Halverson darted back to his vehicle.
He put the cart in gear and steered around the creature in his path. Halverson knew the cart was too small and didn’t have big enough wheels to run over the thing. What he had to do now was to get out from under the overpass before too many of the ghouls dropped off the bridge and blocked the road.
Just another obstacle, decided Halverson. That was what life gave you: obstacles.
As he drove out from under the bridge, a creature crashed not more than a foot away from the cart’s right front fender. He was so close to the creature he could feel a rush of wind stirred by the creature’s fall.
Victoria jumped in her seat and let out a cry of alarm.
Halverson kept driving, the other two carts in tow.
He drove along the narrow winding roads through the hilly Veterans Administration complex. Hardly any traffic dotted the roads here. The VA buildings looked like dark behemoths beached on the sweeping grounds. He wondered if anybody was alive in them. Or were they infested with ghouls?
He could see no movement in the darkened windows.
He wondered if any of the buildings had medicine. They must, since there was a VA hospital here somewhere. He stopped his cart.
“Why are you stopping?” asked Victoria.
The other carts pulled up behind him.
“What’s the problem?” demanded Becker.
“They might have meds here at the VA hospital,” said Halverson.
“Yeah,” said Mannering, “but where is that? This place is a maze, especially in the dark.”
“Anybody know where the VA hospital is?”
Nobody answered.
“We’ll just waste time driving around here,” said Mannering. “Let’s head for the pharmacy. It’s not far from here.”
“I know where it is. We go back onto Wilshire.”
Halverson caught sight of movement to his right on the sidewalk. It surprised him to see a young woman pushing a pram down the sidewalk toward his cart. He doubted she could see him in the darkness. The question was, was she an infected ghoul? He couldn’t tell from here.
“We’ve got company,” he said.
“Where?” asked Victoria, craning her neck, peering into the darkness.
“To our right. A woman pushing her baby in a pram.”
“We’ve got to help her.”
“She might be infected. I can’t tell.”
She didn’t exhibit the jerky movements of the undead, noticed Halverson. She wasn’t flailing her arms, but that could be because they were resting on the baby carriage’s handle.
She didn’t seem to be in any hurry, wherever she was headed.
“We can’t abandon a baby,” said Victoria.
“Let’s keep moving,” said Becker from the second cart.
Halverson stopped his cart.
“Damn,” said Becker, jamming on his brakes.
Kicking up smoke and dirt, his tires screeched to a halt.
Halverson called out to the woman. “Hello.”
The woman pricked up her ears and began pushing the pram toward them.
Halverson saw that she was wearing a pink hoodie. He had trouble making out her face.
“We can help you with your baby,” said Victoria.
Not saying a word the woman kept coming toward them, steering the pram in front of her.
“Why isn’t she saying anything?” Halverson asked on the qui vive.
“She’s probably in shock after all that’s happened today,” answered Victoria.
Halverson wasn’t so sure. He wanted to get a better look at her face.
“Maybe,” he muttered.
He picked up on Victoria sliding out of the cart. She made a beeline for the pram.
“Wait a second,” he said. “Don’t get too close to her.”
He clambered out of the vehicle after her. He still could not make out the young woman’s face thanks to the hood drawn around it. He could not see the baby either. Why wasn’t the baby crying? he wondered. Wouldn’t it be upset riding around in the pitch-dark night? Then again, maybe the baby was asleep.
In midstride Halverson realized he hadn’t taken a weapon other than his automatic with him. If he used the pistol, the gunshots would attract ghouls from pillar to post. He belted back to the cart to collect the pitchfork, just in case the woman was infected.
His hand on the pitchfork’s haft, he heard Victoria scream.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The hood had fallen from the young mother’s face, Halverson could see. He could also see why Victoria had screamed.
The young mother was one of the walking dead.
Its twisted, decomposing face looked like it had less than half its flesh remaining on the skull. A toothy rictus with blood seeping out its corners gaped where once the mouth was.
The creature had released its grasp on the pram and was shambling toward Victoria, who had stopped dead in her tracks. Meanwhile, the blue baby carriage kept trundling down the sidewalk.
Victoria looked as if she wanted to rescue the errant pram, but, in a funk, she could not move as she watched the creature in the stain-mottled pink hoodie closing in on her. Halverson figured the brown stains were probably dried blood.
Pitchfork in hand, he barreled at the ghoul to intercept it before it reached Victoria, who continued to stand staring blankly like a deer caught in headlights.
The thing grabbed her arm with one of its withered hands. Its dirty clawlike fingers circled Victoria’s wrist. The creature widened its decrepit mouth, fixing to bury its broken yellow fanglike teeth into Victoria’s neck. Nearing her, the creature lowered its head toward her to take a bite out of the pulsing white flesh of her throat.
Still, Victoria stood her ground, as if transfixed.
None too soon, Halverson rammed the pitchfork into the creature, impaling its head on the steel prongs and jerking the creature backward, away from Victoria.
He realized he had missed the creature’s brain, though, knifing the prongs through the head at nose level under the brainpan.
The creature recoiled from Victoria on account of the impact of the blow, but the thing was by no means dead, Halverson could see. It continued to claw the air with its bony hands. It wanted to continue toward Victoria. Halverson had other ideas for it. He held it at bay with the pitchfork that stuck out of its moldering head.
He forced the creature backward with a thrust from his pitchfork then wrenched the prongs from the thing’s head. As the thing stumbled forward again, Halverson thrust one of the pitchfork’s prongs into the thing’s eye and slammed the prong home into the reanimated brain.
The creature’s knees buckled. It sprawled on the sidewalk, stone dead now.
Victoria regained her composure and dashed after the rolling baby carriage, which was well on its way to plunging off the sidewalk and spilling its passenger onto the street.
She latched onto the pram’s handle just in time and dragged it back onto the sidewalk—and screamed.
Halverson bolted after her, still carrying the pitchfork. He could not tell what the problem was.
Then he saw—
A hideous sight that boggled his mind.
The “baby,” if anyone could call it that, was walking in the pram toward Victoria, who was clasping the handle. The baby’s body was covered with ulcerous, chancre-ridden, dark skin. The creature’s white-filmed blue eyes were glaring at Victoria as it padded toward her, its pudgy little arms outstretched in front of it.
Sickened at the sight of the monstrosity, Halverson could not stand it any longer. He slammed the pitchfork into the creature’s tiny head. The fragile back of its skull blew out, followed by a small clump of grey brain matter.
Halverson had thrust the pitchfork with such force that it took off the back of the pram after it skewered the tiny creature’s head.
He jerked the pitchfork free from the carnage. He brought his hand down over his goggles. He didn’t know how much more of this
he could take. Was there no end to this nightmare? he wondered. How many more of these god-awful things were out there?
Even as he removed his hand from his goggles, he glimpsed a knot of the creatures staggering toward him across the grassy knoll that bordered the sidewalk.
He snagged Victoria’s arm and pegged toward their motor cart. “We have to get out of here.”
Her face ashen, she was still trying to recover from the shock of seeing the baby that had been transformed into a ghoul.
“Are you two finally through playing house!” cried Becker.
Halverson needed to muster all of his willpower to constrain his urge to tear Becker’s head off.
“How about giving us a hand?” said Halverson.
Becker sneered. “What are you doing? Groping her after you played house with her?”
Again, Halverson had to restrain himself from planting a fist upside Becker’s head. Instead of punching Becker, Halverson had to console himself with saying, “That’s more up your alley, according to the papers.”
“Yeah,” chipped in Reba, turning on Becker. “You ought to know all about groping and sicker stuff than that.”
The only thing Becker wanted to grope was Reba’s ass. It was the first thing he had noticed about her when he met her. She had an ass on her that wouldn’t quit. How could he help but notice it with those skintight stretch pants she was wearing? He could clearly see her panty lines.
“What happened?” Felix asked Halverson.
“The mother and the baby were both infected,” answered Halverson, walking past him.
“Is she OK?” Felix asked, indicating Victoria, noticing her pallor.
“She’s fine, considering what we just saw,” answered Halverson.
Felix didn’t look too good himself, noted Halverson.
Halverson and Victoria returned to their vehicle and climbed into it.
“Could we all get a move on it before we end up being zombie food?” said Becker.
Halverson ignored Becker, fired the ignition, and put the motor cart in gear.
“We’re just wasting time going to the pharmacy,” Halverson confided to Victoria.
“We need to treat Felix’s wound,” she said.
“It won’t do him any good. We’re gonna have to kill him.”
“Are you crazy?” Victoria said, appalled.
“He’s gonna turn into one of those things.”
“Not if we get some penicillin for him.”
“I’m just letting you know what’s gonna have to be done eventually, like it or not.”
“I can’t believe you can just sit there, coldly plotting to kill him like you’re judge, jury, and executioner.”
“This has nothing to do with justice.”
Victoria screwed up her face in puzzlement. “Then why?”
“It can’t be helped.”
“We’re not killing anybody,” she said with finality.
Halverson knew better, but he didn’t press the point.
“You want a bigger share of the money, that’s what it is,” she added with reproach. “Without Felix, you get more for yourself.”
“That’s not what it is. Ask yourself, what good is that money now that society’s collapsed and everybody’s infected?”
“We don’t know that. This plague could be isolated to this area.”
“That money is more of a burden to us than anything. It slows us down.”
“That still doesn’t give you the right to kill Felix.”
“I’m letting you know what’s gonna happen, that’s all. If you want to live in denial, that’s up to you.”
She looked at him like he had flipped out.
They reached Wilshire Boulevard five-odd minutes later. They drove onto the sidewalk and made for Federal Avenue.
Halverson reached Federal. He stopped the cart. He could see the pharmacy building across the intersection. There was only one problem. The intersection was crammed with derelict cars. From here they couldn’t drive to the pharmacy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Becker and Felix drove up to Halverson’s motor cart.
“Where’s the pharmacy?” asked Felix, squinting in the dark, surveying the environs.
“I don’t see any pharmacy,” said Becker.
Halverson pointed across the intersection to the fifteen-story high-rise that housed the pharmacy on its first floor. He didn’t know if they could see the building without NVGs.
“We can’t drive through that mess in the intersection,” said Felix.
Halverson twigged a twentysomething, clean-cut male trying to find his way out of the car-congested intersection toward the sidewalk Halverson was parked on.
Clad in a bespoke grey two-button cotton-and-linen jacket by Bottega Venata and charcoal grey silk-and-cotton trousers by Dolce & Gabbana, he looked like a fashion model that had walked straight out of the advert pages of Esquire magazine, except for one thing—the flesh on the left side of his handsome face was missing. Where the flesh had once been, there were now suppurating jellylike strings dangling from the guy’s skull.
Halverson didn’t even want to think about what those strings were made of.
The thing managed to find its way out of the obstacle course of motor vehicles and lurched onto the sidewalk in its suede monk-strap Santoni shoes.
Halverson could now see that the creature’s jacket was wrinkled and streaked with grime. Its trousers were soaked with motor oil. Its tongue was sticking out of its sneering mouth, what was left of its tongue, anyway. Only half the tongue remained and it was leathery and blue and shredded at the end. Some time ago, while it was feeding on human flesh, the creature must have devoured the other half of its poor excuse for a tongue.
A fashionista zombie was the last thing Halverson wanted to see.
“All dressed up with no place to go,” said Becker.
The sight of the thing revolted Halverson.
He snagged a spade from his cart, charged the creature, and thrust the spade’s steel blade into the creature’s cranium at a dead run. The force of the blow blew out the back of the creature’s skull. Along with the skull, a neatly severed blob of brain matter the size of half a grapefruit soared through the air into the street and landed on a maroon Jaguar’s windshield.
Wearing an aqua pinafore a six-year-old girl who wore her blonde tresses in a pageboy cut screamed as a creature ripped one of her arms out of its socket while she stood near the Jaguar. The girl relapsed into shock. She fell to the asphalt in a puddle of fresh blood that was gushing from her dismembered trunk.
The creature crouched over her and began tearing apart her dress and disemboweling her.
Luckily, decided Halverson, Victoria and Reba couldn’t see the atrocity being committed in the intersection. Unluckily, he could because he was wearing the NVGs. It was too late to save the girl, he knew. Even now the thing was feeding on the hapless girl’s entrails stuffing them into its face like there was no tomorrow.
“Excuse me,” said Becker, “but can somebody tell me how we’re going to drive across the street to the pharmacy? I could do with a Tums after seeing that zombie clotheshorse.”
“We’ll have to drive around,” said Halverson.
“We could leave the carts here and walk through the intersection,” suggested Mannering.
“But we’re still gonna have to get on the other side of Federal and keep going down Wilshire, no matter what we do.”
“Wanna vote on it?”
“I’m not leaving my cart anywhere,” said Felix. “If you want to leave your cart, be my guest.”
“Take it easy,” said Mannering. “It’s just a cart. What’s the big deal?”
“Right now it’s the only means of escape we have,” said Felix, careful to avoid telling Mannering about the sacks of money stashed on the carts.
Halverson picked up on another creature plodding through the wreckage of cars toward him. To complement its swarthy complexion the middle-aged creature h
ad black hair and a salt-and-pepper beard about a half inch in length clinging to its face like moss.
The creature wore silver-framed spectacles, black slacks, and a Tommy Bahama aloha shirt with saucer-sized canary yellow and glaucous flower patterns on it. But the creature had no sense of style: its aloha shirt was tucked in.
The thing ought to be shot for its dearth of fashion sense alone, decided Halverson.
Another male creature popped up behind Aloha Shirt. This thirtysomething creature wore an olive drab T-shirt and blue jeans. A protuberant, bent aquiline nose seemed to weigh so much that it dragged the creature’s head down. A sluglike gob of spit was lolling out of the corner of the undead thing’s sneering, fungus-riddled mouth.
Halverson couldn’t imagine what jobs these creatures had as human beings. The bearded guy could have passed for a shrink. In the end it didn’t matter. They had to be killed or avoided.
Mannering snagged a spade from Becker’s cart. “Let me handle these clowns.”
“Be my guest,” said Halverson.
Spade in hand, Mannering confronted Aloha Shirt as it mounted the sidewalk. Mannering thrust the spade into Aloha Shirt’s throat with such vehemence that the spade beheaded the creature. The bearded head went flying through the air and thumped on a sedan’s hood, rolled along the metal, and fell off onto the road. The creature’s body collapsed.
Halverson could see the head opening and closing its jaws as it lay on the asphalt. The head was still alive, Halverson realized, but what harm could it do without a body? To hell with it, he decided and ignored it.
Mannering made the mistake of going for an upper body blow and stabbing the spade into the second creature’s chest. The creature jerked backward but wasn’t dead. Mannering withdrew the spade’s blade and jammed it into the creature’s heart.
No soap. The creature stepped back then kept coming toward Mannering.
“Aim for the head,” said Halverson.
“That was a direct blow to its heart,” said Mannering in frustration.
“You have to destroy the brain. It’s the only part of them that’s reanimated.”
Zombie Apocalypse Page 36