“Stay, Paul. It’s such a long way to fall.”
He shot her in the head.
She was right about one thing, Paul thought as he jumped. It was a long way down. If he survived, he’d have plenty of time to reflect.
His chute opened. Paul breathed deep. It took a long time to reach the ground, and Paul did indeed have plenty of time to reflect. And plenty of time to scream…
The birds stayed with him, hovering like a cloud, all the way to the bottom. When the pain became unbearable, shock took over, and Paul thought about Kresby again.
The plane fell. Paul fell. The birds fell with him. They all fell down together.
The plane crashed first.
THROUGH THE
GLASS DARKLY
The Rising
Day Twenty-Three
Modesto, California
Larry Roberts didn’t have to understand what was going on to understand what he was seeing. He looked into Hell, plain and simple. Hell, right on the other side of the glass.
Larry knew glass. When he wasn’t running his real estate business on the side, he was a plant manager for the Gallo Winery, producing bottles for the wine. And as another crack spiraled through the Humvee’s windshield, Larry paid attention. Obviously, he didn’t know as much about automotive glass as he did glass containers, but he knew enough. He knew it wouldn’t last much longer. All glass was basically made the same way, starting with the batch process, which mixed all the ingredients for the type of glass in production. In many ways, it was like mixing a cake, only on a much larger scale; ingredients being sand, soda ash, limestone, sulfur, and cullet. After cooking in a furnace at 3,000 degrees, it was then put it into a fore-hearth, which conditioned and evened out the glass for blowing. The glass was then put into molds and shaped. After it had been formed, it was annealed, to take the stress out of the glass. Larry wished the windshield had been annealed a little bit longer, because it was all that stood between him and the things outside.
The Humvee was upside down, its tires sticking up in the air like four dead legs. Larry didn’t know what had happened. They’d been cruising along, the soldier and he, looking for a way out of town. The zombies had barricaded the streets, turning Modesto into a giant trap. With General Dunbar dead, killed in that explosion in Corona, the troops had lost focus. The regular soldiers were drifting away, and the civilian recruits, people like Larry, drifted with them. It was either that, or wait for the zombies to kill them.
He and the soldier, whose name was Higgins, had been barreling down the main drag, weaving through the stalled, burning cars, and running down everything that got in their way—both living and dead. Higgins had been telling Larry about a man in Fort Bragg. He and his buddy had shot both the man and his dog. In the days since then, Higgins felt guilty about the act.
Larry was about to reply when something exploded beneath the driver’s side front tire. The Humvee shook, and then flipped. The last thing Larry remembered was screaming, and he wasn’t sure if it was Higgins or himself.
When he opened his eyes again, he was upside down—and the zombies were all around him. Dunbar’s scattered forces and those they’d been protecting fought a running battle with the dead. So far, they hadn’t noticed him. Maybe if he kept still…
A gunshot went off to the right. A zombie stumbled backward, its head raining down on the pavement and splattering across the passenger’s side door. Larry felt the bile rise in his throat. Higgins was dead. The barrel of his M-16 had speared the back of his neck on impact, and rammed up into his brain.
At least he won’t be coming back, Larry thought. He shuddered.
It began to rain.
In the street, a pack of dead dogs brought down a fleeing Private, ripping him limb from limb as he squirmed beneath them. A red-faced, panting Sergeant stumbled by, hands clasped around his bleeding stomach, dragging his entrails behind him. Giggling, an undead child darted out from behind a newspaper box, grabbed the length of intestine, and wrapped it around a telephone pole. The injured Sergeant walked on, oblivious. The cord grew taught, then snapped. The Sergeant lurched forward a few more steps, and then fell on his face. A woman screamed; her body covered with dead birds. Incredibly, a zombie elephant charged another Humvee. The soldier on the back brought it down with his mounted fifty-caliber, before being shot himself by another zombie.
Bullets chewed up the pavement. Chunks of cement bounced off the windshield, shattering it more. The stench wafted in through the hole: decay, cordite, burning fuel and flesh. The screams became louder.
Slowly, carefully, Larry felt around for his pistol. He couldn’t find it, and he was afraid to turn completely and chance attracting attention. His fingers closed over the neck of a wine bottle. It hadn’t broken during the wreck, and more amazingly, there was still liquid inside. He lifted the bottle to his lips and drained it in one gulp. A child was screaming. He drowned the noise out.
Larry turned the empty bottle over in his hands and smiled. He’d made this, in another time, another life. The first thing he noticed was the little
“g” in a circle, which stood for Gallo. The knurling on the bottom was well formed, as was the pushed up bottom. He checked the baffle and verified that it wasn’t swung. There were no critical defects. His crew had done well. He wondered where they were now.In the street, a zombie horse galloped by, a screaming man hanging from the saddle. His hands beat at the creature’s flank. A homemade gasoline bomb slammed into a building, and the structure erupted into flame. Artillery whistled overhead, then crashed nearby. Larry felt the concussion before he heard the explosion. It rattled his teeth, his chest, and the windshield.
The glass finally gave way, showering his upside down face with jagged chunks. Larry slipped his seatbelt off and sat upright.
Ten feet away from him, an elderly corpse sliced an unconscious soldier’s penis off with a pair of tin snips. It bent its head to the spurting stump and drank, as if at a water fountain. Then, seeming to sense Larry’s presence, its head pivoted towards him.
“Hello, Meat.”
“Shit.” Frantic, Larry glanced around for the missing pistol.
“Look at you,” the zombie teased. “Sitting inside that tin can just like a Vienna sausage.”
Pulse racing, Larry scrambled backward. Shards of glass ripped into his palms. He ignored them. The zombie charged. Larry held the bottle he’d manufactured up to ward it off. He saw it coming through the glass.
Then it was upon him and the glass grew dark.
A MAN’S HOME
IS HIS CASKET
The Rising
Day Twenty-Four
Silver Bay, Minnesota
H Michael Casper didn’t go outside anymore. Not that he had much before. Silver Bay had no cultural activities. H and his wife, Leen, went to Duluth and Two Harbors for that. They did much of their shopping via the internet, and bought groceries off a whole foods coop truck that made the weekly trek from Madison, Wisconsin.
H firmly believed that a man’s home was his castle.
He didn’t go outside now because everything he needed was here. Amazingly, after twenty-four days, the power was still on. He had plenty of food and water (although he longed for some spicy Asian take-out), tequila, two cases of St. Paulie Girl Dark and a six pack of Spaten Optimator), weapons (a semi-automatic .22, which he’d used to kill some feral cats that strayed onto his property and attacked his own cats, and a homemade driftwood cane that he kept next to the front door), radio and television (the satellite wasn’t sending signals—although he occasionally heard snippets of phantom broadcasts on the radio), movies (luckily, because it might be a while before Netflix delivered again), his guitar (even at age fifty-two, H still maintained his tenor and awesome falsetto), music (Rundgren, Champlin, and that ol’ albino, Edgar Winter), and his books. Lots and lots of books…