The crowd kept coming to us. I’d had to hang up on Vinnie.

  “They’re going to crawl right over these damn sandbags,” complained Farris. The bandage around his wrist was soaked through with blood.

  “What do we do?” asked Farris.

  He already knew.

  When they were fifteen yards away, we opened up.

  We burned through at least a mag each before we remembered about shooting them in the head.

  Talia screamed it first, and then we were all screaming it. “The head! Shoot for the head!”

  “Switch to semi-auto,” I hollered. “Check your targets, conserve your ammo.”

  We stood in a line, our barrels flashing and smoking, spitting fire at the people as they crowded close.

  They went down.

  Only if we took them in the head. Only then.

  At that range, though, we couldn’t miss. They walked right up to the barrels. They looked at us as we shot them.

  “Jesus, Sal,” said Talia as we swapped our mags, “Their eyes. Did you see their eyes?”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. When someone is walking up to you and not even ducking away from the shot, you see everything.

  We burned through three-quarters of our ammunition.

  The air stank of smoke and blood.

  Farris was the last one to stop shooting. He was laughing as he clicked on empty, but when he looked back at the rest of us, we could see that there were tears pouring down his cheeks.

  The smoke clung to the moment, and for a while, that’s all I could see. My mouth was a thick paste of cordite and dry spit. When the breeze came up off the river, we stared into the reality of what we had just done.

  “They were all sick, right?” asked Talia. “I mean … they were all infected, right? All of them?”

  “Yeah,” I said, but what the hell did I know?

  We stood there for a long time. None of us knew what the hell to do.

  Later, when I tried to call the major again, I got nothing.

  The same thing with the cells. I couldn’t even get a signal.

  None of us could.

  “Come on,” I said after a while, “check your ammo.”

  We did. We had two magazines each, except for Farris, who had one.

  Two mags each.

  It didn’t feel like it was going to be enough.

  Talia grabbed my sleeve. “What the hell do we do?”

  They all looked at me. Like I knew what the fuck was what.

  “We hold this fucking bridge,” I said.

  -7-

  No more of them came down the road.

  Not then.

  Not all afternoon.

  Couple of times we heard—or thought we heard—gunfire from way upriver. Never lasted long.

  The sun started to fall behind the trees, and it smeared red light over everything. Looked like the world was on fire. I saw Talia staring at the sky for almost fifteen minutes.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Planes,” she said.

  I looked up. Way high in the sky there were some contrails, but the sky was getting too dark to see what they were. Something flying in formation, though.

  Joe Bob was on watch, and he was talking to himself. Some Bible stuff. I didn’t want to hear what it was.

  Instead, I went to the Jersey side of the bridge and looked up and down the road. Talia and Farris came with me, but there was nothing to see.

  “Maybe they made a public service announcement,” said Talia. “Like the Emergency Broadcast Network thing. Maybe they told everyone to stay home, stay off the roads.”

  “Sure,” I said in pretty much the same way you’d say ‘bullshit.’

  We watched the empty road as the sky grew darker.

  “We could just leave,” said Farris. “Head up the road. There’s that Quiznos. Maybe we can find a ride.”

  “We can’t leave the bridge,” I said.

  “Fuck the bridge.”

  I got up in his face. “Really? You want to let them just stroll across the bridge? Is that your plan? Is that what you think will get the job done?”

  “What job? We’re all alone out here. Might as well have been on the far side of the goddamn moon.”

  “They’ll come back for us,” I said. “You watch; in the morning there’ll be a truck with supplies, maybe some hot coffee.”

  “Sure,” he said, in exactly the same way I had a minute ago.

  -8-

  That night, there were a million stars and a bright three-quarter moon. Plenty of light to see the road. Only one of them came down the road. Talia was on watch and she took it down with a single shot to the head. She let the thing—it used to be a mailman—walk right up to the sandbags. It opened its mouth, even though it was too far away to bite, and Talia shot it in the eye.

  Then she sat down and cried like a little girl for ten whole minutes. I stood her watch and let her cry. I wished I could do that. For me, it was all stuck inside and it was killing me that I couldn’t let it go.

  -9-

  Farris got sick in the night.

  I heard him throwing up, and I came over and shined my flashlight on him. His face was slick with sweat. Joe Bob went back to the wall and Talia knelt next to me. She knew more first aid than I did, and she took Farris’s vitals as best she could.

  “Wow, he’s burning up,” she said, looking at his fever-bright eyes and sweaty face, but then she put her palm on his forehead and frowned. “That’s weird. He’s cold.”

  “Shock?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

  Then she examined the bite, and I heard her gasp. When I shined my light on Farris’s arm, I had to bite my lip. The wound on Farris’s wrist was bad enough, but there were weird black lines running all the way up his arm. It was like someone had used a Sharpie to outline every vein and capillary.

  “It’s infection,” said Talia, but I knew that it was worse than that.

  “God,” gasped Farris, “it’s blood poisoning.”

  I said nothing because I thought it was worse than that, too. Even in the harsh glare of the flashlight, his color looked weird.

  Talia met my eyes over the beam of the light. She didn’t say anything, but we had a whole conversation with that one look.

  I patted Farris on the shoulder. “You get some sleep, man. In the morning we’ll get a medic down here to give you a shot, set you right.”

  Fear was jumping up in his eyes. “You sure? They can give me something for this?”

  “Yeah. Antibiotics and shit.”

  Talia fished in her first-aid kit. There was a morphine syrette. She showed it to me, and I nodded.

  “Sweet dreams, honey,” she said as she jabbed Farris with the little needle. His eyes held hers for a moment, and then he was out.

  We made sure he was comfortable and then we got up and began walking up and down the length of the bridge. Talia kept looking up at the moon.

  “Pretty night,” I said.

  She made a face.

  “Should be a pretty night,” I amended.

  We stopped for a moment and looked down at the rushing water. It was running fast and high after that big storm a couple of days ago, and each little wave-tip gleamed with silver moonlight. Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes passed while we stood there, our shoulders a few inches apart, hands on the cold metal rail, watching the river do what rivers do.

  “Sally?” she asked softly.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is all happening, right?”

  I glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

  She used her fingers to lightly trace circles on the inside of her forearm. “You know I used to ride the spike, right? I mean, that’s not news.”

  “I figured.”

  “I’ve been getting high most of my life. Since … like seventh grade. Used to swipe pills from my mom’s purse. She did a lot of speed, so that’s what I started on. Rode a lot of fast waves, y’know?”

  “Yeah.” I was never much of a hophead, but I lived in Newark and I’d seen a lot of my friends go down in flames.

  “Until I got clean the last time, I was probably high more than I was on the ground.”

  I said nothing.

  “So,” she continued, “I seen a lot of weird shit. While I was jonesing for a hit, while I was high, on the way down. You lose touch, y’know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People talk about pink elephants and polka-dotted lobsters and shit, but that’s not what comes out of the woodwork.” She shivered and gripped the rail with more force. Like it was holding her there. “And not a day goes by—not a fucking day—when I don’t want a fix. Even now, twenty-three months clean, I can feel it. It’s like worms crawling under my skin. That morphine? You think I haven’t dreamed about that every night?”

  I nodded. “My Uncle Tony’s been in and out of twelve steps for booze. I’ve seen how he looks at Thanksgiving when the rest of us are drinking beers and watching the ball game. Like he’d take a knife to any one of us for a cold bottle of Coors.”

  “Right. Did your uncle ever talk to you about having a dry drunk? About feeling stoned and even seeing the spiders come crawling out of the sofa when he hasn’t even had a drop?”

  “Couple times.”

  “I get that,” she said. “I get that a lot.”

  I waited.

  “That’s why I need you to tell me that this is all really happening; or am I lost inside my own head?”

  I turned to her and touched her arm. “I wish to Christ and the baby Jesus that I could say that you’re just tripping. Having a dry drunk, or whatever you’d call it. A flashback—whatever. But … I ain’t a drunk and I never shot up, and here I am, right with you. Right here in the middle of this shit.”

  Talia closed her eyes and leaned her forehead on the backs of the hands that clung so desperately to the rail. “Ah … fuck,” she said quietly.

  I felt like a total asshole for telling her the truth.

  Then Talia stiffened, and I saw that she was looking past her hands. “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  She pointed over the rail. “In the water. Is that a log, or …?”

  Something bobbed up and down as the current swept it toward the bridge. It looked black in the moonlight, but as it came closer we could see that part of it was white.

  The face.

  White.

  We stared at it … and it stared back up at us.

  Its mouth was open, working, like it was trying to bite us even as the river pulled it under the bridge and then out the other side. We hurried to the other side and stared over, watching the thing reach toward us, its white fingers clawing the air.

  Then it was gone. A shape, then a dot, then nothing.

  Neither of us could say a word.

  Until the next one floated by. And the next.

  “God, no …” whispered Talia.

  We went back to the other side of the bridge.

  “There’s another,” I said. “No … two … no …”

  I stopped counting.

  Counting didn’t matter.

  Who cares how many of them floated down? Two, three hundred? A thousand?

  After the first one, really, who cared how many?

  Talia and I stood there all night, watching. There were ordinary civilians and people in all kinds of uniforms. Cops, firemen, paramedics. Soldiers. I wished to God that I had a needle of heroin for her. And for me.

  We didn’t tell the others.

  -10-

  I’m not sure what time the bodies stopped floating past. The morning was humid and there was a thick mist. It covered the river, and maybe there were still bodies down there, or maybe the fog hid them.

  We stood there as the fog curled gray fingers around the bridge and pulled itself up to cover everything. The wall of sandbags, Joe Bob, the sleeping figure of Farris, our gear. All of it.

  Talia and I never moved from the rail, even when it got hard to see each other.

  “They’ll come for us, right?” she asked. “The lieutenant? The supply truck? They’ll come to get us, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. She was a ghost beside me.

  “You’re sure?”

  “They’ll come.”

  And they did.

  It wasn’t long, either, but the sun was already up and the fog was starting to thin out. Talia saw them first and she stiffened.

  “Sally …”

  I turned to look.

  At first it was only a shape. A single figure, and my heart sank. It came down the road from the direction our truck had come, walking wearily toward us from the Jersey side. In the fog it was shapeless, shambling.

  Talia whimpered, just a sound of denial that didn’t have actual words.

  “Fuck me,” I whispered, but before I could even bring my gun up, the fog swirled and I could see the mishmash stripes of camouflage, the curve of a helmet, the sharp angles of a rifle on its sling.

  Talia grabbed my arm. “Sally? Look!”

  There was movement behind the soldier, and, one by one, shapes emerged. More camos, more tin pots.

  More soldiers.

  They came walking down the road. Five of them. Then more.

  “It’s the whole platoon,” Talia said, and laughter bubbled in her voice.

  But it was more than that. As the mist thinned, I could see a lot of soldiers. A hundred at least. More.

  “Damn,” I said, “they look bone-ass tired. They must have been fighting all night.”

  “Is it over?” she asked. “Have we beaten this goddamn thing?”

  I smiled. “I think so.”

  I waved, but no one waved back. Some of them could barely walk. I could understand, I felt like I could drop where I stood. We’d been up all night watching the river.

  “Talia, go wake up Farris and tell Joe Bob to look sharp.”

  She grinned and spun away and vanished into the veil of fog that still covered the bridge.

  I took a second to straighten my uniform and sling my rifle the right way. I straightened my posture and stepped off the bridge onto the road, looking tough, looking like someone who maybe should get some sergeant’s stripes for holding this frigging bridge. Army strong, booyah.

  I saw Lieutenant Bell, and he was as wrung out as the rest of them. He lumbered through the fog, shoulders slumped, and behind him were gray soldiers. Even from this distance I could tell that no one was smiling. And for a moment I wondered if maybe this was a retreat rather than a surge. Shit. Had they gotten their asses kicked and these were the survivors? If so … Bell would have his ass handed to him and I wouldn’t be going up a pay grade.

  “Well, whatever,” I said to myself. “Fireteam Delta held the bridge, so fuck it and fuck you and hooray for the red, white, and blue.”

  A breeze wandered out of the south and it blew past me, swirling the mist, blowing it off the bridge and pushing it away from the soldiers. The mass of gray figures changed into khaki and brown and green.

  And red.

  All of them.

  Splashed with …

  I turned and screamed at the top of my lungs. “TALIA! Joe Bob, Farris! Lock and load. Hostiles on the road …”

  The breeze had blown all the mist off of the bridge.

  Talia stood forty feet from the wall of sandbags. Her rifle hung from its sling, the sling in her hand, the stock of the weapon on the blacktop. She stood, her back to me, staring at Joe Bob.

  At what was left of Joe Bob.

  Farris must have heard something. Maybe a sound I made, or Talia’s first scream. He froze in the midst of lifting something from Joe Bob’s stomach. Some piece of something. I couldn’t tell what, didn’t care what.

  Farris bared his teeth at us.

  Then he stuffed the thing into his mouth and chewed.

  Where he wasn’t covered with blood, Farris’s skin was gray-green and veined with black lines.

  Behind me I heard the shuffling steps of the soldiers as the first of them left the road and stepped onto the bridge.

  Talia turned toward me, and in her eyes, I saw everything that had to be in my own eyes.

  Her fingers twitched and the rifle dropped to the asphalt.

  “Please,” she said. Her mouth trembled into a smile. “Please.”

  Please.

  I raised my rifle, racked the bolt, and shot her. She was never a pretty girl. Too thin, too worn by life. She had nice eyes, though, and a nice smile. The bullets took that away, and she fell back.

  I heard—felt—someone come up behind me.

  Something.

  Probably Bell.

  I turned. I still only had two mags. Less three bullets.

  There were hundreds of them.

  I raised my rifle.

  This was written for an anthology, Slasher Girls and Monster Boys (Dial Books, 2015). It deals with body positivity and bullying issues—apart from zombies. I taught Women’s Self-Defense to thousands of students over the years and saw so many wonderful instances of someone who had been bullied or abused rising to claim their power and take agency over their lives. This story reflects a good deal of that. Though, admittedly, I never taught a class on self-defense against the living dead.

  Fat Girl with a Knife

  -1-

  Dahlia had a pretty name, but she knew she wasn’t pretty.

  Kind of a thing with the girls in her family. None of the Allgood girls were making magazine covers.

  Her oldest sister, Rose, was one of those college teacher types. Tall, thin, meatless, kind of gray-looking, with too much nose, no chin at all, and eyes that looked perpetually disappointed. She taught art history, so there was that. No one she taught would ever get a job in that field. There probably weren’t jobs in that field. When was there ever a want-ad for art historian?

  The sister between Rose and her was named Violet. She was the family rebel. Skinny because that’s what drugs do; but not skinny in any way that made her look good. Best thing you could say about how she looked was that she looked dangerous. Skinny like a knife blade. Cold as one too. And her moods and actions tended to leave blood on the walls. Her track record with “choices” left her parents bleeding year after year. Violet was in Detroit now. Out of rehab again. No one expected it to stick.