Days Go By (Cities of the Dead) Page 2

thirty people fighting off a horde of zombies while cutting through the chain link fence somebody put up the week before. It wasn’t a real good fence, just one of those temporary kinds they put up around construction sites to keep kids and homeless people from getting hurt or stealing tools. And so Steve can’t sue them for negligence.

  That’s when a security guard came running out of the self-storage locker building and began waving for the people to go away. There was no way to hear anything from the roof of Salvi’s, but you could tell the guard was trying to get them to stop and go away, and he didn’t care about the couple of zombies making their way down the street toward the group of people on the outside of his fence. But they ignored him and managed to cut the chain locking the gate and the entire group rushed in, pushing him off to the side. Then a couple of mini-vans and some dirt bikes drove through the gate before everyone pushed them closed and shot some of the zombies on the outside of the fence. Since then, nothing, but you hear the dirt bikes riding up and down the railroad tracks every so often.

  In fact, there are a lot of people still in town. You see them up on the rooftops during the day, acting like guards. And everyone has the same idea, too: scavenge. But that’s almost as dangerous as the zombies, because if you try to get into a house that’s got people in it, you can get yourself shot.

  I was out with Carla working up the alley between Grove and Bush streets when we saw two older guys trying to pry open the back door to a house when someone from inside just shot the guy with the pry bar through the door. The guy stumbled around the backyard for a minute while his buddy shouted at the people in the house about murdering his friend instead of just telling them to go away because the house was occupied. But nobody inside said anything, and the shot guy collapsed in the back yard while the other guy cut through the space between some houses and disappeared onto Grove Street.

  Carla and I had to start hustling because if there’s one thing that will bring zombies, it’s the sound of something loud like a gun. Del said he thinks any manmade sound will bring them, because if you watch the zombies on Fourth Street, they can tell that the dirt bikes are running and will start walking down to the tracks. Sure enough, before we made it to Rambo Street on the way back to Salvi’s there were a dozen zombies coming up around the corner from Ford Street, shuffling right at us. Slow pokes, so Carla and I were able to cut through some back yards and up a couple of streets until we came to Desimone’s Café.

  That’s where Mom and Dad would go sometimes on something they called “Date Night.” It had a restaurant in the back that served Italian food, and a bar in the front that still lets people smoke cigarettes, and my parents both smoke, so they like to go there. Valerie, Marsha, Del and Lester all smoked cigarettes, too, until about two days after we got into Salvi’s and they all ran out. Now, the only cigarettes left in town are in the Wawa, and nobody’s stupid enough to try and get into it.

  Desimone’s was burnt-out when we walked by, and there were maybe ten zombie bodies on the sidewalk outside, a couple of them pretty burned up. We peeked inside the building, but there was nobody in there, just charred furniture and broken glass. The place was fine just a couple of days ago, when I went by it with Anderson on my way to check and see if my Dad had come back, yet. He hadn’t - the house was still locked - and we had to run like hell from some fast zombies that had been standing behind some trees in the lawn of Our Mother of Sorrows Church.

  There ought to be a way to figure out the fast zombies from the slow ones, but so far nobody can do it. They all just stand there moaning or shuffle slowly around until they have a reason to go somewhere. These ones were pretty fast, though. If they hadn’t been running across the street, we wouldn’t have heard their shoes slapping on the ground and they might have gotten us. Instead, since it’s so quiet anymore, you could hear them coming across the road, and Carla turned around on the porch while I was standing on a metal garbage can looking through the transom – the only window on the first floor Dad hadn’t boarded over on both sides – to see if he was in there.

  Carla just said, “Shit, runners.”

  I turned around and looked, and sure enough, there were five of them coming across the street pretty fast in a lurching skip-hop kind of run. Anyway, you can’t really fight five fast zombies if there’s just two of you, and all we had were a baseball bat and a cheap-o “industrial” chef’s knife from the bar’s kitchen. My Dad’s kitchen knives are way better than the pieces of crap whoever cooked at Salvi’s had to use, but that’s probably because Dad calls himself a “gourmet cook.” Mom says he just likes expensive kitchen gadgets.

  So, we had to haul off down Coates Street pretty fast, and then started cutting through some of the back yards. One thing I never really knew about Bridgeport before the zombies came was how many back yards had fences around them. It’s like all of them, practically. So, you have to do a lot of climbing, which is a good thing because the zombies aren’t so good at it. Unless you’re not very good, either, in which case you’ll end up like the barber from Nick’s. He tried to get in the industrial center building the day after the group broke in, but there was nobody at the gate, and when he started to climb the fence a bunch of zombies got to him and pulled him off and tore him to pieces.

  We were cutting through one yard when all of the sudden the back door to the house opens and an old guy leans out and starts waving one of those old-style revolver pistols in the air.

  “Over here, quick,” he said.

  Carla and I both stopped in our tracks, because nobody did this anymore. Not that anybody ever did, I guess. But, now? That’s when he pointed the gun past us into the yard behind his at the dozen or so slowpokers shuffling straight at us. And then we were inside his house and he bolted the back door with a metal rod that slid behind the door.

  He lived like my grandparents. All of his stuff was old tech, like he'd just chosen a year to quit updating his life. He had a tube TV with a VCR; a stereo system that played records, cassettes and CDs; a couch covered with handmade Afghan blankets; and an old style tan computer that sat on a small table in the corner of the dining room.

  We had been inside for about two minutes when the zombies started pawing at the back door we’d come through, trying to find something to grab on to and pull off, which is why everybody boards up the windows: they’ll just break right through if the glass ain’t strong. They can be relentless when they know there are living people inside somewhere. They bang and scratch and pull at stuff until something gives way, and then they just pry their way in. That’s probably what happened to Desimone’s.

  The old man said his name was Paul and that he hadn’t talked to anybody since the zombie’s took over the town. His wife had been out getting some last-minute groceries and had never come back. Since then, he’d been stuck in his house, watching out the windows from the top floor at what little he could see on Hurst Street. Which was nothing, except maybe the occasional group of zombies shuffling down the street toward the sound of dirt bikes or gunfire, which are the only sounds anybody hears with regularity anymore. Every once-in-while he said he’d see someone coming or going from a house, although mostly he saw the random group of two or three people trying to break in across the street.

  The most activity he’d seen was a couple of days after the zombies came across the bridge when the apartment building on the corner of Fraley Street burned down. Zombies and people everywhere for a while, and then just zombies and the bodies of the people they’d eaten. Other than that, he didn’t know anything about what was going on. Nobody did, really: there was no TV or radio or Internet anymore. Nobody knew if cell phones still worked because nobody had one with a charge, and the walkie-talkies I had were locked in my house with everything else.

  We told Paul he could come stay with us down at Salvi’s and that we had been trying to find a way to get in touch with the people in the industrial center, but he didn’t want to go anywhere in case his wife – Michelle – came back. I wanted to tell
him nobody comes back anymore. I mean, if my Dad hadn’t come back, then nobody comes back: my Dad wouldn’t have left me here, not on purpose. Pop-Pop only lives an hour away up near the Amish country in Berks County. Dad should’ve only been gone for three or four hours to just drop everyone else off, but now he’d been gone for weeks.

  And, anyway, Paul had tons of canned food and bottled water in his basement, enough to last a couple of months, I’d guess, if he didn’t have to share. He gave us a couple of cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew and some canned peaches to take back to the rest, and when the zombies in the back moved on to wherever it was they go when they get tired, Carla and I slipped back out and made our way back to the pub.

  “Hey, food,” Steve Douchenozzle said after we got back in and put the cans on a table.

  Kyle used to say this was the Zombie Apocalypse. I don’t know. Zombies, sure. Apocalypse? I don’t know what that means, not really, anyway. End of the world kind of stuff, but the world’s not exactly ending. Sun comes up every day, just like it always did. Out there are other people just like me, just like my group, hiding in some building waiting for someone to