Zomtropolis Read online

  She didn’t reply, and I didn’t want to press the issue in case we’d fight or something.

  At the mouth of the alley, opening up onto a new street, I stopped, turned around and surveyed the area to get a handle on things.

  I didn’t like what I saw.

  ·23: Wrong Way

  The dead were everywhere. An entire street just loaded with the suckers. The sidewalks, the roads, even some in the building windows.

  I’ve seen zombies before, so their presence wasn’t what caught me off guard.

  It was their silence.

  I hadn’t heard them when Selena and I were coming up that alley. I hadn’t even heard them when I was at the alley’s edge.

  Something was wrong.

  “Marty . . . ?” Selena started.

  My heart raced. She gripped my arm, head against my shoulder, trembling.

  “We have no choice but to go back the way we came,” I said.

  “But they’re back there, too,” she said.

  “I know, but there’s too many here. There’s no way we can–” I cut myself off the moment one of them began to move. Then, like a line of dominoes, they all began to move, heading right for us.

  Selena and I tore off back down the alley.

  “Hope you have a plan,” she said.

  Not really. “Just keep running. It’s call we can do.”

  When we got back to the street we just came from, I brought my bat up, ready to swing it into any undead skull I saw.

  A gray-skinned businessman came up on my right. I took the bat across his head, the blades dragging across his skin, digging deep into the flesh beneath, ripping it from the bone. I pulled the bat back and let him have it again, this time its end cracking the guy’s skull and sending him to the ground.

  Selena already had her cleaver wedged into an undead teen girl’s face. She had to pull it out by putting a palm to the girl’s cheek while tugging back on the cleaver.

  “Move it!” I said, and headed away from the Chinese restaurant and down the street.

  “Coming!” she said.

  I heard her footfalls behind me.

  A old man zombie reached for me. I knocked his arms away with the bat. Selena’s footfalls stopped so I looked over my shoulder. She was leaning over an undead kid on the ground, chopping the cleaver into it like a slab of raw steak. Blood and meat sprayed up after each blow.

  “That’s enough,” I said. The old man moved beside him. I laid into him and broke his head open.

  She let the kid have it one more time then ran up to me. “Got carried away.”

  Her hand holding the giant knife shook and her lips trembled. We had to find some place safe and take a break.

  I took her by the other hand and we ran a little further down the street, dodging the undead, then rounded into an alley on our right. There was only one zombie in it, which I quickly dispatched with my bat.

  “I don’t want to stay out here anymore,” she said.

  “We’ll be okay,” I said. “Just stick together, work together. That’s what we were good at, remember?”

  She glanced up with me with hopeful eyes, her gaze conveying that, yes, she did remember how much of a good team we really were back in our day.

  “You were always there for me,” she said.

  “I always will be.” The words were out before I had time to think about them. In my heart of hearts, yes, I would always be there for Selena. She was my girl, my angel. Ever since I met her, my life in some way was always about her.

  Zombies rounded the corner into the alley after us. Selena and I made a break for it and headed toward its opposite end. When we emerged on the street beyond, I checked things out. Over here, the dead’s number was thinner. There was still a lot of them–at least ten or so–but they were scattered far enough apart that we wouldn’t get cornered.

  Fallen zipcars dotted the street, a few in heaps from the day they came crashing down from the sky. Building windows were smashed. Patches of blood stained the concrete.

  Some twenty meters to our left was an staircase leading to the old subway system. At the time of the zombie uprising, Comtropolis was in the middle of switching its public transportation to the skytrain, which didn’t require underground tunnels and tracks, but instead hovered some fifty meters above street level, weaving its way in between buildings, folks able to get off the skytrain at stops built into the building’s themselves.

  “I have an idea,” I said, and took her by the hand toward the subway entrance.

  We ran toward it, weaving around the zipcars. I caught Selena looking in a car’s window at the headless corpse of its passenger.

  “No time,” I said.

  She shook her head. “So sad.”

  “Selena!”

  She ran up to me, and we headed toward the subway entrance. We managed to avoid the undead shambling toward us, and went down the stairs leading to the subway entrance as fast as we could.

  “Keep an eye out,” I told her.

  She got behind me, cleaver ready. “Maybe they’ll just fall down the stairs and make it easier for us.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle. Man, did I love this girl. “One can only hope.”

  The subway entrance was a big metal door, locked. One either side of it were glass panes, both miraculously intact.

  In my genius I thought I could whack out the bottom of one of the panes, you know, just have the bottom part break, the rest of it either remaining perfect or just simply spider-webbing but still in place. No go. The entire glass pane shattered when I hit the lower part of it with the bat.

  “You realize they’ll follow us in,” Selena said.

  “No choice. They’re not here yet, anyway. Maybe we’ll be okay. You never know.”

  She simply rolled her eyes and went in through the glass pane.

  Undead moans sounded above.

  I followed her.

  ·24: Light in Real Life (Guys are Idiots)

  The old underground subway tunnel was dark for the most part, but not so pitch black we couldn’t see anything. Far up ahead light streamed in from street level thanks to a large hole in the tunnel’s ceiling.

  Selena and I walked side-by-side, me with my razorblade-bat at the ready, her with her cleaver. I really hoped we didn’t run into any undead down here.

  We jumped from the subway platform down onto the tunnel floor. The tracks were clear from what I could see, so I suggested we make our way down toward the light and take it from there.

  “Sounds fine,” Selena said.

  I went up to the subway tracks. “Wonder if the power’s still on . . .” I spat on them. The gob of spit didn’t fizzle. “Nothing.”

  “Guess the power’s up in a few places and that’s all,” she said.

  “Yeah. Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  We walked.

  We were silent for the first few minutes; I was so on-edge because of the ordeal above ground that all I could think about was the possibility of having to swing my bat into another zombie’s head. Selena seemed to be in the same boat as I. She kept looking around and in behind herself, jumping at the slightest sound.

  “If they indeed are only after food, they’re probably not down here,” I told her.

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because the undead have been around for a while. Anybody they could have eaten down here was probably eaten a long time ago.”

  My little snippet of information didn’t seem to help because she still seemed as paranoid as ever.

  Selena coughed and covered her mouth with the back of the hand holding the cleaver.

  My heart raced, but down here, it wasn’t because of the undead. Those specific palpitations stopped about five or six minutes after we headed toward the light.

  Ha. The “light at the end of the tunnel.” If only I could transfer that statement to real life.

  Being with Selena reminded me of old times when we used to go for long walks, holding each oth
er’s hand, sometimes barely speaking for over an hour straight, each other’s presence being enough to sustain the mood. Even walking with her in the subway tunnel made my hand ache to reach out and hold her fingers with mine. I wondered what would happen if I tried.

  Guys . . . well, we’re all just a bunch of big idiots, aren’t we? I mean, here I was in the middle of a fantasy: alone, with the girl I adored who had broken up with me and wrecked my life long before. You know the saying, “I wouldn’t date you even if you were the last man on Earth!” And here I was, possibly the last man on Earth, and if not on the planet, then in the city. And if not in the city, then most likely the last man standing that Selena knew from her life before the zombies rose and took over.

  In a stupid and weird way, I was her only option. In an even weirder way, it made me happy.

  Selena coughed again. “Excuse me.”

  “No worries.”

  At the end of it, though, I’d gone out of bounds. Here we were trying to get away from the undead and all I could think about was the poor girl being cornered because I was the only dude she knew left.

  Yeah, guys are idiots.

  “What?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “You kind of huffed and shook your head.”

  “Oh, nothing. Just zoned out a bit.” If you only knew what was going through my mind, Selena, you’d probably hate me forever, leave me here and take your chances with the undead. Man, I’m a loser.

  The beam of light streaming into the tunnel grew brighter and wider the closer we got to it. From where we were, I could make out the jagged edges of a rubble heap.

  A low moan came from somewhere down the tunnel. Which direction, it was hard to tell. We both froze in our tracks.

  “Get ready,” I said and tightened my grip on my bat.

  We stood there, scanning the tunnel.

  There was no second moan or any other sound we could make out. We walked on.

  Selena coughed again, this time needing to stop and put her head between her legs to catch her breath when she was done.

  “You all right?” I asked, putting my hand on her shoulder.

  She swallowed, then said, “Yeah. Just got this itch deep down I can’t seem to cough up.”

  “Hate those.”

  She cleared her throat, spat, then stood up. After a deep breath, she was able to continue walking.

  After awhile we finally made it to the beam of light. Scraps of concrete and metal lay in a giant heap, almost up to the surface. Leading down to it from street level was a portion of the road itself, all broken and suspended downward at an angle, the rebar within stopping it from falling. Shards of glass littered the ground, as did burnt seats and scorched metal.

  “Weird,” Selena said.

  “Looks like an explosion,” I said. “One of the subway cars?”

  “Well, whatever caused it was enough to blow the roof out.”

  “Yeah, but these things are electric. I’m no engineer, but I don’t think gas is part of the equation.”

  “Old school technology . . .”

  “Foul play. Could be. The riots Comtropolis saw after the undead, the bombs, the madness. We’re lucky there’s even survivors for the zombies to eat.”

  She shot me a hard look.

  “I mean, it’s amazing people even survived.”

  I put my hands on my hips and surveyed the disarray. There was a gap of at least four feet between the rubble heap and the slanted slab of concrete leading up to the street. The angle seemed climbable even though I figured it was a little more than forty-five degrees.

  “We got to try this,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Climbing out. We got away from the undead. That was our goal.”

  Selena coughed again, covered her mouth. With a nod she said, “Yeah. I don’t want to stay down here any longer than I have to.”

  “Me neither.”

  Moans rose on the air from inside the tunnel. These ones were close.

  “Together,” I said. I held out my hand.

  Selena took it.

  ·25: Love

  Love is a funny thing.

  I know I’m not the first guy to say that. I think Peter Fox said the same thing in his book, April. But it’s the truth. Love brings out the best in people, but it also brings out the worst. I mean, look at me: if you’ve been following this journal from the beginning, you’ve seen what it’s made me. I told you about the good times, the bad, and the craziness afterward, namely that of me and my own life and the stupid headspace I found myself in.

  Love was one of those things that, growing up, you always thought you’d find. Everyone grows up thinking they’ll meet the person of their dreams, get married, get a house, have a couple kids, a dog, maybe even a skyvan. Love is picturesque when you first hear about it. Then it becomes magical–something that, in later years, maybe even unattainable, but magical nonetheless. And then if you’re blessed enough to find it, it is magical and your whole world changes.

  Of all things to be thinking of when Selena and I climbed that rubble heap, that’s what I thought of.

  Love, you see, is no one’s master. This is why–after spending time immersed in it–it makes you lose control, whether for good or bad. It’s why you’ll move heaven and earth to make your girl happy. It’s why you think of killing yourself when she breaks your heart. It’s why it stays with you until the next time you see your woman, and why it stays with you when you know you’ll never see her again.

  Time . . . also belongs to love. Even on the rubble heap, Time was meaningless and I could think and feel and dream and reminisce, and what might have been a couple of minutes in the real world, was time enough for me to think of all these things I’m writing down now.

  Love gives life, and love kills. And, as of this writing, I’ve tasted both and even lived in both. It’s making me ramble right now because if this journal is indeed all that’s left of me and I do get eaten by the undead, I want a full record of what it was like to live in this time of zombies, and what it was like bouncing from a broken heart to feeling like life was worth living again . . . even in a zombie-infested world.

  On that rubble heap, Selena coughed behind me as I led her up. She slipped on a patch of gravel and had to yank her hand free from mine so she could stop herself from landing face first against the debris.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, and held out my hand again. Losing the touch of her fingers made me feel like I was the one falling and not the other way around.

  She steadied herself on all fours and couldn’t stop coughing.

  “What is it?” I asked. “The dust?” It wasn’t all that dusty but perhaps she was more sensitive to it than I.

  All she could do was shake her head, she was still coughing.

  I crouched down next her to as best as I could, careful to have my feet firmly planted so that I didn’t do a nosedive off the rubble heap and back into the subway tunnel below.

  “Selena . . .” I said.

  Finally, she took a big gasp of air then cleared her throat. “I’m o–I’m okay.”

  “You sure?”

  She merely nodded again.

  “Okay, then let’s get going.” I helped her up, swayed backward a little, then righted myself so I could get her firmly on her feet once more.

  We slowly made our way up to the much-smoother cement slab that led up to street level. I was careful not to get too far ahead of her this time.

  Too far ahead.

  In some ways, I think it was my jumping the gun that landed us in trouble back in the old days. Sometimes, what happened before is as clear as crystal. Other times, I could barely remember what went on.

  Love does that to you: makes you see and feel what you need in the moment you’re in, and blinds you to what really is.

  I think it was my “getting ahead” of her that scared her off after we broke up. She knew I still loved her with all my heart, even obsessively so. I couldn’t wrap my head arou
nd how that could frighten her. If anything, I figured, having someone love you too much was a good thing, especially in a world filled with so many cold hearts. Some of you now might think I’ve gone too far on this, talk about how much I loved Selena too much. Guess it just proves my point. Maybe you never fell for someone so hard they became your whole world and you were nothing without them.

  In the end, Selena probably knew I didn’t let her go. There were times, believe me, when I tried. In fact, I tried everything. Books, MP3s, self-help videos, talking it out with friends–all of it for naught.

  Coming out into the light and getting our feet on a less slippery surface made the rest of our climb much easier. Selena stopped once to catch her breath, which I figured had been tied to her coughing. I felt more or less fine.

  We got to the top and immediately surveyed the street. So far, the undead were nowhere to be seen, but I knew better than to just stand there and wait to see if they’d show up.

  “Marty . . .” Selena said.

  I glanced over to her and she was in the midst of lifting her hand to my shoulder.

  Then she collapsed.

  ·26: I Left my Life

  “No!” I ran over to her, dropped my bat and got down beside her. “Selena, wake up. Come on, you have to wake up.” I leaned over and listened for breathing. I had my ear nearly right against her lips. All that came out was a soft wheeze. I put my head to her chest. Her heart still beat, but the beats were very far apart.

  “Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease . . .” I said and gently cupped my hands around her head and lifted it slightly off the ground. “Wake up, Selena. We can’t stay here.” Tears licked the corners of my eyes. I couldn’t lose her. Not again.

  Moans drifted on the air and an immediate shudder went through me. I checked back over my shoulder. A string of undead had rounded a corner not far from us and were stumbling down the road in our direction.

  “Selena, get up! They’re coming!”

  She lay there, still, almost peaceful. I listened for breathe again. The groans of the dead must have obstructed my hearing because I couldn’t hear anything escaping her lips. I checked her chest once more. Her heart beat so slowly, barely there.