Once Dan dropped to the ground, I reeled in the rope, and the three of us hunched in the shadow of the big gate while the lights swung by once more. Davin looked at Dan and me, smiled crookedly, and nodded. The lights rotated away, and we sprinted for the shadows at the edge of Old Town. I figured the guards probably saw dumb kids like us half the time, but no one ever fired a shot.
So there we were: seventeen, full of piss and stupidity, creeping through ruined streets on a Friday night with a couple of jars of Uncle Jeb’s homemade booze, our guns, and an ache to celebrate Dan’s eighteenth birthday. One week later, hopping the fence would land Dan in the stockade—a crime believed to endanger the whole village, but this was coming of age, our ritual. Plenty of other dumb bastards snuck out of the compound before they officially became men; Dad even admitted to sneaking out just before his brother’s eighteenth.
I glanced back over my shoulder at the wall: randomly fused sections of steel, brick, concrete, and stone. Originally a desperate measure against the walking dead, that wall had stood for something like eighty years. For boys raised in captivity, the world outside the wall reeked with mystery, and we devoured grand lies that became our motivation to hop the wall—a man’s right to be free, all that crap. The older men in the compound filled us with stories, baiting us like a lantern to a moth, knowing we’d bite, go over, and look for danger. The stifling closeness behind the wall pushed us, too—personally caught me in the throat.
“What’ll it be boys?” Davin asked once we found the shadows. The moon shone pretty bright that night, drawing the silver out of the world. Davin shimmered like a bit of fresh aluminum.
“Hell, I’m itching to splat a couple tonight.” Dan walked ahead a few steps with long, loping strides, the pinnacle of our small triangle.
“Old man Jantz says we have to check out the church. Says it’s beautiful, sacred ground. Inside the building, with a moon like this, the whole place lights up like a rainbow.” Davin stopped and cocked his head to once side, pointing toward the hill that led to the little building. We all knew about the church, the center of so many stories. Supposedly, that building remained mostly intact after all these years; a vestige of old superstitions lurking in our new ones kept folks from smashing it up.
“Fine, but I want to show you guys something first. Something my brother told me about.” Dan pointed the barrel of his shotgun into a thick patch of inky shadow ahead and strode forward.
Most of the big trees in Old Town were gone, knocked down for safety, but saplings, crooked grass, and snaking weeds groped toward the sky all around. I was surprised at how well I could see with just the moon. With the bright searchlights back at the wall, the rest of the night world look as black as spent oil, but the hunched backs of old houses, broken business, and other buildings rubbed against the blue night and field of stars in plain detail as we walked through Old Town.
I’d heard some stories, mostly from Grandpa, that the bigger cities had drained the plains of their population long before the end. In the meantime, the big corporate farms finished off the aquifers and sucked the land dry. Without water, there wasn’t much reason to live in the flat land. Without too many people out here, there couldn’t be too many of them, the zombies. Hell, I’d only seen maybe a dozen in my life, but they left the taint of decay smeared across everything. You could see it all over Old Town.
As we stumbled down the split asphalt of an ancient street, Dan reached into his pack, rummaged around, and produced a jar of booze. It was nothing but rot-gut moonshine, but all we had because most drivers wouldn’t risk a run through the wastelands just to drop off some beer for a bunch of hold-out hicks. That’s the way Grandpa painted it, anyway. The scavengers in the wastelands seemed worse than a whole stockyard of zombies.
Dan screwed off the lid, tossed back a swig, and shook his head. “Not bad, boys.” He slowed, passed the jar to Davin.
“No,” Davin said, waving Dan off with the barrel of his gun. “Not until I’m kicked back in the church.”
“Nate?”
“Sure,” I said, cupping the jar in one hand while clutching my own shotgun in the other. The gun had my great-grandfather’s; Grandpa said he used it on birds—quail and pheasant mostly—as a boy. I’d only fired the thing a few times myself, mostly at wooden targets that wouldn’t bite. The guns did make me nervous—we were warned against using them as the report would rouse any undead in the area. I tossed back a swig from the jar. Damn, that shit tasted awful, but the warm humming feeling that grew out to my finger tips after a few swigs kept me going.
“Did hear about Stacy’s cousin, over in New Colby?” Dan asked, reaching for the jar.
“Yeah,” Davin muttered.
“Gawd, I never want to see another burning in my life.” Dan spat on the street.
Davin’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t want those superstitious old bastards to set me on fire when I kick off.”
I shook my head and fingered Dad’s old lighter in my pocket, fighting a shiver born of too many burnings. Mom, for one, after Melina was born. Too much blood, not enough medical knowledge, a bad mix of both. Dad tried to explain the need for a burning, the whole ritual, but I wanted none of it. I know you can’t just bury the dead anymore—paranoia, hysteria, and the real likelihood that the undead will sniff out a fresh corpse. When I was five, watching my mother burn to black ash, none of that rationalization amounted to a hill of shit. Grandpa whispered something about Viking warriors in my ear that day, trying to cheer me. “Great big pyres, big as a house,” he said, “it was pride, not fear and shame made ‘em build those pyres.”
Dan clicked on the lantern he’d taped to the barrel of his gun. “Here we are fellas. Used to serve food here. C’mon.” The light reached out, starting to grope the heavy shadow inside a mashed up brick building. I’d never heard anything about that particular spot, and I couldn’t figure what he wanted us to see.
Rows of benches stretched down a tiled hallway; some broken with bits tossed askew to the grid. Across a counter to our right sat the old kitchen, a steel grill and some broken cash machines. A few coins littered the floor, shining on the floor like dead minnows. The whole place rested under a thick dust like frost on a January morning.
“Ssssh.” Dan, walking just ahead of us, waved back with one hand. My heart started pumping against my ribcage until I thought it would spring free and skitter across the floor. I heard why Dan shushed us then—I could smell the thing, too, a rotten, fishy smell mixed with mud.
Davin pushed forward, raising his gun. “Dan, give me a little,” he whispered, and Dan obliged, poking his flashlight around the corner.
“Use a baton,” I whispered, fearing gun’s report and its siren song to other zombies. I reached down to my side and fingered the black rod hanging on my belt.
Davin glanced back at me and uttered a low, “naw.”
Then I saw it, a little thing, bobbing its matted blonde head up and down as it munched on something—most likely a rat or stray cat. Davin clicked his tongue to get its attention, and the thing rotated to face us. It was a girl, six or seven maybe, although she could’ve been six or seven for years now. The undead didn’t age like us. Her little mouth, blotted with blood, opened and a little moaning sound trickled out. I closed my eyes for a moment and saw my sister’s face.
Davin raised the gun, butted the stock against his shoulder, and said, “bye, bye sissy.” The building shook with his report, frozen for an instant in a muzzle flash, and settled under Dan’s dim yellow beam. Its body slumped over on the ground, headless.
“Nice shootin’, Tex.” Dan thumped Davin on the back. Davin nodded, fished in his pocket for a folding knife, and carved a notch in the stock. I staggered to bench and held my head.