The heat she had felt receded, and her body and mind went numb again. There were words she wanted to say. Things to defend Joel. To deflect this attack and to allow her to take agency in her own decisions, but her thoughts became muddled, tumbling over each other until they became tangled and indecipherable.
“Your baby could still be whole,” he said. “Isn’t that the worst of it. He not only took you down, but he obliterated your baby’s future. Oh, what hope and promise there was -- even in this world. But now, all that is lost.”
His words floated in her head like gentle and soothing waves despite the contentiousness and challenge of their content. It was as if he could convince her of anything, even if she didn’t agree.
“Are you saying that my baby is...will be okay?”
“Yes,” he said with his smile back, but it disappeared as fast as it came when he added, “that is, if you do what I ask you to do.”
Her head fell, and despite the confusion and temptation swirling inside her mind, she knew she couldn’t do what he was asking. Could she?
The hunger gnawed away at her insides, and she felt buffeted by the persuasive talk of this dark man. The intense and unrelenting desire tore on her from the inside out, seemingly intent on driving away any of her humanity. It felt as if she were losing herself to it. If she did, she wasn’t sure what she would become. What she would lose.
Whatever it was, she was sure it was worse than what she had become. She feared she’d never recover from the fall, either. It was an endless pit into hell and one she knew she could never climb out of.
All the while, he used his words to confuse her. To break her down. To get her to do something she didn’t want to do.
A red rage boiled inside her. She wasn’t sure how long she could hold it off, but she reached down deep, grasping onto what she once was. Giving in would mean letting all that go, and there might not be any coming back from that.
“I can’t do it,” she said, not looking him in the eyes.
“Child, you’re only putting off the inevitable.”
Chapter 26
The Final Push
The next day was more fun than people should be allowed to have.
The truth be told, we had done a better job on the day before than we thought. Sure, there were still plenty of zombies. Plenty.
We went with the plan from the day before which had Alex and me on the hot seat. It was long and tiresome work, but it went on long enough to be a little tedious. We had the routine down as we took on the zombies, one after the other. We took turns as the lead basher in the doorway. I would batter one, and she would smash the next one.
Woo-woo, let the good times roll.
“Come on, you ugly son of a bitch,” Alex said as she leaned her head into the doorway leading into the stairwell.
I was on the other side of the doorway, which blocked my view down the stairs.
In response to Alex’s taunt, a zombie grunted out in excitement. At least, it sounded like excitement to me.
“This one’s mine,” Alex whispered.
“You know they don’t care if you whisper or not,” I said.
She flipped me off and then drew her piece of rebar back. Four seconds later, a zombie popped into the doorway. One second after that, Alex’s rebar pole smashed its face in with a resounding crunch, and it fell out of view. I only heard it roll down the stairs and felt a little cheated.
Footsteps plodded up the stairs, and I took my turn in the doorway. When I looked down the stairs, I saw a woman in a blood-stained nurse’s uniform coming up. Her face looked a little lopsided from what seemed like an earlier attempt someone made to put her down. I would not make that mistake.
“Come to Poppa,” I said as I gripped the handle of my baseball bat.
She took her time, despite her fervent desire to eat me, but I was patient. She hit the landing and lurched toward me. I met her lurch with a swing for the fences. For me, it was a thing of beauty. For her, not so much.
In fact, my blow was so good, she ended up going ass over elbows down the stairs. We waited for the next one but were greeted with silence, instead. After about five seconds, both of us leaned into the doorway and saw an empty stairwell. Well, empty except for the pile of bodies.
I said, “Well, how about that.” I looked to Alex and put a hand in the air toward her. “High five.”
She slapped my hand, and a moment later, she asked, “What’s next?”
“Down to one.”
I pulled the walkie-talkie from my pocket and called Richard and Brother Ed. “What’s the story down there?”
Richard came back five seconds later, “There are some stragglers in the stairwell, but only a handful.”
“Any sign of our ghostly friend?”
“Nothing yet.”
I didn’t like that he used the word ‘yet,’ but we were in uncharted territory.
“Head our way,” I said. “It’s time to go down to the first floor.”
They made it to us about two minutes later. During that time, Alex and I worked to clear a path through the bodies on the stairs and the landing between floors one and two. It was messy work as we left long blood trails on the steps as we dragged the zombies out of the way. More than once, Alex reminded me that we had to be careful or else we could slip on the gore and end up breaking our necks.
Wouldn’t that be ironic? To be killed by falling down a blood-soaked set of stairs.
She mentioned that we’d have to clean this mess up once we cleared the first floor.
“A zombie killer’s work is never done,” I said.
Footsteps sounded above us, and a moment later, Richard and Brother Ed appeared on the second-floor landing. Richard shook his head and pinched his nose shut.
“That’s some fragrant shit.”
“It is, indeed, pretty stinky,” I said.
“We had worse in the city,” Brother Ed said.
“Want to lend a hand clearing a path?” I asked.
Nothing in Richard’s body language told me he wanted to join in, but Brother Ed started down the stairs toward Alex and me. It was good to see that he was coming out of his funk. After a month of convalescing, maybe some activity and purpose was the medicine he needed. Or perhaps he was just putting on a front? Who knows? Brother Ed, despite being a seemingly simple man, was much more complicated than I ever gave him credit. He had kept his mouth shut for months about the vision that God told him he would die defending Jason.
They say still waters run deep. Maybe that is true for Brother Ed. Then again, sometimes he could be a royal asshole.
When he saw Brother Ed pitch in, Richard sighed in resignation and joined the effort. It wasn’t the yellow brick road, but we had a path through the bodies that led to the door onto the first floor.
Alex peered at the head height portal window that gave her a view onto the wide open foyer of the first-floor.
“What do you see?” I asked, not really able to see past her. “By the way, you have a huge head. Did you know that?”
“My mom drank a lot of milk when she was pregnant with me,” Alex replied. “Plus, my grandpa fed her bone meal.”
“Bone meal?” Richard said as he raised his eyebrows.
“Is this really a topic for right now? Alex asked, giving Richard her best cop stare.
“Back to the point, I guess,” I said. “What do we have out there?”
She shifted her head back and forth in the small portal window in the door, then said, “There’s about thirty of them out there that I can see. There’s probably more around the corner.”
“Like I said, there’s a few in the north stairwell,” Richard said.
“Then let’s say close to fifty possible,” Alex said. “But that’s not the problem.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
She moved aside, giving me access to the window and said, “Check out the front of the building.”
I got what she was saying as soon as I looked. Kil
gore’s helicopter had crash-landed on the roof, but something went very, very wrong and it fell over the edge. When it hit bottom, it exploded, blowing a hole in the floor-to-ceiling glass windows facing the plaza. It wasn’t a huge opening, but certainly wide enough for the zombies outside to make their way in if we made a lot of noise.
Richard grabbed my shoulder and said, “Let me look.” He gently nudged me aside and took a glance. Two seconds later, he said, “Holy shit.”
“What he said,” I replied.
“What is it?” Brother Ed.
I quickly explained the situation to Brother Ed, who still wore a sullen look (and that was a reach because he always looked mournful). And this is in spite of his recent uptick of activity and optimism.
“What can we do?” Brother Ed asked.
“We can’t do any shooting unless we can seal that hole,” Alex said. “That would defeat whatever we’ve done because the ones outside would just be drawn in by the noise.”
“And the risk is too high with that many to try to take them out with hand weapons,” I said as I looked into the face of defeat. And death, really. If we did not get to those supplies at the back dock, we’d starve or be forced into some kind of Donner Party situation where we drew lots to see who was for dinner. Eventually, we’d run out of people to eat.
And why did I let my mind go there in the first place? Stupid mind.
We stood around with blank expressions on our faces, wondering if there was a winning proposition here? I was usually the idea man, but with the grief of losing Kara to whatever she had become my imagination had become dulled and muddied. When I looked to Brother Ed, I could see him wanting me to come up with some inspiration, but I had no more rabbits to pull from my hat.
Thankfully, a moment later, Richard slowly pushed his hand into the air with his index finger extended. “I think I might have something.” He continued to stare somewhat blankly off into space.
Alex leaned toward him, stretching herself forward on her toes expectantly. The seconds ticked by until she said, “And?”
Richard shook his head like someone coming back from a trance and rapidly blinked his eyes. “I took a training course over here before...you know. Anyway, this building has one of those flexible classrooms.” He turned back to the window and peered out into the foyer. “It’s just on the backside of the foyer. It has these moveable walls for dividing the room up into sections.” He turned back to us and said, “And they’re on wheels.”
“What are we doing with these walls?” Alex asked.
“We’re using them to block the opening at the front!”
Chapter 27
Burn the Ships
Richard’s plan had more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese but was the best and most expedient one we had. I knew I was on a totally different wavelength than the rest of them. They wanted to get to the supplies. I wanted the place cleared out so that I could possibly find a way to get to Kara. With that in mind, I may have been a little too exuberant in my support of Richard’s little scheme.
It had a Blitzkrieg quality to it. Initially, we’d use our hand weapons to bash our way through the zombies to get to the teaching room Richard thought had the flexible walls. Of course, there was no guarantee they were still there. If they weren’t, we’d be stuck in a no-mans-land. If the dead swarmed over us, we’d be forced to use our guns to shoot our way free. That would draw in zombies from the outside, and that would put us back to square one. Or dead, which was more likely.
Alex and I had the lead as we stood inside the doorway that led into the expansive foyer. In fact, it was so large, people might call it an indoor atrium. The floor-to-ceiling windows in the front let in plenty of light. I guessed that light was supposed to nourish the now dead plants, drooping over the sides of large indoor pots spaced around the foyer, wilted and brown.
Our destination was directly in front of the blasted away opening in the glass on the back side of the foyer. This worked both for and against us. It would make the trip pushing the portable walls a lot shorter, but would also leave us exposed to the zombies outside. But, in truth, the zombies inside were the immediate danger.
“You sure those walls are in there?” Alex whispered to Richard.
“They were there the last time I was in there,” Richard said.
“When was that?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know. Probably six to nine months before the world went down the toilet.”
Alex looked back at the tall set of double doors that led into the room. “You sure they’ll make it out those doors?”
“Quit asking questions,” I said. “We’re just wasting time. They’re either there, or they’re not. They’ll either make it out the doors or they won’t. It’s time to get off the pot or shit.”
Alex eyed me warily and said, “It’s not like our lives depend on the answers to the questions or not.”
“This world’s just full of questions. But you won’t know the answers until you commit.”
Brother Ed leaned forward and said in a quiet voice, “Joel may sound like a dime store philosopher, but he’s right. As my granddaddy used to say, ‘You don’t know until you know.’”
That made me almost want to abandon this whole plan, but I looked to Alex and said, “We’re as ready as we will ever be. We move as quietly as we can, but no one takes any chances.”
“Like this isn’t one big risk,” Alex said.
“Enough of that,” I said. “We’re going.” I didn’t wait for any rebuttal and took two cautious steps toward the back wall of the foyer. The plan was to get as much distance between the zombies outside and us. No use enticing them.
I paused to look back at the three of them and motioned for them to follow. Alex closed her eyes, took in a breath, and stepped out with me. With that, we were in motion. We actually made it to the back wall which ran the length of the room, spanning nearly a hundred unbroken feet without being seen.
But once we got there, it didn’t take too long for us to be spotted by one of the zombies and she was a nasty looking one.
The zombie had to have been an elderly woman prior to being transformed. She also must have been a patient because she was only wearing what was left of a hospital gown. In life, those things barely covered any part of your body. In death and not caring about modesty, I saw more of a dead, old zombie lady than I ever cared to see.
She limped along, coming at us at an angle from the front of the foyer.
“I got her,” I whispered. “Keep going.”
She shuffled slowly toward me as I stepped out to meet her. I sensed the others passing by behind me as I set my feet, readying myself to kill grandma zombie.
My challenge was to do it quickly and quietly. She grunted and moaned with each step, but she didn’t have a lot of air behind these sounds, so she didn’t draw the attention of the other zombies.
The space between us was down to five feet when I stepped into my swing. My bat crunched into her head, smashing in the side of her skull and sending her to the floor.
It wasn’t all that loud, but the quick motion caught the attention of two other zombies about thirty feet away. They course-corrected from their ramblings and started toward me. Fortunately, they were not between me and the doors of the teaching room. When I looked that way, I saw Brother Ed laying out a zombie in a suit. His performance was better than mine as he jammed his Bowie knife into the things temple while using his other hand to brace the dead thing’s fall.
He was a better man than me. That knife in the skull thing wasn’t something I ever wanted to try. Too big of a margin for error in my humble opinion.
I scurried across the floor to catch up to them as a couple more zombies took notice of us. They were a good seventy-five feet away, giving us some leeway. We were fast while they were slow.
I caught up to my group just as they made it to the doors of the teaching room. Richard put his hand on the door handle and pulled, but the door did not open.
; “Who locks a door these days?” he whispered.
Alex said, “There’s another set down there.”
‘Down there’ was twenty feet to the north side of the room, and that just happened to be in the same direction of the two zombies coming our way. Only they had collected a couple more friends.
When I looked over my shoulder, I saw that we had zombies coming at us from all directions now. The more, the merrier.
“We’re getting boxed in here,” I said.
“Go for the other doors,” Alex hissed out, and Richard went in motion again.
He became our ‘doorman’ as Alex, Brother Ed, and I walked with our backs to him, facing out to monitor the progress of the welcoming committee headed our way. In truth, they didn’t look all that warm and welcoming.
I side-stepped along as did the others. It was ten steps to the other set of doors. In the time it took us to make it those ten steps, we had three zombies closing fast. By my estimation, we wouldn’t make it in the doors before our undead greeters made it to us.
So, I stepped out from our group and went to work with my bat. It wasn’t pretty and, unfortunately; it wasn’t all that quiet. I worked my way to the rightmost zombie and let loose with a vicious swing. The blow pretty much demolished his face and sent him tumbling into his colleague on the right. They tangled together, and both of them went down. That exposed the back of the other one’s head and having no sense of fair play when it came to zombies, I bashed its skull in.
Something moved past me on my left and the next thing I knew, Alex was knifing her piece of rebar down the center of the head of the next one. It collapsed face first to the floor and did not move again.
“I couldn’t let you have all the fun,” she said.
The immediate threat was taken care of, but we were just thirty seconds away from a small wave of undead as eight or more were headed our way. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw six more coming out of the shadows to the north. The party was on, and we were the guests and dinner all wrapped into one.
Books of the Dead (Book 8): The Living Dead Girl Page 13