Just Another Day at the Office: A Walking Dead Short(4)

Within seconds there are so many of them filling the lot and surrounding the SUV that Philip can barely see daylight. Greasy fingers and slimy lips drag across the window glass. Some of them manage—almost accidentally—to crawl onto the hood. Pale, gray faces with pupilless eyes scrape across his windshield. The symphony of gurgling moans—muffled by the sealed windows—vibrates the air and penetrates Philip’s ears and puts the hackles up on the back of his neck.

He keeps honking the horn until it looks as though the SUV is buried in an undulating womb of dead flesh. Like sides of rotting beef, the lacerated ribs of cadavers streak against the glass in Technicolor hues of purple, salmon, oxblood red, and the deepest, darkest, oiliest black. Hair matted with dried blood and torn fingernails and the blackened stumps of ragged amputations—all churn against the window. The sights and sounds would drive any normal human being out of their wits, and even Philip, locked in this zone of utter focus and concentration, starts to feel the wind of madness stirring in his brain. This is what Judgment Day looks like. He flashes on the impulse to put the barrel of the .45 in his mouth and make it all go away. But he has other plans.

He yanks the shift lever down into drive and slams his foot on the accelerator hard enough to bend the metal brace.

The SUV lurches.

The front end steamrolls through layers of the dead, and then gets stuck, the rear wheels spinning in the grease and slime of all the human tissue collecting under the chassis. Philip keeps the pedal pinned. The rear end fishtails for a moment, the engine screaming. Then the tires find purchase and the vehicle rockets forward, bowling over another hundred or so on its way out of the lot.

Philip slams on the brakes at the edge of the lot, then twists around and shoots out the rear window. The earsplitting blasts erupt inside the car. Philip’s ears ring unmercifully as he trains the front-site of the .45 on four tiny spiral-shaped objects on the ground by the fuel pumps, only partially visible now behind the throngs of zombies milling about the lot. Only moments ago Martinez gave him a quick tutorial on the volatility of such military ordnance, and now Philip executes his Hail Mary pass.

He squeezes off four quick blasts—the rest of the clip—and the sparks off the pavement catch the detonator cords coiled by the pumps.

The first explosion pops like a camera strobe, followed by three more successive pops of the flexible plastic tubing, which is filled with Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (or so its says on the label, right next to the field guide directions), sending debris up into the air and roasting a small group of dead that are too close. As these initial flashes of “det” cord light up the sky, Philip gives the SUV a kick, and the vehicle takes off with a jerk.

He gets far enough away, slamming through another few rows of zombies, and then careening across the vacant lot, that the second-level explosion—the C-4 that he hastily squeezed under the pump housings—merely slams him against the dash and momentarily blinds him. The SUV keeps going, while the eruption behind him vaporizes hundreds of moving cadavers and opens up the sky, sending a necklace of fireballs heavenward, making Philip swerve and gasp, the shock wave goosing the vehicle and flashing magnesium-white in the rearview.

Now he knows he has only microseconds to get behind cover, and he yanks the wheel.

The SUV skids sideways in the mud, completely clear of the zombie horde now. The gravitational forces push the vehicle over. The interior slams down onto its side, cracking Philip’s teeth and sending jolts of searing pain up his rib cage. He curls into a fetal position, as the third and final level of explosive gases ignite.



On the fire escape across town, above the dry cleaners, Martinez instinctively ducks down. The shock wave rattles the storefronts, some of the windows imploding in a series of sucking crashes. The few zombies left inside the cordon of town are knocked over like bowling pins. Martinez shields his eyes against the heat flash.

In the distance, a fireball the size of a house shoots up and ignites the sky.

Martinez backs into the corner, squinting up at the brilliant maelstrom. A crown of black smoke curls up on the tail of the fireball, then mushrooms with a rumbling roar that sounds like a freight train. The radio tower ignites in a fiery column of pure white light.

Martinez is transfixed by the sight.

At this distance, it looks as though the blast is raining litter. The sparks and burning chunks of debris bloom in all directions, then cascade down like a smoldering waterfall. With a mixture of exhilaration and nausea Martinez realizes that the burning particles are body parts.