The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(48)
“Oh thank God,” he croaked.
It was the highway all right, however a different, more level stretch than the one he had left behind. There was no traffic-jam here, no Pemex station—the lanes were clear in both directions. Hiking down to it, he fell on the pavement with the gratitude of a shipwreck survivor. But was he north or south of the pile-up? Rather than heading into trouble, he decided to stay where he was and wait for help to come to him. Which was just as well—he couldn’t move another inch. His blisters had blisters. But the thirst was getting out of control; if someone didn’t come along soon…well, someone had to come along.
He got as comfortable as possible and waited. As he sat there, a couple of large black birds landed nearby. It took him a minute to realize they must be vultures. That was interesting, sitting under the hot white sky and watching turkey vultures waddle along the opposite side of the road like fat little undertakers—it was the corniest thing ever. Real vultures! Back and forth, back and forth, exactly as if they were pacing. Which they were, of course. It was too stupid.
An hour passed. Then two. Dozing under the makeshift cowl of his jacket, he heard the truck before he saw it. It was a big one—some kind of heavy construction vehicle. It came rumbling around the bend of a hill, and at the sight of it the American let out a hoarse cheer: it was a huge red dump-truck bristling with armed men. His body had stiffened from sitting so long; it took a painful effort to get to his feet. By that time the truck was much closer, coming on fast. Its wheels were taller than he was, and there was a railed walkway around the high cab on which several men were standing. They were pointing at him and calling to the driver.
Tears streaking his face, the American waved his arms and shouted as best he could, “?Por favor! ?Por favor!”
The truck slowed, its passengers shading their eyes to see him better against the late-day sun. He could see them well enough: a harsh-faced bunch in dirty coveralls, bearing picks and shovels—a prison road crew escaped from their keepers. He didn’t care; to him they looked like angels of mercy. But at the last minute the truck swerved wide and throttled up.
Crying, “No, no!” the young man ran to intercept it, to block the road if he had to. “I’m not crazy!” he shouted. “?No estoy loco!”
The truck grew bigger and bigger; the truck took over the landscape, expanding like the Big Bang until its right wheel alone was bigger than the entire world—the whole universe. A black rubber sky studded with shiny pebbles, turning over on him.
The last thing he saw was stars.
The Other Side
By Jamie Lackey
Jamie Lackey’s short fiction has appeared in Atomjack Magazine, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Drabblecast, and in the anthology It Was a Dark and Stormy Halloween. She is also a slush reader for Clarkesworld Magazine and an assistant editor for the Triangulation annual anthology series. She hails from Pittsburgh, where George Romero filmed Night of the Living Dead.
For most of history, human beings have been throwing up walls. Walls seem to offer protection from a hostile world, and give us a sense of control, of keeping people where we think they ought to be. But walls definitely have a spotty history when it comes to their actual usefulness. The magnificent Great Wall of China never really did keep the barbarians out, nor did the walls of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The Berlin Wall ultimately failed to keep Germany divided, and the strenuous efforts by the Israelis to put up walls between them and the Palestinians haven’t really proven effective.
Can we have much confidence that walls would do any better against zombies? And of course with any wall there’s the question not just of what are you keeping out, but also what are you holding in. Our next story is about fences, about boundaries, and being on the wrong side of them, and, of course, about zombies. The author says, “This story is about high school students almost twenty years after a zombie apocalypse. And unrequited love. I started thinking how the world would be different if there were zombies, but they’d been driven back decades ago. The zombies might still be a threat, biding their time, waiting to strike again, or they could have all rotted away without anyone noticing. The emotions in the story are what make it personal to me—the need to fit in, the fear, and in the end, the sorrow and regret.”
No one has seen a zombie in my lifetime. The twelve-foot-high electrified chain-link fence that protects us from the dead land passes behind my house, and I used to stare into the woods for hours on end, looking for zombies. I saw a raccoon once, peeking out through a broken window in a half-burned townhouse. It might have been undead. But it might not have been.
There used to be regular armed patrols on the dirt road inside the fence, back when I was little, but eventually the manpower was diverted to other projects. Federal troops still come around once a year in a tanker truck and burn back the vegetation in the buffer zone with napalm.
We have about fifty feet of scorched earth so that if they do come out of the woods, we can see them before they get to the fence. It keeps them from using trees to climb out, too. But like I said, no one has seen a zombie for well over a decade. Some of the kids in my school want to take the fence down and see what’s beyond it, see if there are any people up in Canada anymore. But anybody who was alive during the apocalypse is set against ever taking the fence down. Just in case, they always say. Just in case. Let them keep the dead land.