He blinked rapidly at me. “Oh…oh dear.”
I realized I had absolutely no form of identification on me, and had zero proof to show these people if they asked me for any…but fuck it. I was here. “Yes. You need to clear out immediately. The dead have broken through the checkpoint and Durkee needs this place cleared out so he can…um…stop them.”
He pushed his glasses high up on his nose. “Durkee is dead.”
I pointed at the fatigue-clad figure clinging to the overpass some fifty feet away. “Misunderstanding.”
The man nodded. “Well, I’ll head along then.”
This seemed a little too easy. “You don’t need anything?” I asked.
He shrugged. “My wife died last year, and my children are on the East Coast. Everything else is just material, isn’t it?” He lifted his cane. “And if any of those goddamn zombies try anything, I’m going to leave their brains all over the sidewalk.”
I liked this dude.“That’s the spirit, sir.”
He started walking up the street. I watched him go, then went to the next house.
The woman who answered the door was not quite as placid-looking as the old gent. I set my axe down so I didn’t look as threatening, although I’m sure my general appearance didn’t exactly fill her with confidence. She grew considerably more hostile when I made my Zombies-Are-Coming-You-Need-to-Evacuate speech.
She jammed a finger into my face. “Evacuate? I have three kids. Where am I supposed to evacuate to?”
“The front gate. The Army will take care of you.” At least, I assumed they would. Durkee had just said to get them out. He hadn’t said to where.
“Because the Army has done such a stupendous job so far?”
“Ma’am, I’m just passing on the word.”
She grabbed my left arm. “Don’t call me ma’am. And you can’t just come in here and tell me I’m evacuating and—”
I reached behind me and clasped my right hand around the STG. It came forward effortlessly, and before she or I knew what was going on I had it propped up and pressed against her chin. I had no easy way of firing the thing this way, but she didn’t know that.
She stopped talking immediately, her eyes widening. “If you won’t listen to me, maybe you’ll listen to Mr. Sturmagawher.”
I was ninety-nine percent sure I hadn’t pronounced the gun’s name correctly. It came out sounding like sturmguh.
She began to shake. “I have children…”
“Then take them to the front gate. The Army is there. There are thousands of fucking undead coming right for this neighborhood. We’re going to detonate that overpass and try to stop them, and that means you need to not be here.”
“Mommy?” someone called behind her. A small child stood in the hallway about ten feet away. She took in the scene before her and her lower lip began trembling. “Mommy?”
I lowered the gun immediately.
The woman glared at me. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead, and she sagged against the front door.
“Take your kids and go,” I said. “Trust me. You don’t want to be caught when they get here.”
She nodded, and stepped away from me.
“Sorry,” I added.
The front door slammed as I headed up the street. Was she going to do it? Would she leave? Or would she stay there and watch the revenants swarm? She has kids, she has to leave. But everyone here was so sheltered, so unbearably stupid—they saw the ghouls as an inconvenience, something that happened Outside.
You always think it’s going to be easy until you actually have to face it. Then you realize how hard that shit really is.
I went down the row of houses and continued issuing warnings. To their credit, most people listened—maybe I looked scary enough to persuade them not all was well. Soon enough, a number of residents—some carrying nothing, some clutching kids, pets, or belongings—streamed down the street, turning left on Chapman and heading west to the safer part of the city. As they hurried, the dull roar of the dead crept over the neighborhood, more distinct to me because I knew what I was listening to. To everyone else, all these people who had never seen a zombie try to crash a dinner buffet, it was probably the same as hearing a plane pass overhead. Indistinct, easily ignored, just something else to get used to.
I moved from house to house, condensing my speech as I went. Pretty soon, “Zombies are coming. Get out” sufficed, and people were glad to leave.
Or stay. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t up to me to save them once I told them what was coming.
What was it like to just go, to leave your home and know you’d never come back to it? When I left my house in Ellisport the day of the meteors, I knew I’d be working late that night, but it had never once crossed my mind that I wouldn’t go home at all.
So many of these folks seemed to take it in stride. They moved along on the sidewalk and in the streets, dodging around each other, helping one another out, mumbling about what was going on. Some of them even shouted up to Durkee as they moved beneath the overpass.