Bob Fingerman - Pariah

“What the fuck, dude?” the guy said, glaring at Dabney. No one was in his right mind. No one. Dabney checked his door locks.

As the guy neared, another blood-drenched cannibal scrambled over a motionless car and sank his teeth into the Maglite guy’s throat. Dabney’s mind raced even as all around him remained stationary. His thoughts came rapid fire: Okay, now that asshole’s definitely not moving. His car is stuck in my way. Can’t reverse. Can’t move forward. He was gonna kill me. In all this, he was gonna kill me. I gotta get home. Look at this shit. On the sidewalk it’s more spread out. I’m near a hydrant. There’s a gap. I’m near a hydrant. That guy was gonna kill me. But now he’s dead. I gotta get home .

Dabney bit his lip hard, then yanked the steering wheel hard to the right and bulled his van past the hydrant onto the sidewalk. Fuck it , he thought. Everyone out here is gonna die, anyway . There was little to contradict that thought, but even as he rationalized his decision to mount the sidewalk and plow through the pedestrian pandemonium he couldn’t help but vacillate between I’m committing vehicular manslaughter big time , and I’m performing euthanasia on an epic scale . There really was a fine line between mercy killing and mass murder. And did it count as murder if they came back to life? Dabney could lose sleep over that ethical conundrum later, if he lived that long.

Bumps, thumps, screams, and percussive squelchy crunching sounds were the soundtrack to his trek north, his shallow hood being battered and spattered. As his windshield wipers strained against the profusion of blood and viscera, a stream began to leak through the small aperture. Bodies bounced off the front grille. After fifteen protracted minutes he ran out of wiper fluid and the blood began to congeal, even as it was slicked back and forth. Visibility was nearly nil.

“God dammit,” Dabney keened. “God dammit.”

Tears flowed down his round cheeks. This was wrong. Everything about this was wrong and fucked-up. What was he thinking? He’d left the house to install locks and window gates. Panic was good for sales and of late sales had been slow. He needed the year-end business. He shook his head. How had he let this happen? All kinds of folks-mostly white and willing to pay extra for rapid emergency service-had phoned. He smelled cash. But for what? Greed was a sin, sure, but stupidity should be the eighth deadly sin, because it was going to get him killed.

Traffic ahead actually eased a bit. He could see patches of gray-black asphalt through the havoc. He hit the accelerator and surged forward for a few glorious, optimistic seconds and then WHAM! A westbound Volvo sprang forth from the side street and spun Dabney’s van. His blood-caked windshield imploded, covering him in wet fragments of safety glass. Unseeing and startled, his foot slammed down on the gas and his truck plowed into the front of a building, the engine sputtering and then silent.

With both ears ringing, Dabney wiped the blood, sweat, and tears from his eyes and saw a large confederacy of cannibals coming at his vehicle. The accident had smeared several all over the pavement, but there were so many. More than he’d seen anywhere else. These weren’t cannibals. These things weren’t human. They looked human, but they weren’t. Not any more. Some had been gutted and dismembered but here they came nonetheless, dripping gore and spilled innards. People didn’t do that. The news was right.

These things were dead but still moving around.

And hungry.

He tried starting the engine again. No use. He looked at his crumpled hood and saw steam jetting out. He had moments before the ravenous mass outside reached his van. He clambered out onto the hood and climbed onto his roof.

Over the tinny roar in his ears he heard voices. Though the front of the building he’d crashed into was boarded up, there were people calling out from the windows above.

Hands reached down.

He was saved.

And getting home was no longer an option.

“Hey, where’s Eddie?” Dave asked.

Ellen was flabbergasted. “ You don’t know where he is?”

“No. I haven’t seen him today. I can’t believe he missed the rain.”

“That is pretty odd,” Alan said, glad the ape hadn’t been there to ruin it.

“Now I’m worried,” Dave said, looking it. “I knocked on his door on the way up. I just assumed he’d follow and once I got up here I got all jazzed and forgot about him.”

Without dressing, Dave went back into the building and ran down to Eddie’s door, which was unlocked. He stepped into the apartment and called out a couple of times, going from room to room, leaving puddles. Eddie wasn’t there. He then tried his place with the same result. On each landing he pounded doors and called Eddie’s name to no avail. He wasn’t around. The elation from the rain dance burned off quickly as worry set in.

“He’s not in the building,” Dave said as he stepped back onto the roof. The others were all there, except Ruth who’d hobbled back to her apartment in disgust. Abe still sat naked on a low wall, basking in the waning precipitation. After being distracted for a moment by how long and low the old man’s testicles hung, Dave stalked off in search of his comrade, unsurprised that no one offered to help.

Working his way north, the first building Dave tried was the one directly next door. Dave gave the stairwell door a few yanks but it remained locked tight, the norm since they’d thrown together this tattered kibbutz. The next building the stairwell door was unlocked and blackness waited within. Dave poked his head in, reticent to venture into the strange building. Maybe it wasn’t as secure as theirs. Who knew? It all depended on how well the slapdash exterior fortifications had held up and if the former occupants of the building had bolstered them from within. No, if the zombies had gotten in they’d have made their way to the roof by now. In the back of his mind Dave remembered the front door was secure, but that gloom yawned like a hungry mouth. Maybe just Gerri lurked down in the dark. The Wandering Jewess’s absence at the rain party didn’t disturb Dave at all. She was a ghost; what did ghosts need with rain?

“Hello?” Dave called. “Eddie? You there?”

No answer.

“Eddie?” Dave shouted. The sound reverberated off the walls. Dave was in no mood to go spelunking in an unfamiliar building. Not naked. He wondered if he should go back for his clothes. It had stopped raining and like the moisture on his body, his jollity was evaporating. Any dampness now was fresh perspiration. After a few more tries, Dave gave up and moved on to the next building, which was the one he and Eddie had resided in previously. Maybe Eddie had gotten homesick or something. Maybe he needed something they’d left behind. Eddie did periodically make trips over there to mine their old digs for abandoned artifacts. The stairwell door was blocked, as ever, but he pounded on it a few times anyway, to no avail.

Holding the handrail because of the wetness, Dave stepped onto the fire escape and carefully walked down to the top floor. Both windows were closed and locked, gated inside. He went down to the next landing and tried the left window. It had no gate but was locked. The right one was locked and gated. According to Eddie, gates were for pussies. “I’m not paying to live in a cage,” he’d declared. “Faggots wanna live like zoo animals, that’s their problem. I’d like to see some nigger come through our window and try to steal our stuff. I’d Luima the shit out of him. Literally! ” Then he’d laugh and glare at their unprotected window as if willing someone to breach it. That was then, of course. With the zombies, everyone kept their gates locked, even though the likelihood of one getting up a fire escape was pretty negligible.