Balance Read online

  Her serrated teeth plunged into The Hunter’s neck. His screams deteriorated to garbled, gargling cries, blood spewing from his mouth. A sensation of warmth raced through her nervous system. Strength. Euphoria. Her monotone world was replenished with bright, pulsating colors. Chewing the flesh of The Hunter’s warm, tender throat, she took satisfaction in watching the life ebb from his fearful eyes. She would finish him later, she thought. She still needed to deal with the breather on the cot.

  “Please,” he cried. “Please don’t...”

  She held up her hands, trying to convey benevolent intent. But the man’s body continued to quake, his eyes alive with fear. Working slowly, she used her good hand to untie the restraints. It was not an easy task, but eventually he was free of his bonds. Despite his newfound range of motion, he remained frozen.

  She backed away from the young man, giving him a wide berth, and pointed to The Hunter’s gun on the floor, emphasizing the action she wanted him to take—the action he needed to take—by jabbing a stiff finger forward repeatedly.

  He finally looked where she pointed. Still trembling, he managed a nod. He gingerly got up from the cot and picked up the pistol.

  Pointing up at the cellar door, she urged him to leave.

  He looked confused. “Why...why are you letting me go?”

  She put her hand on her chest and sighed. She could only imagine what that must have looked like through his eyes.

  Behind her, Joe thrashed against the bars of his cage, trying to free himself as she had. Frustrated by his impatience, she shot him an angry glare. And with a defeated groan, he seemed to relent.

  She motioned toward the stairs again, catching her reflection in a cracked mirror that hung next to a boarded window. Her decomposing lips were turned into a dreadful grimace of decaying gums and jagged teeth. Her neck was bloated and torn open. Ashamed and horrified by her appearance, she looked away. No wonder the man was frightened. She was a monster.

  When she turned her attention back to the breather, he was running, tripping up the stairs. Once he was gone from view, she listened to him fumble around on the main floor of the house—drawers and doors opening, the clanging of metal, and frantic footfalls. After a few moments, a door slammed, and then the loud roar of The Hunter’s truck, peeling out as fast as the engine could go. Certain the breather was safely away, she fished a set of keys from The Hunter’s pocket.

  She freed Joe, and they dined.

  * * * *

  Trees swayed and indistinct forms melted into one another. Geoff sensed zombie presence; he could hear and smell them. He studied the large run-down brick house with white columns, the place to which Amanda had fled.

  Two forms shambled onto the porch of the house. Amanda’s rescue wasn’t going to be easy. Nothing ever was. Thank God he’d stocked up at The Hunter’s.

  Geoff gripped the 9mm in his right hand and stepped out of the truck. He snatched the revolver from the dashboard and tucked it into his waistband. From the bed of the truck he grabbed an AA-12 assault shotgun, clipped on the 20-shell drum, and strapped the gun across his back. Turning to face the house, he saw the two zombies stepping off the porch, growling and grunting as they advanced. Geoff started walking. He leveled the 9mm, taking aim at one of them—a thin male in a V-neck sweater. A quick blast and recoil, and a dark bloom appeared on the thing’s head. The second zombie—Hardy to the other’s Laurel—covered his ears, one of them mangled and hanging by a thin thread of blackened flesh. Hardy shrieked as Geoff took aim. A squeeze of the trigger took the porcine zombie down.

  Adrenaline pumping, Geoff tried the front door. It was locked. Scanning the mailboxes, he looked for Amanda’s name. Found it: Travis Stillwell & Amanda Herbert - Unit B, south side terrace. “Travis,” he muttered with contempt. Remembering Travis was dead, he smiled.

  He jumped off the porch and then crept along the south wall of the house. In the distance, he saw a door with a large “B” stenciled on it; a few yards down from that was a carport with a VW Bug parked inside. Crouched by one of the Bug’s wheels was a short, fat female with dreadlocked hair, half her face missing. One hand was splayed awkwardly against the car for balance. She glanced in his direction and moaned. He fired. The back window of the Bug shattered. She rose on stiff legs and began moving toward him. He took a step forward, steadied, and fired again. Her head blew back and she crumpled to the ground like a rag doll.

  But the moans of the dead didn’t cease. From behind the carport they crawled and shambled. Geoff’s eyes went wide, his pulse quickening. He took two steps back to give himself more room and surveyed the size of the enemy. Half a dozen of them, moving with dead determination.

  He dropped the 9mm to the ground and swung the shotgun off his back. Planting the butt of the gun on his shoulder, he took aim at the closest zombie—a man in a business suit, chattering his teeth as if demonstrating his new dentures. Geoff pulled the trigger, and the top half of Businessman’s head exploded in a spray of viscera.

  Geoff was in awe; he’d never fired anything so powerful with such minimal recoil. Lord only knew what dark alley deal had landed the gun in The Hunter’s arsenal, but—Fuckin’ A!— He was glad of it. The other five were going crazy, shrieking and wailing. They didn’t seem to like the report from the AA-12. He opened fire on them, keeping the gun level with their heads as he mowed them down, guessing what they might have been: school teacher, bartender, drug dealer, truck driver, and cop. The last one was easy, he was in uniform.

  His ears ringing from the multiple blasts, he lowered the shotgun. Suddenly, he was pushed from behind. He fell to the muddy earth, dropping the AA-12. Instinctively, he rolled onto his back just in time to see a tall female zombie in a sequined club-dress lunging at him. He moved out of the way as she splashed face-first into the mucky earth. Getting back on his feet, he pulled the revolver from his belt and took aim at Party-girl’s head. A quick bang and she, too, was gone.

  He rearmed himself with the shotgun, made a three hundred sixty degree inspection of his surroundings, and then, strapping the AA-12 around his back, rushed to Amanda’s door and knocked.

  No answer. Thinking of her, against his better judgment, he aimed the revolver at the deadbolt. “Stand back, Amanda!”

  A quick blast splintered the door open.

  Hearing a sucking noise behind him, he spun around. Three more zombies were advancing. He dispatched the first two quickly—a skinny teen with a missing arm and a burly oaf with a missing jaw. But the third squeeze of the trigger only produced a dry, hollow click.

  He ducked into the apartment. “Amanda,” he shouted. “We have company. Wake up.”

  He turned to face the zombie in the doorway—a short teenage boy wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan FIVE DOLLAR FOOTLONG and an arrow pointing to his crotch. Geoff brought the shotgun around and fired. Footlong’s head splattered across the door, and his body toppled into the apartment.

  He assumed that the other dead guy in the living room, the one with the iron rod sticking out of his skull, was Travis.

  The first light of dawn bled through the open doorway. The temperature gauge by the front window read 105 degrees.

  Why hadn’t the zombies broken through the window? The question terrified him. Part of a televised interview with a doctor from the CDC came back to him with an answer: “From what we have observed, the reanimated corpse is only attracted to living blood and tissue.”

  Racing for the hallway, he began to cry. The first room was small: desk, computer, a couple stacks of books. The next room: king mattress, a framed Led Zeppelin poster, a bookshelf with a bong on top of it.

  His body drenched in sweat, he held his breath. He made the sign of the cross: forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder.

  And then, slowly, he opened the bathroom door...

  * * * *

  When Joe fled into the woods, she didn’t go after him. It was clear the spark that had caused him to love her once had been frozen to oblivion in The
Blast. Wanting her pain to be at an end, she took to the road, exposing herself to would-be hunters.

  The sun was coming up when she heard a vehicle approach from the south. She turned and saw The Hunter’s truck speeding around a corner. It slowed as it passed, and then pulled over a few yards in front of her.

  Visibly distraught, the breather stepped out. He made his way to the back of the truck and lowered the tailgate, revealing two large gas containers, and the corpse of a girl, not yet reanimated.

  She wasn’t sure what to do. Her instincts screamed for her to feed, a trace of fear asked her to flee, but her heart, or whatever it was that she was clinging to, told her to wait. The breather kissed the dead girl’s lips and muttered words she couldn’t make out above the hot November wind. Tears in his eyes, he turned and approached.

  “I was too late,” he muttered. He held up The Hunter’s gun and studied it, a deepening expression of grief in his sleepless eyes. “I know I should shoot her in the head...keep her from... from becoming like you, but I...” He tossed the gun into the nearby field, and then crouched low, holding his head in his hands. “I can’t do it,” he screamed. “I won’t do it!”

  She stood motionless as he broke down at her feet.

  “I always thought I tried too hard. But now I know that was a lie. I let the world happen to me. I never tried at all, not until now. Not until Amanda needed me.” Finally, he looked up. “You let me go, so something...something human must still live inside you.”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t deny it,” he pleaded. “I know it’s there.”

  Perhaps some vestige of humanity still lived in her at that point; she didn’t know. But she didn’t want the breather clinging to false hopes. She wanted him to flee, to leave her to others of his kind, to the hunters. To her end. She shrieked sadly, waving her good hand, trying to get him to leave.

  “Does love have to die?” he asked. “If it’s strong enough, does it have to die when ... when we die?”

  She turned away from him, and a tear, the second she’d cried since her death, streamed down her cheek.

  “It doesn’t have to die, does it?”

  Again, she shook her head. Maybe she was wrong to do it, but false hope, she decided, was better than no hope at all. She and Joe had died in The Blast. This young man and the girl he loved had survived, reaching out to each other across a long divide of terror. He had suffered, hadn’t he? He had taken a risk that others would have considered reckless, even deplorable. Perhaps their love was strong, a thing that would endure, even in death.

  The breather took her hand.

  The urge to bite him was overwhelming, but she resisted it, her jaw clenched in defiance, her eyes shut against his presence.

  He pulled one of her fingers to his face and, with a tightening grip, dug her nail into his cheek. Blood—hot, sticky, alive!—welled around her finger. She jerked away from him, sharp pains stabbing within, screaming at her to lunge, to tear, to rip, to rend, to—she folded her arms tightly and dropped to the gravel shoulder of the road, shaking violently, digging her bloody finger into the ground, attempting to deaden the intoxicating scent.

  He must have sensed the urgency of her inner conflict because when she looked up the truck was racing toward the state line of Missouri.

  By the side of the road, she waited.

  Morning turned to day, day to night. But no cars came.

  The next day, she joined the hordes in the woods.

  She ran with others of her ilk; they hunted and fed on animals. But the animals were growing smarter, craftier every day, the Balance of Nature shifting. Many nights she went hungry, her corpse racked with want. She knew her kind didn’t have long; it was clear the planet had plans for the future that didn’t involve her. And as time passed—her flesh blackening, falling from her bones—she grew colder and colder inside as the world grew warmer. She even forgot about Joe. If she met him in the woods they would probably hunt in tandem, maybe even camp together for a while. But her feelings for him had gone as dead as her species.

  Would her love have died had it been requited? Sometimes she thought not, other times she was not so sure; but mostly she didn’t think about him at all. And yet, despite everything that she—that everyone—had lost, she never forgot the two breathers she’d tried to help.

  Did their love survive?

  She didn’t know.

  She knew the man had tried. They tried. And in the end, if there was anything she remembered about what she once was, if there was anything she clung to in the shining madness of the new world order, it was one simple truth.

  We tried.

  About the Author

  Peter Giglio is the author of the novel Anon, the novella A Spark in the Darkness, and the editor of the anthology Help! Wanted: Tales of On-the-Job Terror. With Scott Bradley, he is the co-author of The Dark, a soon to be released novel, and an unproduced, feature-length screen adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Night They Missed the Horror Show.” He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and three cats, but you can find him online at www.petergiglio.com.