Just Another Day at the Office: A Walking Dead Short(3)

Martinez stares at Philip for a moment. “We’ll give it our best shot.”

Philip gives him a nod, goes around to the SUV’s driver’s side door, and climbs in.

The engine fires, the rear wheels dig in, and the vehicle roars away.



Over the course of those next five minutes—most of which Martinez keeps close track of on his watch—the heartier souls of Woodbury go through fifteen hundred rounds of metal-jacketed, armor-piercing shells. The makeshift militia consists of eleven men and two women, most of them parents, most at the end of their tethers—former middle-class working people with equal parts fear and madness in their eyes.

Thirty magazines’ worth of 5.5-millimeter slugs taken from the National Guard station are sprayed across the boundaries of vacant lots, into alleys, through tangled knots of zombies that have clustered together near the racetrack, and across rows of storefronts in order to shake the biters out of hiding and ultimately herd them into the center of town. Side roads are blocked with cars. Gates are swung shut. The zombies change course like sheep.

Martinez calculates that four and a half minutes have passed when they finally see the shift in the tide of walking dead. The main road that runs through the heart of Woodbury becomes clogged with a virtual traffic jam of upright corpses. They crowd intersections and mill about in their slow, retarded manner, craning their necks up at the rooftops, where the echoes of automatic gunfire slap back against the clouds.

At almost precisely the five-minute mark, as Martinez is climbing a fire escape ladder, he begins wondering if the stranger with the dark hair has up and vanished. Maybe it was all a scam. Maybe the guy just wanted to steal the SUV with all the goodies from the Guard station.

Right then Martinez hears the amplified voice reverberating in the distance.



“YYYYYOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

Philip Blake stands on the roof of the idling SUV, parked on the edge of a Marathon station two hundred yards north of the downed fence. The wind whips his pant legs, and the brilliant cold sun shines in his eyes as he screams into the bullhorn that the guardsmen had tossed into the carryall, probably earmarking it for crowd control.

“COME AND GET ME, YOU BRAINLESS SMELLY STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS!!”

The megaphone crackles and rings with feedback, the volume turned up to ten. In the distance Philip can see the first dribbles of dead things coming this way, about twenty or thirty of them, drawn to the sound of his voice. Philip starts jumping up and down, waving his free hand while he clutches the bullhorn and presses the transmitter button.

“I WILL SKULL-FUCK EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU PATHETIC SHIT-BIRDS!!”

More of them are coming. In the distance, across the bulldozer-rutted lot bordering the construction site, the twenty or thirty in the lead are joined by a huge crowd only half a block or so behind them, hundreds of them, all sizes, all conditions, some of them bloodied by bullet wounds, others dragging entrails.

“YYYYYYYYYOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHOOOOOOO!! THAT’S RIGHT!! COME TO PAPA SO I CAN RIP EVERY STINKING HEAD OFF EVERY FUCKING ONE OF YOU AND SHIT DOWN YOUR NECKS!!!”

It only takes another minute or so for the multitude to begin its spectacular exodus. Behind the hundreds in the lead appear hundreds more, maybe thousands. The human eye can barely take it all in, the throngs homing in on the gas station like a broken-down army coming home starving and shell shocked. And the sound is almost beyond comprehension—a wave of feral groaning that swells to a gurgling roar—and the stench is worse. The incredible putrid odor bathes the entire countryside in its black tide.

Philip pulls the .45 pistol from his belt, and slams in a fresh magazine.

The first zombies reach the gas station and come toward the SUV.

From the vehicle’s roof Philip fires into the top of the first one’s head, blowing a divot in its skull and sending it to the pavement. The second one reaches up for him and Philip blows it away. Brain tissue splatters the side of the SUV and spits across the insteps of Philip’s boots. More of them reach the SUV and claw at the roof. Philip empties the clip into their heads and then springs into action.

He swings his legs down and through the open driver’s side window, and then lowers himself into the driver’s seat. He jacks up the windows and drops the empty magazine, grabbing another one from the passenger’s side. He shoves it into the gun, cocks the slide, and watches the gas station parking lot teem with dead people.

The SUV begins to shake as more and more zombies arrive. They flood the property and crowd in like rotting, moldering lemmings seeking the source of the clarion voice. Philip honks the horn.