Terrifying Lies. Craig Nybo
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woman’s head crunched on impact. She swayed off kilter, took a few shuddering steps, and collapsed into a rack of pink heart-shaped acoustic guitars.
More undead came at me. I batted them side-to-side, swing after swing, backing up as they came. They moved in lumbering steps, but there were a lot of them. The strain of my work tired my arms. I continued to back away, swinging with every step, until I collided into a bank of bass guitars hanging from a set of wall hooks. One of them fell with a twang as the bass’s head broke in half. I gasped and looked down at the broken instrument. Relieved that it was just a Squier Jaguar, I went back into battle.
The undead had backed me into a corner. I eyed the room beyond them as I punished them with blow after blow. I spotted a hallway about fifty feet off. With the entrance clogged by more undead entering Wanesgard Music, the hallway was my only escape. If it led to a dead end, I was finished. I could only hope for a rear exit.
I smashed straight down into the head of an undead man wearing a Chap’s Lumber hat, leveling him to the floor, and began an oblong battle, traversing along the wall of guitars toward the rear hallway.
A rail of an undead man with barely fifty pounds of meat on his bones came at me hissing and swiping with a pair of claw-like hands. I ducked one of his blows but took the second swipe in the face. I felt lines of blood rise from a set of parallel scratch marks in my cheek. I opened my eye slowly, hoping I hadn’t lost it and realized with great relief that I could still see.
I jockeyed around a Marshal full-stack, placing the amps and cabinet between me and the skinny undead man. I put my shoulder to the stack and pushed until it toppled over. I heard the slender man hiss and thump under the weight of the cabinets. I snapped a look down at him. He lay crushed under the stack, wriggling and trapped.
I continued along the wall, slashing and stabbing with the B.C. Rich, pushing them away. I hooked one of them with the horn of the instrument’s body and flung him into an entanglement of amplifiers, chords and microphone stands.
After a reckless but successful battle, I made it to the hallway on the back wall of the guitar store. I sprinted along the short corridor past three offices and two restrooms to a double door, fixed with a push bar. I ignored the sign that said Alarm Will Sound and pushed the bar. A tinny speaker mounted on the door rasped out a high-pitched chirping cry. It must have run on batteries in case of a power outage (and what a power outage we were having). The alarm blasted my ears. But its effect had even more impact on the undead coming down the hall toward me.
The creatures stopped their advance and covered their ears with open palms, moaning and crying against the shrill rhythm of the exit door’s piercing alarm.
The door swung open into the rear parking lot of the place, dark and festooned with cars. I backed out onto a loading dock and let the door close behind me.
I had forgotten myself. I had let the music overtake me and hadn’t stayed alert. That was a mistake I wouldn’t make again.
As I turned to leave the loading dock, I glanced into a large, blue dumpster—a habit I had recently picked up. A handful of guitar shipping boxes and a few gig-bag guitar cases lay strewn inside. I touched the Gibson, still hanging from my shoulder. I leaned into the dumpster and picked up one of the gig-bags. As I left Wanesgard Music behind, I shoved my new prize into the case and re-slung it over my shoulder.
I found my motorcycle where I had left it in a handicap parking place in front of the music store. I kicked the engine to life and rode out. It took me nearly two hours to find a dumpster with enough slime and filth to hide my scent. I leaned the Gibson Hollowbody against my motorcycle and climbed inside. I nestled down into the dreck and laid still. In time, my heart rate slowed down and I drifted off to sleep.
13 – July 7, Year 1
I’ve been riding for nearly three hours toward a column of smoke. Going is slow. The freeway is a graveyard for thousands of cars, most of them abandoned, some of them occupied by their former owners. It’s like an infinite river of mausoleums, every make and model. The repeated heat and cool of the season has had a mummifying effect on the corpse drivers—unlike the carrion that I have seen lying out in the open, picked by birds, bugs, and scoundrels.
I ride the embankments and the roadside forests rather than the pavement. I have been able to take some stretches of shoulder, and even a few jaunts between lanes of traffic. But frequent wrecks force me to the sidelines.
The freeway feels safe. I have seen a few undead moving about. But the on-the-road food supply seems scarce; they don’t have any appetite for spoiled meat.
I stopped to investigate an enormous 3rd wheel. The previous owners had fixed the mobile home with a generator. I pried the door open and smelled death. The previous owner, a man of about 70, lay between the two pilots chairs, his chest torn open, most of his flesh chewed away. Someone else lay on a bed in the back of the vehicle, probably the man’s wife. Before I could catch a glimpse of her that would haunt my nights, I shut the door and moved on.
I rode the freeway a while longer and took highway 83, headed North into a canyon pass, toward the smoke. Hours of travel had only taken me 60 miles from the dumpster in which I had awoken that morning—so much lookout, dodging, and weaving.
I turned the road’s curves, winding my way down toward the valley. The signs said I was coming up on Farmingham. The little town lay at the base of the pass at the tip of an enormous damned reservoir. From my vantage point, I could see the source of the smoke. Farmingham had an oil refinery. Someone was putting out the signal. People, I thought. I hoped the smoke was a sign of peace, not a warning to stay away.
I made the valley, not able to help the excitement rising within me at the prospect of any kind of human interaction.
I momentarily became careless.
Something hit me hard from the side, causing my bike to fishtail. I’m sure if I was a more experience rider, I could have pulled out of the tailspin; but as it was, I lost my center of gravity. The mind works like a runaway train, prioritizing and cataloging at superhuman speed during duress. At the moment I lost control, a picture of my new Gibson came to me. I adjusted my body’s positioning as I fell in such a way to protect the Gibson from harm. Somehow, I managed to slow down enough during the crash to keep my wits and at least control the worst of the damage. The road peeled away my jeans and ground into my leg and hip, biting like a million teeth. My arm smeared into the turf, leaving a slur of puckered skin and blood on the pavement.
I pushed up to my hands and knees in time to see an undead man standing above me with a broken tree limb in his raw hands, his jaw hanging to an unnatural angle.
They were using tools. Not just tools: they were using weapons.
I pushed over onto my bottom and skidded away. The undead man made an awkward swing at me, landing a glancing blow to my shin. It hurt, but didn’t break anything. I pushed up to my feet and away from him all at once.
I scanned the area to ascertain what had happened. As far as I could reconstruct, the undead man had bushwhacked me from behind an SUV. Had he the sentience to set a trap? If they were gaining intelligence, things were going to become a lot more complicated for us humans.
I drew my Glock and aimed. I fired. Even at close range, I missed with my first shot. I swore under my breath; I couldn’t afford to waste ammunition. I fixed my aim and put the undead man down with a second bullet.
My bike lay in a mess. I wove my hands behind my neck and looked up at the sky. Half of my body lay open with road rash and my shin hurt like hell. I looked ahead at the plume of smoke, still rising from the refinery. I took a deep breath and moved out at a limping crawl. I wouldn’t get ahead of myself and be caught off-guard again. The undead bastards could think. They could use weapons. I had to stay alert.
13 – July 8, Year 1
I’m tired. Last night I tried for a dumpster. But as I neared town, the number of walkers seemed overwhelming. I had to keep to the shadows and move methodically. I’m sitting at a desk in a locked up, abandoned split-level home. Before the dead started walking, this little community must have