Steampunk Zombie

The longer they sat there, the more Adrian’s eyes adjusted. He could make out the petrified form of his younger cousin sitting a few feet from him. Her eyes were dry, her lids seemingly frozen open as she bore into the dirt. Her boots and gloves were no longer a pristine white, but instead were soiled with dirt and splotches of malodorous blood. Her once shiny brown curls now lay dull and matted across her face. The chipper version that Adrian had once been riding with was now gone, leaving behind a horrified shell of a terrified woman.

“How long has it been?” Rebecca finally murmured. Her voice cracked.

Adrian strained his neck so that he could look down the alley. A glimmer of light was slowly beginning to inch its way into the darkness. “By how much the sun has moved west, I’d say it’s been about three hours,” Adrian answered.

“It’s so quiet,” the woman whispered. The words barely made it to Adrian’s ears.

The town had stilled. There were no more high-pitched screeches or deep gunshots. The rapid stampede of shuffling footsteps no longer shook the ground as people ran. The horses were silent. Adrian’s legs had stiffened. They threatened to cramp as he worked to stand. He placed a rough hand on the top of a barrel to cautiously lift himself up. He looked towards both ends of the alley. Seeing nothing, he offered a hand to his cousin. She hesitated, but eventually accepted the lift.

The alley had been nothing more than a rectangular hampered space between two wooden buildings. The roofs above overlapped so that no sun could break up the damp and musty space in-between. An amalgam of horse piss and rainwater made a small valley of mud through the space. And now a deep crimson had been added to the mix. Adrian tried leading Rebecca through the liquids. The bottoms of his pants were now sullied.

“The horses are gone!” Rebecca’s voice was strained.

But Adrian hadn’t been looking for the horses. His sight had been set on the mass grave of bodies spread out through the wide street. There was no true pattern: a few limbs missing here and there with a neck or liver pulled apart on occasion. He kept Rebecca tucked behind him as his brown eyes picked through the bodies. They settled on one that was still moving. It was a man. Or, it had been a man. His middle had been flattened, skin pressed into the mud where its belly had been torn open. His own intestines were tangled in his fingers. But his eyes were wide, his jaw popping open and closed. He was growing, too. Patches of his hair were missing. His skin was a sickly translucent gray. Adrian recognized him as the feral son of the town’s barber.

“He is still alive,” noted Adrian.

“We need to get out of here, Adrian. I don’t want to die that way.”

Rebecca was the first to move from the alley. She pushed past her cousin until the warmth of the sun touched her body. Rebecca surveyed the area. She delicately removed the dirty gloved from her right hand before sticking two fingers into her mouth to release a loud whistle. A horse neighed in the distance. It wasn’t long before Gizmo came charging down the street. His hooves kicked dirt up behind him.

“Whoa, boy,” Rebecca murmured. She grabbed the Appaloosa’s reigns and pulled him close. She pressed her forehead against his. She then turned to face her cousin. “Yours is down the road.”

Adrian followed her extended finger down to the building just across from the general market. His thoroughbred was huffing near a pile of corpses. Adrian cautiously moved away from his cousin as she mounted her horse. The man took his time gazing down at the man whose fingers were tangled in his own innards. His yellowed irises narrowed. He screamed, throwing his hands out to grab at Adrian’s boots. A piece of intestine landed on the leather toe. Adrian jumped, quickly moving away from the thing that was trying to follow him across the dirt.

As the man reached for his horse, a woman came lunging at him from the front door of a store. Her bonnet had been ripped in two, a bloody gouge covering the right side of her face so that her eyeball was hanging by a strip of muscle. Adrian dropped low, ducking under her arms. He grabbed at the horn of the saddle and quickly swung himself onto his horse. Rebecca came galloping up behind them. Together, they urged their horses forward, racing from the town and into the field of tall, yellow grass.

Rebecca looked over her shoulder. She let out a short laugh. Adrian looked at her with a puzzled look. “You’re laughing?” he breathed, heavily.

“They can’t keep up,” Rebecca cried. “The danger is behind us now.”

Adrian looked back. Only a few of the beings had tried to follow them. Their pace was slow, their own brittle ankles hitting against each other as they tried to run. An insane glint sparked in all of their eyes. It was unlike anything Adrian had ever seen in his life. It seemed like a horrible skin infection that affected their mental state, making them slow yet forceful.

Despite the distance between the cousins and the town, they did not slow their pace. They continued to dig their heels inside the sides of the horses to the point that their own sweat was landing on the skin of the animals. It was the inhumane cry just a quarter of a mile from the farm that caused them to stop. The trees were opening up into the clearing that led to Adrian’s mother’s farm. They cantered down the trail.

“Adrian…”

The Hereford bull was snorting. He stomped, spinning around the corral as three infected humans clambered over the fencepost. The tough, white skin around the jugular groove of his drooping neck swung back and forth as the animal backed into the far side of the corral. His parted his thick, slobbering lips to let out a low bellow. He dug his right hoof into the dirt, creating a divot in the earth. It was a warning stance, but the three infected humans continued to move in on him.

The animal lunged, plowing his hard poll into the gut of one of the infected. The human made no noise. Instead, it latched onto a tuff of the animal’s skin before burying its face into its neck. The animal cried out and the other two began grabbing at its shoulder. It wasn’t long before its white fur turned a darker red than the rest of its body.

Rebecca slapped the side of Gizmo. The horse took off across the dirt road. Adrian followed suit. Before the horses had even made it to a full stop, both cousins were scrambling up the porch steps. A feathered trail of blood covered the white porch floorboards. The screen of the front door was torn. A crash erupted inside.

“Rebecca, wait!”

But it was too late. The woman had already run through the broken door. “Mother! Jake! Elizabeth!” she was yelling, desperately searching for her family.

Adrian breathed deeply. This house had never brought him comfort. For twenty-seven years it had been his cage, stories of numerous rooms that held secrets he wished never to divulge. Whatever was inside destroying it now was welcomed. But for the sake of Rebecca’s fragile mind, Adrian knew he couldn’t let her run through it alone.

He stepped over the wooden threshold onto the pine wood floors. Directly in front of him was a tall oval mirror. There was a tiny spider web crack at the top that had not been there when he had left that afternoon. To the right was a staircase with dark twisted spindles and a maroon carpet runner with a paisley design. A similar color of blood was splashed against the wall. Adrian passed it. He walked down the narrow hallway into where the kitchen was. The long table that was once neatly arranged to hold platters of food and goblets of wine was now a mess. Adrian sidestepped a casserole spread across the floor.

Heavy breathing caused him to veer left. He saw the huffing figure of his nineteen-year-old cousin. He was a young man who had always taken pride in his looks, often keeping his brown hair slicked back and under a top hat. It was now disheveled, chunked strands falling across his pale face. His white drop shoulder dress shirt had been ripped open in front to reveal his smooth chest. A deep gouge just under where the left side of his ribs was had turned black, dark veins running from where the skin had been ripped open.

“Jake…,” Adrian murmured, taking a step back. He slowly raised his hands so that they were held out in front of him.

Jake screamed, dropping his jaw an extra two inches more than he should have been able to. His bones popped. He threw himself over the marble island, pushing pots and pans to the floor with a loud crash. Adrian grabbed the butcher knife from off of the table.

“Jake, it’s me!” Adrian tried again. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

The teen hissed, black gunk squeezing from between his rotted teeth. He pushed his chin forward and dived once more. Adrian jumped to the right. Jake ran head first into the wall. The glass inside the wooden china cabinet shattered from the blow. Jake screamed. His nose had broken. Black liquid was dropping from each nostril.

The injury didn’t stop him. It seemed to make fuel his fury. He pushed off against the wall, his black nails nicking the rose colored wallpaper. Jake reached for Adrian. The older man pushed the knife forward into the gut of the petite teen, but he still continued to grab for Adrian. Adrian pulled the knife back out, narrowing missing a bite to the neck. He heavily shoved it upwards, the blade embedding itself through the teen’s bottom jaw into the back of his throat. He made a choking noise before going rigid and falling to the ground.

Adrian shuttered. He looked down at what his cousin had become. Adrian felt sorry for the boy. He had been smart with a promising future in medicine. He was supposed to be the one grandchild to fix his family’s reputation and now he lay dead in a pile of plum pudding, a hollow expression forever frozen across his wrinkled face.

The heavy footsteps of his cousin’s boots coming from upstairs caused Adrian to push aside the history of his family. He ran into the living room where a wooden chest sat to the left of the brick fireplace. He pushed the lace doily from the top, knowing the two silver candlesticks down with it. He unlocked the brass latch and threw open the top so that it crashed into the corner of the fireplace. He pushed through the books until he came to the cow skin bag at the bottom. He untied the string to reveal a two-barrel shotgun. Its sides were adorned with interlocking gold gears. Adrian quickly loaded the gun. He stood, turning to see his mother standing in the archway.

“Mother…” he whispered.

His mother has always been a portly woman. Her thick hips and wide middle had been what his father had been drawn to. Now, she looked sickly, her collarbone protruding from her sunken skin. The lace collar on her cornflower blue dress was now loose around her neck. Splotches of bright red and dark brown blood were speckled up to her elbows. The same pattern adorned her fat lips. Her dark golden hair was coming out from the bun that she had pulled to the back of her round head. Her eyes were yellowing. There was no hair on her eyebrows, just two bows set in a permanent scowl. She hissed, mucus spraying from her mouth like the Hereford bull.

Adrian’s fingers tightened around the barrel of the shotgun. “Mother, please,” he murmured. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

His mother shuffled one foot forward. She threw the right side of her body frontward as though it could not move on its own. Her jaw snapped open and closed. She paused. Then snapped them open and close again. She heaved her body into the living room. Adrian brought the gun up, warningly. His mother didn’t stop. He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. The force pushed him back a bit and his nose soon swelled up with white powder. His mother screamed. He opened his eyes to see only the top of her right arm still attached to her body. Blood squirted from the opening. Pieces of muscle hung from around her bone.

Adrian’s face turned green. The blood from the cattle births he had seen was nothing compared to seeing his own mother coming at him with a gushing limb. He tried pushing himself further against the wall, the edge of the brick fireplace digging into his back.

“You have to shoot her in the head,” Rebecca said. She was standing in archway, face void of emotion.

Adrian’s mother turned towards the voice, giving the man an easy target. He gulped, holding the gun up once more. His mother jumped towards Rebecca. Adrian pulled the trigger, the back of her skull erupted. Pieces of bone bounced on the floor as the woman dropped forward. Blood had shot across Rebecca’s face. She didn’t move and neither could Adrian.

“My father is upstairs,” she stated. “Without a head.”

Adrian dropped the shotgun. It fell into the pool of blood that was now forming in the middle of the room. He stepped over his mother’s immobile body, his eyes glued to her. He reached out for Rebecca and turned her before she could see Jake’s body by the table. They moved into the hallway. There were two infected humans trudging up the porch steps and headed towards the open door.

“They must have been attracted to the noise!” cried Rebecca in a panic.

Adrian pushed her forward. “Go upstairs!” he ordered.

Adrian slammed the door shut as Rebecca moved past him to go up the stairs. He quickly twisted the lock of the front door and slid the brass chain across the frame. He felt the weight of the two beings as they threw themselves against the door. One punched through the glass, shards hitting the floor where Adrian stood. The man backed up with eyes wide. He turned back towards the hallway, racing into the dinning room where he grabbed the knife from out of his cousin’s jaw. He went back to the door, thrusting the blade into the forehead of the infected human whose head was pushing through the remaining pieces of glass. He did the same to the second one after the first fell.

His boots echoed over each step of the staircase. His cousin was standing at the top. Adrian grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her into his room. He shut the door and locked it behind them. Both were breathing heavy, chests heaving as their lungs struggled to keep up with their paranoia.

Rebecca let herself fall onto the small bed. The bedsprings creaked as she pulled herself against the brass bedpost. She folded her hands in her lap, finally looking up at Adrian with a broken smile. Adrian walked towards her. He dropped the bloody butcher knife on the nightstand before sitting down next to his cousin on the dark blue quilt. He pulled her into his chest, his right arm squeezing her shoulder.

“There’s at least one more out there,” Adrian finally spoke. “But if we keep quiet, hopefully he will move on.”

“Unless my mother, sister, brothers and all of your slaves got away, there’s more than just one, Adrian,” Rebecca sighed.

“I want to go back into town.”

Rebecca pulled away from her cousin so that she could get a good look at him. “Why?” he frowned.

“I want to go through that stagecoach; see if there’s anything in there that will tell us where it came from. Maybe then we could know what happened or where this thing came from,” the man answered.

“But…why?” Rebecca repeated, her brows furrowing together.

“It’s better than hiding away up here, Rebecca. I don’t know what these things are. I’ve never seen them before. What would the purpose be of us living in uncertainty alone, when at any moment more of those things could come back here?” wondered the man.

Rebecca sighed. “I guess.”

“It’s like they were still living.”

“That’s not what living is, Adrian. That was something far greater than a sick life.”

“My own mother didn’t even know who I was. She looked at me, but she didn’t see me,” Adrian said.

“…I’m sorry you had to shoot her. Guess in a way, I don’t want to find my mother,” Rebecca softly admitted.

Adrian strained his neck so that he could look out his open window. He couldn’t see any of the Hereford herd. A few cows were lying in the field, bodies still and devoured. It wasn’t long before the smell consumed the room. It was deep and musty, a putrid combination of feces and decaying flesh.

“It’s getting dark. We will sleep here tonight, then head into town in the morning,” Adrian concluded.

“What about the horses?” Rebecca asked with a sudden fear.

“Gizmo is smart. If he sees danger he will take off and my horse will follow. You know how to call him back,” Adrian assured his cousin.

The woman nodded, seemingly satisfied with his answer. She burred her face into her cousin’s firm chest, her hands balled into sweaty fists against the fabric of Adrian’s shirt. He ran his fingers through her tangled hair and watched the sun set through the open window.