All Hell Breaks Loose (Cities of the Dead)

All Hell Breaks Loose

  By William Young

  Copyright 2011 William Young

  Los Angeles, California – Day 21

  Brooke Tammerlin felt Joshua Sparks’ fingers lace through hers as they stepped onto the sidewalk outside the bar and for a second she could feel her wedding ring get pressed into her finger. For a millisecond she remembered that she was married, that her husband had just texted her from work on the other side of town wishing her a good time out with her girlfriends, and then she forgot about the ring and her marriage and felt the warmth of Josh’s palm, the light pressure of his fingertips on the back of her hand.

  She had known Josh twenty years earlier in high school and had never thought about him since. Rather, she had known Josh was in her high school twenty years earlier and never thought about him then, either. But she had run into him one night in a bar on the last girls night out and began idle chit chat with him while her two friends reviewed the karaoke song menu. He was a nice guy, almost bland conversationally, but he had an easy laugh and knew when to flatter a girl. He was a normal guy with a blue collar job, a soon-to-be ex-wife, two little girls and a shiny pick-up truck that was immaculate on the inside.

  He had mentioned right away that he was going through a divorce when she noticed the wedding ring on his hand. He had told Brooke that until the divorce was final, he was still officially married, and so he was going to wear the ring right up until the end. That sense of commitment had made Brooke feel something for Josh that she no longer felt with her own husband. Hours later, they had drunkenly made out in the parking lot alongside his pick-up truck, exchanged cell numbers, and begun the intoxicating initial stages of an affair that had led to this night: dinner, cocktails and then sex in his apartment. Which is what both of them were anticipating as they walked down the sidewalk away from the bar, she eager for a charge of romance in her life and he just looking to get laid.

  Brooke had been listening to Josh talk about a soccer trip he was planning to take his two girls on in a few weeks time but she had been imagining the scene to come in his apartment. How would it transpire, she wondered? Part of her just wanted to strip naked immediately and fuck, replace the boring routine of marital sex with a new paradigm, and part of her wanted him to find some way to seduce her, to make the moment something she would never forget, the beginning of the next phase of her life.

  Which is when a blood-spattered Latino man ran past them on the sidewalk, his eyes wide with terror.

  “Jesus, what the hell happened to that guy?” Josh said, absent-mindedly releasing Brooke’s hand as he turned to watch the man run away from them into the night. He turned to Brooke, “Did you see that guy? He had blood all over him.”

  She hadn’t seen. She’d been inside her head, fantasizing about what was about to happen just a few minutes from then, if he would notice the brand-new pink underwear set she had bought specifically for the night.

  “What?” Brooke said, turning and looking. “Was he shot or something?”

  Josh shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s gone, now. He went that way. Blood all over him, though.”

  “I thought this was a safe neighborhood.”

  Josh smiled, a smile she had grown to love the two other times she’d been with him in person, on nights she'd told her husband she had to work late but had met Josh for beers and flirting. His smile was wide and genuine, his teeth white.

  “Oh, it’s safe,” Josh said. “Probably some dude trying to break into a car and got beat up by the owner or something.”

  “You get a lot of that around here?” Brooke asked.

  “Yeah. It’s a nice neighborhood for cars, so this is where the thieves come to steal them,” Josh said. “Caught an asshole trying to break into my truck last summer, but he ran off before I could get to him. I probably shouldn’t have shouted at him when I saw him trying to slim-jim the door, but at the time I was more worried about him getting in the truck and driving off than I was about beating the shit out of him.”

  Brooke smiled at the notion: Josh didn’t seem like the kind of man who could beat the anything out of someone, even if he looked lean and trim in his button-down plaid shirt and blue jeans, his receding hairline close-cropped and conveying the impression of speed. They got to an intersection and paused for traffic; she felt Josh lace his fingers back through hers. A thrill ran up her spine at his touch: this is what it felt like to fall in love, the heady dose of infatuation, the draw of pure lust, the overwhelming sense of excitement that good things were going to happen to you. He pulled her to him, wrapped his free hand around her waist and kissed her, the press of his lips firm and slightly wet. She felt light, as if she would float, and watched him longingly as he pulled his head away from hers and smiled. She hadn’t felt this way in a long time.

  They turned a corner and saw a group of people near a cemetery, some of them with their cell phones out, pointing them at something. On their side of the street another knot of people stood watching the people with the cell phones. Josh and Brooke closed in on the group and then paused alongside them to see what they were looking at. Inside the cemetery were a pair of young men with small handheld digital cameras pointed at a group of a dozen people in soiled clothing, shambling about as if they were extras in a zombie film.

  “What’re you guys doing?” Josh asked.

  A guy turned and looked at Josh, glanced at Brooke approvingly, and then motioned across the street. “Watching them film the dudes filming inside the cemetery. I think they must be doing some sort of movie or something. The guys in the cemetery keep running circles around the actors while these guys on the street are just taking video on their cells and talking about what they’re seeing.”

  A girl with a scarf and her hair in a ponytail nodded and turned to Josh. “Yeah, I think it’s some sort of cinema verite thing. Cool shit if you do it right.”

  Brooke looked across the street at the group with cell phones and noticed one of them had moved inside the cemetery through a nearby gate and was recording from inside. She’d never seen a movie being made, and hadn’t realized it might look like this.

  “That’s kind of cool to film a movie this way,” Brooke said to Josh.

  Josh shrugged. “I guess. You want to get closer? We can stand beside those guys if you want.”

  First dates had never been this cool before, Brooke thought, as she nodded at the idea. Her husband had taken her to dinner at a TexMex place and a Whiskeytown show in a small venue. She had thought her husband was cutting edge at the time. Now, he was just some guy she knew who complained he wasn't getting laid enough. Josh led her across the street and they watched as the zombie actors lurched and stumbled at the two cameramen inside the cemetery.

  And then one of the cameramen stumbled and fell down, his camera bouncing on the grass. Brooke watched and felt the warmth of Josh’s palm against hers, and for the first seconds of what she saw next, she was totally unperturbed. One of the zombie actresses closed on the fallen cameraman, bent over him and wrenched his head sideways so violently she heard the crack of his neck as it broke. And then the zombie actress knelt down and began squeezing the cameraman’s skull between his hands. She was almost certain the actress had grunted out something that sounded like “brains.”

  “That’s so cool,” a man with a Texas Longhorns ball cap said, changing his attention from the LCD screen on his phone to the real life rendition a few dozen yards inside the cemetery. “I wonder how they're doing the special effects. That looks so-"

  At which point the other camera operator inside the cemetery noticed his fallen friend being torn apart by the zombie actress and paused, startled, “What the fu
ck? Gary?”

  Gary’s body was completely limp in the zombie actress’ grasp, and the zombie was continuing to squeeze Gary’s skull, resulting in streams of blood from the nose and eyes. Brooke turned her head slowly to Josh and gave the barest squeeze to his hand. “That’s pretty gross.”

  Josh nodded. “And kinda cool. I wonder how they’re doing it.”

  Just then there was a crack almost like the sound of a baseball being struck by a bat, a loud snap that spat through the air. The other zombie actors reacted to the sound and turned their attention on the female zombie pulling Gary’s skull apart, a light steam rising off the brain matter into the cool California night air.

  “Gary!” the other man said, sprinting to his fallen friend as the other zombie actors shuffle-hobbled to the spot of the now available brains. “What the fuck? What the fuck? Gary!”

  The other man skidded to a stop and dropped to his knees just as three of the other zombie actors got to the spot, bent over him, and began breaking his arms and neck, simultaneously biting into him. Blood spurt everywhere, but the man screamed only for a moment until his neck was broken and his head hung limply on his chest, blood soaking his shirt.

  “Oh, my God, that is so cool,” the Longhorns ball cap guy said to his buddies, who were nodding along and watching as the dozen zombie actors feasted on the two cameramen. “I wonder what film school this is for.”

  Brooke felt sick in the pit of her stomach. She had never seen anything so gruesome in her life, and the fact it was college filmmakers at work was only kind of comforting. She had always assumed that what she saw on the movie screen looked fake in real life, but what she was watching inside the cemetery looked real from her vantage point on a sidewalk fifty feet away. She felt Josh give a little squeeze to her palm and glanced up at him, batting her eyes only slightly for effect.

  “We should get moving. I’m sure they’ll yell ‘cut’ at any moment,” Josh said.

  Josh turned away from the fence, took a half-step and stopped dead in his tracks. His fingers went slack in Brooke’s hand and she somehow noticed the cool band of metal around her ring finger, a blip of reality that confused her senses and momentarily distracted her from what her eyes saw on the street.

  “What the– ” Josh said, his voice trailing quickly from astonishment to silence.

  Shuffling down the street in a wide herd formation were more than twenty zombie actors. But that observation existed only for a moment, as the group across the street stood watching the oncoming batch of new zombies, several people of the group smiling in amazement at their luck at seeing such a weird show. Until one of the zombies grabbed the woman wearing the scarf with her dark hair in a pony tail, yanked the pony tail hard and bit the woman on her throat. An eruption of blood doused the zombie actress, dying girl and the young man standing next to her watching the horrifying spectacle.

  At which point he grabbed the girl’s arm and yanked her to him, accomplishing nothing.

  “Hey, let her go!” he shouted.

  But in those few seconds, the approaching zombie actors had engulfed the little group on the opposite side of the street, and within moments there were shrieks of terror, shouts of surprise and last gasps for life. Blood ran on the street at the feet of the zombie actors as they held the bodies of those in the group between them and took bites from their flesh.

  Brooke froze in place at the sight. “I don’t think this is a movie.”

  Josh watched the carnage across the street and stood stock still, his eyes flitting among the various zombie actors on the other side of the street. “What is it?”

  The Longhorns baseball cap guy next to them had been recording the scene with his phone and turned to them. “I don’t know, but it’s super-realistic.”

  “I think this is real,” Brooke said softly. “I think those people just got killed by those … people.”

  As they watched, a man from the group of onlookers across the street stumbled out of the crowd of zombies, his left arm dangling by a tendon at the shoulder, blood coursing down the side of his body, his face deeply grooved with scratches. He took a few steps and looked around in a daze, saw Brooke and Josh and made an uncertain step toward them.

  “Help me,” he said, his voice weak and barely audible.

  He took another step and collapsed to the asphalt.

  “I think we need to get out of here,” Brooke said, common sense suddenly flooding into her body, romantic notions dissolving as the primeval fight-or-flight responses kicked in deep in her mind. “Josh, we need to get the hell out of here.”

  Josh turned to her and nodded several short, quick jerks. “Yeah, let’s go this way.”

  He grabbed her arm by the wrist and pulled her alongside him back down the road, away from the group of onlookers. Brooke looked over her shoulder at them. Even they were backing down the road away from the zombie horde, but still recording everything with their phones. She wondered if maybe she were overreacting, if maybe this weren’t some elaborate movie set she were on, and then a pair of zombies – two ashen-faced black teenage boys wearing lots of gold necklaces, baggy jeans and over-sized nylon jackets – stepped out of the shadows to Josh’s side and grabbed him by the arm not holding onto Brooke. For an instant, Brooke noticed the one on the right had a deformed mouth, wider and filled with larger teeth than normal.

  One of the boys yanked Josh away from her, ripping his hand from hers and causing her to stumble in her heels. She regained her balance just in time to see Josh take a swing at him. His hand connected with the zombie’s shoulder, but to no effect. Before he could say anything, the other zombie with the bigger mouth pulled Josh's other arm to its mouth and bit deeply into it, blood pooling around the zombie’s lips as it shook its head to sever flesh from the limb. Josh shrieked in pain, twisting around the bitten arm to try to land a punch on this other zombie, but the first zombie grabbed Josh's head in its palms and bent it down, biting Josh on the back of the neck and crunching into backbone. Josh vibrated violently for a second and his body went slack in the clutches of the two zombies.

  Brooke began to run, unaware she had just urinated in her favorite designer jeans, the pair her husband loved on her and said brought out the best curvature of her ass. She had been hoping Josh would notice that, too. She hadn’t made it too far down the street before the guy in the baseball cap and his two companions passed her, none of them even glancing at her as they sped by. Brooke turned her head over her shoulder and saw even more … zombies? … moving onto the main street. This could not be, she thought. There can’t be zombies. Not zombies.

  And then she bounced into something and tumbled to the ground, banging her skull against the curb and bringing tears to her eyes. She rolled on the ground for a moment clutching her head at the point where the pain felt like a spike through her skull. She opened her eyes and realized it hadn’t been a something she had run into, but a mottled-gray, mucus-and-blood covered balding man in his pajamas. And he was about to grab her by the head when she rolled over to her side several times, pushed herself up from the ground, kicked her heels off and sprinted down the street.

  Flight mode was quickly turning into panic. Brooke didn’t know the neighborhood she was in and her car was parked in front of Josh’s apartment building, which was in the opposite direction. Very soon, she was going to be a shoeless, urine-stained thirty-nine-year old woman lost in Los Angeles, with a would’ve-been-soon-to-be-estranged husband on the other side of town at work, and a should’ve-been-new-lover dead on the street, neither of which was in a position to help her out.

  She didn’t realize she was crying until she had to stop to catch her breath. Hot tears were streaming down her face and she was gasping for air amid the weeps. Everything had gone wrong. Josh had just been murdered. Her future life had just vanished into thin air. For a while, during dinner with Josh, she had actually imagined what it would be like to be single again, dating Josh, with every-other week off from her own three children: free from th
e crushing burden of being a mom and a wife. She had felt like freedom – happiness – was almost in her grasp. She had been falling in love, an emotion that had been lost to her for more than a decade, and it had been taken away from her on the night it was supposed to have been given to her. It was so unfair.

  She opened her purse and fished out her cell phone, doing the only thing she knew she could do for help: call her husband.

  “Hey, honey, what’s up? I can't really talk on the phone long,” Charles said.

  She gasped and tried to catch her breath, looking around the neighborhood, wondering what to say. She couldn’t tell him she had skipped out on girls night out after a beer with her friends while she checked her make-up and changed her outfit for her date, and she wasn’t sure what to tell him about the attack that wouldn’t involve telling Charles about her date. She just hadn’t had any time to think about it.

  “Are you crying?” Charles asked a moment later.

  Brooke nodded and rubbed her hand beneath her nose, “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know, everything just went wrong,” she said after a pause, subconsciously editing Josh out of her story and inserting her girlfriends on the fly. “We just left the bar and were walking to the car when we were attacked by … oh god, it’s going to sound stupid … but we were attacked by a group of people dressed up like zombies.”

  There was an awkward pause on the other end of the line. Then, softly, any incredulity hidden, “Zombies?”

  “I know, I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but I think they killed several people on the street right in front of me,” Brooke said, the words coming out of her mouth in small bursts. “It doesn’t make any sense. I saw them breaking people’s arms and biting them on the neck.”

  She broke down into spasms of tears as she thought about the carnage, the blood, the sudden onset of mayhem. It had been such a beautiful night, and then horror. A police cruiser with its lights twirling turned the corner in front of her and sped up the road toward where she had been.

  “Biting them on the neck? That’s vampires, babe,” Charles said on the other end, his voice light, trying to find a way to disarm the situation, to calm her down.

  “Oh, god, not vampires, Charles, zombies,” Brooke said.

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No, but they’re already on the way,” Brooke said. “Can you come get me and take me home?”

  There was a pause on Charles' end. He was at work and his