as I watched? I couldn’t move, I didn’t even want to move. Someone was making low, whimpering noises, and I refused to believe it was me. If I believed that, I was going to bolt, and if I bolted it would be on me in seconds.
“Candie, if you can, take a couple steps back. We’re going to head to the kitchen.” It was Charlie’s voice. I slid my foot back a little.
“Good job, keep your attention on me, just keep moving it back.”
I felt his hand settle on my arm, and I took another step back. The zombie looked confused, its head turning this way and that as though it had lost the scent of me, but knew there was prey there somewhere.
I took one more step, and came up against Charlie’s chest, the warmth of him. His hands rested on my arm, a reassuring living weight, and he pressed the knife into my hand. Relief moved through me, just to be armed again, and I let out a long shaky sigh.
Without missing a beat, the zombie came at me, mouth gaping unnaturally wide.
I barely had the chance to open my mouth to shriek when Charlie shouldered me out of the way, grabbed the zombie by the throat and threw it in the opposite direction from where I fell. It scrabbled back up, frighteningly fast, and went for him, fingers curled into claws. Charlie calmly lifted one of the sturdy restaurant chairs in two hands and swung it around to connect with the zombie’s head. The impact made a sound like an ax in a ripe melon and a whoopee cushion at the same time and the zombie went down like . . . well, a corpse. Charlie reached down, dragged me to my feet, and we were running through the overturned tables and blood spatter in the dining room and through the swinging doors of the kitchen. The second we cleared the doors, Vic and Doyle pushed a doublewide refrigerator across the entrance. The zombies close on our tail made low, hoarse screaming noises as the hit the suddenly sturdy barrier.
I leaned over, trying not to throw up from nerves and freaking out, and fuck it all zombies were in the Sandy Beaches Resort and Casino. The most excitement I had been expecting was a catfight with Barbara.
Charlie slowly eased himself into a seat leaning against the chrome of the refrigerator. His eyes were closed and his hands were shaking.
“Thanks,” I croaked out. I reached out and patted him on the leg. He didn’t react.
Then I noticed the spreading stain on his shirt and the panic button went off. I don’t remember moving, but the next thing I knew I was straddling him, and pulling his shirt down, hands scrabbling for the wound. “Charlie, you’re bleeding. Oh, god, you’re goddammed hurt did that fucking sonovabitch bite you I’m going to rip his Goddamned ears off.” I didn’t even know what I was saying, I kept remembering the oozing puss coming from the dead man’s neck and I was sure being bit wouldn’t be good.
He snapped out of his shock and grabbed at my hands, pushing me off him while I tried just as hard to see where the blood was coming from. “No, Candie, I’m fine, I’m not hurt. It’s his. It’s his. It’s just . . . bodily fluids.” He pushed me off and lifted to his feet. And then he seemed to realize what he had said and what it meant he was covered with. He shuddered, his entire body shaking, and his hands flew to his neck. He ripped the shirt off and threw it away, shaking like a startled horse.
I had a second to realize Vic wasn’t the only brother who went to the gym, before Vic himself broke the semi-silence.
“I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but if those people were wearing makeup, that’s the best damn blood and rot costume I’ve ever seen.” He sounded shaky too, and I saw he was sweating.
“Those were no costumes.” Evelyn sounded authoritative. I looked away from Vic and Charlie and saw that she and Doyle were in the back pouring salt into little plastic baggies and checking the clips of shiny little automatic guns. “Those were zombies.”
Doyle snapped a clip of ammunition into his weapon. “Fortunately, this restaurant is equipped for the zombie apocalypse.” He gestured to the weapons cabinet they had uncovered from behind the refrigerator, and then frowned. “Or a police raid. I’m not sure which. But either way, it’s fortunate for us.” He tossed Vic a shotgun, which he caught one handed. “Think you can handle that, Pretty Boy Vaughn?”
Vic grinned, and quickly did something with the gun that I couldn’t follow, but looked very confident and intimidating. “I think I can manage.”
Doyle looked mildly impressed. “What about you, Charlie?”
Charlie held out a hand. “Our parents dropped us at the hunting cabin every fall break. I think we’ll be able to manage.”
“Candie?” Doyle had one more gun. “You think you can manage the other shotgun?”
Vic and Charlie beat me to it. “No,” they said together.
“Absolutely no firearms for Candie,” Charlie said.
“She can’t hit the broad side of a barn unless she’s in the barn,” Vic added. “And even then she’s much more likely to hit the narrow side, or the ceiling, or Charlie.”
“Hey, I never actually hit him!” I said. “And it was your own fault. I told you Mama didn’t like guns.”
“You didn’t actually say that you have absolutely no ability with projectile weapons,” Charlie said, rubbing the shoulder I’d almost winged when I was seventeen. “Your mother doesn’t like a lot of things, but I would have remembered an actual statement of skill.”
I put my hands on my hips and glared at him, but a smile kept appearing on my mouth. “You still holding a grudge?”
He met my eyes, mock angry, mock sad, and then he grinned. “It’s good to have you back, Candie.”
Evelyn looked up. “That’s true. Where did you go?”
I looked at Barbara. Everyone else looked at Barbara. I realized then that she was the only person Doyle hadn’t offered a weapon. She just stood there by the door, swaying slightly, as though she could imagine the zombies coming through any second. Any time they pounded against the barrio, she flinched.
She felt us looking at her, and turned crazy eyes to us. I decide that whatever my problems with her, they were mine. Not anyone else’s.
“My tow-line broke,” I said. “Sorry I couldn’t catch up with you guys sooner.”
Evelyn threw a comforting arm around my shoulder and smiled at me. “Honey, you came back for the zombie apocalypse. That’s all that counts.”
Turns out that Evelyn and Doyle are zombie survival experts. They took apart the kitchen piece by piece, and distributed anything that might be useful. Knives, lighters, alcohol, even little packets of salt that they swore would stop a zombie in its tracks. Or at least slow one down.
“I hit one with a salt-shaker,” Evelyn said nonchalantly while trying to secure a rolling pin along her spin. “It kind of started melting.”
I ended up with a modestly sized frying pan and an assortment of knives. Mama would have approved.
Doyle said the kitchen wasn’t safe, so we left behind the shuddering refrigerator moved out for what EveDoyle termed “higher ground.”
Doyle took point, with Evelyn and Charlie bringing up the rear (which was the farthest separation in EveDoyle I’d seen in about a year) leaving me and Barbara in the middle. I might have felt insulted, but given the way Evelyn was handling her gun, I think that it was safe to say we were the weakest links in the party.
I kept an eye on Barbara, not sure if she was going to try anything surrounded by our friends, but she kept her mouth shut while we walked through the disturbingly silent halls. But it only lasted until we stopped at a place that Doyle said he liked (an out of the way nook where the six of us could bunker down beneath a low wall and stay out of sight, but still have a good view of all approaches).
She looked at me, her eyeliner running over her face. I held on to my frying pan and braced for the attack. No way she was taking me by surprise twice.
“If you think you’re going to take Vic away from me you’ve got another thing coming, Candie.”
I didn’t bother keeping my voice low. “Sugar, Vic’s not your property, and there’s no way in hell you’re getting what you want out of him.”
“You think you can take me, bitch?”
The answer seemed obvious to me (I did have a frying pan), but maybe she was slow. “Yeah. I think I can beat your ass in any damn time I please.”
“I think you’re just jealous,” she hissed.
Barbara was within inches of my face and she wasn’t hiding anything, not anger, not fear, not the crazy gleam in her smile.
“You think you’re good enough for Vic?” she snarled at me. “Do you, bitch?”
“Sugar, I’m a hell of a lot closer to getting into bed with that boy than you’ll ever be, even on a cold day in hell, or a hot day in Antarctica. I can promise you that.”
Everyone was listening. Doyle had his hand resting on the wall, and Evelyn was staring at us, rubbing a little bottle of vodka. Vic had his attention split between our spitting match and Charlie. Charlie was the only one not looking at us. He looked down at his feet, flexing his hands as though they were cold. Vic was angry, and it was the feeling that something wasn’t right that made me back down from the fight, that made me physically step away from Barbara.
“We’ll finish this later,” I told her.
And then the zombies hit us again.
Ten minutes later, there were zombies out of action on the ground in various states of burnt, shot, cut and asSALTed (get it, because we were using salt?) and I was splattered with gore. Frying pans do a hell of a lot of damage to partially corrupted heads, but they definitely don’t keep a girl clean. Vic leaned over our barrier, panting, a severed head at his feet and his shotgun smoking a little, while Evelyn calmly put a new clip in her gun. Barbara had collapsed at the first sign of the undead, and was currently curled up in the back of our hideout, shaking.
“We should scout,” Doyle said, frowning, looking to the left and to the right for the enemy while he mixed Molotov cocktails using Evelyn’s vodka.
Vic straightened. “Candie and I will do it.” He gave me a look, and it was angry. “Right, Candie?”
Vic doesn’t get angry often and I’d never seen it directed at me. I straightened. “Sure, Vic.”
He pulled himself over our barrier wall, and I scrambled after him, wishing, not for the first time that day that I’d worn jeans to dinner. Charlie stared after us, his face empty of emotion.
I was on edge, expecting something to happen, but I was leaning toward zombies or a shouting match.
I didn’t expect Vic to wheel around and pin me to the wall the second we were out of sight of the rest of our group.
“I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, Candie, but if you keep fucking with my brother’s feelings like this, I’m going to shoot you myself.”
I stared at him, utterly and completely confused. My mouth opened and closed like a stranded fish, and nothing came out. I couldn’t think. There was nothing that I could think of to say.
Finally, “What the hell are you talking about?” came out of my mouth, but it sounded garbled, even to me, and slightly panicky.
“I don’t know what game you and Barbara are playing, but stop it, now.”
“We’re not playing a game,” I said, but that was almost a lie, and it came out a little high pitched and squeaky.
He leaned harder on my shoulders, it hurt. His mouth was very close to my ear. “Charlie loves you, Candie and if you haven’t noticed it by now, you’re a lot thicker than I thought you were. And I thought that you loved him, but then you disappear, and he gets so goddammed depressed, and then you appear again, and it starts sounding like you’re chasing me, and . . . you need to stop it, for Charlie’s sake. Even if you don’t love him, you can’t keep playing him like this. It’s not pretty. It’s not worth you.”
I heard almost nothing he said, because a phrase kept echoing over and over again in my head: Charlie loves you, Charlie loves you.
“Charlie loves me?” I asked in a small voice.
He released me slowly, looking at me with his big brown eyes, searching for something. I couldn’t tell if he saw it. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m pretty sure he has for a couple years. What about you?”
“Charlie loves me.” It sounded better this time, sweet and delicious in my mouth. “Charlie loves me.” I felt inexplicably happy.
“Yeah.” Vic stepped away, and I knew he was putting a hell of a lot more than just physical distance between us. “And if you love him back, you have to tell him, soon. Got it?”
He didn’t wait for my answer, just turned and walked back to the group. I hurried to catch up to him. We had done absolutely no scouting. Vic had missed up my tank top and I had to tug it back into place when we came back around the corner. In that second, I saw Charlie’s face, and I knew exactly what he thought Vic and I had been doing. And I understood exactly what Vic meant.
I would have worried more about it, but the zombies hit us again. They rushed us, and some, the corpses with the best coordination, threw gambling token and wallets at us, whatever they had had in their pockets when they died. When I had a second, I kept looking at Charlie, and worrying because now that I knew, I had to tell him.
“Charlie,” I said, inching closer to him, while butterflies, energetic, deadly butterflies started doing acrobatics in my stomach.
“I’m out of goddammed shells.” He fumbled with the weapon and wouldn’t look at me.
“Charlie.”
“Don’t distract me, Candie. You always distract me.”
I reach out, grabbed him by the collar and swung him around to face me. “Charlie Vaughn, I love you.”
He froze, completely, as though he was one of the zombies struck with a salt pack. The butterflies in my stomach transformed abruptly grew ten times, and started making disturbing, spiraling circles in my stomach.
So I said it again, before I lost my courage completely. “I love you.”
He jerked back, away from me, every line of his face astonished shocked and maybe joy (an expression which made the butterfly sink down to their normal size and start fluttering against my throat). Then I realized that he was standing completely upright, in full view of the imminent zombie incursion.
Nerves gave over to exasperation and irritation immediately.
“Jeesh, Charlie, sit down before they notice you!” Without thinking about it, I grabbed him by the belt and jerked him back down to my level. One thing turned into the other and the next thing I knew my lips had found his, and his hands were on my back and I realized that this was something that I had been missing my entire life. With Charlie right there, his mouth on mine, suddenly life was good and zombies were no problem and everything was going to work out okay. Just when the situation was getting a bit too warm for my sleeveless tank top, Vic wacked Charlie on the back of the head.
“Focus!” he said, but he was grinning, his eyes happy for the first time in weeks, and I noticed that EveDoyle were watching on and grinning like it had all been their idea. Barbara was looking at me and Charlie with the greatest expression of shock and distaste that I had ever seen on anyone’s face.
I was too happy to do more than give her the casual finger, but Charlie turned, and his expression become something so dark that I almost couldn’t recognize my love, my friend, my brand-new shiny sweetheart.
“What are you looking at, Barbara?” His voice was low, calm, but the growled threat in it made him more of a threat to her than the corpses were.
She ignored him completely. “You’ve been fucking Charlie?”
She said it like it was the most unbelievable thing in the world. Like never in her wildest dreams had she ever considered Charlie to be worth a second glance. I thought I’d been angry with her before. My previous rage now seemed like a gentle breeze compared to an industrial strength experimental jet fan. I very calmly wanted to rip her head off and paint “Fuck you, bitch” on the wall in her blood. My frying pan, already covered with gore, was very close at hand. What would a little bit more blood be across the stainless steel surface?
But then the zombies hit us in another wave, and this one was more overwhelming than all the ones before it, than any previous attack.
I vaguely heard EveDoyle shouting at Barbara, “We have no time for this, grab a weapon!” and then I saw the pink blur of her coming at me from the corner of my eye, some kind of weapon raised.
Charlie didn’t see her. Doyle and Vic didn’t see her. Evelyn saw, but couldn’t catch her in time, couldn’t put a bullet through her back without risking it hitting me. I saw her lift her gun, and lower it again, screaming warnings that I couldn’t react to in time.
Fortunately for me, a zombie went for my neck at the exact same moment, and Charlie dragged me out of both lines of attack in one smooth motion. As I fell back into my hunk’s arms, I flailed my legs and tripped up Barbara, who unbalanced, hit the wall with way too much speed and went over the edge straight into the zombie onslaught.
I grabbed my weapon and, back-to-back with Charlie, we applied ourselves to the spot where she went in, which was right where the corpses were flying the thickest. After that, the entire battle becomes a blur in my memories. People I had seen in the dining room earlier in the night shambled up to me, their oozing wounds moving through their ragged clothes, and I had to thwack them in the heads with my frying pan or chop them open with my butcher knife. Over and over again.
We must have fought for over an hour, zombies everywhere, their bloody mouths gaping wide. More than anything, the sheer numbers began taking their toll. The content sickening sound of blunt object against rotten meat and bone, the feeling of utter terror when a one got its mouth too close to my exposed skin, all of it made my nerves into one big electric blur.
Right when I thought the onslaught would never end, and my arms were going to drop off like noodles from the weight of my frying pan, I heard a horrible noise.
It wheezed across the corridors. It echoed, it rattled, it thumped. It sounded like someone was playing a polka with a banjo and a cat, and neither one was happy. But I could forgive the racket its faults as the zombies turned to the sound, as though mesmerized, growing still. Then they started shaking as though they were having seizures. They shook, they quivered, the air stored in their lungs wheezed out in long agonized sighs, and then, one and all they collapsed, as though they were actors hitting the finale of an interpretive dance piece designed by the damned.
When the music stopped there was perfect silence for a long few seconds, and then a short, scraggly haired man in a scuba suit peeked his head around the corner. “Hallo down there!” he called. He sounded cheerful and British.
Charlie was the first to get his voice. “Hello!” he called. His words rasped. The man waved, and began to pick his way toward us. He didn’t look like a zombie, no obviously rotten patches, and he didn’t move like one. In fact, he bounced in an almost spritely fashion as he moved between the now inanimate corpses. Vic slowly lowered his shotgun while Evelyn made no bones about putting the last clip in her automatic.
“Did you do this?” Doyle asked. He sounded almost irritated, as though someone had done something rude at his party.
The man looked around at the corpses, then back to us. “We didn’t make, if that’s what you mean. But we did knock the bastards out.”
“We?” Evelyn asked.
He grinned at her. “My band, luv. We’ve isolated a specific sonic resonance that disrupts the function of zombie brain matter. They get one hit of our little concerto, and they just fall apart.” He sniggered. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Ah,” Vic said.
Charlie nodded slightly. “Hmmm.”
I think we were all in shock.
The little man turned around and waved his arm in an expansive gesture. “All clear, lads. These nice don’t seem like they’re going to shoot us anymore.”
And our saviors came from around the corner. They were all shapes, sizes, genders, and colors, and they toted their accordions, flutes, banjos and baseball bats with the casual ease of long time freedom fighters in the zombie apocalypse. The lone tuba player, a fat man with a mallet hanging off his wrist, waved pensively, and our greeter waved back. The rest of the band kept moving in the direction of the bar in the dining room.
“Good as new,” the front man told us. “You lot shouldn’t be having any trouble with zombie incursions, for a little while at least.” He kicked at a head and flew through the air like a wet soccer ball. He scowled after it. “And if they spring back up, just give us a call.” He winked at me. “We’re in the yellow pages under ‘Z’.”
The zombies were gone. I felt faint. At least for the moment, we were safe, and I couldn’t sustain any energy any more. I dropped the frying pan, and a second later I followed it down, as though the weapon I’d been using to scramble brains had been the only thing keeping me on my feet. But Charlie was there to catch me, even though I could feel his arms shaking, too, and we ended up collapsing together, me in his arms, my head against his shoulder, while he ran his hands up my arms, as thought to assure himself I really was there. And I couldn’t help smiling, probably grinning like an idiot in the midst of the carnage, thinking how, in spite of the zombies, and the fight, the fear and the unhappiness that had started it all out, it had been a good day. Evelyn and Doyle were alive. Vic was alive and kicking (and wiggling his eyebrows at our savior like the pretty-boy he was), and I had love.
Barbara got eaten. It couldn’t be helped.
