Страница 14 из 166
He’d been stupid to think Grandpa Joe could keep him safe. He was an old man who lived in the woods.
Kendrick ran, his legs burning and throat scalding. He could see the road above him, but he ran in the embankment like Grandpa Joe had told him, out of sight.
For an endless hour Kendrick ran, despite burning legs and scalded throat, struggling to stay true to the directions Grandpa Joe had given him. South. Stay south.
Centralia. National Guard. Devil’s Wake. Safe.
By the time exhaustion claimed Kendrick, rain clouds had darkened the sky, and he was so tired he had lost any certainty of placing his feet without disaster. The trees, once an explosion of green, had been bleached gray and black. They were a place of trackless, unknowable danger. Every sound and shadow seemed to call to him.
Trembling so badly he could hardly move, Kendrick crawled past a wall of ferns into a culvert, clutching the little Remington to his chest.
Once he sat, his sadness felt worse, like a blanket over him. He sobbed so hard he could no longer sit up straight, curling himself in a ball on the soft soil. Small leaves and debris pasted themselves to the tears and mucous that covered his face. One sob sounded more like a wail, so loud it startled him.
Grandpa Joe had lied. Mom had been dead all along. He’d shot her in the head. He’d said it like it hardly mattered to him.
Kendrick heard snapping twigs, and the back of his neck turned ice-cold.
Footsteps. Ru
Kendrick’s sobs vanished, as if they’d never been. He sat straight up, propping his shotgun across his bent knee, aiming, finger ready on the trigger. He saw a small black spider crawling on his trigger wrist-one with a bloated egg sack, about to give birth to a hundred babies like in Charlotte’s Web-but he made no move to bat the spider away. Kendrick sat primed, trying to silence his clotted nose by breathing through his mouth. Waiting.
Maybe it was that hitchhiker with the sign, he thought.
But it didn’t matter who it was. Hide. That was what Grandpa Joe said.
The footsteps slowed, although they were so close that Kendrick guessed the intruder couldn’t be more than a few feet away. He was no longer ru
“I have a gun! I’ll shoot!” Kendrick called out, and this voice was very different from the one he’d used to ask Grandpa Joe for a Coke. Not a little girl’s voice this time, or even a boy’s. It was a voice that meant what it said.
Silence. The movement had stopped.
That was when Grandpa Joe said the danger word.
Kendrick’s finger loosened against the trigger. His limbs gave way, and his body began to shake. The woods melted away, and he remembered wearing this same jacket in the safe room, waiting. Waiting for Grandpa Joe.
There had never been a gunshot from Grandpa Joe’s truck. Kendrick had expected to hear the gunshot as soon as he ran off, dreading it. Grandpa Joe always did what needed to be done. Kendrick should have heard a gunshot.
“Go back!” Kendrick said. Although his voice was not so sure this time, he cocked the Remington’s hammer, just as he’d been taught.
Kendrick waited. He tried not to hope-and then hoped fervently-that his scare had worked. The instant Kendrick’s hope reached its peak, a shadow moved against the ferns above him, closer.
“Breakfast,” Grandpa Joe’s watery voice said again.
Zombieville by Paula R. Stiles
Paula R. Stiles is the author of more than two dozen stories. Her work has appeared in Nature, Albedo One, the zombie anthology History Is Dead, Shine, Writers of the Future XXIV, Jim Baen’s Universe, Space and Time, and in many other venues, such as the South African magazine Something Wicked, where this story first appeared. She is also the editor of I
Resident Evil, a 1996 video game set in a haunted mansion, combined polygonal characters with pre-rendered backgrounds, and was one of the first games in the “survival horror” genre, following the model of Alone in the Dark. The game has spun off numerous sequels, as well as three feature films starring Milla Jovovich and written by Paul W. S. Anderson, most recently the Mad Max-inspired Resident Evil: Extinction. The most recent video game in the franchise, Resident Evil 5, is set in Africa, which has provoked some criticism of the game’s handling of racial imagery.
The author of our next tale says, “I kept hearing they wanted to do a Resident Evil movie set in Africa, and I groaned a little, thinking about how many boring clichés they’d come up with for that. Then I thought, ‘Well, self, why not do your own take on an African Zombocalypse?’”
Stiles made the protagonists of the story Peace Corps volunteers because she used to be one. “AIDS was already at epidemic proportions in Cameroon by the time I left in ’94, and that’s a pretty scary atmosphere to be in for two years,” she says. “So when I was hearing people talk about the zombocalypse as if it would be this catastrophic event, I kinda laughed and thought, ‘You know, I should just write a zombocalypse tale that’s a metaphor for AIDS in Africa.’ It’s not actually the first AIDS-in-Africa metaphor tale I’ve written. Probably won’t be my last, either.”
The gendarme had wandered out into the middle of the road. His already well-fleshed form had swelled to bursting, and his skin, once the color of the stash of dark chocolate we’d traded for in Yaoundé, looked almost as green as his stained army uniform. He looked like he’d been from the Bulu, a tribe down in the South Region near the port of Douala, down the railroad line from Yaoundé. He stood there, waving his arms in a parody of his old contrôle-point routine of stopping bush-taxis and other traffic to check their papers, hunt up the odd bribe.
Our taxi, a gray Peugeot, stuffed with ten live passengers and driver, cleared the hill and slammed down on all four wheels into a nasty pothole. We hit the gendarme about dead center five meters later to the tune of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” which the Hausa Muslim driver had been blasting on the Peugeot’s tape deck. The gendarme flew up over the roof, landing hard-and in pieces-on the paved road behind the car. The driver didn’t so much as ease off the gas. Just as well. We’d all sooner stop for a cobra than a zombie.
“That was pretty spectacular,” Josie said. She was a reasonably good-looking blonde and my housemate, crammed half onto my lap and half up onto the armrest of the right rear door. That might sound like a good thing, but only if you’ve never been stuck in a Peugeot with ten other people for three hours on a tropical afternoon. Our only break was the half-hour we’d spent on the side of the road to allow the six Muslims in the car to pray and the rest of us to pee.
“Yeah, pretty spectacular…if you like blood and guts splattering all over the road,” I said. “Bet he’d have stopped if the guy had been Muslim.”
“Since he was obviously a gendarme, he couldn’t have been Muslim, so I’m sure the driver thought it was perfectly reasonable to run him down,” Josie said.
Cameroon’s president just before everything had gone to zombie hell had been from the South. His predecessor had been a Fulani Muslim from the Extreme North. There’d been bad blood between the Muslims and the Government ever since. Considering this was a country where a Muslim friend had once told me that his Christian neighbors were “ca