Into the Fire

Gordon Patterson:

The fire was everywhere.  It was clawing up the wall and licking at the ceiling above the stoves.  When the jugs of oil blew up, they had spewed flaming oil across the kitchen.  A pile of dirty aprons were burning merrily in one corner, and a stack of paper towels were cooking a box full of those little packets of jelly that come with orders of biscuits and toast, giving the acrid smoke a slightly sticky feel.

From the front of the diner, the moans of the undead sounded even louder than they had when I had escaped just moments before.  The doorway connecting the kitchen to the front of the diner was still mostly clear, but the smoke was getting thicker by the second.  Nothing it for it but sheer hard-headedness then.

I kicked the door open as hard as I could, knocking one of the creatures forward and into the counter.  Nearly a dozen of the things were packing the other side of the counter, and a dozen pairs of sightless eyes turned in my direction as I burst into the room.  Not slowing down, I used my momentum to throw myself up and across the counter, using my arms to leverage myself.  A gnarled hand snarled at the back of my robe as I tumbled down on the busy side of the counter, but I slipped free.

There, in the keyhole of the women’s restroom were the keys to the diner and the Lincoln out back.  I snatched the keys up and shoved them into my robe pocket.

The things were lined wall to wall now, and the only way out was through them.  My mad dash had let me get the keys, but now I was trapped, as I knew I would be.  I kept waiting for some flash of insight to get me out of my own mess, but no sudden plan was forthcoming.  I leveled the pistol at the nearest ghoul and pulled the trigger.

The explosion from the kitchen blew me backwards and down the little hall that lead to the restrooms.  I was lifted bodily from the ground and I scraped painfully against the far wall before sliding to the floor.  Something, I’m not sure what exactly, had blown up in the kitchen.  Something big.  Most of the counter was wrecked, and the dozen or so ghouls that had occupied my side of the counter had been blown out the front window of the diner.  The front of the diner was also very much on fire now, and smoke was pouring in from the kitchen.

No way I could get out through the back, so I picked myself up and ran for the shattered front windows.  Leaping over a now mostly glassless storefront, my borrowed boots crunched heavily on broken glass and bits of unidentifiable meat.  Dozens more of the things were picking themselves up around me as I stood up, and I knew that in moments, they would be chasing after me again.  I tore off around the side of the store. Two more shots, and two more dead ghouls later, the gun clicked dry.  I shoved it in one of the pockets in my robe and fished out the 9mm and the keys to the Lincoln.

Fire and debris had been blown out the back door of the diner, but the car and the girl were more or less where I had left them, and unhurt from what I could tell.  She was up on her feet, making hooting noises at the back of the diner.  She saw me running from around the side of the diner and made a peculiar hop away from me, then relief showed on her face as recognition dawned.  I must have had a similar expression on my face, because it was then that I finally understood.  She was deaf.

I checked the backseat of the Lincoln to make sure it was clear of any surprises.  I’ve watched too many slasher flicks to not be paranoid about that sort of thing.  Finding that it was clear, I climbed into the driver’s seat and she buckled into the passenger seat.  The car roared to life as only big, older cars can, and we left the burning diner behind us, heading away from the inferno and out into the predawn light.

Superman with a shotgun

Raymond Reeves:

The apartment complex was thick with smoke from a fire somewhere in the building.  The front door had been smashed in and I had to put down several of the things in the entryway and on the stairs up to the fourth floor where Kayla lived.

Coughing, I made my way up to the fourth floor landing and jogged down the hallway leading to Kayla’s apartment.  At each intersection, I slowed down and swept each hallway, making sure I wasn’t going to blindly run into a pack of the undead.  Or looters.  On my way to Kayla’s I had seen several dead in the street with bullet holes in them, even thought they had no visible bite marks on them.  Things were getting bad in the city at an unbelievable rate.

I lowered the barrel of my sawed-off shotgun, as the last hallway to Kayla’s apartment was clear.  The smoke was getting thicker by the minute and I swore I could hear the crackle of flames somewhere below me.  Running over to her door, I was relieved to see that it was still intact and on its hinges.

“KAYLA!”  I banged on the door like an idiot.  “KAYLA SHEPHERD!  Open the goddamn door!”

I heard the shuffle of footsteps and the click of the deadbolt, the sliding clink of the chain, and finally the click of the door lock.  As the door swung open, I found a very scared, but very cross looking Kayla looking at me.  Behind her, I saw the evidence of a hastily packed survival backpack and several sets of practical clothes.  She took in my nondescript cargo pants, tactical vest, and shotgun with a look of growing annoyance.  The moment stretched and I had that nagging feeling that I looked really silly, even though I had every right to feel justified in my current outfit.

“Uh, hi.  Hi, Kayla.  I know we’re kind of in a weird post-relationship thing right now, but I came to, uh, save you.”  I wanted to bang my head against the door frame.  Kayla always had a way of making me feel like an idiot under the most normal circumstances.  I was glad to see things hadn’t changed during a serious crises.  Kayla crossed her arms and just shook her head, stalking back into her apartment.

“It figures,” she said.  “It figures that the most irresponsible man-child to sweet talk his way into my apartment is the one that ends up being right.”  She was angrily tossing a sports bra into a survival backpack, the one I had bought for her on her birthday.  “I should have sworn off men ages ago, but no, maybe this one is different.  Maybe if I just give him a chance to mature he can grow up to be the man I need him to be.”  Kayla gave a frustrated growl.  The initial sheepishness I had felt was starting to fade under her tirade.  I mean, I did kind of go out of my way to make sure she was okay.

“Hang on a second, so you’re mad at me?” Great rebuttal there, Ray.

Kayla arched one of her elegant eyebrows at me.  “You bought me this effing backpack on my birthday, the first one we ever celebrated together!  And I didn’t throw it away because I figured I could keep my spare art supplies in it.  And now… now I’m using it because I really need it.”

One of the things I always loved about Kayla was that she didn’t really cuss.  Saying ‘effing’ was really about as harsh as she ever got, which was a good thing since she had a habit of losing her temper at me.  Of course, I have a habit of pushing her buttons because I have a childish way of showing that I like a girl.

“Hey now, that’s no fair!  And besides, aren’t you glad that you have it now?”  I asked her.

“Fine Ray, great.  You were right and I was wrong.  Aren’t we just in a spectacular situation now?”  I could see tears threatening behind Kayla’s eyes.  Then it suddenly hit me.  She wasn’t really mad at me, she was just scared and lost and unsure of what to do.  Kayla was great with people, she always had been.  I’ve always thought it has something to do with her fantastic figure and idiocy-inducing smile, but she has a good way with people.  That, and her skill as a painter and photographer has kept her going in a town chock full of those types.  Zombie apocalypses however, that’s more my specialty.

I took a deep breath and exhaled, letting some of the mounting anger ease out of my shoulders.  I extended my hand and looked at her as seriously as I ever have.

“Come with me if you want to live.” I heard myself say.

Out of the frying pan

Gordon Patterson:

My head whipped around at the sound of shattering glass from the front of the diner.  The unmistakable gasping moan of the undead sounded loud from somewhere back towards the front door of the diner.

Taking a step out of the women’s restroom, I risked a peek into the diner.  The auxiliary lights showed a half dozen ghouls breaking their way through the large windows at the front of the diner.  One had actually busted its way through a window and impaled itself  on a large wedge of glass.  It was blocking some of the others behind it and from the darkness beyond the gaping windows I imagined I could hear more of the creatures struggling to get in.  No time for subtlety then.

Turning back around, I found the girl was still huddled underneath the sink.  Her eyes were wide with fright and little scared squeaks kept coming out of her.  I reached down and grabbed her around one arm and hauled her to her feet.  Like I said, no time for subtlety.

“Come on!  We have to get out of here!”  I whispered to her fiercely.  She collapsed in a heap almost as soon as she was on her feet, making groaning noises and clutching her side.  Great, I thought.  I must’ve really done a number on her when I kicked the door in.  Reaching as gently as I could, I grabbed her under her waist and heaved her over my left shoulder.  She was fairly light and responded almost automatically by wrapping her little arms around my neck.  Having her in place, I ducked back into the hallway connecting to the main diner and almost had my nose bitten off.

One of the things had climbed over its impaled cousin and shuffled back towards us while I had been getting the girl into a carrying position.  Fetid breath washed over me as ragged and rotting teeth snapped closed just shy of my face as I stumbled backwards.  I pulled the trigger on the pistol in my right hand on reflex.  The round punched into the thing’s chest and spun it around and to the ground.  More of the things were climbing into the diner.  I had to get the two of us out, fast.

I stepped on the back of the ghoul I had just shot and then jumped us as far away from its arms and teeth as possible.  Clearing that obstacle, I had to bring myself up short as another of the things tumbled into the diner.  Not waiting for the thing to get up, I set the girl on the counter top and then hoisted myself up and over behind the counter.  I grabbed her and pulled her back over my left shoulder.  As I did so, a gnarled hand shot up and grabbed hold of one of her ankles.  The girl let out a frightened squeak and I think I yelled some wordless snarl of denial as I leaped back over the counter and jammed the pistol into the thing’s gaping maw and pulled the trigger.  Brains and bone spat out of the back of the thing’s skull and it slumped back, really dead this time.  I had to yank at its hand to get it to let go of the girl.

As I hoisted the girl fully over my shoulder, I slipped on what might have been a slice of apple pie that had ended up on the floor.  Stumbling backwards to keep my balance, I lurched against the wall behind the counter.  As I heard the slight double set of clicks and felt the little plastic nubs in my back, I vaguely remembered having been in this general area when I had turned the outside lights off before my nap.  The outside floodlights and neon sign of the diner lit up the parking lot.  My blood seemed to freeze in my veins.

The parking lot was packed with the things and as the lights flipped on outside of the diner, the two or three dozen zombies out in the parking lot turned in unison to stare blankly at the diner’s front entrance.  Whoops.  The ones partway through the broken window were suddenly flung into the diner as the mob behind them turned as one to get at us.  Way past time to go, Gordon.

Hoisting the girl into a slightly better position, I ran as best as I could with my burden to the office.  Setting the girl down, I wasted no time grabbing the 9mm pistol from the desk in the office and jamming it into the front pocket of my old robe.  Grabbing a handful of car keys from the pile I had collected in the office, I picked up the girl again and ran for the back of the diner and hoped for the best.  Along the way, I slapped several of the stoves on in the back and tossed some gallon-sized plastic bottles of frying oil on top of the burners.  I figured a bit of fire ought to slow those things down.

I burst through the back door of the diner fearing the worst, but was greeted by an empty back lot and an old blue Lincoln Town Car.  Shuffling over, I set the girl down on the hood of the car and untangled the wad of keys in my pocket, tossing them down on the hood next to her.  A set of Chrysler keys, a set for the old hatchback out front, and a key to the old Ford truck were the only ones in the pile.  I cursed out loud.  Where the hell were the keys to the Lincoln?  Then it hit me.  The Lincoln’s keys were on the same key ring as the ones to the diner.  And I had left them in the keyhole of the women’s restroom.  We needed those keys, otherwise the things from the diner would just run us down when we got too exhausted to stay ahead of them.

Taking the girl by the shoulders, I made her look me in the eyes.  “Stay.  Put.  I will be right back.”  As I turned to re-enter the diner, I heard a set of loud pops and the unmistakable whoosh of sudden, expanding flame.  The tubs of cooking oil I had left on the stoves in the kitchen had finally caught fire.  From the front of the store came the ugly, hungry moans of the undead.  Me and my bright ideas.

Zombies don’t cry

Gordon Patterson:

I had been having a pleasant dream about better times, of my wife Emma and my daughter Sheryl.  In the dream we were a happy family again and waking up to reality made for a bitter return.  The diner was still and quiet when I awoke but there was something still nagging at the back of my mind.  Sitting upright and listening to the utter silence of the still-dark diner, I tried to place what was nagging me and what had been nagging me when I had first fallen asleep.  The doors were locked and there was no sign of dragging footsteps either in the restaurant or outside to make me think I was in danger.  Still… there was something that my mind had noticed but wasn’t quite processing that was setting little alarm bells off in my head.

Tossing the blankets aside, I padded to the men’s room, taking care not to step on my little pile of corpses at the far end of the counter.  They now had a pile of extra waitress outfits piled on top of them so I didn’t have to look at them.  Checking my reflection in the bathroom mirror after I was done, I saw a haggard, haunted man staring back at me.  It was freaky, like I was looking at someone else through a window and at any moment he was going to grow claws and scream “Boo!” at me.  Instead, the stranger turned away when I did and remembered to flick off the lights.  Nice guy after all.

I was just about to toss myself back on the blankets and pillow in the office when a sudden swirl of intuition flooded my mind.  It took a second for everything to click into a logical order but when it did, it felt like ice water was sliding down between my shoulders.

The sheets and blankets had been in the passenger seat of the hatchback.  In my mind I ran back through how I had found them.  I had tried the driver’s side door first, going through the various keychains I had lifted from the dead inside the diner.  Once the door was open, I had noticed the pillow and sheets in the passenger side.  They hadn’t been folded up neatly.  Instead, they had been rumpled and mostly covering the seat, just the way they would look as if a kid had come with their parent to the diner late at night.  A kid?  But there hadn’t been a kid among the zombies I had killed.

The zombified little girl stepped up from behind me and took a small chunk out of my forearm.  Horrified and dumbstruck, I stumbled away from her, blood spurting furiously from my arm. As I stepped back from her into the office, my foot slipped on the blankets on the floor and I fell, heavily.  A tangled mat of  blonde hair and bloodstained teeth flashed towards my throat.

I woke up screaming from the nightmare to the sound of something small but persistent pounding against something in the diner.  I was drenched in sweat and when I glanced down I noticed that I was clenching my left forearm, where I had been bitten in my dream.  No blood, no bite, but the message in my dream had been real.  There was a zombie kid in the diner and I hadn’t found it.

I grabbed the .357 from where I had left it near the pillow and ducked out into the diner.  The auxiliary lights I had left on bathed the diner in a dim light.  Enough to see by but not enough to attract unwanted attention, or so I hoped.  The contrast of light inside and utter darkness outside made the parking lot an impenetrable wall of shadow.  The pounding was coming from the women’s restroom.  Thinking back, it had been the one place in the entire diner I hadn’t thought to look.  I guess you get trained not to go in a place for so long, it gets ingrained in your behavior.

The pounding was non-stop, but it seemed less powerful than I would expect from a full grown zombie.  Lips suddenly dry, I had to clear my throat twice to force any sound out of them.

“Hello?”  No answer.

“HELLO?” If anything, the pounding on the door got louder, more frantic.  A sudden flash of intelligence finally swept through my sleep addled brain.

“If you’re not a zombie please say something.  I have a gun and I will shoot you if you don’t answer.”  A garbled moan and increased pounding were my only answer.

Raising the gun, I tried the door handle.  Locked, like I had expected.  I went back into the office and dug through the pile of keys I had collected.  Finding the set of keys to the diner, I fished through until I found the one labeled ‘WR’ which I took to stand for women’s restroom.  Taking the keys back to the restroom, I readied the gun once more, clicked the door unlocked and kicked it inwards as hard as I could.

The force of the door slamming open knocked the thing into the sink opposite the door.  It slid to the ground and curled up into a ball, making awful, garbled sounds, sounding something like a like a sick kitten.  It had been a little girl once, with shoulder length brown hair.  Fighting back sudden tears, I stepped back and took aim with the revolver.  I was going to have to kill another little one.  Another Sheryl.  My hands shook, and my head was going kind of fuzzy with the injustice of it all when sudden clarity cut through.  The thing on the floor actually was crying.  It sounded wrong, but I had heard my own little girl cry enough to know it was crying and I was pretty damned sure that zombies don’t cry, regardless of whether they were of the adult or child-sized variety.

Holding the gun back and away from both of us, I slowly slid closer to the thing on the floor that may or may not be a girl.

“H-hey.  I didn’t mean to hurt you.  I thought you were, you know, one of them.”  I thought of all the horror movies I had ever seen and knew that this was the exact moment that the monster would turn to attack me, but I felt kind of silly going and prodding the girl with a broomstick.  I reached out my left hand to touch the girl’s shoulder.  As I reached out, the girl flinched back away from me, scooting on her side to get under the sink.  Okay, definitely not a zombie then.  Congratulations Gordon, you just kicked a door into a little girl.  What’s next?

The sound of shattering glass from the front of the diner was my answer.

Last stop before nowhere

Gordon Patterson:

Some food and drink can do you wonders.  An actual shower would have been nice, but I settled for a thorough scrubbing in one of the huge sinks in the diner’s kitchen.  I had found a fairly clean flannel shirt and a comfortable pair of work boots in the old truck out front of the diner.  A pair of too-large khaki pants found in a cabinet in the diner’s tiny office fleshed out the rest of my outfit.  It would have been nice to have a fresh pair of boxers but I know I had been lucky to find what I had.

Raiding the other cars in the parking lot and searching through the diner yielded mostly useless junk but a few reassuring items.  The pickup out front had a .357 revolver in the glove box and a few rounds of spare ammunition.  Jackpot.  A small, 9mm pistol was tucked away a purse in the office.  No extra ammo there, but then again a pistol that size was for self defense, not a full on shootout.  Still, I was grateful for an extra gun and a bit more ammo.

I briefly toyed with the idea of stealing some socks off of the dead cook but thought better of it.  I had no idea if the disease could be transferred through simple physical contact, but I didn’t really want to find out.

Exhaustion and the persistent ache from my tender skull were starting to drag on my eyelids.  I found a child’s Winnie-the-Pooh pillow and some blankets in the back of an old hatchback.  I choked back a slightly hysterical sob and felt the shame that only a full grown man knows when those big weepy tears hit the back of his eyes.  Sheryl had loved old Pooh Bear.  Clutching the pillow and blankets like a set of life preservers, I stumbled back into the diner.  I had enough presence of mind to make sure the doors were locked.  I tossed the jumble of blankets and pillow on the floor of the office and then threw myself down on top of the mix.  Something was nagging at the back of my mind, but the aching pain of loss and exhaustion took me down into a troubled sleep before I could register what it might be.

A mystery in the woods.

Bianca Testarossa:

The hill wasn’t really all that steep, but Bianca was still fighting off the aftereffects of her hangover.  She was just clearing the ridge of the hill where it leveled off when a small, brunette figure darted from behind a tree and slammed into her, taking me completely off guard.  It was Jessi and she was completely unhurt.

“Jess!” Bianca exclaimed.  “What on earth are you doing all the way out here?”

Jessi didn’t answer her aunt.  Instead, she just started tugging on her left wrist, trying to lead her back down the way she had come from.  Bianca glanced around to make sure their immediate surroundings were safe and then crouched down to take hold of Jessi.

“Calm down, Jess, it’s okay.  I’m here.  What’s wrong?”

Jessi just shook her head and tugged on Bianca’s wrist.  Something had obviously spooked the child and although Bianca’s curiosity was piqued, the oppressive silence of the woods and the urgency in her niece’s actions decided her course of action.  She had already slipped up and let Jessi wander off into potential danger.  She wasn’t going to make things worse by hanging around when all of her instincts were telling her to run.

Bianca took one of Jessi’s little hands and quickly lead her back down the hill.  The trip back to the tree fort lead them past a few zombies that had made their way into the woods.  They began to pursue the humans but were soon left behind.  Back at the tree fort, Bianca and Jessi packed up their belongings.  Mr. Huggins peeked out ever so slightly from Jessi’s backpack, his floppy ears waving goodbye to the tree fort that had been their home for a night and the mysterious horror that Jessi had witnessed.

Nine days.

Raymond Reeves:

I was beginning to regret going to save my ex-girlfriend, Kayla.  I had started out with this misguided notion of being some sort of zombie killing hero, but the novelty started to wear off once the blood of the things started to spatter up around the windows of my car.  Some of them hadn’t turned yet, some of them might not have turned at all, but the fact was, the streets were starting to become cluttered with the dead in one form or another.  San Francisco is a bad place to be in a zombie outbreak.  In fact, it’s about as bad as you can get.

However the outbreak started, things had gotten worse over the next couple of days at a ridiculous rate.  Hospitals were overrun, quarantines were established and overrun, and the police and military tasked with manning the barricades became zombie chow or part of the shuffling hordes.  No hospitals and no police meant a rapid and wholesale breakdown in social structure.  My nerd friends and I, with our fancy city maps and what-if diagrams had estimated critical, non-containable outbreak levels after about two weeks.  Our estimates were off by nearly nine days.  I went to get Kayla on the third.