Neighborhood Watch (3 page)

This was probably what a concussion felt like.

I couldn't remember getting out of the car, but there I was. My shirt whipped about me in the wet murk as two figures moved nearby. One was larger, the cop, and the other was the same height, but thinner. Like a black, spindly form.

“Stay back!” the officer shouted.

I saw his gun fire and then the thinner form crumbled. He fired again.

I was over by his side in a second, looking down. The skeletal face, tattered clothing and blackish flesh of the creature were familiar. But it wasn't the same.

And that's when I knew that the other one—the most dangerous one—was still out there. “We have to go,” I said hurriedly. I was already running back into the opaque grey, expecting the cop to follow. A second later, I stopped. I looked back and waited and then I crept a foot forward. I was surely in the road, I had to be—but where?

The outline of the overturned police car caught my eye. Impossibly, my bike was still inside and intact. Although the door had been nearly torn off, the bike had been undamaged. I pulled it out awkwardly, steadying against the rain and wind. A second after that, I was pedaling.

The human body could only take so much, but the exercise didn't bother me. I was a natural athlete in an unassuming body. A freak. I didn't participate in organized sports and I didn't measure my achievements on a stat sheet. If there was a mold, I didn't fit it. Real athletes were supposed to be loud. They were supposed to be popular and sociable; they were supposed to have tons of friends and get tons of girls. They
weren't
supposed to be quiet, so quiet that nobody knew how good they were. So quiet, that few even knew they existed...

But I was a freak nonetheless, and as I pedaled like the endurance machine I was, I knew
:
the weather could not deter me. The forces of nature could not tire me; the adrenaline was alive in my veins, and so into that endless grey I'd continue.

Somewhere in my wake, the cop's scream carried on the wind.

***

“We're not going out there, goober.”

I had made it, all the way. I could have been dead like the two cops. I could have been a zombie for all I knew, but I wasn't. I had dodged death—
fled
death, more like. Why it hadn't chased me down was beyond me. Part of me thought that it simply hadn't seen me. That it had been... distracted.

My brother and his friend Sam were sitting around the inside of his empty palace. This was the family room with a giant hearth that Sam's mom had personally chosen. There were high ceilings and giant carpets and glimmering chandeliers. It was like a museum, and to my surprise, Mitch and Sam had yet to ruin it.

Outside the windows the rain and flood waged on. But they were slowing. Even though the fuzz in my head was not. That strange, warm feeling in my head. It
had
to be a concussion.

“Bill, you need to get a damn phone man.” My brother was no longer joking or jovial. He was tense and serious, and Sam was as quiet as I had ever seen. On the large mahogany table before us, rested Sam's laptop and a small local map of suburban Dansbury. The bongs and the booze were nowhere to be seen.

“No phones are getting reception,” I said. “When did you first see it?”

“On our way over here,” Sam said, his eyes not moving from the computer screen.

Mitch nodded. “Just like you said goober, black and skinny and all rabid lookin.' It was movin fast too.” My brother shot his a friend a dark look. “See, I told you they could move fast.”

I swallowed, because I didn't want to frighten them any further—but I had to. Hell, I didn't want to frighten myself any further, but they had to know. If we were going to do this, we all had to know. You couldn't jump into this blindly.

“There's not just one,” I said.

Sam looked over, his face expressionless. “This could be an apocalypse...”

Mitch shook his head. “Shut up man.” He turned to me. “How do you know, it could just be the same one, right?”

“It's not,” I breathed. “I saw a different one on Landbourne. It was stronger, faster.” I imagined those yellow piercing eyes. They were so familiar...

“The infection could be airborne you know, if we go back into that wind we could be
fucked
. It could already be in us, just dormant.” Sam's eyes continued to scan the 'Zombiepedia' website.

“Dude,
pleaaase
don't say that shit...” My brother looked exhausted. “What do you mean it was different goober? How?”

“It was different,” I repeated. “More muscles, so much faster... it just, it—it
ripped
through the cop.”

“We're
fucked
guys, you hear me? We're
fucked
sville. They're gonna multiply and then they're gonna come here. And then what?” Sam turned away from the computer, his nervous laughter filling the air. “What, so.. so we're to go at these things with my AEGs? You think an air-soft gun's gonna work on these guys? You really think that?”

He was shaking his head, denying our ambition, our drive, our ability to survive. “We're
fucked
sville and that's that. They're gonna come here, to my mansion on the hill, they're gonna surround us like in the movies, and then we're getting eaten alive.
Alive
. ”

“We can't stay here.” I said softly.

“We're not going out
there
, goober,” my brother repeated. “I told you, I don't care what..
Samwise
here says, we're not gonna go out th—

“I survived,” I said then. My brother and Sam shared a look. “I've been on my bike riding through this storm, barely seeing what's 10 feet ahead of me, but I'm here.”

“
Instaweather
doesn't even recognize it,” Sam said then.

“What do you mean they don't 'recognize' it?”

Sam's eyes were blank as he looked away from his computer. “It's an isolated cell.” He turned the computer screen so that we could all see. The stormtracker showed a map of our entire county, with surrounding counties just visible north, east, and south. There were no indicators of rain, or torrential downpour. In fact, almost the entire radar looked clear. Our community, our stretch of suburbia, was just a blip on the radar...

Sam's mouth drooped half open. “It's like... it literally exists
only
over Dansbury...”

I breathed. Another piece of the puzzle had been introduced, but we were only getting further from the picture. All of this was coming together, impossibly, to create what we now had. The zombies, the weather, the festival—none of this was random. Or was it?

“We have to take the fight to them, stop them before they infect more.”

My brother shook his head but his words were gone.

“We have to take the fight to them,” I repeated “There's only one strong one that I've seen. The one I saw in Mr. Clark's house was fast but not super... I saw the cop kill one!”

“How do you know it was dead?” Sam challenged.

I shook my head. “It was dead, it was on the ground. It was a  normal one.”

“But how do you know?” Sam said.

My brother began to talk but Sam was already rattling away: “Because if they're not dead, if they're not
100%
certifiably dead, they'll come for you. They'll crawl for you, they'll walk millions of miles, through lava and... and record rain storms, for
you
.”

“We have to kill them.” I said with an air of finality. I was tired of others ignoring me, lecturing me, telling me what had to be done as if they knew. Well I knew. I knew more than either of these two because I had seen more than them. I had seen the zombie at our cul-de-sac, and I had seen the one the cop killed and the one at Mr. Clark's house. I had seen three distinct... 'creatures,' and I knew what I was talking about.

“I saw a liquid at Mr. Clark's house,” I explained. “I think he started it.”

My brother rubbed his head. “Great, crazy science man decides to start zombie apocalypse. Wonderful headline for your papers, goober.”

“He picked a good day to unleash,” Sam said.

I looked out the window, again to that everlasting storm. I could still remember the picture of that woman on Mr. Clark's kitchen table. Right aside the glass of dark liquid.

“Who knows if Mr. Clark intended this,” I said.

“Well what else would he
intend
, brother?”

“I dunno.”

My brother looked over to Sam. “Samwise, your dad's in security, right? Does he have any weapons or anything?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Yea, my dad just keeps shotguns and bazookas lying around.”

“Come on man, think,” my brother urged. “He's gotta have something we can use.”

Sam seemed at a loss. My heart sank. I knew that if we couldn't figure out something fast, Sam's terrifying prediction would come true. Our communities weren't that big as far as total area, but they were crowded. My paper routes varied, but many of them were one series after another of snaking turns and endless loops.

“I got it!” Sam said then. “What about this?”

He raced off to some part of the house, much like I had done earlier in my own house. They had laughed at me then, but now nobody was laughing. We all knew what we were up against. And by knowing this, we knew—truly—that we
didn't
know anything.

Zombies weren't supposed to be real. How could we just read websites about something that had never existed? How could we ever trust these 'facts' about a creature, a being, an undead person? For all we knew, we were up against the shit storm of the century.

What if they started flying? Could zombies fly?

Hopefully this question was more stupid than scary...

“Here we are!” Sam declared. He placed the nondescript bronze container onto the desk. Reaching in with obvious care, he extracted the find. They were goggles, but not just any goggles. They were headgear. Fancy, sturdy, cutting-edge goggles.

“Infrared,” Sam said to my brother's awestruck face. “Legit shit, man.” He handed one to my brother as he fastened the other one around his eyes.

I looked from Sam to my brother.  “Will they work?” I asked.

“Definitely,” Sam said. “Zombies give off heat.”

I nodded. I had read the same thing but I wanted others to say it. According to
fvza.org
,
the body temperature ranged between 65 and 75 degrees
in colder temperatures.

“We were wrong about the head,” Sam said. He was already back on his laptop, goggles on but not activated.  “Even if they're missing ¾ of their brain, they'll keep coming. You have to completely sever the brain stem to kill them.”

“And they won't bleed out,” I added.

“No,” Sam agreed. “Their circulation is too slow, it's why their blood is so thick. You can't even disable them long... says here they can still walk after 24hrs even if their spine was severed.”

“Wonderful,” my brother said.

I sighed. “The one I saw was muscular but super sharp and bony too.”

“Did it have flesh?” Sam asked.

“Not really.”

Sam frowned. “Doesn't add up. That would put the super zombie at stage 3, which is
7-9 months. How about hair and teeth and eyes? Was it missing an eye?”

“No.” I swallowed at the memory of the creature in the cul-de-sac. It had been anything
but
eyeless or toothless. Its teeth were razor sharp and its eyes... they had been a gleaming yellow. “No,” I said again, as if affirming to myself this mental image. “It definitely had eyes and tons of teeth. Like a piranha.”

Mitch  shook his head, exasperated. “
Like a piranha
. That's just jolly fuckin great. Sooner or later they
will
be piranhas, out there swimmin' in this shit.” He got up off the couch and tossed the goggles aside.

“Hey be careful with those!” Sam said.

Mitch was pacing back and forth. “So we got the infrared, but how do we kill 'em? We've still solved nothing.”

He turned to me. “Where the hell are the cops anyway?”

“Probably downtown,” I said.

“Probly inside, like everybody else,” Sam remarked. “I'm telling you, it's the smart thing to do. With these winds the zombies can smell us from over a mile away.”

Mitch jerked. “What the
fuck
are you talking about dude? Two minutes ago you were sayin' how they were gonna corner us in your house on the hill, now you wanna stay here? Which one is it?”

“There have to be others that know about this.” I said it out-loud, though I had meant to think it.

“Not necessarily,” said Sam, avoiding my brother's eyes. “This storm presents the perfect cover for a takeover...”

I thought about the cop car still sitting at the cul-de-sac, and the police car that had been attacked. Surely somebody had come across them...

Who was I kidding? Sam was right, there was probably nobody on the streets around here. The people on my road were likely all nestled up in their homes. It wasn't like they could see anything by looking out their windows anyway.

This was truly a storm of the ages.

But the questions remained. How many more were infected? Were zombies just breaking into homes all around us seeking humans? Were they smart or dumb? Coordinated or random? And what, oh what, was their weakness?

“There's only one thing we can do,” Sam said at last. He closed his computer and my brother's head shot up from his hands. He eyed his portly friend with momentary discretion, and then his eyes glistened and the cold realization took hold.

“We've gotta seek them out, and kill them,” my brother said flatly. “We have to find every last one, and kill it.”

I wanted to tell my brother that this had been my idea, and the only sensible idea, all along. Instead, I nodded my head as resolutely as possible. “We'll make it work,” I added, not knowing at all if we could. “We can do it.”

There was a sudden smirk on my brother's face as he and Sam shared a look. “Time to go
Zombies Ate My Neighbors
on these muthafuckas.”

***