Zombie Attack! Rise of the Horde (33 page)

“On your right,” Benji called out. I turned to look at him,
confused by everything that was happening as I felt a sharp pain shoot through
my right side. Something cold clamped down onto my skin. Glancing down I saw
that a small zombie boy in a blue and yellow striped shirt was latched onto my
stomach by his dirty mouth. With a sharp strike from my elbow I dislodged him,
then swung around and took his head clean off. I watched the expression go
blank on his kid zombie face as his lifeless head rolled to a stop at the curb
and his small corpse fell over flat.

My hand shook as I touched the wound and saw bright red
blood forming. I'd been bitten! I heard Felicity yelling something at me but I
couldn't make out what it was. There was a loud ringing in my ears and I could
feel my heart beating hard in my chest. I started to feel woozy. My legs
wobbled beneath me as they gave way. The last thing I remembered was the ground
rushing up to meet me and then seeing a big burst of light.

***

When I opened my eyes again, I was lying on my back looking
up at the inside of a canvass tent with a hole that went straight up into the
sky. The brown skinned man with the bird feathers in his hair and black paint
on his face worked over a fire nearby, boiling water. Rolling my head to the
side I could see my sword lying next to his two huge shiny knives. My
reflection was clearly visible in them. I could tell I was in deep trouble with
a single glance. My skin was already turning a yellowish green to match the
feeling of bile rising up from my stomach, and my forehead was beaded with
feverish sweat as my body tried to fight off the killer infection. I touched my
side where I had been bitten and winced with pain.

“Awake to the dream of reality,” the man said with a smile.

“Who are you?”

“I'm called many things by many different people,” he said.
“It all depends on how they see me or what they need from me.”

“I don't need anything from you,” I said trying to sit up
and falling back over in agony.

“We all need something from each other,” he said pleasantly.
“Life is by its very nature interdependent. You can call me Simon if you like.
You've more than earned the right.

“Where am I?”

“Paradise City,” he said.

“I thought we were in Oxnard,” I argued.

“That's what it used to be called,” he explained. “Before
things fell apart. There isn't much that remains as it once used to be.” He had
a cryptic way of talking, as if everything he said was a riddle or Zen koan
waiting to be unraveled. My head throbbed and I tried not to think about it.

“Who were those people hunting us?” I was already starting
to feel feverish.

“Cannibals,” he replied. “They would have eaten you all if
they could have caught you. Turned your organs into soup and your flesh into
strips of jerky.”

“Just like zombies,” I said, attempting an ironic smile.

“Worse,” he offered. “Zombies don't have free will while the
cannibals know exactly what they are doing and just don't care. There aren't
many people left out here. Almost everybody is a zombie. Cannibals track
passing traffic on the freeway to trap fresh victims. I saw your car hit that
pole in the parking lot from my little hill up here and knew you were in big
trouble so I headed down. I figured if you had any sense at all you'd cut
through the mall and head west.”

Despite my state I took his words as the compliment they
were intended to be. It felt good to know I'd been right, even if it had cost
me my life. None of that mattered as long as the others were safe. Panic shot
through me as I realized I didn't know what had become of them.
What if the
zombies had eaten them?
I couldn't go to my grave without knowing and
judging from the way I felt I knew I didn't have long until I changed.

“Where are my friends?” I asked, confused. I tried to sit up
but didn't have the strength. It felt like a boulder had been dropped on my
chest.

“They are outside, waiting,” he said. “You were very brave.
You saved their lives.”

“I was very stupid,” I said. “I'm paying the price for it
now.” The realization that I was going to become one of those flesh eating
monsters wasn't fully kicking in. It was just more than I could handle at the
moment.

“I don't think so,” he countered. “You're brother will be
very proud of you.”

“How do you know my brother?” I lifted my head, straining to
look at him.

“Moto is a friend,” he said. “That's more than I can say for
the rest of his tribe. He will be pleased to learn his little brother has
become a fierce warrior. He's been looking for you since news reached him about
Vandenberg. He left me a walkie to contact him if you came this way. He said
you would make it, that you were strong and would find your way to the base.
Turns out he was right.”

“It's too late,” I said. “I've been bitten.”

“Don't worry,” Simon said. “He will be here soon. He was
very excited to hear you were still alive.”

“I'm dying,” I said, fighting to stay awake. “By the time he
gets here more than likely he'll have to chop off my head.”

“I wouldn't be so sure,” Simon said. “Things are not always
as they appear in this world. Nor are they otherwise.”

“I saw you,” I said, ignoring his brain twister. “You were
walking right through a crowd of zombies but they moved out of your way. It was
a miracle, like parting water with your bare hands. How did you do that?”

“It's a long story,” he said with a pleasant smile that made
me feel calm and at ease. “The short answer is by controlling my breathing.
I've spent years learning how to lower my heart rate through meditation. It
helps me to move calmly among them without drawing attention to myself. Usually
I don't have to raise my weapons at all. Today required I move with greater
speed than normal, hence the light display. Forgive me if it seemed vain. It
was not without purpose, I assure you.”

“I thought zombies were attracted to movement,” I said.

“If that is true, then why don't they attack each other?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I always assumed they came after us
because we smelled alive, like food.”

“They are driven by hunger,” he answered. “Like all
predators, they use their senses to search out victims. Most people panic when
they see them, causing their heart rates to skyrocket and their skin to sweat.
Just like a dog can smell fear, so too can the undead sense our repulsion of
them. Add to that the fact that most people scream or wave their arms and run
around like chickens with their heads cut off and it's no wonder they zero in
on us as if they had heat seeking technology.”

“So you're saying if I stood perfectly still in the middle
of a zombie horde I wouldn't have been bitten?”

I thought about Joel and Tom's story of hiding under the
dead soldiers as the zombies passed by them.

“I can't say that for sure,” he admitted. “What I can tell
you is that I have been walking with them in a trance-like state on many
occasions and have not been attacked.”

“How do you remain calm when you know they can turn on you
at any moment and rip you to shreds? How is that possible?”

“You have to learn to change the way you see the world,” he
said with a kind smile. “When you view them with compassion, your fear is
transformed into sympathy. These were people once, just like you and me. They
had hopes and dreams, families, loved ones. Just like you and me they wanted
more happiness and less suffering in their lives. They had plans for the
future. Now they are eternally damned to wander the earth with a terrible hunger
that cannot be fulfilled, reviled as monsters. It's heartbreaking in every way
imaginable.”

“I'm glad you are so sympathetic,” I said. “Considering I
will shortly be one of them. But I still think you should cut my head off the
minute I change. I don't want to be responsible for killing anyone.”

“You're going to be just fine,” he said opening his hand and
revealing two blue pills. “Your friend Felicity told me to give you these. She
said she took them from your pocket in Ojai. She told me to tell you not to be
mad at her.”

So she stole the pills back from me!
I wasn't mad at
her. A pang of sadness shot through me knowing that I would never get to kiss
her again, that the moment we shared up on the hill was the best we would ever
have together.

I raised my head and he placed them in my mouth. He took a
bottle of water from the ground and placed it to my lips. It felt cool and
refreshing. I gulped down as much as I could.

“How is she?” I asked. “How is her arm?”

“I managed to take the arrow out and clean the wound,” he
told me. “She's going to be just fine. The shaft went almost clean through. She
is very lucky it only hit her arm.”

The pain in my body was growing. It spread across my entire
chest, radiating out from the wound in my side and even ran down my legs. I
panted steadily to relieve some of the pain, trying to breathe it away.

“I'm going to need you to listen to me,” Simon said. “An
antidote is on its way, but for now we're going to want to slow down the spread
of the virus. The pills will help calm you but I want you to work on your
breathing with me. Got it?”

“Yes,” I managed. The pain was growing exponentially now. I
could feel it in my toes and finger tips.

“Remember what I told you about controlling my heart rate
with meditation?”

I nodded in reply, too sick to answer. My throat felt dry
like hot sand at the beach.

“We're going to slow yours down now too,” he said. “I want
you to close your eyes but concentrate on the sound of my voice.”

I closed my eyes without argument.

“That's good,” he said. “Now I want you to focus on your
breath as it moves in and out of your body. Don't try to control it. Just
become aware of it. When thoughts arise, resist the temptation to follow them.
Instead, gently push them aside and return your concentration to the breath.”

I did as he said and immediately began to relax. The pain
was still there but I wasn't fighting against it now so its effect on me didn't
seem as overwhelming.

“Think of your mind as a vast blue sky without end and your
thoughts like white, fluffy clouds. They don't come from anywhere and they
don't go anywhere. When the causes and conditions are right, clouds appear.
Don't follow the clouds but return to the calm, peaceful blue of your mind.”

He kept talking in a soothing voice that lured me deeper
into a state of total relaxation, but I stopped focusing on the meaning of what
he was saying. A calm rose in me, overriding the pain that was consuming my
entire body. I surrendered to it completely and let it take me where it wanted
me to go. I felt my spirit mix with the blue of my mind, like water poured into
water as everything I knew faded away into emptiness.

For a while I wandered, dead and disembodied, through a
collage of memories from my childhood. I saw Mrs. Sanders, my kind third grade
teacher, watering flowers in her garden. She stopped to wave as I went by. She
looked the same as she did when I was a kid. The fact that she had been dead
over a decade gave me further conviction that I had passed away.

So this is heaven
, I thought.
Strange. I expected
something else, like clouds or angels playing harps or Morgan Freeman in a
white suit telling me he was proud of me.
Instead, I was drifting past a
river of soothing memories filled with people I had once known and loved who
had passed before me. More than anything I wanted to stop and talk to them, to
find out what they knew, not just about this afterlife but about what had
happened in the place that I had come from. What I wanted didn't really seem to
matter. The river slowly pulled me onward, past my best childhood friend Doug's
mom Cindy who had died of leukemia, and Sally, the girl I asked to prom who
later died in a car accident while texting, and Jim, my brother's friend who
had been killed in action in Afghanistan. I saw the Parker twins off in the
distance, chasing after fallen soldiers I'd known at the base. Joel ignored me
but Tom turned from over a hundred feet away and smiled. He waved then darted
off.

What about your mother?
I thought to myself.
Where
is she?

No sooner did I think it than her smiling face appeared.

“Oh son,” she said, her voice like ringing crystal wind
chimes. “I am so proud of you. I love you so much.”

“I love you too, Mom,” I managed before she melted away. “I
miss you so much.”

The whole world became a blur of shifting blue shapes;
hexagons and trapezoids and rectangles formed and crashed into one another in a
dizzying array of fractal shapes, like a kaleidoscope. My mind tried
desperately to attach itself to these forms but disconnected as the colors came
together and crashed apart like waves in a turbulent storm. I could hear voices
gathered around me but I couldn't make out the words they were saying. Every
now and then a sentence would get through.

“You're going to feel a pinch and then the burning will
stop,” someone said as a sharp pain shot through me followed by hard pressure.
Almost immediately I felt a soothing sensation like being bathed in cold ice
water. I began to shiver all over.

“Try to relax,” Simon said, his words transforming into a
living jelly that wriggled across my skin and made me laugh. Warmth returned to
my bodiless form like a ray of sunlight penetrating my heart. I felt like I was
falling through a vast and endless blue sky, but I wasn't afraid. Nothing
mattered anymore.

Then the ground came rushing up toward me and I landed in a
soft foam of sand. A ripple ran off from where I touched down in every
direction as far as the eye could see. I was in a desert and my body was normal
again.