Joseph Love - Kill Town, USA

The bulldozer took out half a dozen fence sections. It drove through campus and into a building, stalling after it crashed halfway through a wall. The bodies dispersed. They wandered into their own freedom. Guards fired at them from the roofs.

We drove into the field, back to the spot where we saw the woman cowering on the girders. I stopped near the woman’s shadow.

Audrey called to the woman. We waved her to the truck, but she was frozen with fear. Stragglers surrounded us. Audrey and I pushed them back with the pistols, cleared them out to thirty yards. Plenty of room for the lady to climb down.

Audrey helped the lady into the back seat where she was at once hidden in shadows. The lady’s heavy breath caressed my neck.

“There are more,” the lady said. “They’re in the gymnasium. I told them they were wrong. I wasn’t bit. It’s just a bruise,” she was exhausted.

“But they threw you in.”

“They did, and I was up there three days.”

“Show me the bruise,” I said.

Audrey slapped me twice. My cheek and temple stung. My eyes watered.

I turned to the woman. “Show me.”

She pulled her shirt up to the bottom of her breasts. Her stomach and side were scratched and bloody, a fingernail embedded in her skin at the end of one of the scratches. She peeled back a piece of skin and the flesh below seeped a yellowish fluid.

“Wasn’t a thing wrong with me until I got thrown in that pen.”

“Where’s the gymnasium?” I asked.

The guards outside had quadrupled and flanked all around the stadium. The shamblers spread out faster than they could be contained. They moved tirelessly, continuously, never stopping for fatigue, never considering which way to move.

“The gym is that tall building back there,” she turned in the seat and pointed. “That’s where they keep everyone else.”

Behind the gymnasium was a ghost-town place. An awning shielded piles of retired school equipment from the flustering snow. Empty barrels, broken desks and chairs covered in graffiti and carved insults.

The double doors to the rear entrance were chained and padlocked. I swung the truck around, shifted into reverse, and sped backward. The tires spat out snow and mud, rocks clanged against the frame. We rammed the door and stopped abruptly. Our heads snapped against the headrests, our brains like mush. I plowed the truck into the doors again. The chains snapped and whomped against the truck bed.

“Give her some of our rations,” I told Audrey.

“I’m not hungry,” the woman said quickly.

“Lady. How are you not hungry, held up under the bleachers three days?”

“I’m just not. And my name is Jean-Anne Huston, I thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And I happen not to be hungry because…” she trailed off.

“You happen not to be hungry because why, Jean-Anne?”

Her face soured. “Because right now, the thought of food makes me sick.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hate to keep sitting in this truck. Then we’ll all be sick. They’ll be on us in a minute.”

Jean-Anne sighed. “He’s right. I don’t know how they know, but they just follow you all over. Does that make sense? I must have crawled through a mile of bleachers. Those heathens always knew where I was. They’ll come for sure.”

I threw open my door and the cold air whipped us sober.

The sirens whistled sadly. Sporadic gunfire on top of it. We limped and shuffled and hastily dragged ourselves into the gymnasium. We dumbly went in the godforsaken place we’d been trying to avoid.

WE ENTERED THROUGH THE PUMP ROOM, where we stumbled over filter tanks, chlorine tanks, and twelve miles of plumbing. I used the Remington as my sight stick, slamming the muzzle into walls and wires. The pool was in the next room. We stayed close to a wall of foldout bleachers to avoid the cold, still water.

Shortly, we came to a door. It was stuck, but it gave when I leaned into it. The door slammed against the tile wall and echoed.

“These are the showers,” Jean-Anne said. “My niece had swim lessons here a couple of years ago. The lockers are just ahead. The gymnasium is after.”

As we approached the locker room entrance, we heard the murmuring of hundreds of voices, the humming of the lights, the cathedral echo of the gymnasium.

We left the locker room and hid in the steel spider web under the bleachers. Not talking, we huddled deep within the framework. We watched through the slits of the folded bleachers. The gymnasium was set up like a Red Cross tent. Cardboard partitions separated nurse stations and examination rooms.

We could see into the exam room. A man sat on a crate, the doctor was carefully covered in surgical gown, head cap, latex gloves, and shoe covers. The doctor examined a bite on the man’s leg. The flesh was gone, muscle gouged away. The doctor pointed to the scale. The man stepped up and the doctor opened the cabinet behind the scale. The doctor twisted a valve on an air tank, picked up a small hose, and held a bolt gun to the back of the man’s head.

The man’s legs buckled. He fell in a heap. A small stream of blood rolled down his neck. The doctor knocked on an exit door and two men, covered head-to-toe like the doctor, hurried in. They hauled the man outside to a waiting trailer. The doctor wiped up the small streak of blood, shut the valve, and closed the cabinet. The doctor called in the next patient.

We maneuvered through the bleachers and looked out to one of the several waiting areas. No fewer than fifty people—children, women, grandparents, a man in a wheelchair—waited with various wounds. They came for help.

I pressed the muzzle through the gap in the bleachers and aimed into the waiting room. When the doctor stuck his fat head in again, I fired. I missed.

The gymnasium roared in panic. Patients in unseen waiting areas screamed—the partitions wobbled and guards threw the doors closed.

The doctor grabbed for a pistol under his gown. He struggled to get to it under all the layers. I fired again. He fell face down on the glossy wood. Guards stormed in and fired into the waiting crowd. I hit one guard in the shoulder, another in the shin as he crouched behind a chair. They fired straight at us. The bleachers opened, the steel beams crossed like scissors, unfolding and swinging. I saw shadows of men dancing through the moving framework, leaping through the interior scaffolding. I retreated to the entrance. Audrey and Jean-Anne were far ahead of me. I knelt and fired at the leaping shadows, one fell face-first into the metal tracks. The other landed with a thud.

I rejoined Audrey and Jean-Anne in the hall, but there was a swarm of prisoners—injured and bleeding—rushing to the exits. They found the exits chained. And they realized they were prisoners.

Ten of the camouflaged men joined the melee in the hall and opened fire. Blood splashed the navy blue and gold walls. In the cattle chute hallway, the crowd of two hundred cowered from the guards. Guards blocked the doors and sprayed the innocent with bullets. Dust from cinderblocks fell like snow. The guards fired desperately. The crowd finally assembled against a pair of double doors and crashed through them. They spilled into the cold air, leaving us and the guards. I took cover behind a vending machine. I’d lost sight of Audrey and Jean-Anne.

But there were shamblers among us. A small, fragile-looking woman overpowered a man and rammed him into a trophy case, plate glass falling and ripping through them both. The woman didn’t notice. I saw it was Jean-Anne, her face expressionless and her body rigid. She tore into the man’s face with her hands and mouth. Her teeth sank into his cheek, raking through zygomatic major and minor, ripping temporal from occipital.