End of the Line

I could taste my heart in my mouth. The skin and blood weren’t the worst factors. By far it was the pulsating that it did, rapidly like the bullets flying out of a machine gun. My fingers shook in sync with my scared heart, shaking the gate of our temporary haven and gripping so tightly that the skin atop my knuckles burnt a bright and hot white. Even though I had seen countless amounts of zombies over the past three weeks, I couldn’t get over when they attacked us. Especially with a major portion of our group out there amongst them, with their rotting flesh and the soulless eyes.

“Donald, oh my God, Donald!” my mother whined from the back of the store. Sobs were released in quiet bouts, careful not to draw too much attention to the back of the store. Until recently, I hadn’t heard my mom cry so many times as I had being in the middle of this war. The war of the undead versus the living. We were living in fear of them in abandoned stores with guns clutched in one hand and our families in the other—could you guess which side was winning? We didn’t even know if there were people alive outside of the mall, or if there were other people inside of the mall with us!

But with the clanging of things against the floor, empty bullet shells and undifferentiated objects clacking against the tile, I registered that there were other people here—undead and alive, mingling in the dark halls of Towers Mall in a dance that would ultimately leave bodies on the floor. Whether they would change later or stay down would be determined once the dance finished.

The sound of bullets escaping chambers rang in my ears and made the rest of my body shake. From behind me I could feel something move, so I tensed up in return, but it turned out to be only Frank. He clang to my body and buried his face into my neck, his teeth chattering, his cheeks cold with fear against my neck. Despite our love of horror films, Frank couldn’t keep his eyes on the fighting for the life of him. All of the blood and the screaming froze his core. The grunts of the undead were so much worse, though; sometimes he even recoiled into himself, staring almost blankly into the distance. Once, under a small advance of two or three zombies, Bob had to pull him back and take his spot to save his neck.

“Gerard! Where did Gerard go?” Bob barked, shooting a few rounds before realizing his gun was now empty. He looked from side to side, did a double take, and moved away from a zombie that teetered towards him while reloading his magazine. “And Eliza! Eliza!”

“Is Gerard the one with the black hair?” someone called.

“Yeah, that one!” Bob returned, and with a jubilant cry shot out and nailed the advancing zombie in the nose, as well as hitting the one staggering quickly behind it in the forehead. Both toppled over after their faces exploded in the slightest, the one in the back going out cold while the first one convulsed.

“He fell!” another person replied. I watched the outline of the person’s form move as it aimed a rifle of its own, causing a shell to zing out and pound into a zombie’s throat and then out, into one of the large white columns of the mall’s structure. Blood and decayed flesh sprayed out from the zombie’s body as it toppled to the ground, its head hitting the floor with a loud, echoing crunch.

I stood, frozen, as Bob gawked at the information. Then he cried out, “Down what? Where? Is someone helping him?” Glass broke in the distance, but no one seemed to catch it other than me.

“Down the escalator!” The same person as last time fired another shot and took down what looked to be the last zombie. He climbed out from behind his makeshift shield and wiped away sweat with a hand that shook clearly in the flashing warning lights.

Quickly, I grouped together enough courage to yell, “I’ll go look! Frank, you stay here, okay?” The look that swam around in Frank’s hazel eyes begged for me to stay, but he nodded his head despite himself. I staggered out of the store, nearly falling before getting out, and made my way towards the escalator. My mother screamed out for me to come back and vaguely I heard my father comfort her, telling her that I’d be alright and that she needed to keep quiet.

Bob met me at the rail of the escalator, swallowing hard as he peered over as far as he could. “I don’t see him. Did you two have anyone else with you? Please tell me you had someone else with you,” Bob spoke, licking his lips quickly. “Because if you didn’t…that means that there’s more zombies on the bottom floor and we have to go hide-and-go-seek down there.”

“Jeph—did Bert come down with us?” a tall, blond guy called, stepping carefully over the zombie’s bodies, avoiding their mouths and fingers in case they weren’t fully dead yet. He made it to the rail, as well, but propped his back against it to keep a watch on the bodies covering the floor like a rotting rug.

“Didn’t we tell him to turn around last minute? To guard the place with Dan?” Jeph whispered. In the flickering lights around us I saw tattoos inked into his skin. Silver studs in the flesh beneath his lower lip shined dully. He looked like the kind of guys that Gerard associated with. At that thought, my heart fell from my throat and down into my gut. “Unless he came down anyway…do you think he’d come down anyway?” They duo exchanged a few panicked looks before looking towards Bob, who had begun pacing a little

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit,” Bob repeated. As he did so, a gunshot rippled through the air and stirred the worry more. The look on Bob’s face made my hold my stomach in fear of becoming sick. “Toro? Toro! Where the fuck are you?”

“Back here—I’m fine.” Ray appeared from one of the darkest corners in sight, his forehead cut and dowsed in blood, which ran down his face like red paint. In result, the two new guys—Jeph and the blond—raised their guns. “It’s my blood. I fell over something and collided into a glass table. Nothing bit or scratched me,” he assured us, but the other guys lowered their guns hesitantly. As he stepped closer and into the dim lightly around us, I could see glass sticking to his shirt and out of his neck. There were a few slivers shimmering on his jacket sleeves, as well. Mockingly they shined at me. I wrinkled my nose in distaste and worry. Did he actually get bit without knowing it, with them masking it? The elder male noticed me looking at them and dusted them off. His face contorted in a small ounce of pain as a piece caught his flesh. “Where’s Gerard? And Eliza?”

“Quinn and I will go downstairs and look for your friend, okay?” Jepha spoke up after a string of uneasy silence. The soles of heavy boots trailed behind him as he lead the way for Quinn down the escalator.

Last minute I decided to follow, seeing as he was my brother and if anything happened to him I wanted to be there. A sense of pride eased a bit of the tension in my gut, but as we plunged farther and farther into the darkness it was erased and the tension flooded back in. “Gerard?” I called out in a whisper.

“Don’t be too loud,” Quinn whispered back. The barrel of his rifle pushed a clump of blond hair from his eyes, slim cheekbones exposed in the dull light.

“I can’t find him if I don’t call out. I could stumble over him and break his neck or something.” My brows furrowed in aggravation until we reached the landing, where Jeph shushed us. Normally I would have snapped at him, but under the circumstances I kept my mouth shut. He had a rifle and I had nothing.

I tried my best to get my eyes to adjust to the darkness around me. Nothing changed though. Everything remained black as can be, each thing ominous in its own way. “Do you have a weapon?” Jeph croaked softly. Despite all of his modifications he had a look of tenderness and vulnerability in his face. Was it the fear of the zombies? Or was it just the fact that he wanted to be nice after finding another group of alive, human faces? Whichever it was, I was glad it was there, because as I shook my head he produced a handgun from his pocket, unlocked the safety and handed it to me. Then he pulled out a lighter and flicked back the wheel, a two and a half-inch flame coming from the top. The size startled me and my expression seemed to amuse him and Quinn.

I scowled softly and Quinn tugged out a lighter as well, the flame a half-inch shorter. Now I could clearly see their faces as the flame swayed before them and bathed their faces in an amber glow. I could also see a foot or two before us. Thus we walked, both of them holding a lighter in one hand an a gun in the other, with me covering the rear, into possible hostile territory. My heart skipped my throat this time and pounded inside of my ears while I looked in front of me, to my sides and behind myself in rapid succession.

“Quinn, is that you?”

“Sh, Bert. You’re going to give us away.”

“I really think that’s them, though!”

“Dan? Bert?” Quinn called.

“Told you!” one of them hissed. As soon as that was said Jeph and Quinn walked forward quickly. The darkness engulfed me without the gentle light of their lighters. It was so much darker downstairs than it was upstairs. A shudder trailed up my spine as I whined under my breath and jogged slightly to catch up. When I made it to where they stood, I noticed two things: there were four of them, and my brother was lying on the floor unconscious. Not to mention his head was in the lap of a brunette male sitting on the floor, his hair long and his face scruffy. Gerard’s pants leg was cut up on the left side, a large horizontal cut bleeding slowly from beneath the fabric, and I prayed silently that that was just from the fall.

“We should get him upstairs,” the brunette suggested. Everyone nodded and helped pick Gerard up so the brunette could stand. Before fitting his body to Gerard’s to pick up his upper half, he grabbed a machete off the floor and nodded to the other guy that was with him. He was also a brunette, but his hair was short and his face clean, and instead of a machete he had a long, thin metal stick with a hooked edge. Together they carried my brother up the broken escalator, myself, Quinn and Jeph walking behind them slowly. I felt so relieved, though. My brother was alive and from the looks of it, just wounded and unconscious. I could be grateful of a few cuts and bruises and a possible concussion if he lived.

At the top landing of the escalator, everyone seemed to sigh in relief as Gerard and the rest of the gang came back in one piece.

“Dan, Bert—get him back to their store,” Quinn instructed quietly.

“Which one?” the long-hared one asked. My mother directed him over, gawking softly at Gerard’s limp form. Dad walked out and over to Bob and Ray, still standing at the escalator rail, but now discussing what to do with the bodies. I heard “throw them outside”, “lock them in a store” and “burn them on the lower level”, but I wasn’t paying attention. My shoulders were tense and my hands were still shaking. That was so close…

I snapped out of my thoughts to the sound of bones crunching against the floor of the first level. They were throwing bodies over the railing to clear the floor. “Was Eliza down there?” Bob asked solemnly. “Was she downstairs?” When I shook my head, he sighed loudly. “Gerard’s not going to like this…”

“Wait! I found her!” my father clamored. At his feet laid Eliza, still and dripping blood from a wound in her neck. I shied my eyes away from her and licked my lips. “My God, Eliza! Are you okay?”

“Mr. Way—you might want to step away from her,” Ray said cautiously. His eyes locked with Bob’s for a second before they began walking towards my father, both of their fingers on the trigger.

“Are you mad? She’s injured!” he countered.

“She could change at any second. She’s one of them now—we need to finish the job,” was Ray’s reply, his face stern and grave. The way his brows were furrowed showcased the stress that had plagued us all for the last couple of weeks.

The words went in one ear and out the other with my father. He lifted her up slowly, brushed back some of her hair, and patted her cheek softly. “She’s so cold…I’m going to check her pulse now—”

While he made his way down to her throat her eyes flashed open. Those weren’t Eliza’s eyes anymore; that body was just her shell. And inside that shell rested a mindless, crazed spawn of hell without soul nor memory. The only thing her body showed anymore was “hunger” and she took that out on my father’s hand.

He howled in pain and tugged his hand back, her head falling and clunking against the floor loudly. Skin fell off of his hand and slumped to the floor beside her, blood trickling from the limb like water after a dam had been broken.

Without a second thought I raised my gun and shot her, everyone else just staring at me, frozen to their spots like mannequins. The gun slammed back in my hand but I didn’t feel it; the bullet tore through her chin loudly but I didn’t hear it. All I heard was my own breathing and my heart beating in my ears, and all I felt was the fear rising in my stomach. Would I lose my father now?

From back in our refuge I heard my mother scream and someone make their way over to us. “The only way to keep it from spreading it to cut his hand off,” the short-hared brunette whispered softly.

Everyone just stood there still, my eyes locked on my father’s. We could all fight off these zombies and do unthinkable tasks under pressure like this, but…to our own guy? To my father, none the less? Cut off his arm! I couldn’t begin to fathom someone chopping his arm off, let alone one of the few human beings that I knew were still alive!

“Bert, get him to put his arm against the railing,” Quinn choked out.

Bert, the long-hared one, appeared from the store and lead my shaking, pale-in-the-face father over to the railing and held his hand there cautiously. “We going to use my machete?”

“Dan, you hold the other side,” Quinn ordered next, and the short-hared one moved to my father and took his other hand, pinning it down to the railing so that his wounded arm was exposed, like they were offering it to some unseen God. “Jeph—you going to cut it?”

“No! I thought you were!” Jeph returned, his voice shaking.

“Any of you?” Quinn said softly afterwards, looking from Ray to Bob and then to me. I burned a hole in his forehead with my eyes and he looked away, slightly flushed.

“I’ll do it,” someone answered abruptly. Out from the darkness of our store came Frank, shaking softly although his face still, his determination fixed in stone. Bert held out the machete, its handle wrapped in a cream colored tape and its blade shining in the alarm lights. Frank was going to do the job? Before I could protest and ask—plead—for someone else to do it, Frank took a deep breath, took the machete and looked to Quinn.

“To the elbow now. Too much time’s past,” he said darkly.

Frank nodded. Dad nodded. Bert nodded. Dan nodded.
And then Frank brought the machete down swiftly on my father’s elbow. The sound of the bone crunching, mixed with my father’s screaming and the blood squirting everywhere, made me vomit. I turned and emptied my mouth over the railing as Frank sawed off the remaining intact skin. Then the arm fell to the floor. I watched it, paralyzed, as it fell to the floor and landed on a zombie’s body. Again I vomited, this time with Bob rubbing my back slowly and Frank hissing beneath his voice while tears streamed down.

My dad fainted a few seconds afterwards from the trauma. Dan and Bert lifted yet another Way and took him into our store. They were met by a blood-curdling scream from my mother and a series of loud barks from Max.

“You had to, you had to,” Jeph reassured Frank while he stood there, just as frozen as I was.

I met my friend’s eyes and we walked to each other, both of us walking like there was glass on the floor. Then he melted into me, his cold face chilling my neck and his hot tears reviving the flesh. “You…you had to…” I adopted, stroking his back. “You probably saved my father.”