Joseph Love - Kill Town, USA

Quickly and violently as she attacked, she stopped. Tar bled from the man’s face, his screams quieted. He stood fixed, eyes hollow. Guards peeled into them with gunfire. Bullets sank into their bodies and passed through. Blood seeped from the holes but they made a straight line for the guards. Finally, they made a headshot. Jean-Anne collapsed. But there were more. One overtook a guard by the far exit. Several crashed through the opposing locker room.

I slipped out a side door and saw the infinite limping shadows closing in on the gymnasium. They seemed to materialize from darkness. I searched for Audrey in the hallway and saw nothing but bloodshed. I crept along the shadows outside, following an awning until that, too, was unsafe. Guards and prisoners scurried in every direction. I turned a random door handle. It opened. I hid inside and tried the flashlight. It flashed intermittently and died. I felt for a wall and followed it until I was stopped abruptly by the sound of splashing water.

No voices. Only splashing. Waves that lapped and crashed.

“Jack?” Audrey yelled from the darkness. “Is that you?”

“Yes! What the hell is that noise?”

“They’re falling in,” Audrey said.

“Falling in?”

“Yeah. They’re walking straight into the pool.”

“Let me come to you,” I said, “I need—“ but something grabbed my right arm. I panicked and fired the Winchester into the pool.

“It’s me,” Audrey said. My heart raced. “I found another room, and I think another exit.” She pulled me into a room and shut the heavy door behind us. There was no sound. Even the splashing water was silenced. We stood in complete stillness. It was warm, the air moist.

Quickly, we reached the opposite end of the room fifteen feet from the door. We searched for another door but felt only a bunch of rubber hoses like dry, leathery tentacles.

Audrey yelped. “I found a body.”

“Shoot it.”

“It’s not moving.”

“What’s it doing?”

“Standing. It doesn’t have a head.”

I shuffled toward her and ran my hand over its firm chest, over its headless, armless torso. “A mannequin. It feels like it’s wearing a wetsuit.”

She took my hand and pulled me to another wall where she made me feel the items on a shelf. I picked up a diving mask with a snorkel attached. Respirators and a weight belt. Then, she shoved an air tank around in a wooden bin. The scuba cylinders crashed together like an oversized wind chime.

Fingernails scratched at the steel door.

“Well. We’re stuck, aren’t we?”

“We’ll just push through them.”

“We don’t know how many there are,” I threw the rifle on the bench.

The scratching got louder. The door shook in its frame.

The tiny room lit up like day. Audrey held a bright silver light, it cast her pale and white.

“Look. A light,” the large lights were attached to a camera in bulky underwater housing.

Eighteen air tanks were stored in the wooden bin, and nearly every square inch of the wall was covered in tools or equipment. A clothing rack with soggy wetsuits, a barrel of fins, and a shelf of broken knives. A long, two-inch crescent wrench rested on metal pegs. I picked up an air tank and the wrench.

“We’ll use the tanks,” I said. “They’ll plow through anything.”

“You’ll kill us.”

“So will they.”

The metal bench scraped and screamed as I slid it across the concrete floor. I placed it directly in front of the door and set a cylinder on top.

“Keep the light on the valve.”

Audrey held the light as I raised the wrench over the valve.

She covered her eyes and the light dipped away. I swung the hefty wrench against the stem. The valve flew off, a deafening sibilance filled the room. The bouncing valve skittered across the floor and the tank flew furiously into the door. The door burst open and the tank, spinning deliriously, sent six undead crashing into the pool. The tank tumbled into the water after them, gurgling and whistling.

Quickly, I set up another air tank and struck the valve. It took off and caught the doorframe. The tank spun like a propeller and skipped across the water. I set up cylinder after cylinder. I released ten of the tanks into the dark, moaning pool. I struck the last cylinder. The valve crashed off the wall and landed in my eye. I fell straight down. Blood dripped into my mouth.

I dragged the pack and the rifle behind me, spilling out into the chlorine air. The infected writhed on the floor outside the equipment room. The pool still slapped and splashed. The silver light bounced behind me, and I waited for Audrey to join me. There was darkness in my right eye. It was warm and sticky and it hurt to blink.

With the light, we saw the bodies as they collected in the pool. They sank and waddled eerily at the bottom. Their hair drifted and bobbed. The light caught each individual hair. There must have been thirty or forty and they kept falling in. We left the pool for the pump room.

We closed ourselves in with the pumps. A rat fell from the top of one of the tanks to a lower one and scurried across a pipe. Snow had blown in the pump room, scattered and melted and tracked with blood and sand and dirt. We hurried to the truck, which was as we’d left it. The doors were wide open and snow covered the seats. It chimed with the keys still in the ignition.

I climbed onto the seat and pulled the door closed. Audrey shut her door and we were back in silence. Stillness. I propped my leg on the dash and let my head roll back.

At the end of the world, you press on. You don’t stand still in case the earth collapses beneath you.

I started the truck as Audrey stretched the Glock in front of my face. The cab exploded. Powder burned my eyes and the hot shell spiraled around the cab. Something collapsed in the snow. I rubbed my ears and looked out the shattered window. A guard was less than a foot from my door, hand twitching around the stock of his rifle. His eyeball hung from its socket and dripped like an uncooked egg.

I dropped the truck into gear and turned on the auxiliary lights. We sped across the parking lot and bounced through a ditch. The truck spilled sideways into the road. The cold air bellowed in the window and my ears rang. The sirens continued to wail across campus. I sped half a mile down the road before stopping on the shoulder.

I examined the dark eye in the mirror. There was a deep gash across the whole socket. I pried the lid open. The eye was flooded with blood and looked pretty well gone. I sat back and took deep, angry breaths. I opened the console, the glove box, and the door pockets. Desperately, I emptied them all to the floor.

“Jack, what are you looking for?”

“I smell wintergreen. I know there’s some in here.”

“Gum?”

I pulled down the visor. A can of tobacco fell in my lap. “Not gum.”

I tore open the can and stuffed a large pinch in my lip. “I quit this shit when I was fifteen. I figure it doesn’t matter much now. You want some?”

“I think it’s nasty.”

I stuffed more in my gums. My mouth flooded with spit.

She reached out and took a few threads between her fingers and packed them in her lower gum. I spit out the open window. The tobacco stained the snow brown.

I waited on the side of the road until my gums burned and my head felt light. Then, we headed for the downtown area, a single strip of road that ran half a mile. The area was circled in blue on our map. The Sheriff’s office, police department, and Alfie’s Outdoors were all drawn in with little squares.

Halfway there, Audrey leaned forward and held her head. She swiped her finger swiftly across her gum and pulled out the tobacco.

“It feels like I just smoked ten cigarettes.”