Joseph Talluto - Taking It Back

Tommy and I pedaled north and based on the map we had roughly ten miles to go, five miles north and five miles east. We were going to stick to the roads since we were not sure of the overland route and we really didn’t want to have to sidestep any natural barriers.

I didn’t relate this to Tommy, but I had a dark suspicion that wherever we wound up, the local ghouls might be out in force because these yahoos had been tearing up the countryside for a while with their travels back and forth. Too much activity tends to cause zombie investigation, and if they had been taking shots at the Z’s they’d come from even farther away.

We pedaled quickly on the road, passing by untended fields and empty farmhouses. I didn’t feel the remotest desire to check out any of the farms, the memory of the last one we checked out too fresh. The evening air was cooler and the moon hadn’t risen yet. The land was darkening with the sky following suit. I was hoping for a clear night sky to give us some light to work with, but that was really out of my hands.

We passed the first crossroads without incident and moved along the road towards the next. The nice thing about country roads in Illinois is they are laid out in one mile square increments. At each mile was a crossroad. If you didn’t know where you were going, you could still do a decent job just following the pattern of the roads. I told this to Tommy who seemed dubious.

“How do you know this stuff?” He whispered as we worked our way past another farm.

“My wife’s family is from downstate. They own a farm and she told me. Never thought it would be useful.” I swerved around a large pothole.

“Never thought the world would end, but here we are.”

“Yep.”

Our conversation seemed normal, but underneath we were both wired as tight as snare drums. I knew we were being heard by Z’s in the area, and in all likelihood many zombies were rousing themselves out of their holes and on the prowl for prey.

We traveled down the road, glancing briefly at the dark homes that rose up out of the darkness like gravestones. Not a light was seen, not a sound was heard. I felt like a trespasser, like we were intruding on a world no longer ours. Stay in the light children, for the dark hides monsters.

Tommy raised a hand as we approached the second mile road crossing. The stop signs looked lonely and out of place, and the street lamp that once lit this little intersection stood silent and dark, watching sentry over its little corner of the world. We slowed to a stop in the middle of the intersection. I looked over at Tommy, and his eyes were locked on the road ahead.

“See something?” I asked

“Hang on.” He looked off to the left a little bit.

“Yeah, there it is. It’s in the ditch on the left side, about fifty yards up,” he said, pulling out his blunt weapon.

I squinted into the darkness. “What’s that weird glow?”

“I don’t know. Never saw that before.”

I shrugged and pulled out my own weapon, the handle-modified pickaxe. “I guess we should go see.”

I pedaled a bit forward, then parked the bike. I was not about to engage a Z while still straddling a bicycle. I got off and stood in the center of the road, figuring it gave me the best purchase for fighting. I listened as the zombie made its way along the ditch, aware of me now, and zeroing in for the kill. As it approached, I could see more details in the waning light. Its clothes were in tatters, hanging off more than hanging on, its dead skin stretched over its dead features. Its nose had been torn off, giving its face a more ghastly, skeletal appearance. Wispy hairs stuck out from its head, and its glowing eyes focused on me as its mouth opened to reveal jagged teeth.

I did a double take. Glowing eyes? When the hell did that start happening? I didn’t think it was possible to make a creepy dead thing creepier, but here it was. The eyes of the zombie actually glowed with a mild luminescence, like a glow in the dark toy that was starting to fade.

As twitchy as glowing zombie eyes made me, I was actually curious how it happened. Was this a side effect? Had it always happened and we just never noticed because we didn’t go out at night? On the plus side, it sure made it easier to spot them at night. On the minus side, it gave me the willies.

The Z scrambled up the ditch and crawled out onto the road. Before it had the chance to get up, I ran up to it and hit it on the head with my pickaxe. The new handle worked well. I didn’t take as large a swing as I normally did, but the additional weight carried well and the pointed end crushed the ghoul’s head easily. I pulled out the pick and noticed that the zombie’s brains were glowing as well. Stranger still. I wiped off the pickaxe and climbed back about the bike. Tommy stepped down to inspect the corpse.

That’s just wrong,” he said, getting back on his bike.

“Makes them easier to spot at night, now, I guess,” I said, putting my weapon back into its place.

“Some consolation,” Tommy said. “Can you imagine hiding in a dark room only to see glowing pairs of eyes coming at you from the blackness?” He shuddered for effect.

“You mean like that?” I pointed to a very dark spot in a small grove of trees. Sure enough, three pairs of glowing eyes could be seen, weaving back and forth, unblinking, unwavering. They had seen us and were now coming for us.

“I will never look at fireflies the same way again,” Tommy said as he started his bike. I pedaled after him. We could have stayed and killed the converging dead, but we had places to go and we only fought when we really had to. I had run into lunatics who felt it was their mission to eradicate the undead threat and wound up taking chances that got themselves killed.

We moved steadily north without further incident, although Tommy and I saw several more zombies in the countryside as the sky grew darker and darker. No doubt, there were a lot more we couldn’t see, since the glowing eyes weren’t like flashlights, more like a slow dull glow. If they had hair falling in front of their faces we could not see their eyes.

Still, it was creepy as all hell to be riding through the dark country and seeing spots of lights dancing in my peripheral vision and I knew they weren’t little harmless insects.

We reached the five mile crossroads and finally turned our bikes east. The sky was even darker and the stars were coming out in force. Without the glow of civilization muting the light of the stars, the night sky was amazing. We could see thousands of stars and a couple of planets low in the sky. The arm of the galaxy could be seen, something I had only seen once a long time ago when Ellie and I visited the southwest deserts.

We pedaled steadily for another twenty minutes and with the night breeze coming out of the east, I could smell water on the wind, enough that I knew we had to be coming near a significant body of water. Remembering the map, I reasoned the LaSalle Fish amp; Wildlife area was getting close.

I let Tommy know we were getting close and he just nodded in the dark, his eyes straining and his hands gripping the handlebars tightly. I didn’t blame him. Up ahead was a pack of zombies, around ten of them, walking along the road, and headed towards us. Their glowing eyes marked each one and I had to decide what to do. We were near enough to where I thought the renegades were that I didn’t think we could risk a shot and there were too many of them to take out in hand to hand combat. There was no cover and the Z’s would simply overwhelm us.

“I’m going to head right at them to bunch them up, then I’m going to swerve to the edge of the road and go around them,” I said to Tommy as I pedaled faster. I could hear the groans of the dead as they saw us coming, carried on a wind that brought also the scent of decay and death.