Kirk Allmond - What Zombies Fear - A Father's Quest

I turned to YouTube. I searched everything I could think of, and finally searched Zombie Baltimore and got a hit. I watched a grainy cell phone video of a man ripping huge chunks out of a woman’s shoulder and swallowing them. I turned my leather office chair sideways, leaned back and put my hands behind my head to think. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement behind the graffiti covered cinderblock wall that was my office view. All I could see was the top of a head, the scalp partially removed, flopped over to one side like a bad comb-over in a windstorm. Two more figures moved slowly by. From my vantage point, I could only see the top couple inches of their head, but it was clear that they were not walking normally.

For the first time since all of this started, I got the feeling that things would get bad; and it would get bad quickly. I moved out of my office window to the break room on the side of the building. Walking through the rows of desks, I had the strong urge yell, ‘Get out of here, there are zombies outside!’ But who would believe me? Inside the break room, I could see the alley, and I could see Chuck. Chuck was leaning against the elevator of the parking garage, pepper spray in his hand. There were two of the things on either side of him.

I almost ran to the windows on the front of the building. From my second floor vantage point, I could see down to the police cars, and the ambulance that had finally arrived. They were loading the pedestrian victim into an ambulance; he was already on a gurney. They pushed the gurney over to the ambulance. Right as they bent down to lift the gurney into the back, the corpse on the stretcher abruptly sat up and bit the front medic on the nose, completely removing it. The medic threw his hands over his face, blood spurting out between his fingers as I stood there transfixed; horrified as the creature on the gurney chewed and swallowed the medic’s nose. The injured medic climbed in the back of the ambulance, and the other ran around the front of the truck. The corpse on the gurney struggled within the straps that were holding him pinned, from the waist down, to the bed. The doors slammed shut and the ambulance took off at a high rate of speed. The freshly reanimated corpse slowly rolled down the street, still strapped to the gurney.

The police officers were nowhere to be found. One car was still there, and one of the officers had lost his hat on the sidewalk.

That made up my mind; I needed to get Candi and Max out of town. I needed to get them safe. When I thought of Max, all thoughts for my own security flew out the window. All I could think of was getting to him and making sure he was safe. Candi would never believe me. If I’d snapped a picture of the zombie ripping the victim’s throat out and sent it to her, she would still never believe me. I had to come up with a way to make her come home. She worked about forty minutes south of York, so I needed her on the road, now. I texted her, “Max is in trouble. Come home now. My phone is dead.” She would be pissed at me if I couldn’t convince her that this was real when she got home.

I was at the bottom of the stairwell when I got her return text ‘omw’. ‘ Good, Candi was on the way home. Now I just have to make it to the truck’, I thought.

The door closest to the parking garage was a gray solid steel door. There was no window to look through, and it had been about five minutes since I’d looked outside at Chuck. Last time I could see, he was by himself, but I couldn’t help thinking, ‘ What if the ones from behind the block wall at the back of the building had come around? ’

I quickly looked around and there was nothing to defend myself with, and there was a nagging voice in the back of my head that I was over reacting to this whole thing anyways. I opened the door outwards and stuck my head out. The door swung back towards the building, and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The nagging feeling got a little stronger, and I stepped out towards the parking garage.

As soon as I was out in the open, I ran towards the parking garage and I heard a chorus of low moans. Over my shoulder, I saw a group of ten or twelve of them shambling down the alley towards me. One of them appeared to be slightly more coordinated than the rest; he was at a near trot. That scared me into action, and I took off running as fast as I could for the truck.

I sprinted across the alley, rounded the corner and ran straight into Chuck. Or what used to be Chuck; all that was left of his uniform shirt was the shoulders and sleeves, the front and back had been ripped away, and it looked like a pack of wild dogs had been feasting on his intestines. The little that was left of his guts was hanging down his legs. I crashed into him so hard we both went flying. As I landed on top of Chuck, his hands came up to grip my throat. Kicking hard to roll to my side, and grabbed at chuck’s hands. His grip wasn’t very strong, I was able to force his hands away from my neck, but doing so put my hands very close to his jaws. I forced his arm down across his face, effectively plugging his mouth with his own chew-marked bicep, which bought me the time to leap off of him. I took off running, hoping that his lack of mid-section muscles would make it harder for him to get up. I was halfway up the stairs before Chuck regained his footing, and started after me. The crowd that had been coming down the alley was right behind Chuck, and starting up the narrow stairs. Running up the stairs, I was fumbling in my pocket for the key fob of my truck, which had broken off my keychain a couple of days before. Cursing myself for not getting that replaced sooner, I managed to get my finger on the unlock button just a step from my Four Runner. I ripped the door open and leapt inside. I’m not sure how long the window would hold with Chuck beating on it, that’s not a piece of data I was interested in testing.

As quickly as I could, I started the truck and inched forward. The creatures were all around the truck now, and it was rocking slightly back and forth from their pressure. I couldn’t bring myself to run them over. I’d seen every zombie movie ever made, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that these were people, and maybe we’d find a cure for this. I doubt we could cure poor Chuck of his missing entrails, but some of these people didn’t look so bad. I inched my way through the throng, and sped away as soon as I’d managed to nudge them away from the front of the truck.

‘I bet Candi won’t make fun of my brush guard now’ , I thought to myself. No telling how much damage it had absorbed, but one side of it was slightly bent. It must have taken an enormous amount of strength to bend that, it wasn’t solid steel, but it was made of one and a half inch welded tube.

When I bought the Four Runner a year before, Candi had made fun of me for spending an extra $4,500 customizing it. She called it my “Mall Crawler”, because with the exception of driving through the yard a few times, my thirty-five inch tires had never seen any dirt. At the time I didn’t really care, I loved the off-road look. I loved the lights mounted to the roof rack, even if they’d never had their covers off. I loved having my spare tire up on the rack like those safari vehicles in Africa. Maybe it would all pay off now.

02. Flight to Max

My earlier feelings that I was exaggerating the situation were now firmly gone, replaced by the need to get to Max and make sure he was safe.

I sped down the alley way between the office and the parking garage, no sign of the group that followed me up the stairs in my rear-view. Driving down Philadelphia St., I began to get a picture of how badly York had been affected, every block or so I saw a house with a zombie beating on the door. They would look around at me as I drove by, a few of them even took a few stumbling steps towards me. I was driving about fifty miles per hour down a twenty-five miles per-hour street, and I was well past them before they could make it down the steps and across the sidewalk to the street. The only thing keeping me from finding out the maximum speed of my truck was the thought of hitting someone running away from one of these things. There were no cars on the road, other than the ones parked along the side, making it extra difficult to see someone who might run out in front of me. The Four Runner makes a lot of noise, between the aftermarket exhaust designed to boost the power of its V8 engine and the noise of the off road tires, but who knows if someone would be paying attention to traffic. I could see people watching me pass out of their second story windows, a look of fear on their faces.