Man Eaters Read online

  “What else do you know?” The young woman asked.

  “Well, they can’t climb because things like that and swimming are higher level activities and they are, for the most part, brain dead. See, look. That guy over there is missing his arms and yet, he’s walking around.”

  Dallas shuddered. “So basically, you’re telling us those…things…are dead.”

  “Or undead as they’re called in the gaming world. Just note, climbing to higher ground is usually the dumbest thing you can do because these things can outwait us for weeks. They never get tired, never need to sleep, and will never give up. Don’t do whatever you’ve seen in the movies. No roofs, no trees no attics. We’re safe for now only because they can’t see us.”

  “What are you, some Zombie Einstein?” The woman asked, smiling at him.

  The boy shrugged. “I’ve been called worse.”

  “Well, Einstein, what’s our next move?”

  He scrunched up his face as he thought. “Obviously, they came from the City, so that’s out. We can’t stay up here very long, but we’ll need them to clear out first. We can’t afford to go down there as long as one is still there. Once you are bitten, you’re toast.”

  Dallas wrapped her arms around herself, feeling both internal and external chills. The group of undead was moving toward the east bay. “Where are they going?”

  “Wherever the living are. If they aren’t stopped before they get to Oakland—” He paused and shook his head.

  “What? Then what?”

  “Well, it’ll be like the plague, and a lot of people will die…or not die, as the case may be.” Einstein suddenly looked out toward the water, as if there was something he couldn’t bear to see.

  “You okay?” He blew out a breath. “That man eater down there in the jean jacket is…was…my friend. We were going to get tattoos today.”

  “What happened?”

  “We both decided to make a run for it. He…he didn’t make it.”

  The woman put her arm around him. “I’m so sorry.”

  Einstein slowly turned around. “We’ll all be sorry if we don’t get off the bridge soon. We’ll be trapped between those who’ll go toward the city and those who’ll go toward Oakland.”

  “Surely, people must have called the police.”

  “Or the news. Where are the news helicopters?” Both Dallas and the woman looked to Einstein, who shrugged.

  “In the games and movies I’ve seen, the government shuts the press down because of the panic that could ensue.”

  “You think that’s what is happening here?”

  “You know people videotaped this with their cells, so yeah, I think someone shut them down.” He pulled his phone out. “They won’t want people to panic, so they’ll take over the news.” He looked at his phone. “Yeah, no signal. It happens fast. The shit is gonna hit the fan right quick.”

  “Won’t we need to evacuate Oakland and Berkeley? If those things get into the East Bay—”

  Before Dallas could finish her sentence, two Blackhawk helicopters appeared on the horizon.

  “Get down!” Einstein cried, flattening himself onto the cable.

  Dallas and the woman followed suit. “What the fuck? Aren’t they the good guys?”

  “Thank God the military has arrived.” Dallas said, hugging the cable.

  With snipers perched on the decks of the helicopters, the Blackhawks hovered above the blood-soaked bridge while the snipers put bullets into the heads of the man eaters. One-by-one, the zombie heads exploded as bullets ripped through their brains.

  “I’ll be damned,” the woman said. “Einstein was right.”

  As the undead fell—truly lifeless—to the ground, those living people still in their vehicles got out and waved at the snipers, who then promptly shot them in the head as well.

  “What the fuck?” The woman said, mouth agape as the snipers shot anyone who moved. Even those who had remained in the safety of their cars were shot with high-powered bullets through the windshields and side windows.

  “Keep your head down. They’re not taking any chances,” Einstein said. “They’ll kill everyone they see.”

  Dallas watched as one of the Blackhawks peeled away. “Don’t you think the smartest thing to do would be to blow up the bridges leading to San Francisco?”

  The woman and Einstein stared at her.

  “Cut off the main arteries like we would do in a state emergency? I’m a firefighter. It’s what you do to contain any spreading.”

  “You’re right. We need to get the hell out of here.” The woman rose just as the helicopter moved further down the bridge. “But we’ll never make it on foot.”

  “We don’t have to.” Dallas replied. “We can take my Harley.”

  “Your bike will never get through the mass,” she said, zipping her jacket up. She had these piercing eyes that reminded Dallas of a hawk’s eyes by the way they took everything in.

  “Maybe not, but the snipers will have a much harder time of hitting us on the back of a motorcycle.” Einstein nodded. “I’m in, but we’d better get going.”

  Dallas did not make a move as she stared down at the dead bodies of the hundred or more people the snipers’ bullets had found. “I’ll get to the Harley and get her started. Once I get the bike turned around, Einstein get on behind me and…” Dallas hesitated, looking at the woman.

  “My friends call me Roper.”

  “Roper, hop on behind him. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but you’ll need to give me room to shift and ride. Have either of you ever ridden on a bike?”

  Roper nodded. “Rider and bitch.”

  Einstein shook his head.

  “Lean with me. If I lean left, so do you. If I lean right, so do you. If it looks like we are going to crash, stay with the bike. Don’t try to jump off. Stay. With. The. Bike.”

  They both nodded and together all three moved as quickly as they could down the cable.

  When they were low enough to be able to jump down, Dallas did, her Harley boots making a solid sound as she landed on the deck. Roper wasn’t far behind, and they both caught Einstein, who, like many gearheads, wasn’t terribly agile or physically confident.

  “Oh crap.” Einstein pointed in the direction of the city.

  Shielding her eyes from the sun, Dallas saw three more helicopters in the distance. Throwing her leg over the saddle, she backed the Harley up and was almost completely turned around when the now familiar moaning came from behind her.

  Without taking her hands off the handlebars, Dallas glanced over her shoulder. Walking toward her was an older man with half his face missing. It looked like he was grinning with only one side of his mouth.

  “Get on!” Dallas ordered the others, starting the bike.

  Einstein leapt on so fast and hard Dallas was barely able to keep from dumping the bike. As she pulled it back to center, she looked in the rearview mirror in awe as Roper drove a buck knife into the man’s eye socket and pulled it out, blood clinging to the knife.

  The man eater crumpled to the ground and Roper hopped on behind Einstein as three more came toward the loud roaring of the motorcycle. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Yarding on the throttle, Dallas had to swerve to miss one of the undead coming back toward them.

  “Control, Dallas. Keep control,” she muttered to herself. Up ahead, she could see blocked lanes and hundreds of dead people, most of whom sported a bullet hole in their heads.

  Torn between getting off the bridge before it exploded and zigzagging in and out of the stalled traffic, Dallas slowed down as she approached the now dispersing horde. If she crashed, they were dead anyway, either from a bullet, a bomb, or a bite from one of these hideous creatures.

  “Wait. Slow down a sec!” Roper cried. “That cop car!”

  Dallas had been focusing so much on the road she had almost missed it.

  “We’re gonna need a weapon,” Roper said. “Or we’re sitting ducks.”

  Dallas slowed to a stop, and Roper ho
pped off and carefully looked in, knife poised. “Damn. Shotgun is locked up.”

  Dallas took her left hand off the grips and pointed. “The release is on the floor next to the brake. Just step on it.”

  Roper did so and, after three unsuccessful attempts, heard the click as the shotgun holder released it. Just as she grabbed the rifle, a face popped up on the other side of the wire mesh.

  “Oh my god! Thank god! Please. Get me out of here!”

  Roper jumped, her breath leaving her body as she gazed at the wild-eyed man sitting in the back seat. He reeked of alcohol and stale body odor.

  “You can’t leave me in here. Please. Please let me out.”

  Leaping out of the car, Roper racked one into the chamber.

  “Let him out,” Dallas said.

  Roper shook her head. “Bad idea. We don’t know why he’s in there.”

  “I’m with Roper,” Einstein said. “We don’t need the hassle.”

  “Then I’ll do it. I can’t just walk away from this.”

  “Wait. We gotta get out of here. Stay on the bike.” Five creatures were bearing down on them as Roper opened the rear door and backed away, pointing the shotgun at the prisoner. He had greasy black hair and a worn and dirty jean jacket.

  “You’d just shoot me?” he asked incredulously.

  “If I had to, yeah. Step away from the bike.”

  “How am I gonna get out of here?”

  “Not our problem.” Roper raised the rifle, keeping one eye on him and one on the slowly advancing corpses.

  “Come on, Roper, get on.”

  Just as Roper started to climb on, the man lunged for Dallas. “Give me the fucking bike!”

  Fighting to keep the bike up, Dallas watched as the butt of the shotgun crunched into the side of his face. He staggered back, blood pouring from his nose and mouth, and he stood motionless for a moment before falling to his knees.

  “Go, go, go!” Roper cried, getting back on the bike.

  As Dallas pulled away, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw two man eaters bearing down on the guy. In a few minutes, he would become one of them…or be their dinner. She wasn’t sure which, and she no longer cared.

  As she wove around the graveyard of bodies and cars, she realized the snipers had only been able to put down about half of the walking corpses. The other half were walking toward Oakland, creating more like them along the way.

  Einstein was right. The only way to protect the rest of the population was to blow the bridges, and Dallas was pretty certain that’s what those helicopters were about to do.

  Wrenching down on the throttle, she pushed herself and the bike as fast as she dared, narrowly missing the undead as they plodded along in search of more flesh. Twice, when Dallas thought they would surely collide with the corpses, Roper had fired the shotgun and knocked them out of the way. The blasts caused Dallas to be able to hear nothing but a slight ringing in her ears until she was sure the next sound was a huge explosion.

  “Floor it!” Roper yelled, looking behind them.

  All three helicopters released missiles that blew the bridge up at the end of Yerba Buena Island, the island connecting the western and eastern spans of the bridge. By leaving the main bridge alone, they could still effectively cut off San Francisco from the East Bay.

  As this section of the bridge shook, Dallas gave her everything she had, the bike’s front tire lifting slightly as she did. She had to get them off the last stretch of the bridge or they would go tumbling into the bay, along with thousands of dead, undead, and dying.

  Dallas felt as though she was racing against the falling sections quickly collapsing behind her. As she zoomed past immobile, slack-jawed creatures and around half-consumed corpses, she didn’t think they were going to make it.

  Leaning low over the gas tank and beneath the windshield, Dallas knew she’d reached eighty-five miles an hour. She knew her bike well enough to know what she felt like at certain speeds and the vibration clearly indicated they were well on their way to ninety.

  “Look out!” came Einstein’s voice as they neared the stretch of bridge that would turn into freeway.

  Hovering directly above them were two more helicopters with snipers hanging off the sides, putting bullets into living and dead brains alike.

  The moment the Harley was free from the collapsing bridge, Dallas zigged and zagged in and out of more stalled cars as bullets pinged all around her. One shattered her Plexiglas windshield, but she just kept pushing her limits until she could get off the freeway and into the more industrial areas of Oakland.

  As Dallas flew down the freeway, she noted fewer and fewer cars in the gridlock, but only a dozen or so of the man eaters. Clearly, they had made their way off the bridge, which must have been why the helicopters turned back to the bridge to continue firing on those creatures that had made it off the bridge.

  Way up ahead, she could see cop cars on their way, so she took the next exit into the warehouse district until Roper said, “Dallas, slow down. It’s okay. We’re not being followed. The choppers are busy elsewhere.”

  Dallas was gripping the handlebars so tightly that slowing down took longer than normal. When she finally came to a stop and turned to look at her passengers, she realized Einstein had wet himself. He was incredibly pale and needed their help to dismount.

  Roper had Einstein on one arm, the shotgun butt on her hip, and for the most part, she didn’t appear the least bit phased. “Easy, kid. It’s okay. We’re okay.”

  “I’m…I’ve never…” He blushed, his cheeks coloring his shame.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Dallas said. “I’ve seen grown men barf on their own shoes before. We’re all scared, Einstein. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Dallas walked around the bike inspecting it from every angle. She found two other bullet holes: one in the sissy bar, another in her saddlebag. “You guys didn’t get hit?”

  “Hell no,” Roper said. “You were awesome. Mario Andretti has nothing on you, man. That was brilliant riding.”

  Dallas knelt down to check the engine. There was something about the silence of the warehouse district that made her skin crawl.

  “Did you guys see the man eaters off to the side of the road?” Einstein asked.

  Roper nodded. Dallas was still examining the engine.

  “Unless those cops and snipers can kill every one of those undead, our problems have just begun.”

  “I saw at least three dozen once we got off the bridge,” Roper said, wiping off the blade of her enormous buck knife on a piece of newspaper that had fluttered by.

  “Uh…you always carry a huge knife around?” Dallas asked over the gas tank.

  She nodded and lifted the leg of her jeans up to reveal a sheath attached to her boots. “Never leave home without it.”

  Dallas could only grin. “Well, it sure came in handy.”

  Roper peeked around to the other side of the motorcycle at Dallas before tracing her fingertips over the personalized license plate. “Your name really Dallas?”

  Dallas nodded, wiping her hands on her chaps. She’d found no more holes. “It is. My parents thought it was cute to name me for where I was conceived.”

  Roper turned to Einstein. “And your name is?”

  He smiled. “Einstein will do.”

  Dallas tried her cell phone, but received a message that the circuits were all busy. “What are the chances that those things will spread in the East Bay?”

  Einstein looked up in thought. “I saw a ton of them moving parallel to the freeway. I don’t think the snipers saw them all or could get them all. This got out of hand right from the getgo.”

  “Well, at least a good number of them sank to the bottom of the bay.”

  Einstein shook his head. “That’s just it. That won’t kill any of them.”

  Roper and Dallas cut him a look. “What?”

  “Look, everyone knows the only way to kill the undead is to shut down the control center…the brain. Now I�
�m not saying these things are zombies, but they sure as hell are man eaters. We all saw that.”

  Roper shook her head. “Whoa. Wait. You’re saying they’ll what? Just up and walk out of the bay?”

  “They don’t need oxygen. They’re dead. So water doesn’t really change anything for them.”

  “So they’re going to just walk out and start attacking more people?”

  Einstein dug the toe of his sneakers into the gravel before answering. “The mass of the horde grows exponentially with each populated area they pass through.”

  “Oakland.”

  “And Berkeley.”

  “And Alameda.”

  “Shit.” Roper paused a second to listen. “Do you hear that?”

  The other two listened. “What? I don’t hear anything.”

  She nodded. “Exactly. Where are the cars? Where are the sounds of life? We need to get out of here.”

  “Wait. No cell phone use, but the news is reporting it.” Einstein held out his cell phone and started watching the local news. “This will probably be the last real newscast we get. In all of the zombie and virus movies I’ve seen, the government has to shut them down for fear of panic.”

  All three crowded around the tiny device.

  “Oh god…”

  The disheveled newscaster was being force-fed paper after paper and she couldn’t keep up. Before she could read the first one, the emergency warning sounded and the red ticker tape crept across the bottom of the screen warning everyone to stay inside their homes.

  “Terrorist attack?” Dallas asked as she read the tape’s explanation.

  “Shh.”

  The ticker tape warned everyone of a poisonous gas released on the bridge and that everyone—everyone—needed to stay indoors until further notice. If you were home, stay home, and only allow military medical personnel into your home. If you were not home, return home as soon as possible. It appeared that Marshall Law was going to be announced and go into effect at dusk.

  The buzzer continued sounding for another ten seconds before returning the stage to the newscaster, who read the warnings:

  “The United States is under attack in several major cities from a toxic gas leveled at them from an as-of-yet unknown terrorist cell. This bioweapon causes a violent reaction in those who breathe it in. If you come in contact with the infected, do not attempt to engage or help. The virus is transmitted through bites, much like rabies. Do not try to help or subdue the victims. Do not try to cure them or allow them into your homes.”