But the chief wasn’t facing her anymore. He leaned forward and spoke to the driver. “Turn left up there. Did you tell Becky and the others to meet us at the NIS physics lab?”
“Yeah.”
While the two men talked talked, the other cop in the back touched Paula’s shoulder. “You all right? Injured?”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Your last name’s Trent? Like, Jeff Trent’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“I met him this afternoon at the airport. Cool guy. I’m Larry, by the way.”
Paula shook his hand, but she was full of questions. Why had the police been at the airport? Jeff had mentioned the meteor near-miss but didn’t say anything about police. She noticed dots of blood across the shoulder of Officer Larry’s uniform shirt and wondered where it came from.
The chief glanced at them. “Larry here is Kelton’s new partner. ’Bout a year.”
“Oh.” Paula nodded dumbly. Maybe that’s why Jeff hadn’t mentioned it. He’d had dealings with Kelton today. It was getting hard to think. The night’s shocks were catching up to her.
“And I heard what you said about Jeff. I’ll send someone to Sammy’s Grocery as soon as I can.”
The driver slammed on the brakes, throwing them forward as he maneuvered around two stumbling dead people in the road. Paula was astonished to recognize them as Mr. and Mrs. Kearney, a young couple who were regular customers at her pharmacy. What had happened to them?
“I think we’re each worried about someone at this point,” the chief continued.
“How is, uh…” She wracked her brain for the chief’s wife’s name. It had been a long time. “Wilma?”
“Wilma’s fine, last we talked, when the phones were working. Told her to hide in our panic room in the basement.” Chief Simpson paused to wipe his eyes.
Officer Larry pulled a shotgun off the rack by his head. “We’ll get back to her, Chief. She’s probably going through your survival doughnut rations.”
The chief glared and smiled at the same time. It was an odd effect on his grizzled, gray cheeks. “Nobody likes you, Larry.”
Larry smiled back.
“Almost there,” the driver called.
Paula looked out the front and saw only a heavily wooded lane. “Where are we going?”
“Nilbog Institute of Science,” the chief said. “We have no choice since the zombies overran HQ.”
“I saw that. Did they get inside?”
“They were about to, so I thought it best to bug out. We got a woman in our jail cell, but I’m hoping she’ll be safe behind bars.”
Officer Larry nodded. “Don’t worry. Myra’s a tough old bitch.”
“It’s like they knew attacking HQ was the best way to cripple emergency response. Tells me they’re being coordinated somehow.” Chief Simpson looked at Paula and raised an eyebrow. “It’s all so…re-donk-u-lous.”
Paula shook her head. “Huh?” She turned to Larry for help, but he smirked and looked away.
She remembered the chief was an odd bird. Back when she dated Kelton, the chief’s obsession was sailboats. He tried to drop in references to it whenever possible. Bathrooms were heads, walls were bulkheads, his deputies were swabbies, and so on. He even occasionally wore a pirate’s do-rag on his head. He was probably onto something else by now, like outmoded slang. In any case, she saw his jokes for what they were: an attempt to relieve some of the horrible stress he was under.
He tried again. “Freak-tarded?”
“This reminds me,” Paula said. “I saw your detective. Inspector Clay?”
“You did? Where was he?”
“Breaking into my kitchen. It looks like he’s a…” She gulped. “Zombie, now. Like everyone else.”
The chief shook his head. He looked older than ever. “Shit. Kelton better have some good answers for us.”
“Kelton?”
“That’s right. He’s waiting for us at NIS.”
Paula pulled her robe tight around herself. Kelton.
Had talking to Jeff’s cologne-scented pillow only been an hour or so ago? A million years had passed since then. She kept flashing back to the sight of Inspector Clay groping through her broken window. She felt herself shutting down. Oddly, she felt cold, although the van’s stagnant air was warm with sweat and fear. Her teeth began chattering.
Yeah, re-donk-u-lous summed it up.
Chapter 11
JEFF
With a huge effort, Jeff pushed the images of flaming meteors out of his mind. He sat up in the wreckage of the overturned paperback display.
Get yourself under control.
A distorted face appeared in the window of the grocery’s entrance. It was the old woman who attacked Danny. She now had a crater where one eye used to be, thanks to Jeff’s rake handle. But of course that didn’t make sense. A rake handle took out her eye, completely, and she was still standing?
As he watched, the old woman licked the glass. And then she punched it.
Sammy turned the deadbolt and backed away. “That won’t hold ’em.”
Danny sank to his knees and held his stomach like he was going to throw up. The old woman had bitten his right shoulder. Red teeth marks bled through a hole in his shirt.
The others didn’t look so good, either. The teenaged boys who piled in after them had obviously fought their way here. Dried blood plumed down from the older one’s nose, and the younger one bled from fingernail scratches around his throat.
And the actor, Criswell or whatever his name was…
Criswell.
Cold clarity brought Jeff to his feet. He seized a lapel of Criswell’s black suit. Then he drove a fist into the fat fucker’s chin. “You son of a bitch!”
Toby and Sammy seized his arms. They held him from following up with a kick to the groin.
Criswell sat up where he’d fallen on the floor, shock writ large behind his horn-rimmed glasses. He held his chin. “What would you have me do? Let them in to kill us all? You saw what they did to that guy outside!”
“Fuck you!”
Sammy pointed a finger in Jeff’s face. “Calm down!”
Jeff glared back at him. He was about to say something about the Sammy Threshold of Control—something like keep your S-TOCing finger away from me—realized that was stupid, and nodded instead. “All right. All right.”
But that was Mac. The guy outside he was talking about was Mac.
He couldn’t believe it. Mac was a Nilbog fixture, a vital part of its landscape. To say that he was dead was like saying Nilbog didn’t have paved roads anymore.
Sammy let him go. Jeff turned away from Criswell. He controlled the urge to rip off the man’s bow tie and find out if it was a clip-on.
He helped Danny to his feet. “You all right?”
“Yeah. Just a scratch.” Blood welled between Danny’s fingers where he held his shoulder. He wiped his hand off on his jeans and went to look through the door. “Happy campers out there.”
Jeff patted him on the shoulder—the other shoulder. He was glad Danny was here. If anyone could keep him sane in a dangerous situation, it was his co-pilot. That and being a womanizer were the two things Danny was good at.
The one-eyed old woman had lost interest in the door. She and the others shuffled around in a circle near a stack of mulch bags. Jeff gawked at their wounds and their oddly formal—yet filthy—clothing. What had happened to them?
One man, he saw now, wore a hospital gown. He looked normal except for a bloody gash at his neck. When he turned away, exposing the gown’s opening, Jeff saw he wasn’t wearing anything beneath it.
Another person lay near them, face down in a pool of blood. It was Mac.
Jeff swallowed and wiped his eyes. He hoped the police showed up soon.
He looked up at Danny’s sharp intake of breath. “What?”
“Look!”
Mac was climbing to his feet.
“Mac!” Jeff grabbed the door handle, ready to run back out.
>
Except Mac wasn’t Mac anymore. He couldn’t be, not with his abdomen now a gaping hole. Intestines hung out like pillow stuffing. His face was an expressionless white slate.
“How is he still alive?”
Danny shook his head. “They look dead.”
The men glanced at each other, and Jeff knew they were thinking the same thing. Because they are dead.
No. That was impossible. So he said the next thing that roared into his head like a freight train: “I have to get to Paula.”
Paula was vulnerable. Alone. If this was happening across town, then she could already be under attack. The realization panicked him, made him want to run out there right now, regardless of the risk.
Mac suddenly rushed the door and smashed his fist into its window. The pane cracked in a small spider web pattern.
Jeff and Danny backed away in a hurry.
Jeff breathed hard, feeling like he’d run a marathon. He turned to Danny. “You don’t have any beer left, do you? I could use one.”
***
With Toby’s help, Danny located a first aid kit and sat down on the floor to treat his wound. He must have smashed his fingers when he fell outside, because he had trouble opening a gauze package.
Jeff was also sitting on the floor by that time, leaning against the check-out counter. He felt like a marionette whose strings had been cut. For now, he could only watch as the red-haired mother he’d met at the drink refrigerators knelt beside Danny and took over the first aid.
He also watched as Sammy and Toby bickered over how best to cover the entry door’s window so the zombies—and yes, they actually called them zombies—might forget they were in here. (“We ain’t using no foam mattress doohickey, you moron.” “Yes, we are.” “Ain’t you got no bedsheets?” “C’mon. Does this look like a hotel?” “Why don’t you just use your new Taser on the zombies?” “Why don’t you shut up?”)
The teenaged boys huddled near the endcap display of cigarette lighters and conferred in low voices. They periodically looked over at the red-haired mother and her creepy ass daughter, who watched the goings-on like she knew something. Jeff saw now that that older boy with the nose bleed was actually college-aged or near abouts. He had a rough look to him; a shadow of grease darkened his fingers and neck. The younger one had similar eyes, nose, and mouth, so he was probably the little brother. Neither his shaggy mop of brown hair nor his sweat jacket looked like they’d seen water in recent memory.
The grease monkey took a step closer to Danny and the redhead. “Ms. Rooter?”
She pretended not to hear him. Jeff saw it in the way her eyes slid from side to side as she kept her back to him.
“Ms. Rooter? Rachel.”
The blonde-haired daughter had been staring at the ceiling. She blinked and seemed to wake up. “Oh, hi, Jimmy. I didn’t realize that was you. Mama, Jimmy and Justin Owens are here.”
“I see ’em.”
The young girl smiled at Jimmy Owens like she didn’t have a care in the world. “What are you boys doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing. Did you all run here from the fire?”
“What fire?”
“Your house is burning down. Didn’t you know?”
The girl frowned. “What’s he saying, Mama?”
“Just ignore him, Emily. Come here and help me.”
The younger Owens brother stepped forward, hands balled into fists. But Jimmy held him back. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“But she’s acting like—”
“I said it doesn’t matter. If they were still at that house, they’d be dead, just like—” Here, Jimmy Owens caught himself from saying more.
Dead just like who? Jeff wondered.
The blonde-haired daughter held a bandage in place while her mother taped it to Danny’s shoulder. “What’s he saying, Mama? Who’s dead?”
“Everybody’s dead, honey. Or dying. Someone’s causing things to go haywire.” Rachel Rooter paused to look hard into her daughter’s face.
Jeff wondered what the hell that was about, too. But maybe the greaseball was right. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered—at least to him—was that he get back to Paula.
He heaved himself to his feet and went in search of a phone. If he could call and warn her…
The actor, “Criswell,” emerged from Aisle Three. He was drinking a bottled water he’d snagged off a shelf there. He finished guzzling it and hurled the empty plastic bottle at the floor. “This is ridiculous! What in the hell would cause those men to go rabid like that?”
Maybe the meteor caused it. The thought stopped Jeff as he searched behind the check-out counter. It wasn’t so far-fetched, was it? What were the chances all these weird things would happen in Nilbog on the same day?
He searched the shelves underneath the cash register. A landline phone sat there next to a shotgun. He made a mental note to ask Sammy about the gun before picking up the phone. He listened for a dial tone. Nothing. Shit.
“They ain’t people.”
It was the older brother, Jimmy Owens. Something about his tone—haunted, pained—made Jeff look up from what he was doing. The boy leaned against a support pillar with his arms crossed and head down. He looked like he was struggling to keep something from jumping out of his chest.
Danny grunted as he pressed gauze against his bloody shoulder. “All right, you win. The floor is yours.”
“Me and Justin were at the graveyard when it happened. Their hands. That was the first thing we saw coming up out of the ground. Then we saw their eyes. And they saw us.”
Justin nodded and flicked his curly hair out of his face. “They’re not just from the graveyard, either. Tons of them came charging out of the hospital over on Winchester.”
Jeff felt a chill. They were right next to that hospital. You could see its roof from the Gas ’N’ Sip next door. He went to look out the window.
Criswell took position in the spot Jeff vacated behind the checkout counter. He posted his hands there like a college professor delivering a lecture. “This isn’t a horror film, boys. Trust me, I know. People don’t rise from the grave and wreak havoc. It’s over-played, anyway.”
Jeff frowned at him. So he’s an actor in a horror film, and that makes him an expert?
He began to say something, but Sammy cut him off: “The boys are right.” Sammy pointed out the window at an old man covered in dirt. “That’s John Swales out there. We buried him three weeks ago. And I’m pretty sure he was dead when we did.”
Jeff remembered him. John Swales was a bearded old coot who liked to hang out on a rocker in front of Sammy’s. He spat tobacco juice at squirrels. He was another Nilbog fixture, kind of like Mac. He’d been on that rocker ever since Jeff was a kid. Sammy tolerated him because spitting at squirrels didn’t breach the S-TOC. Jeff hadn’t known until now that Swales had died.
He looked out the window. Except for the grimace and the mud streaks in his beard, Swales looked the same as he always had.
Jeff sighed. “He doesn’t look that dead now.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Sammy said. “Well, I’m going to get that camping pad to cover the window.” He pointed at his business partner. “Don’t you argue with me about it. I’m gonna do it.”
Toby was busy ripping open a bag of potato chips. “Fine. We’ll just dock your pay to recoup inventory.”
“And where’d you get those chips, exactly?”
“Aw, shut up.”
Shaking his head, Sammy disappeared down Aisle Two.
The younger Owens brother, Justin, suddenly raised his hands like a referee calling a timeout. “Wait a minute!”
He had a crazed look in his eyes, and for a second Jeff wondered if those scratches bleeding at his neck had infected his brain. What next came out of his mouth didn’t much dissuade that notion.
The boy pointed at Danny. “In the movies, when you get bit by a zombie, you become a zombie!”
Greaseball Jimmy immediately gr
abbed a block of firewood from a display near the school supplies. “’Nuff said.” He raised the log and prepared to club Danny over the head.
Jeff couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Stop!”
He rushed to stand between his friend and the young man. A punch to the face, like the one he gave Criswell, would be next.
Danny scrambled away on his butt, still holding the gauze to his shoulder. “Let’s hear another theory. Please?”
Jeff raised his hands—an I surrender gesture that set up his plan to wrench the firewood away. But he saw now that Jimmy Owens wasn’t fully committed to actually bludgeoning the man on the floor. The log wavered in the air and lowered a few inches.
“Look. Jimmy. We’re all scared. Not sure what those things are out there, but so far there’s no proof we’re dealing with zombies from the movies. Agreed?”
Jimmy lowered the log further. Finally, he allowed it to drop on the floor.
Behind the counter, the actor crossed his arms. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”
Jimmy Owens frowned at the log lying at his feet. “I read a book telling me how to deal with these things if there was ever an outbreak. Now, I’m not sure what number it was, but I’m pretty sure it was close to the number-one rule, not to let your bitten friends live.”
Still scooting away, Danny shook his head.
“That was just a book.” Jeff tried to keep his voice low and reasonable. “Let’s not start killing each other just yet. Let’s wait and see what we’re actually dealing with. Okay?”
Jimmy nodded and slumped. He went to go stand beside his brother, who was nervously using his hand to wipe blood off his neck.
Criswell resumed his lecturing-professor pose behind the counter. “Everything seems wrong.”
No shit, Jeff thought, but what he said aloud was, “We need a plan.”
Everyone nodded, but no one volunteered anything. In the silence, they listened to the groans and shuffling footsteps of the creatures outside.
***
Sammy walked out of Aisle Two, holding a staple gun in one hand and the foam pad from a tent in the other. He went to the entrance door and proceeded to staple the pad over its window.
He turned when he saw everyone staring at him. “What? Did something happen?”
Plan 9- Official Movie Novelization Page 10