Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse Read Online Free Page B

reason to go somewhere. These ones were pretty fast, though. If they hadn’t been running across the street, we wouldn’t have heard their shoes slapping on the ground and they might have gotten us. Instead, since it’s so quiet anymore, you could hear them coming across the road, and Carla turned around on the porch while I was standing on a metal garbage can looking through the transom – the only window on the first floor Dad hadn’t boarded over on both sides – to see if he was in there.
    Carla just said, “Shit, runners.”
    I turned around and looked, and sure enough, there were five of them coming across the street pretty fast in a lurching skip-hop kind of run. Anyway, you can’t really fight five fast zombies if there’s just two of you, and all we had were a baseball bat and a cheap-o “industrial” chef’s knife from the bar’s kitchen. My Dad’s kitchen knives are way better than the pieces of crap whoever cooked at the bar had to use, but that’s probably because Dad calls himself a “gourmet cook.” Mom says he just likes expensive kitchen gadgets.
    So, we had to haul off down Coates Street pretty fast, and then started cutting through some of the back yards. One thing I never really knew about Bridgeport before the zombies came was how many back yards had fences around them. It’s like all of them, practically. So, you have to do a lot of climbing, which is a good thing because the zombies aren’t so good at it. Unless you’re not very good, either, in which case you’ll end up like the guy from A2Z Batteries. He tried to get in the industrial center building the day after the group broke in, but there was nobody at the gate, and when he started to climb the fence a bunch of zombies got to him and pulled him off and tore him to pieces.
    We were sneaking through one yard when all of the sudden the back door to the house opens and an old guy leans out and starts waving one of those old-style revolver pistols in the air.
    “Over here, quick,” he said.
    Carla and I both stopped in our tracks, because nobody did this anymore. Not that anybody ever did, I guess. But, now? That’s when he pointed the gun past us into the yard behind his at the dozen or so slowpokes shuffling straight at us. And then we were inside his house and he bolted the back door with a metal rod that slid behind the door.
    He lived like my grandparents. All of his stuff was old tech, like he'd just chosen a year to quit updating his life. He had a tube TV with a VCR; a stereo system that played records, cassettes and CDs; a couch covered with handmade Afghan blankets; and an old style tan computer that sat on a small table in the corner of the dining room.
    We had been inside for about two minutes when the zombies started pawing at the back door we’d come through, trying to find something to grab on to and pull off, which is why everybody boards up the windows: they’ll just break right through if the glass ain’t strong. They can be relentless when they know there are living people inside somewhere. I saw one with a screwdriver one day but couldn’t figure out what it would do with it. Maybe something inside its old life told it the tool could be useful? They bang and scratch and pull at stuff until something gives way, and then they just pry their way in. That’s probably what happened to Desimone’s.
    The old man said his name was Paul and that he hadn’t talked to anybody since the zombie’s took over the town. His wife had been out getting some last-minute groceries and had never come back. Since then, he’d been stuck in his house, watching out the windows from the top floor at what little he could see on Hurst Street. Which was nothing, except maybe the occasional group of zombies shuffling down the street toward the sound of dirt bikes or gunfire. Every once-in-while he said he’d see someone coming or going from a house, although mostly he saw the random group of two or three people trying to break in