He came from the master bedroom, where he’d been pinning blankets over the windows. It was full dark by then and he was only a shadow. “Sure, I’ll just run down to the store and pick up some eggs.” The joke fell flat. After their experience on the road, the store was the most dangerous place either of them could imagine just then. It would be a beacon for every hungry mouth in this part of the city, if it was even still standing, that is. “I’ll just get my pack from what’s left of the camping supplies.”

  ***

  Will Shaw stepped out into the night and was greeted with the crack of a gun. It sounded close, two or three blocks away at the most. It was followed by three more shots in quick succession. Armed with just the knife, he suddenly felt very naked and was tempted to go back inside for something bigger. But he did not golf or play baseball. The best he’d be able to do was to take a leg from his dining room table.

  He liked the idea of a spear more than any sort of makeshift cudgel. A spear was a simple tool that could strike quicker than a club and from further away. The problem was that spears with an actual metal tip were rare. Will didn’t trust wood-tipped spears. Not only would they break easily, they were far less intimidating than a real one. The more Will thought about weapons, something he’d only just started doing in the last couple of days, the more he realized how important intimidation was as a factor in combat.

  Raul had not been intimidated by Will’s knife until Will had explained exactly how he had planned to use it. It was only then that Raul had looked nervous. Had Will been able to act aggressively, he might have been able to save his food. It had been at least ten days’ worth, which in the end, could mean the difference between life and death.

  “There’ll be more,” he told himself. These were the suburbs. Although there were no “preppers” in the neighborhood, at least as far as he knew, people tended to have pantries and cupboards filled to overflowing with goods. Yes, sometimes the cans would be expired by a few years, but in a pinch, he would eat them without batting an eye.

  As much as he hated stealing from strangers, the idea of stealing from his neighbors was too much, so he slunk over his back fence and crossed to another street. This one was just as dark as his, but there was life on it somewhere. He could smell smoke from a wood fire, and up ahead there was someone coming towards him. Will slid down behind a parked car—for some reason, he was surprised to see that its gascap was open. Someone had siphoned out the gas.

  How had it come to that so quickly? he wondered.

  There was no time to consider the answer. The man…or rather, the creature, was coming towards him. The person was slow and awkward, moving in a slouch and groaning to himself. Will was hit with a sudden flash of goosebumps. He was looking at a zombie.

  The knife was suddenly slick in his hand. If the rumors were true, that only a head shot could kill them, then a knife was a stupid weapon. His was especially stupid in that it flared wide from the tip. It couldn’t go deeply enough into an eye socket to even tickle the brain.

  Running was Will’s only option. It wasn’t a good option, not by a long shot. The cluttered street was midnight dark, and if he tripped while running at full speed, he could break a bone. And weren’t the zombies supposed to be fast? And supposedly they never tired. He hesitated a few more seconds, clutching the bumper of the car, his heart pounding in his chest. Was this the terror a rabbit felt just before it dashed from cover in front of a fox?

  Probably.

  Fueled by mindless fear, Will took off, racing across the street and towards a ranch house that was surrounded by a waist-high chain-link fence. In the daytime he might’ve been able to leap it completely. In the dark, he misjudged the height and jumped a fraction of a second too soon. His lead foot hit the top and then he was somehow tumbling into the fence, onto the fence and mostly over the fence all at once.

  With a crash, he found himself partially upside down and caught in two places. The waist of his jeans was hooked at his hip, and the pack on his back was caught only God knows where. “Shit!” he hissed, twisting and desperately trying to push himself up. He was at an impossible angle to free himself, but a perfect angle to see the zombie staggering toward him.

  Fear made him mad and he bucked and cursed and torqued his body into weird angles—and all for nothing. He was caught. “Get away!” he snarled as the creature came closer.

  It tripped over the curb and went face first into the dirt. Its moan intensified as it tried to get up. Will thought it might have broken a bone because it couldn’t stand. It could crawl, however. On its hands and knees, it crawled towards Will.

  “Get the fuck away from me!” Will roared. “I have a knife!” Except he didn’t. He had lost the knife going over the fence. Turning his head around, he saw it just out of reach.

  The creature groaned once more and then vomited on the lawn of the ranch house. Up came a great gout of brown fluid that smelled horribly of stomach acid and whiskey. It was enough to make Will dizzy. Three times the creature vomited before it rolled over and sat next to its mess. Like a sapling in a strong wind, it swayed and seemed to forget that Will was there.

  “Oooh boy,” it said. “Ooooh boy. I should-ddn’t drank-ded that wassa call it.”

  Will hung from the fence trying to understand what he was seeing. If he didn’t know better, the man wasn’t a zombie, he was a drunk. “Hey. Psst, buddy.”

  “Huh?” The man turned around slowly and stared at Will with bleary, bloodshot eyes. “Wha arrre you doin?”

  “I could use a little help. I tried to jump the fence and mis-timed it. Can you see where my pack is caught?”

  “Back is got? Yeah. Yeah. Hol on.” He tried to stand—and failed, falling to the side. Although he smashed his ear into the fence, he laughed. “Tha herped. I mean herpded. Hur-ted.”

  Will rolled his eyes and was about to agree that it must have, when there was a crash from up the street. It was the sound of a door being kicked in, and it was followed by a scream. The man began to turn in that direction. “No. Mister, over here. You said you would help me, remember?”

  “I did? Okay. Hol’ on.” He fell into the fence and stared over it at Will. “You’re caught on some-tin.” Another scream had his head swinging away again. “Hey. Issa person.” Someone ran down the street.

  “Yeah,” Will agreed. There were more crashes and a hoarse shout. “We’ll figure that out in a second. Help me off this, okay? Try to lift me up.” The drunk lifted Will much the same way he might try to lift a similar sized tuna. It was more of an awkward hug. Still, it freed his jeans and he fell sideways and was able to wiggle out of his backpack. “Thanks so much.”

  He started to pull his pack free when there was a whooping cry and braying laughter. Someone else went sprinting up the street. A rock bounced after, almost hitting the person.

  “You better get over on this side,” Will whispered to the drunk. “Come on. Something’s happening.”

  Will figured that the people up the street were like the hoodlums from the highway: immoral opportunists, or desperate suburbanites afraid for their future. He was wrong, not just about the mindset of the individuals but also of their numbers. The hoodlums on the highway had been about one percent of the fleeing refugees. Most people were already carrying as much as they could.

  The people in the dark neighborhood were carrying next to nothing because they owned next to nothing.

  At 25.7 percent of the population, Philadelphia had the highest poverty rate in the country. All told, there were four-hundred thousand people within the city limits who didn’t need an apocalypse to set them on the road to starvation. These people didn’t have overflowing pantries or freezers filled with meat. To make matters worse, the number of supermarkets in the inner city were drastically fewer per capita than in the suburbs. These were emptied early Sunday morning at about the same time credit card services were discontinued.

  Without cash or credit cards, the few serviceable cars left to the people were usually so low on gas that no one wanted to risk getting stuck trying to cross the jam-packed bridges over the Schuykill River. The masses looted what they could, stripping supermarkets and convenience stores right down to the last stick of gum. Then, for the most part, they hunkered down to await the zombies or to be rescued by the government, which was doing “All that can be done.”

  For the people stuck in one-bedroom apartments, this felt like a whole lot of nothing.

  On the morning of the fifth day of the apocalypse, there came an inexplicable, unannounced, spontaneous migration. About a hundred thousand people simply threw on their warmest clothes, grabbed what cash and food they had, and walked out of Philadelphia, looting as they went.

  They headed west across the river and then fanned out from there, moving in slow waves. Like the suburbanites before them, their morals were set aside, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. They took what they wanted, killed anyone they wanted to, and, with growing frequency, raped anyone they wanted to as well.

  About half of them had a destination in mind when they set out; usually a relative or a friend who lived in another state. The rest simply walked with the idea of evading the zombies and seeing what tomorrow would bring them.

  After a day, the lead element had finally arrived on Peakview Drive.

  “Climb the fence,” Will whispered to the drunk. “Come on. Just grab it. Fall over it if you have to.” The drunk put one sneakered toe within the links and tried to climb the fence like a ladder. His toe slipped and he collapsed into a whisky-stinking pile.

  He cackled, “Humpy Dumpy had a fall on his ass! Ha-ha!” Shadows moved from up the street. The drunk was unaware, he was too busy pulling a fifth of Jack Daniels from his coat pocket. “Humpy Dumpy took a big swig.” As he tilted the bottle back, he saw people coming closer. “Is all da king’s hores and all da king’s mens!”

  There were women among the men, and the drunk’s slurred speech doomed him.

  “What did you just call me?” one woman demanded. “Did you just call me a whore?”

  “Whores,” the man tried to correct. “Horses-ses.”

  Will slid back into the shadows as a half dozen women stepped forward. One said in a deadly whisper, “Call me a whore again. I dare you.”

  “No. Horses-ess.”

  This was still too much like “whores” and the woman stooped, found half a brick and threw it the man. In seconds, the others did the same, pelting him over and over again. A group stood around and watched, some with looks of disgust, others with grins. Most of the latter looked around for stones to hand to the women. They did not have good aim and their throws were not exactly powerful—it made for a long death for the drunk. Rocks thudded into him and very slowly he slumped against the fence, bleeding from two dozen wounds.

  Unbelievably, one of the onlookers decided to film the murder. He brought out a phone with a glaring spotlight.

  “There’s another one!” In the light, Will had been spotted. Mob mentality had infected the group and he knew there’d be no justice or mercy granted. He jumped up and ran, choosing a direction at random. He was through a close-cropped yard in a flash and found a six-foot fence in his way. Although the last fence had made a fool out of him, he flew up this one with all the dexterity of a monkey.

  There was no time to see what he was going to land on when he dropped over the other side and into some sort of bush or hedge. His clothes tore and his face was scratched open, but he wasn’t seriously hurt. However, he was slowed as he had to pull himself out of the grasping branches. Just as he did, he was hit in the back by a baseball bat.

  Spinning, he lashed out with a punch and hit only air. The bat hadn’t been swung, it had been thrown. The men and teens chasing him couldn’t climb and hold a bat at the same time, so they were throwing their bats over ahead of them. Will grabbed the bat and went after his closest pursuer.

  The man was only a shadow, cursing about the bushes. Will cracked his skull open with one swing. Next, he went after a man who was just pulling himself from the bush and broke his jaw with another swing. Will went up and down the hedge laying about with the bat as if he were Babe Ruth. The men crawled deeper into the hedge to get away from him. When he found bats lying on the ground, he picked them up and hurled them at the men sitting on the top of the fence.

  It only took a few throws to make them fall back onto the other side. Finally, one of the men broke free from the bush and raised his own bat. Will didn’t hesitate.

  Unlike what’s portrayed in the movies, the bat is basically a purely offensive weapon. A strike could be parried if someone had both the skill and the guts to stand their ground. The man in front of Will was barely a man. Although tall, he was only sixteen or seventeen. He flinched back when Will sent his bat sailing down at his head. Bat met bat and the teen’s bat dropped from his numb hands. He fled back into the bush, while Will ran in the opposite direction.

  ***

  Catherine and Jillybean saw the same wave of people. They saw houses being broken into and they heard the same screams. In a cold sweat Catherine dragged her daughter to the attic, where she planned to make a final stand with only the knife as a weapon.

  The blade was pathetic and next to useless. She was not a big woman, or strong, or tough. Although everyone she met thought she was smart, she didn’t think so.

  She was book smart. Her reading comprehension and ability to retain knowledge was off the charts. She could name the capital of a hundred and fifty countries, she could give the atomic number of every element on the periodic table, she could speak five languages. She could do a crossword puzzle in minutes. All of which was basically useless in the real world. She couldn’t write a grocery list without leaving off seven items. She understood the concept of bluffing, but couldn’t play poker to save her life. Anything improvisational was beyond her. And that included defending her home. She had her barricades and her knife, anything else required true independent thought and creativity.

  Jillybean felt the same level of fear as her mother. Where their fear differed was in the specifics. Catherine Shaw knew what evil lay in the hearts of her fellow man, while Jillybean had something of a cartoon view of the world. She assumed that the bad people outside were very much like the bad people on the highway. Those people had done little more than threaten. The bad guys wanted their food and nothing else. The solution then had been obvious and the very same factors seemed to be at play here.

  Barricading the house would suggest to the bad guys that there was something of value that needed to be kept safe—and there was of course. Their lives for one, Ipes for two, and Jillybean’s Barbie tea set for a third. But in her mind, bad people wouldn’t be after such things. They wanted food and would break down the door to get it—unless the door was already open.

  “You know what Ipes just said? He said we gots-ta let them in the house. We just gotta make it look empty, like there’s no food and they’ll go away. This is just like with the car, amember?”

  “It’s not,” Catherine stated, reaching for her daughter. “This is far, far worse. Now, sit down. If anything happens, I want you to hide behind that chair.” She indicated a puffy old chair that had been her father’s when he had been in school.

  “Where are you going to hide?”

  Catherine shook her head. She couldn’t risk hiding and having someone finding Jillybean instead of her. “I’m not going to hide. I’m going to fight.”

  “But you can’t fight, not against bad guys. Only daddy can do that. He’s bigger-er and stronger-er, and that’s what means we should open the doors. Even Ipes thinks so.” She held up the zebra because who could argue with a zebra? “If they come in and see we gots no food and it looks like no one’s home, they’ll go somewhere else.”

  And if they go prowling around? Catherine wondered, What then? She and Jillybean would be sitting ducks.

  Just then, three gunshots went off right in a row: Bam! Bam! Bam! They were close. Before she knew it, Jillybean was at the window, peeking above the sill. “They’re at the blue house down the street.”

  “The Santoros’?” Catherine hurried over in time to see the Santoro’s eldest daughter, Erika shoot a man from her bedroom window. Erika ducked down as someone in the dark fired up at her. “Jesus Christ!” Catherine whispered. There were more dark figures trying to kick in the garage door. They smashed at it until suddenly, the entire thing came down in a shriek of metal.

  This brought on more gunshots, this time from within the garage. Two men fell in the driveway and the rest fled.

  “We need a gun,” Catherine said. Only a gun could save them.

  Her takeaway from the situation was the opposite of Jillybean’s. In the little girl’s mind, guns were a last resort. Had the Santoros used Jillybean’s strategy, they would still have a garage door. And besides, her family didn’t have any guns and wishing that they did wouldn’t make anything better.

  “Maybe we can ask Mr. Santoro if he has an extra one that we could borrow,” Catherine said, talking to herself, unaware how foolish she sounded even to her six-year-old daughter. “Just for a few weeks until…” Something moved in the house. There was someone on the stairs. They creaked when a grown-up walked on them. “Hide!” she hissed to Jillybean.

  All of Jillybean’s ideas went right out the window. She was a child again with a child’s mindset and she dashed to the chair and hid behind it. Her heart was in her throat as the person on the stairs went up and up, getting closer with every second, until she was just about to wet herself in fright.

  Catherine grabbed the knife and tiptoed behind the door. She raised the blade in a shaking hand and was ready to plunge it into the first person who walked through the door. She envisioned a dark beast of a man, his shadowed face offset only by a Cheshire grin.

  The door began to open. “Cat? It’s me. You two okay?” It was Will. He came in filthy, torn-up, and bleeding from a dozen little cuts.

 

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