Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse by William Young Page A

into the house. Fyodor picked up a Desert Eagle .50 caliber pistol off the kitchen counter and snugged it into his waist band while Vasily grabbed a shotgun from its resting place in a corner of the room. They stepped outside onto the patio and paused, listening for the sound of an undead walker that might have made it through the fence. None ever had, but there was no reason to be lax. All it took was one bite.
    “We’re going to need to pick up a new woman as well,” Vasily said. “These ones are all burnt out.”
    “That’s going to be tougher than getting coke or vodka. Nobody trusts anyone anymore, and promising girls drugs and food and security hasn’t worked well the last few times. The girls that are left already know how to survive or have men,” Fyodor said. “And we need to find something better than canned dog food, too.”
    Vasily laughed. “Yeah, Mariya was good for fucking after we gave her coke, but when she found out she had to eat dog chow, our luster wore off pretty damn quick. Here we are, millionaires with sports cars, apartments and access to everything the city had to offer, and now we’re lucky if we can get some farm girl like Mariya. There was a time when Mariya would have been sidewalk trash to us, just some chick to ignore on the way to somewhere, and now she’s the crazy fuck.”
    Fyodor paused for a moment and thought about the time they had rescued Mariya from the farmhouse she had been holed up in. A small group of undead had found a weakness in some plywood covering the front windows of her house and had begun pulling it down when her father, an over-weight middle-aged man wielding a .22 caliber rifle had stepped from a window on the second floor onto the roof over the front porch and begun plunking zombies. He lost his balance and slid off the roof and had been quickly torn to pieces.
    Fyodor and Vasily had been watching from a copse of trees across the street, initially amused that the farmer had thought his little varmint killer would do much to the undead, and then saddened at his fate – who can predict a loss of balance on a pitched roof? It’s like slipping in the bathtub: it happens, but not so much. Mariya had climbed out onto the roof moments later and begun wailing at the sight of her father being destroyed by zombies and Vasily had broken from the cover of the trees with his shotgun in hand, blasting holes in the pack of undead. In less than a minute the zombies were all dead, and Fyodor had walked across the street, scanning the distance for itinerant zombies drawn by the noise.
    “Vasily, that was stupid,” Fyodor had said. “You might have just drawn a hundred more to our location with all the shooting.”
    Vasily had ignored him and looked up at the girl on the roof of the porch. “Come with us if you want to live.”
    Mariya had been Vasily’s sex slave for the first few weeks, but the gratitude of having been saved and the grief of the loss of her father finally having morphed into the realization she was still trapped, and then she had succumbed to the alcohol and drugs as a way out of her new predicament. Or, perhaps, a way to avoid the fact that they often had to eat food meant for dogs and cats.
    The next morning, Fyodor gave Nikita a 20-gauge shotgun with shells filled with birdshot. He wanted her to be armed, to feel safe, but he didn’t want her with a weapon that could be used to kill either him or Vasily should she have come to the conclusion that her only way out was to kill her velvet jailers.
    Fyodor had always told the girls they brought back that they could leave at anytime, and he meant it. It was Vasily who would take them aside and reaffirm that commitment, and then point out the decaying skeleton of Irina just the other side of the fence, her bones picked clean by zombies and scavengers, killed by runner-zombies just ninety seconds after saying her tearful good-byes to them, Fyodor locking the gate behind her and wishing her