by D.L. Snell
(Originally published in Permuted Press' zombie anthology, The Undead)
Crying, Nathan swung the axe. The beveled steel chopped into the stair. It squeaked against the wood as he wrenched it free and swung again and again and again.
Nathan didn't know that he was crying, didn't notice the hot, salty tears trickling through his thick beard. He was deaf to his own mutterings and to the snot stinging his left nostril. He was blind to the shaggy brown hair that tickled his dense and wiry eyebrows. He was too busy thinking about his father Jon, about how those . . . those things had slurped the intestines out of Jon's gut, how, beneath the pale light of a nearly-full moon, Nathan had pressed a gun to his own father's head, and--
"Arrrghh!"
Swinging with all his might, Nathan buried the axe into the stair. He tried to dislodge it, but it was caught in a stud.
Nathan cursed, spraying spittle and thick ropes of mucus. He slammed all his weight against the axe handle, pushing, face boiling red and teeth clenched. The axe began to move. Just a little.
He stopped with an exasperated splutter and wiped his sweaty brow on the back of his arm. He had rolled back the sleeves of his flannel shirt, so his arm hair came away from his forehead matted and wet.
Great. Just fucking great. He hadn't even demolished one step, let alone enough to keep those bastards out of the upper story, and now the goddamn axe was stuck.
Fighting the constipated aggravation that boiled in his chest, Nathan slammed his body into the axe handle. The blade budged again. Another inch.
Then, a bad odor died in Nathan's nose. He stopped pushing against the axe and looked over his shoulder. He sniffed. Even through all the snot, he could smell rotting meat. And now that he was alert, he could hear something dragging across the concrete walkway outside. He could hear sluggish footsteps.
The gun he'd used on his father, a Smith & Wesson .38 special, was tucked in the waistband of his jeans. He tried to pull it out, but the hook-like hammer snagged the inside of his pants.
Nathan flinched as glass shattered in the parlor to his left. A wall blocked the room from view, but he could hear the windowpane shards crunch under a dozen feet. He could hear groans.
Nathan yanked on the gun. Something ripped, and the weapon sprang out. Its chamber echoed with a phantom gunshot, and its steel retained the pallid glow of last night's moon, the same moon that had formed cataracts on his father's staring eyes.
Shaking, cringing at the feel of the gun's oily wooden grip, Nathan leapt down the stairs onto the hardwood floor. The front door was straight ahead, with a patchwork rug at its foot. Nathan bounded toward it, glancing left into the parlor, his arm held out sideways to point the gun through the archway.
A pasty hand, veined with blue, shot out at his throat.
Nathan screamed and fired. The .38 shouted, bucked slightly, and the zombie's bloodshot eye disappeared. The ghoul stumbled back into the arms of its brethren. The others didn't try to catch it; they just trampled over its body, their groans muffled by the lingering gunshot.
As he reached for the door, Nathan's foot slid on the rug. His head hit the floor. It bounced, and a bright explosion temporarily blinded him.
Whimpering, he clambered to his feet and twisted the doorknob. Soon, he'd burst out onto the porch, into the light of the newly risen moon.
Nathan yanked the door open.
Zombies crowded the porch. They groped and lurched forward.
Nathan stumbled back, feet tangling with the rumpled rug. He windmilled his arms to keep balance, but the weight of the gun bowled him over. He stubbed his tailbone on the floor.
The cannibal corpses seized his legs and started to drag him through the door. The intruders from the parlor were closing in, too.
With two shots, Nathan brained the duo clogging the doorway. He kicked their hands away, feeling fingers break beneath his Timberlands. Rolling into a crouch, he shot a parlor zombie in the collarbone, leaving a smoking hole in the thing's plaid shirt. The ghoul, beer-bellied and suffering male-pattern baldness, staggered back, but kept coming, pushed forward by the ones behind it.
Using his last bullet to deter the parlor zombies, Nathan strafed toward the kitchen, toward the back door, but corpses were already spilling out of the dining room. They seized the back of his vest and pulled. Nathan fought, knowing that most his extra bullets were in the vest pocket. But the zombies were surrounding him. Some were already snapping teeth at his face, and their breath was fetid because it didn't come from their lungs; it came from their bloated stomachs and intestines.
Managing to shrug out of the vest, Nathan pushed past a skinny female zombie that had her hair up in a bun. She swiped at him, but he dodged her, pounding up the stairs. Another zombie, this one a gas-pump attendant wearing a STIHL cap, snagged Nathan's ankle. Nathan fell and hit his head on a stair. He plunged his boot into the gas-pump attendant's face, breaking the twisted spine of the cadaver's nose. But the bastard clung, and more zombies were lurching up the staircase.
Nathan kicked again, shattering the attendant's nicotine-stained teeth. Then he smashed the ghoul's fingers between his boots. The attendant released him, and the other dead bodies reached forward. Nathan escaped their flailing hands and scrambled up the staircase. The zombies swatted at his heels.
At the top of the staircase, there was a hallway, carpeted with a strip of royal blue. The left wall was lined with windows that overlooked the dark front yard. The right wall was lined with doorways.
Kicking open the second door, Nathan ducked into the darkness. An arm darted through the doorway and grazed his shirt collar. He slammed the door, and the limb snapped, withdrew. Nathan shut the door and turned the lock with shaky hands. He flicked on the light switch, but the bulb popped, and the light didn't come on.
Out in the hallway, zombies began to beat against the door. Their shadows moved in the light that leaked through the seams.
Eyes adjusting to the dark, Nathan moved to the nightstands beside the bed. A candle and matches stood on the nightstand's tabletop. Trying to light the wick, Nathan wasted three matches. When he got it right, candlelight flickered across the glass in a picture frame, illuminating the photograph within: though he was smiling, arm around Nathan's mother, Jon's eyes were grave moons.
Nathan looked away, shuddering.
A zombie hit the door, and its attack sounded like a distant gunshot.
Nathan dug into the pockets of his jeans. One pocket contained lint. The other held a single bullet.
Trying more than once to fling open the chamber, Nathan steadied his hand enough to slide the bullet into the .38. With the gun loaded, he tucked it in his waistband so he didn't have to touch it and remember his father, so he didn't have to remember the pale moonlight. He hunkered down behind the bed and tried to push it, but his face just flushed. He'd forgot that Jon had bolted all the heavy furniture to the floor. The dresser--which contained all Jon's socks, underwear, and t-shirts--was also secured.
Moaning, groaning, the zombies continued to pound on the door.
Nathan went to the only window and threw open the gossamer curtains. The candle made enough light that the glass reflected the bedroom. It also reflected Nathan's face, but he ignored his own sunken eyes; they were too much like his father's.
With a grunt, Nathan slid the window open.
In the yard below, zombies stopped crunching over mats of dead oak leaves and looked up. They moaned louder, gurgling, their useless lungs flatulating. Some were partially eaten, arms gnawed down to the bone and clothes blotted with russet blood. Others looked normal except for sallow skin, bruised purple in spots, except for torn shirts and missing shoes. But they all had one thing in common: they were all headed toward the house, toward Nathan.
Nathan ignored them and looked straight down, scanning the face of the house. The white siding, though overlapped, provided no handholds, no way to climb down, and the drop was nearly fifteen feet onto a brick patio; the overhang of the roof was too high up to reach, and the neighboring window, also too far away, led into a sardine can of the undead.
Nathan pulled his head back through the window and glanced over his shoulder toward the bedroom door. Something black jumped out at him. It was just the dresser's shadow, stretched into a tilting, two-dimensional skyscraper; the shadow recoiled only to leap again.
It sounded like the zombies were kicking the door now, slamming into it with all their weight. The door was shuddering. The doorjamb was splintering. And the stink! Flesh liquefying into seaweed-green rot. Bloated bodies belching green gasses.
Nathan only had one hope left.
He looked over the skeletal branches of the Oregon white oaks, and he searched the gangrene-soaked clouds for something that glowed like an incandescent bone. The moon had been nearly full last night when Nathan shot his father. Tonight, it would be completely full.
Behind him, the door bucked; it shifted back and forth. Nathan glanced back, then fixated on the sky again. And just as the clouds drifted past, Nathan saw it: the lunar skull, ghostly and round as a coin. It had just risen past the distant mountains.
At the mere sight, Nathan's hackles constricted and stood on end. His heart began to gallop, and his pupils dilated to the size of dimes. He felt his bones become restless beneath knotting muscles, and his beard began to itch.
The door lurched forward as zombies hammered it. There was one more crack, and the jamb gave way. The ghouls stumbled into the room.
Nathan's skeleton twisted, reconstructed. He screamed as his fingers went momentarily arthritic. He dropped the gun, and his fingernails protracted into claws. His pants, shirt, and shoes stretched against his bulging muscles, then ripped. His jaws and nose began to elongate into a snout, shoving knives of pain through his sinuses. His teeth grew into sharp canines. His eyes went black.
Unafraid, the zombies came forward and tore at his already ripped clothes. They dragged him down, and Nathan screamed, not from fear but from the pain of shifting bones. The cannibals sunk teeth into Nathan's rippling muscles, which were sprouting wiry, black hair. They piled over him, moaning and gnashing flesh.
Nathan's screams curdled, gurgled, and ceased altogether. The only sounds were hungry slurping and munching.
Then, a low growl. And a snarl.
Suddenly, Nathan sprang up. He was a canine, covered with black hair. Zombies hit the wall, the bed, and the closet door. One crashed into the window, shattering glass, and another bounced off the edge of the dresser.
Nathan shook off the clinging flesh-eaters, and his skin mended over his wounds. Still, the creatures ambled forward, moaning. Nathan lashed out, severing arms, slashing faces. Entrails, runny from putrefaction, piled at his feet. A severed head bounced off the mattress and rolled, thumping into a corner. A bloated carcass toppled with half its skull clawed away. A dead woman fell with her face chewed off.
Nathan ravaged his way out of the house while zombies clung to him and bit away chunks of hairy flesh; their virus withered in Nathan's fortified blood.
Outside, Nathan shook off the pests and stomped their heads to smithereens. He looked up, and he saw his father.
Jon was pale and bloated. The belly of his flannel shirt was ripped open to reveal the cave of his disemboweled gut, and a bullet hole blemished his forehead: Nathan's shot must've missed Jon's brain; then, after a pre-undead coma, Jon must've woke in his grave and clawed his way out.
With dirt still packed under his jagged fingernails and caked to his shirt, Jon stretched out his arms and tottered forward. His moan was more of a chortle.
Snarling, Nathan slashed his claw through the air. But, inches from Jon's sagging cheek, he stopped himself. He took a few steps back. His father groaned, and the moon reflected in his dead eyes.
Feeling the burn of a single tear, Nathan shrugged away from newcomer zombies and loped across the yard. He howled as he crashed into the withering stalks of corn, and the moon watched over him; it was milky and pale, just like his father's dead and staring eye.
D.L. Snell feeds pulp fiction to man-eating corpses. The entrails of his recent offering, "Limbless Bodies Swaying," can be found in Cold Flesh, a zombie-infested anthology from Hellbound Books. For more information, such as free articles and free ad space for your own work, visit Snell's website, Exit66.net.
This story may be freely reprinted in any e-zine, newsletter, newspaper, magazine, website, etc. as long as Snell’s byline and bio remain intact; also, the story must not be altered.