Troll made a new home for himself, a new life. And when the world fell apart above, he figured the apocalypse was just catching up to everyone else. Pausing again in his ruminations, Troll sniffed the air, making sure there were no zombies around. Their stench usually gave them away, even through the thick walls of the shelter. The coast smelled clear. The only corpse was Sylva’s, still lying in the corner because Troll was too exhausted to haul him out. The attacks were increasing in frequency, even down here beneath the city. So far, the undead contingent had been mostly four-legged. A few dead humans had shown up in the tunnels—homeless people who were killed topside and then returned for their friends below. They were easy enough to fight. The zombie rats presented a bigger problem. They were smaller, sneakier, and their numbers multiplied faster. He’d seen them swarm over people, stripping them to the bone within seconds. Whenever he left the shelter, he carried a metal spray can full of gasoline and a lit torch. This makeshift flamethrower had kept the rats at bay so far.It might have worked on Sylva too, if he’d had the nerve to try.
Mark Sylva was one of Troll’s closest friends—or perhaps, the closest thing he had to a friend. Originally from Boston, the younger man had drifted south, going from city to city, staying in various soup kitchens and shelters. He was schizophrenic; never had enough money for medicine or a family to take care of him. Eventually, he’d ended up in Baltimore’s underground. Troll had sort of adopted him.
This morning, feverish, dehydrated, and suffering from dysentery and a nasty bite on his thigh—a wound inflicted by a zombie rat—Sylva had begged Troll to kill him.
Troll shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Please,” Sylva moaned. Bloody sputum had dried on his chin. “I’m dying anyway, man. I don’t want to go out like this.”
“You’re not dying,” Troll lied. “We just need to get some more liquids in you, and I need to find some antiseptic for that—”
“Fuck the antiseptic!” Sylva coughed. His entire body shook. Yellow-white pus oozed from his swollen thigh. “Grab a pipe and bash my head in, Troll.”
“No. I can’t.”
“You have to. It hurts.”
“I can’t do it. Please don’t ask me to.”
“You used to help people,” Sylva said. “You told me that. You used to help people who were in pain. That was what you lived for.”
“But this is different.”
“No, it’s not. You can help everyone else, but you can’t help me?”
“That’s not fair!”
“Why?”
“Because I did help everyone else and none of it mattered. Look what happened in the end. I wasn’t much help to my daughter now was I?”
“So start again,” Sylva wheezed. “You want to forgive yourself for that? You want to live again?
Well then help me out, man. Kill me.”
Rather than responding, Troll got to his feet and grabbed a candle. He tipped the wick into the flame burning atop a second candle next to Sylva’s makeshift cot. The younger man’s flesh looked waxy in the flickering light.
“I’m going to look for something to clean that wound up with. Some medicine, too—something for your diarrhea. You rest. Try to drink some water while I’m gone. You need to stay hydrated.”
“Troll...”
“Rest. I’ll be back soon.”
Troll had spent the rest of the morning searching for supplies and battling the dead. When he returned, Sylva was gone. He’d left behind a note, scrawled on the back of a soup can label. It said that if Troll couldn’t kill him, then he’d do it himself. He didn’t want to suffer any longer, and he didn’t want to come back as one of them.
But he did, anyway.
Later that evening, while Troll read a Stephen Crane poetry book by candlelight, Sylva’s corpse came back. It opened the hatch door and lunged into the shelter, giggling like a child. The suicide method was immediately obvious. Sylva had cut his wrists and slashed at his throat, mistakenly believing that it would prevent him from returning. But it hadn’t.
“You should have killed me when you had the chance, Troll.”
“You’re right. I should have.”
After a brief struggle, Troll put him down again by driving a rusty railroad spike through the zombie’s head. Then he knelt over the body of his friend and wailed.
Not for the first time, Troll wanted to die. He wanted it with all of his being. But he couldn’t. Couldn’t summon the courage to end it all no matter how bad he felt. Couldn’t surrender to the rats or other zombies, no matter how badly he wanted to sometimes. His survival instinct always overrode those urges. All he could do was suffer while the world fell apart around him.
The end of the world? Hardly. Everyone had their own personal apocalypse. His world had ended the same day as his daughter’s life. He’d died with her. And all of the things that had happened since: the homelessness and hunger and sickness, and more recently, the zombies—everything that came after his pocket apocalypse?
This was just Hell.
Troll wanted to live again. Instead he was a ghost, haunting the underground. A living dead man battling the living dead. Maybe Sylva had been right. Maybe, if he embraced his purpose and found someone to help again, maybe then he could finally start living.
Several days later, he did. Her name was Frankie. And though he died while helping her, Troll died alive.
THE VIKING PLAYS
PATTY CAKE
The Rising
Day Fourteen
Detroit, Michigan
The air burned their lungs, thick with smoke from the fires—and the cloying miasma of the dead. Chino pushed a branch out of the way and peered through the bushes. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Don’t know.” King shrugged. “He ain’t a zombie. Looks more like a Viking.”
They studied the giant on the park bench. He was impressive; early forties but in good shape, well over six feet tall, decked out in tattoos and earrings. His hands clutched an M-1 Garand, the barrel still smoking from the round he’d just drilled into a zombie. The creature sprawled on the ground ten feet away—minus its head. The grass and pavement were littered with more bodies. An assortment of weapons lay scattered on the bench: two more rifles, four grenades, a dozen handguns, and boxes of ammunition for each. Next to those was a large backpack, filled with bottled water and food. The Viking sat like a statue, his eyes roving and watchful. Another zombie closed in on him from the right. The rifle roared and the creature’s head exploded.
The Viking never left the bench. He brought down three more before the rest of the creatures fell back. From their vantage point, Chino and King heard one of the monsters ordering others to find guns. Several of them raced off.
The Viking began muttering to himself. “Patty cake, patty cake…”
Chino crouched back down. “The fuck is wrong with him? Why don’t he hide?”
“I don’t know,” King said. “Maybe he’s crazy.”
“Got an awful lot of firepower,” Chino observed.
“We could use that shit.”
“Word.”
The Viking fired another shot. From far away, deep inside the city, more gunfire echoed. Chino’s fingers tightened around his .357. “That the Army guys shooting?”
“Maybe,” King said. “They’ve been trying to take the city back. Held it up to the railroad tracks down on Eight Mile, but then they got overrun by them things.”