Mannering shook his head and shrugged. He thrust his spade into the creature’s forehead.
The creature dropped dead.
“What’s the point of staying here?” asked Victoria. “Let’s go.”
“Where to?” said Becker. “We can’t get across the intersection.”
“We’ll drive north on Federal, cross Federal, and double back to Wilshire and the pharmacy,” said Halverson, climbing into his motor cart.
Mannering bucketed down the sidewalk and managed to climb into his seat before Becker could drive off without him. Gripped in Mannering’s hand was the spade, which had bone splinters, gore, and lumps of brain smeared on its blade.
“Were you gonna leave without me?” said Mannering.
“I was going to drive over to you and pick you up,” said Becker.
Mannering didn’t buy it. “Whatever.”
Becker steered to his right to avoid a one-legged zombie that was crawling off the road and onto the sidewalk.
“Pew!” said Becker. “Those things stink to high heaven.”
“They seem to bring flies with them, too,” said Mannering, swatting at flies buzzing around his head.
One flew into his mouth as he was speaking. Mannering gagged and spat out the invading insect. He commenced coughing.
“It’s all good,” said Becker.
His eyes bloodshot and tearing from his coughing fit, Mannering gave Becker a look.
“Anything that makes us strong is good,” explained Becker.
Mannering coughed.
“I see an opening in the traffic jam where we can cross,” hollered Halverson in the lead cart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Halverson drove left at the intersection up ahead where a narrow street from the VA Center met Federal.
He found the carts could squeeze through the tiny intersection, which wasn’t really an intersection but a lane for a left turn onto Federal. An eighteen-wheeler had jackknifed up ahead and had prevented traffic from passing it, leaving Federal clear in its southbound lanes for some twenty feet, after which the traffic clogged up again.
To avoid the jam-up, Halverson drove onto the cement sidewalk that was inclined for handicapped access and headed back to Wilshire and the pharmacy.
“Can we turn our lights on now?” said Becker in the cart behind Halverson’s.
“No,” Halverson called back to him. “Those things gravitate toward lights and noise. Just follow me.”
Victoria shifted in her seat beside Halverson. “I can’t believe you want to kill Felix.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone,” said Halverson. “We’re gonna have to kill him when he turns. You don’t want him walking around like one of those creatures, do you? He’ll attack us when he turns.”
Victoria didn’t answer.
Halverson drove to Wilshire and stopped.
Becker and Felix braked their vehicles behind him.
“Do you see a way across?” Felix asked Halverson.
“No,” answered Halverson. “We’re gonna have to walk across from here to get to the pharmacy.”
The high-rise that housed the pharmacy was in a lot better shape than the buildings around it, Halverson could see. Most of the neighboring buildings had burned down to piles of smoldering, soot-blackened rubble. Perhaps the steel-and-glass construction of the high-rise had saved it or maybe the overhead sprinkling system had been triggered to scotch the fire. In any case, the building remained in overall good condition save for several scorch marks on its sides.
“I’m not leaving this cart,” insisted Felix.
“Why do we all have to go?” said Becker. “Some of us can go. The rest can stay here.”
“Works for me,” said Halverson. “So who goes?”
“Felix is the one who needs the meds, so he should go.”
“No way,” said Felix. “I told you, I’m not leaving this cart.” Felix clutched his steering wheel harder as if to emphasize the point.
“If you won’t get your own meds, why do you think any of us should bother?”
“All I know is I’m not leaving this cart. What you do is up to you.”
“Why should we care, if you don’t even care?”
“It’s just a little bite. Whoever died from a bite from a human?”
Sitting beside Felix, Reba rolled up his sleeve and inspected his wound. She winced and shook her head.
“His wound’s getting worse,” she said. “It’s turning black with pus oozing out of it.”
“Shit,” said Mannering. “Too much information.”
Reba glowered at him. “He needs antibiotics. He isn’t gonna make it without them.”
“He isn’t gonna make it, anyway,” muttered Halverson.
“Hell, I’ll go, if all of you are a bunch of chickens,” said Reba, sliding out of her seat.
Mannering reached under his armpits and started beating his arms up and down, clucking.
“Very funny,” said Reba irritably.
“I’ll go with you,” said Halverson. “I have the goggles.”
He climbed out of his cart.
“How long will this take?” asked Becker. “I don’t exactly feel safe waiting here on the sidewalk.”
“I’ll protect you,” said Felix dryly.
“You against thousands of ghouls. That’s not very reassuring.”
“Next time I’ll bring a tank.”
Mannering chortled.
Becker wasn’t amused.
Halverson picked up on someone walking on the sidewalk toward them from the west. It was a dark-complected twentyish woman with a long mane of brown hair that was fastened with a scrunchie and hanging down the front of her shoulder. Clad in a pink string bikini, she had a voluptuous figure he couldn’t help but notice.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” said Mannering as he set eyes on her, too, giving her the once-over.
“I want a piece of that,” said Becker, leering at her.
Felix managed a wolf whistle, even though he wasn’t feeling up to it.
“Nice legs,” said Mannering.
“Your eyes are too low,” said Felix, ogling her. “Nice everything.”
The woman had fine features. She reached for her dainty nose, picked a fat maggot out of her nostril, and flicked the squirming insect to the sidewalk.
“Oh no,” said Mannering. “Even the foxes are zombies now.”
“And I was hoping she was gonna come over here,” lamented Felix.
To everyone’s dismay, she did waltz over to them on unsteady but shapely legs. The decomposition of her flesh was such that it had only just begun and her zaftig figure was still intact—except for her face, which was in a more advanced stage of decay.
The skin on the lower half of her jaw had rotted away baring her jawbone, various squiggling worms, black, suppurating gums, and broken teeth.
“Man, what the hell was I thinking?” said Mannering.
“I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting sick of listening to you two,” said Reba.
“I’m getting sick of watching her. I mean, watching it,” said Felix.
“This is the textbook example of a chick with a bodacious bod and the face of a dog,” said Mannering.
“I think I’m cured of women,” said Becker.
“Somebody put it down,” pleaded Felix.
The creature streeled toward them. It was wearing tumbledown scarlet pumps with three-inch heels, Halverson noticed. No wonder it was having so much difficulty walking, especially when you considered its coordination was shot.
“I’ll do it,” said Mannering. “If you can’t fuck ’em, kill ’em, is what I always say.”
He took a shovel from Becker’s motor cart, confronted the creature, and clouted its head with the curved steel blade. It was neither the easiest nor quickest way to kill someone on account of the shovel’s unwieldy length, Mannering found out, but in the end it was effective.
Mannering kept battering the thing’s head. At fir
st he swung at it like the shovel was a baseball bat. Clobbered several times on the side of the head, the creature toppled to the sidewalk, wounded but not dead. Once the thing was on the cement, Mannering sledgehammered the shovel’s blade down on the thing’s head again and again until the head was reduced to pulp.
“Are you married?” asked Reba.
“I used to be,” answered Mannering. He faced her. “How could you tell?”
Reba shook her head. “You looked like you were enjoying yourself.”
Mannering turned back toward the creature and pounded it a couple more times on its ruined head with the shovel.
“Save your energy,” said Halverson. “There are more of those things where that one came from.”
Mannering pounded the creature’s head in a few more times for good measure.
“Enough already,” said Reba, watching him.
“Let’s get out of here,” Halverson told her.
He snared a pitchfork from his motor cart and approached Reba, who was retrieving a shovel from her cart.
“We don’t have all day to wait for you,” said Becker. “A mob of those things could be just around the corner, for all we know.”
Halverson and Reba waded into the junkyard of cars on Wilshire. They could still hear Mannering’s shovel thudding against the creature’s shattered skull.
“Don’t leave without us,” Reba told the others over the din.
“We’ll honk if we see a slew of those things heading our way,” said Felix, wincing at the pain in his wounded arm.
Becker sneezed. “This smoky air gets to my sinuses.”
“I’m thirsty,” said Victoria.
“Yeah, the smoke irritates my throat,” said Mannering. “I could do with a cold beer.”
“Just keep an eye out for those things,” Halverson called back to them over his shoulder as he led Reba between the junkers toward the pharmacy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Do you think they’ll wait for us?” Reba asked Halverson in the middle of Wilshire.
“I don’t know,” answered Halverson. “Let’s get this over with fast before they decide to split. They’re not gonna hang around if hundreds of those things attack them. That’s for sure.”
Halverson spotted bloody corpses sprawled in several of the cars. The corpses weren’t moving, he noted with relief. But that could change any moment. It was impossible to predict how long it would take for a corpse to reanimate.
A tan plastic Ralph’s grocery bag blew past them, borne by the gusting offshore Santa Ana winds. Halverson took in Reba’s orange supermarket cashier’s uniform.
“I guess we’re not in Santa Monica yet,” said Halverson.
Reba gave him a blank look.
“Plastic bags are outlawed in Santa Monica,” he explained. “Where do you work?”
“In LA. We still use plastic bags in LA. That’s what I do all day—scan food and bag groceries,” she said wearily.
“That’s what you used to do.”
“Compared to this, that was paradise.”
“Anything would be better than this.” Even kissing up to his boss DCI Slocum at the Agency, decided Halverson.
“How do you know so much about this area? I thought you were from back east.”
“I used to live here in California and I come back here frequently because of my job.”
“As a journalist?”
“Yeah.” That was his cover story and he would stick to it, decided Halverson. He wasn’t about to tell her he worked for the CIA.
“I get the feeling you’re not telling me something,” said Reba, scrutinizing his face.
Halverson had no time to answer. A middle-aged bald man with a brown goatee and mustache staggered down the sidewalk toward them as Halverson stepped out of the road onto the red-painted curb.
Wearing a brown sweater vest, the figure shambled toward Halverson and sneered. Hollow eyes clouded with white film gazed blindly out of the figure’s withered visage.
Halverson pegged him for a zombie. The telltale white eyes sealed the deal, as far as Halverson was concerned.
The creature moaned and reached for Halverson. Halverson thrust his pitchfork under the creature’s chin, through its palate, and deep into its brain.
Halverson withdrew his pitchfork as the creature doubled over and crashed to the sidewalk.
“How did you know he was one of them?” asked Reba.
“He attacked me,” answered Halverson.
“He didn’t attack. He just raised his arm. Maybe he was waving hello.”
“His eyes have white film on them. All of the infected have that film on their eyes.”
“Maybe he’s a regular guy who happens to have walleyes.”
That was possible, decided Halverson. He hadn’t thought of that. “But he was staggering, too, like a zombie,” he said, suddenly unsure of himself.
Christ! Halverson thought. Did I kill a man?
He stepped toward the lifeless body. It was doubled over so he couldn’t see the face.
With the pitchfork Halverson prodded the body so that it now lay supine on the sidewalk. He stooped down over the cadaver to get a better look at its face.
He let out a sigh of relief when he remarked distinct evidence of decomposition already in progress on the cadaver’s face. The skin was ulcerous and suppurating. Too, patches of black rot dappled the desiccated, rucked face.
“Zombie,” he said.
“He may’ve been infected, but he’s still a person,” said Reba.
“No, he’s not. This is a corpse. This is a thing, not a person. It may look like us, but the resemblance ends there.”
“OK, Mr. Know-it-all.”
Halverson strode across the sidewalk to the drugstore. At once, he could see that its picture windows were shattered and shards of glass were strewn all over the sidewalk and the store’s interior.
Not good, he decided.
“Looks like somebody beat us to the punch,” said Reba.
“Looters maybe.”
They entered the pharmacy crunching fragments of glass underfoot. Sundries lay scattered all over the aisles between half-empty, rifled shelves.
“Where’s the pharmacy?” asked Reba. “This is all over-the-counter stuff. Penicillin’s not gonna be here.”
Halverson pointed to a counter in the back of the disheveled store. “That looks like it.”
They made tracks to the counter.
Halverson thought he heard a noise on the floor above them. He halted.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“What?” Reba listened, but didn’t hear anything.
“I thought I heard a noise upstairs.”
“Let’s just get this over with and get out of here.”
“Some of those things may be in this building.”
Reba reached the counter before him.
The pharmacy wasn’t in any better shape than the rest of the store, Halverson could see. Different-colored pills and powders littered the floor. The shelves had all been ransacked.
“They trashed the pharmacy, too,” said Reba in dismay. “This isn’t gonna be easy finding penicillin.”
“I wonder what they were looking for.”
“Hopefully not what we’re looking for.”
Reba swung open the white-painted waist-high wooden door in the counter and stepped into the pharmacy.
“In and out,” said Halverson. “Maybe it was zombies that ran amok in here trashing it.” He looked up toward the next floor. “And they may still be here.”
Reba commenced rummaging through the shelves for penicillin.
Halverson started. He definitely heard a noise this time. Only it wasn’t coming from upstairs. The sound of scuffling and banging was coming from beyond the back door of the drugstore.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
He stole toward the back door. Grasping the knob he cracked the door. The door opened onto a corridor. The hallway looked deserte
d.
He heard a crump behind a closed steel door ten feet away on his right. Pitchfork in hand, he shouldered the drugstore door wide open and padded toward the steel door, which had a glass judas window set in it at eye level. The window measured about six inches by six inches with wire mesh sandwiched between two plates of glass for reinforcement.
He saw something run past the glass inside the room. It looked like a running woman.
He stepped up to the judas to get a better view.
Somebody in the room saw his face and charged the window.
It was a berserk woman pushing thirty. She had shoulder-length, unkempt, curly brown hair. Wild-eyed, her face contorted with fear, she screamed at him.
“Help!” she cried, crashing her gaping mouth against the glass.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Startled, Halverson flinched. Reflexively, he drew back from the glass as the woman jostled the door.
He tried to open the door. It was locked.
He heard footsteps running behind him. He wheeled around.
It was Reba.
“What’s happening?” she asked anxiously.
“I’m not sure,” answered Halverson. “A woman inside this room needs help.”
“Why?”
Halverson could now make out the reason for the woman’s panic. As she stepped away from the window, he could see three haggard creatures shambling toward her. Terrified, the woman fled from the door and scooted behind a metal desk to escape her assailants.
“Things are in there with her trying to get her,” said Halverson.
“Let’s open the door and help her,” said Reba.
Reba grabbed the doorknob, tried to turn it, but couldn’t. She yanked on the doorknob in frustration.
“How?” he asked.
“Tell her to unlock the door.”
“Unlock the door!” he hollered toward the woman through the judas.
The woman didn’t respond.
“Maybe you can’t unlock it from the inside,” said Reba.
“Looks like some kind of supply room. I see rows of shelves in there.”
“After they trashed her store, she may have tried to hide in there, not realizing those things were already in there.”
“Who knows?”
Halverson didn’t know if the poor woman could hear him. In any case, she had her hands full eluding the zombies.
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