“Please, Kara, don’t do that.”
“Why?” she asked, but I could hear the contempt in her voice. “I don’t feel anything anymore. I mean -- anything.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I truly didn’t. I would do anything to go back in time to change it.”
“But it did happen.”
“I know, I know, I know. This mission we’re on. This damned holy mission. We’ve known there were risks all along.”
“I told you I wanted to stay with Ross,” she said and she was speaking of the older man we had met living in a pawn shop south of the city. “If you hadn’t talked me out of that, I would be whole again. I wouldn’t be this thing.”
“There is nothing more I regret than changing your mind back then.”
“But you did,” she said as she leaned back in toward the window, her face filling the frame creating the most heartbreaking and grotesque picture I had ever witnessed. If God could have stricken me blind at that very moment, I would have never stopped thanking him. But he didn’t.
“Let me help you,” I said, and I knew I was pleading now.
“How can you help me?” she asked, and I could almost hear a laugh behind her voice.
“Doctor M might be able to come up with something,” I said. “We...we’ve been talking with the team down in Cincinnati. Doctor Richter has said they’ve made some real progress.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” she said. There was nothing but contempt behind her tone. “How can you help me? How can you help our child?” Her hand dropped out of view, and I knew she was running it across her abdomen.
My heart was literally cracking in two at that moment. My legs felt as if they might give out on me, but I felt a hand press against my back to support me.
Alex said in a soft voice, “Don’t listen to her. You did everything you could to protect her. To protect all of us. She’s been twisted from the inside out.”
Kara swayed back from the window and drew back her fist, then slammed it forward against the door so hard that the door shook in its hinges. The shock of it knocked both Alex and me back a step.
“SHUT YOUR MOUTH!” Kara screamed, the power of her voice blowing through the door like a physical force, making me take a half step back.
“Alex, you shut up,” Kara raged. “You weren’t there when I begged to stay behind. But he pleaded for me to come along. We had a mission.” With each word, she moved back toward the window. She had her fist in the air, and I could see that reddish-black blood dripping down her wrist and arm.
“Look what that mission did to me,” Kara said, her face nearly pressed up against the glass of the portal window. “Look what you did to our baby. LOOK AT ME!” She reared back with her fist again, and this time she planted a punch against the window.
The window was made of fire-rated, extra-thick safety glass with an embedded, crisscrossing wire mesh. Her punch sent cracks across it in several directions.
Again, I jumped back, more out of shock than anything.
I could still see her out there standing a step and a half away from the window, panting with rage. She showed no ill effects from the punch other than more blood dripping off her hand. Other than bringing her halfway back from death, I wondered what else Doctor M’s vaccine had done to her. It would take a lot of force to crack that window the way she had.
I stepped back toward the window and said, “Please, Kara.”
She moved closer to the window and said, “What did you say when I said please? You should have shot me when you had a chance.”
I watched her lean to her left, and the next thing I heard was the strain of metal near the door handle. It sounded as if someone were compacting a car down to miniature size inside the door. When I looked at the handle on our side of the door, I saw it shaking from the pressure she was putting on it.
Instinctively, I took both hands and placed them on the handle, trying with every fiber of my being to hold it. The handle shook in my hand, and the sound of cracking steel came from inside the door.
Somehow, she had been made super-naturally strong, and I quickly knew there was no way I could hold her off. No matter how much effort I put behind holding it in place, I felt it slowly slipping downward.
I heard movement behind me and jerked my head up in time to see Alex aiming her rifle through the portal window at Kara.
Holding the door handle was a losing cause, so I jumped between the barrel of Alex’s rifle and the window.
“Get out of the way, Joel,” Alex hissed out.
“Give me another chance,” I said, my voice straining to convey that I could do it.
“She’s going to break through that door, and all of them are coming in,” Alex said. “You’ve got to let me take the shot.”
The entire door quivered from the force Kara was exerting on the door handle. I was beginning to think that Kara just might be able to break the whole door down.
In a desperate move, I pressed my face to the portal glass and screamed her name.
“Please, you’ve got to stop,” I said, my voice close to breaking. The door moved beyond quivering and was now shaking from the force Kara was applying to it. I decided to play my ultimate trump card. “Think about Naveen.”
It took two more seconds, but the door quit shaking, and Kara slowly raised her face to look through the glass at me. Her face was still contorted in rage and hatred, but it seemed less so. She chuffed out breaths, her chest heaving as she continued to lock eyes with me.
This went on for several seconds before she let out what could only be called a primal scream of fury. Her anger felt like a palpable force, radiating through the door. The cry echoed up and down the stairwell, seeming to go on forever.
When it finally dissipated, she jerked her body to the left, swung her arm out, striking several zombies, and knocking them into the rest of the zombies on the steps. This caused a chain reaction as the zombies toppled over all the way down to the landing below. She turned her head my way one more time, peered at me, and then started down the stairs.
I watched her for as long as I could, but she disappeared out of view. I continued to listen as she and her zombie horde slowly descended to the first floor, waiting until the stairwell went quiet.
Chapter 34
After the Fall
Somehow, I made it up to the roof. I don’t know how. My legs felt like noodles, weak, and ill-formed. I was moving totally on auto-pilot, taking one step after the other, but it barely registered in my brain. Something drove me on. I had to know what was happening down on the ground.
I came out of the exit door and stumbled toward the edge not really sure that I wouldn’t tumble over the edge. A part of me didn’t really care if I did.
My insides felt cored out. This wasn’t a gentle removal. This was something violent and down with a rusty tool with jagged edges, ripping and tearing my heart out. Then whatever took my heart out stomped on it until it looked like a giant over-sized raisin.
At least, that’s how I felt from a metaphorical perspective.
I made it to the edge and found a support pole for a roof light. That’s the only thing that kept me from going over the side.
Below me, zombies streamed out of the building, coming out what I presumed was the same window that Kara had broken through. Like I had seen so many times before, the group moved in that undulating motion that reminded me of a flock of birds. They squeezed down to make their way around the burned-out hulk of the helicopter then widened out on the other side of it.
All the while, they followed their gray queen. She was at the lead of their zombie processional. Her silver-gray hair caught the last vestiges of twilight with the sun just dropping below the horizon in the west.
When she had come into the building, it was at a rage-fueled pace as she stomped toward us. On the way out was a totally different story. Her shoulders were down, and she moved in the same fashion of the rest of her undead clan, trudging across the plaza and the
n onto the street. She disappeared from view for a moment as she passed around the corner of a building, but reappeared again, slowly shambling down the street.
I had no idea that she even knew I was there, but she was about to walk out of view for good when she stopped in the street. Dutifully, the zombies behind her stopped, too, gathering around her. From where I stood on the roof of the building, they looked like flowing water nearly enveloping her in their numbers.
She slowly turned back toward the direction of the research building and stood there for nearly thirty seconds, her eyes searching the building. Maybe she was looking for me? Perhaps she was having second thoughts and was getting ready to turn around to finish what she had started?
I guess I will never know what she was thinking because she turned away and trudged out of view.
A part of me wanted to dive off the building at that moment. I just couldn’t begin to imagine a world without her. Despite all that we had been through, I always envisioned the two of us as the ones who made it. We would not only survive. We would thrive and maybe even grow old together.
Through the haze of grief, I heard the sound of footsteps coming up behind me.
“You’re not thinking of going over the edge, are you?” Alex asked.
I wanted to answer, but my voice was gone. There was no strength left in me to talk. What little strength I had was the only thing maintaining my tenuous hold on the light pole.
A moment later, I felt Alex’s hands on my shoulder and arm as she pulled me back from the edge. After a few steps, my legs finally gave up, and I collapsed into a sitting position on the roof. Alex helped ease me down or else it would have been a hard landing.
I felt her more than saw her as she lowered herself down beside me. After a few seconds, she slid an arm over my shoulder and pulled me close to her, snuggling me in tight in a way a mother might.
We sat like that for a long time, neither one of us speaking. The stars began to pop out in the sky, and the night air shifted from cool to downright chilly, but I barely felt it. I really didn’t feel anything as I began to shut down. My body became a dried out and desiccated husk, devoid of emotions and life. It was the only way I could cope with what happened.
Alex broke the silence. “When I lost Rebecca, I thought I wouldn’t be able to go on. I wanted to crawl into the nearest hole and never come out. Life had lost any meaning or joy for me, but, as we humans have done for centuries, I survived. I wouldn’t call it living, but I existed.” She went quiet again. I’m not sure she was looking for a response or whether it was a dramatic pause.
“You will come out of this,” she said. “You’ll do it because you have to. You have a lovely little girl down there that’s going to need you more than ever. That may not register with you right now because you are so lost, but it will mean something to you. It may be the thing that brings you back.”
Alex wasn’t the loquacious type, so that’s where her speech ended. So again, we sat in silence. I’m not sure how long this stretched on, but I was the one to talk this time.
“I’m not giving up on her,” I said, my voice ragged and raw. “She’s still inside there. I just know it.”
“Well, if that’s what you need, then who am I to say anything different,” she said as she squeezed my shoulder. “We all have to have some kind of faith, now don’t we.”
The silence fell on us again, but Alex didn’t let it go on for too long this time.
“Hey buddy, it’s getting a little cold. I think it’s time we headed downstairs. We’ll get a good night’s sleep, and things might be a little better in the morning. What do you think?”
“Okay,” was all I could say.
She slowly rose to her feet, then turned back to me and offered her hand. It took an enormous amount of energy to lift my arm, but somehow, I made it happen. With great gentleness, she lifted me to my feet and let me fall into her. We stood together like that, in a comforting embrace for a few seconds before she broke it, swiveled me in beside her. Then she guided me to the door as the gentle pale glow of the moon bathed us in a ghostly blue light.
Author’s Note
A book is a long process that ends up with you as the reader. You are my end goal. You are the reason I write. Thanks so much for coming on the journey with me. With that in mind, I greatly hope you liked this book. If you did, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or wherever you can. Reviews are the social proof to other readers that this book is worth reading.
Books of the Dead (Book 8): The Living Dead Girl Page 17