The Dead Won't Die

by Glass, J. B.

  Sheila put a finger over her lips, thinking stupidly about locking the barn door after the horses were already out. Jesus, she had a cliche for every occasion, didn't she?

  There was a tentative knocking -- quiet, like someone tapping with a knuckle. Then a whisper, frantically fearful: "I saw you go in there, Sheila!. McCormack -- let me in! Right now!"

  Sheila and Jerry looked at each other. Of course, if any one person would have come to the door of the room they'd taken shelter in and demanded to be let in, it would be Fred.

  Jerry shook his head at Sheila. He shoved his hand into the top of his backpack -- and when he brought it out, he was holding a short, snub nosed revolver.

  Sheila had never been so happy to see a gun in all her liberal-progressive gun-control touting life.

  But what were they going to do about Fred? They couldn't leave him out there to be eaten by zombies just because they didn't like him... could they?

  Jerry caught her look. "NO," he whispered to her. "Those things move way too fast. They see Fred come in through these doors, it will take me a couple of seconds to wrap those handles again, and even if I do they'll fucking hammer the doors down to get us."

  "BUT..." Sheila gasped, and put both her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were wide, though. They couldn't just leave someone to die... could they?

  "Time to tough up," Jerry whispered. "Hard choices ahead, She-Ra. Hard motherfuckin' choices."

  It reminded her of Woody Harrelson in ZOMBIELAND, saying 'time to nut up or shut up'.

  "I'm warning you," Fred whispered, a little more loudly now, through the secured doors, "you are not authorized to be in that conference room and I will not hesitate to --"

  From off to Sheila's right, she heard a scream, and abruptly, the sound of running feet. A growl like a dog's, only inches away, and Fred started screaming "NOOOO STOP IT STOPPPPP DON'T THEY'RE IN THERE THEY'RE IN THERE THEY'RE IN THERRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAA"

  The doors were shaking in their frames, the doorknobs rattling like wind chimes as something -- something that, perhaps, had been a co-worker, minutes before -- ripped Fred to pieces, only inches away from them.

  Sheila backed away from the doors, fighting the near overwhelming urge to throw up.

  To take her mind off the noises coming from just the other side of the doors, she started looking around the room they were in, assessing potential resources. They had water, but no food. They could stay in here for a few hours.... maybe a few days ,although she didn't want to think about what they'd be doing regarding nature calls after a day or so... but eventually they'd have to come out. And the floor was already full of zombies...

  Jerry was looking around too. His eyes seemed to be ticking off everything in the room methodically... chairs, table, mini fridge, obsolete overhead projector shoved back into one corner...

  "Nothing heavy we can barricade the door with," he murmured, moving past Sheila towards the windows. "No way we can move that table..." He pressed his nose up against one of the four foot glass squares, and Sheila knew he was trying to get the best view he could of the parking lot outside, not just straight ahead, but to the right and left, as well.

  "We can't stay in here now," Jerry said, finally, turning to look at her. "Fred's going to be back up and around in a couple minutes, and motherfucker that he is, he's gonna start banging on that door. We need to be gone like Shaun before that happens."

  Sheila just nodded. She couldn't trust herself to speak yet. Although part of her mind gibbered Gone like Shaun? Who still says that?

  "Where'd you park?" Jerry continued.

  Beyond him, through the window, Sheila could see that there were a few -- not people -- shambling around in the parking lot, and on the road beyond. Where had they all come from? How were there so many of them, so fast? How could this possibly have spread from the hospitals down near the University to way out here near the county line in such little time?

  But if it started in hospitals... there was an immediate care center in a strip mall just about a quarter of a mile up the street. And a big funeral home on one of the side roads, too, near that Christ of Cavalry church with the gigantic concrete cross out front...

  "Around the side lot," she said. From here, it was an impossible sixty yards away. "You?"

  "Same," Jerry said. "But... I did work as a field tech here for my first three months before a slot opened up inside for me." He turned and pointed through the window; no more than forty feet away were a rank of company repair vans. "Those won't be locked and the keys will be in the ignition. And they're pretty heavy duty. Four wheel drive... and some interesting blunt objects in the toolboxes, if we should need that sort of thing. Plus CB radios, which may be more useful than cell phones right now."

  "Okay," Sheila said, her voice feeling rusty but coming out surprisingly steady. "You've sold me. I'll take it if I can get it in Ardent Red." She paused and licked her lips. "You don't think it would be better to stay here... see if they... I don't know... move on?"

  There were still screams coming through the doors, but they were fewer now. The sounds of frantically running feet and slamming doors were gone, too.

  Jerry gestured in that general direction. "A few of the luckier, faster people will be hiding out in places with closed doors, like us. But most everyone who came to work today is bit... and judging by how fast Dawn came back after she left, I'd say it doesn't take long for these things to turn. They probably got her in the parking lot. And Dawn was apparently smart enough to use her badge to get herself back in after she turned."

  Sheila hadn't thought of that. Smart zombies. That... was bad.

  "It's instinctive, we do it several times a day five days a week," Jerry said. "She might have just done it reflexively as she walked up to the door. She sure didn't look like she was firing on too many cylinders upstairs, from what I saw. But, even if it's just reflexes... and even if I wasn't sure Dead Fred wasn't gonna start hammering on those doors any minute... those things are going to start turning doorknobs soon."

  They were both keeping their voices low, all the way over by the windows. Still, Sheila felt horribly exposed. How good was a zombie's hearing?

  "Plus," Jerry went on, "it's just going to get worse outside as time goes on, not better. If we're lucky, there may be a very slender window right now, in all the confusion, where we can get out of here. If we wait... walkers all over the roads."

  'Walkers'. Jerry must have been a WALKING DEAD fan. Of course, hardly anybody wasn't...

  "These windows don't open," Sheila finally pointed out. "And these aren't 'walkers', Jerry. They're motherfucking sprinters."

  "Yeah," Jerry said, flashing her a grin showing teeth yellowed from a bad cigarette habit. “Fast zombies suck, fo' sho. We're gonna have to break out, and that's going to cause noise, and that's going to bring them screaming at us."

  More than that, Sheila realized. It would commit them. Right now they had a room with water in it, secured doors between them and a building full of zombies, an intact window wall holding off the hordes outside. Sheila knew from driving by the front of the building that the glass was polarized; you could see through it easily from this side, but from the outside, it presented a mirrored surface. This place might be safe for a few days, but... no. No. That was an illusion, and a dangerous one.

  Jerry was still musing, "I wish I could think of any easy way to distract them, but..."

  Sheila looked around. She was pretty sure she'd seen...

  Yes. She pointed at the fire alarm box inset in the wall next to the double doors. "What about that?"

  Jerry tilted his head to the side, eyes narrowed in thought. "Well... it should confuse them and give us noise cover. And I think the alarm bells on the outside of the building are set at either end, so it should pull the outside zombies away from us. What the hell. Let's give it a shot."

  Sheila ran, trying to move as quietly as possible, across the carpeted floor to the handle. Across the room from her, Jerry shoved the gun into his fr
ont blue jeans pocket and picked up one of the heavy, luxuriously padded leather chairs, hefting it experimentally. Sheila saw the way the muscles below his t-shirt's short sleeves tightened and stood out in definition. Nice, she thought to herself, and immediately felt guilty for it.

  Jerry nodded to her. She pulled the lever.

  Immediately bluish white lights started to flash in the corners of the room; Sheila knew they'd be flashing throughout the building. Alarm bells began clanging as well. Had it been a normal day, everyone would be telling their customers they had a fire alarm and terminating the calls, grabbing purses and backpacks and coats, starting to move towards their team's designated evacuation area.

  Jerry spun in a circle and let go of the chair in his hands, which flew four feet and smashed through the outside window with an alarming crash.

  He used his plastic weave backpack to knock shards of glass out of the window frame and then stepped through. He had his gun out again. "Come on!" he whispered urgently to Sheila, who was running full out around the big conference table towards the broken window. "We can make i--"

  A young black guy in Galaxy field tech coveralls with a hole in his cheek that you could see his teeth through on that side came screaming and sprinting at Jerry, running down the side of the building. Jerry calmly took the two handed stance of an experienced shooter and fired, once. The pistol made a sharp little crack and a red hole appeared on the unfortunate field tech's forehead and a momentary red cloud appeared behind his head. He tumbled backward onto the ground.

  The sound of the alarm bells was very loud outside. The zombies that had been shambling around in the parking lot and the road beyond had all headed for the corners of the building, where the outside alarm bells were mounted. Only the black guy had apparently been in a position to see Jerry stepping out through the shattered window.

  Sheila clambered through, even more grateful than usual that Galaxy had no dress code for inside employees. If she'd been in heels, pantyhose and a skirt, this would have been much much harde...

  The black field tech had gotten back up. About a third of his head on the left side seemed to be just gone, but that wasn't slowing him down any. With another shrill shriek, he charged forward and tackled Jerry, gabbling and gibbering and snapping his teeth as he did his best to bite Jerry's face off.

  But headshots always kill zombies!!! was screaming in Sheila's brain as she stared in horror.

  Jerry was struggling hard to keep the former field tech from getting in close enough to bite, but before Sheila could even step towards the two of them (assuming she had decided to) she saw the black tech turn his head and sink his teeth into Jerry's bare arm.

  Jerry screamed.

  And then "SHEILA!!! GET TO THE VANNNN!!! I GOT THIS GUY!!!"

  And he sent the gun spinning down the tarmac towards her.

  Sheila wanted to throw up. Wanted to hit, pummel, kick the black field tech zombie, drag him off Jerry, wanted to shoot fire out of her hands like some superhero from TV...

  Wanted to live.

  Now there were other people -- not people! -- looking around the edge of the building, probably tracking the sound of intelligible human speech. Sheila saw one of them, followed closely by another, start to scream and sprint this way, towards her.

  She scooped up the gun, shoved it into the top of her purse, and ran to the closest van. Jerry had said it would be unlocked, it had to be unlocked, her hands scrambled frantically at the door handle and the push button under it, IT WASN'T OPENING --

  A zombie went by the end of the van at a dead sprint, veered off and threw itself on top of the black field tech who was still struggling with Jerry. Another one ran up and stopped, looked straight at Sheila, eyes bugging out, head bobbing in and out, in and out, like a bird staring at prey.

  The van door came open. It had just been stuck.

  Sheila threw herself inside, screaming in terror, and grabbed at the handle on the inside of the door to yank it closed. The zombie -- a very petite bleach-blond woman with really short hair from the Dispatch department Sheila could vaguely remember seeing in the cafeteria on occasion, having coffee with her husband, who was a field tech -- came scrabbling like a cockroach down the side of the van at her. At least, that's how it seemed, although the blond woman was probably just clawing at the side of the van with her fingernails. Sheila slammed the door closed just as the woman reached her left hand inside and grabbed the headrest of the driver's seat. There was a snapping sound, like a piece of firewood breaking, and cool, almost gummy blood sprayed the side of Sheila's head and face as the blond woman's forearm and hand fell to the floor of the cab and started writhing around violently down by the van's clutch, gas, and brake pedals.

  Without even thinking about it, still screaming, Sheila started slamming her sneakered feet down on the violently thrashing severed hand as if she were stomping on a poisonous spider. The fingers on the hand made awful snapping noises, crunching against the van's floor underneath her sneaker soles. Outside, the blond woman was shrieking along with Sheila and beating against the windows with her remaining hand and her fresh new ragged stump.

  Sheila realized her throat hurt. She stopped screaming. The blond woman had stopped screaming outside, too. She was staring through the blood splattered side window at Sheila, eyes bulging with avid interest, head tilted to one side as if pondering the situation.

  The dead woman reached out, tentatively, to touch the door handle --

  Sheila slammed her hand down on the power lock button, and heard all the locks on the truck click shut.

  The severed hand was no longer writhing under her sneakers.

  The keys were in the ignition, just as Jerry had said they would be.

  Jerry's pistol was sitting in the middle of the passenger seat next to her purse. It was a lump of shiny, polished metal that, judging from what she had seen, was pretty much entirely useless to her. Sheila did not have any idea how her purse had gotten there. She must have tossed it there as she scrambled into the truck but she had no memory of doing so...

  Fuck it. She needed to get the hell out of here.

  Okay. The goddam truck had a stick shift and a clutch pedal, meaning no automatic transmission. She'd have to figure that --

  Sheila started as someone started smacking the side of the truck, hard enough to rock it slightly on its tires. Looking at the side mirror through the gore spattered window, she could see three or four zombies bunching up on her side of the van, hitting it with their open hands.

  Behind them, Jerry was shambling up, his face and arms a mass of bites.

  Sheila turned the keys in the ignition, hit the clutch, yanked the stick shift through the H pattern etched on its knob into reverse. The adrenaline in her bloodstream was causing floating sparkles in her vision, making her hands feel numb, causing her stomach to jump and turn inside her, making her heart slam in her chest like that big drum high school kids whacked hell out of at the front of a marching band.

  She hit the gas, and the van lurched into motion, backing up so suddenly she nearly rammed it into the building. She braked just in time, cut the wheel to the left, and rammed the huge stick shift into first gear, only grinding the gears a little bit before hitting the gas again.

  Swerved the wheel at the last minute to run Jerry down, taking him under her left tire with a crunching thud. She didn't think he'd want to be up walking around like that.

  And it was time to tough up.

  Then she was gunning the service vehicle towards the front exit that led out onto Commerce Crossing. The big lumbering van didn't handle anything like her little Neon, but she could run it.

  In the rear view mirror, she could see Jerry getting back to his feet again. The entire left side of his body, including his head, looked... crushed, and malformed... but he was back up again.

  Sheila swerved onto Commerce Crossing, turning in the direction of Preston Highway, and, eventually... hopefully... home.

  What they'd do when she got there,
she had no idea.

  iv.

  Dan and Vicki were in the master bedroom upstairs. Vicki was in the big bed, pillows and stuffed animals crowded in around her, a blanket pulled up to her neck.

  Stacked around the room haphazardly were all the things the two of them had brought up from the downstairs in a running twenty minute scavenger hunt. Two cardboard boxes and three Kroger bags, all full of canned goods. Another box loaded with kitchen implements with a can opener sticking out the top of it. The wooden block full of cheap kitchen knives. A rolling pin. A metal pry bar. Three different hammers, including a rubber headed mallet. Several two liters of soda -- Pepsi and Mountain Dew and Orange Crush -- and the cardboard flat containing 36 12 oz bottles of Deer Park spring water. Pans. Bowls. The cutlery drawer, full of cutlery and other random sundries. The hardware drawer from the plastic rolling shelf at the top of the basement stairs, full of other assorted junk that might come in handy. Several more Kroger bags containing the contents of the downstairs medicine cabinet. Several of the weight bars from his barbell set. A small ax they used to chop wood when they went camping. And a lot of Vicki's toys and books. All the various bags of chips from the top of the refrigerator. All the boxes of cold cereal in the house. Vitamin pills. The microwave oven from the kitchen... they might as well have hot food while the power stayed on.

  Dan had been hesitant to barricade off the door at the bottom of the interior stairwell before Sheila got home. He thought he might, using the pry bar and a lot of elbow grease, just be able to walk the concrete lined fireproof file cabinet from his upstairs study around the corner and send it down the stairs, but he was pretty sure if he did, it wouldn't just come to rest at the interior door and hold it shut. It would shoot straight through it, most likely knocking it off its hinges if not simply smashing it into splinters. And that door wasn't at all sturdy anyway; even barricaded, it wouldn't hold off a horde of screaming zombies for very long.