The Crossing: A Zombie Novella Read Free Page B

pole. He was sitting down, his back against the pole, knees pulled up to his chest, refusing to look at the people who had gathered around the fence. A few people were chatting, but most seemed to be just milling around, waiting.
    We weren’t there long when the two men in camouflage who had been shooting from the deer blind trotted over to a horse trailer attached to the fence. One of them got up on top of the trailer and used a broom handle to pry open the door latch. Nothing happened. The door stayed close.
    “ Hit it,” somebody yelled.
    “ Yeah, yeah,” the man on top of the trailer said. He slapped the door with the broom handle and the door swung open. Three zombies piled out, staggering into the sunlight. They looked confused and lost. But then they saw the man chained to the pole, and as soon as that happened, the zombies staggered toward him, hands raised and clutching at the air.
    “ They’re gonna kill him.”
    Jessica gestured for me to be quiet.
    I watched the man chained to the pole, and I thought for sure I was going to throw up.
    The man climbed to his feet, backing away to the length the chain clasped to his neck would allow. He watched the zombies advancing on him, his eyes bulged in panic, lips trembling. He looked pathetic tugging on the chain.
    But he didn’t lose all self control. When the lead zombie got in close he made his move. Holding the chain out in front of him he sprinted to one side, catching the lead zombie just under the knees and sweeping it off its feet. The zombie pitched over, landing face-first in the dirt, then slowly climbed to its feet again.
    I kept waiting for a bunch of redneck hooting and hollering from the assembled crowd, but hardly anybody spoke, much less yelled. One man, drunk already, though the day had hardly started, made a feeble attempt to stoke the crowd by yelling at the condemned man, but everybody ignored him and eventually he too fell into a sort of sullen, bored silence.
    It was ennui, I realized then, that was the root cause of misery in the Zone. There were no prospects, no way to improve one’s life, save through savagery and the debasement of others. Whatever the man had done wasn’t enough to overcome the feelings of emptiness and bootless rage that afflicted these people. They watched him scramble around that enclosure, and even when he made a narrow escape, it wasn’t enough to change the exhausted listlessness in their expressions. It was like all the life had been bled from them.
    Then, he got lucky. One of the zombies was a man in the remnants of an orange t-shirt and jeans. The zombie slipped and went down to one knee. The chained man got behind him, looped the chain around his neck, pushed him face down in the dirt, and stood on the back of his neck. I saw the zombie’s expression change as he struggled against the weight holding him down. I don’t know if it was muscle memory or some atavistic fear surfacing in its ruined mind, but I swear, for a moment, I thought I saw fear in its eyes.
    The crowd grew interested too. They murmured. One man even chuckled. Most just leaned forward, hoping for something to break the boredom.
    Meanwhile, the chained man was pivoting around, making sure to keep the other two in sight. They were closing on him, but he didn’t seem willing to quit with the zombie in the orange shirt until he was dead.
    One of the zombies reached for him, but the chained man was faster and kicked the zombie legs out from under it. More people were getting interested now. The man who chuckled just a few moments before was nodding now. He shucked his shoulders from side to side, the way my dad used to when he watched the fights on TV.
    The zombie in the orange shirt and jeans stopped fighting. It looked dead to me. It wasn’t even twitching. The chained man tugged on the chain, pulling the zombie away from the other two, and then started unraveling the chain from the dead man’s neck.
    He’d almost freed himself when the