Rise (Book 3): Dead Inside

by Gareth Wood

  Once upright it looked around disinterestedly, but there was nothing moving in the night, and very little light to see by. Shapes and shadows were blended in the dark, and the vision of the undead was poor to begin with. It simply stood, with infinite patience and no understanding of the passage of time. It merely was.

  The rain slowed and finally ceased. A sound came, the living sound of food, attracting attention and awakening a deep hunger so acute that it was overwhelming. The sound came again, distant but clear. It was enough to determine direction, and the dead thing took a step toward it, dragging the broken leg. Hunger drove it forward. In this way it managed to shuffle toward the sound of voices and laughter, with recognition of neither. It passed dark windows and doors and kept going, through the maze of streets. Buildings were merely obstacles, having no other meaning. The rain started again, harder than before, driven by a cold wind. All the while the hunger grew, and even though it could no longer hear the sounds, it moved out of instinct. For two blocks it walked, until the glow of light appeared.

  Ahead, under a dim yellow bulb, two figures were standing outside the Essential Supplies warehouse, enjoying the cool night air under the canopy that sheltered the door. They were laughing and speaking, noises that meant nothing to the former deputy. One of the workers lit a handmade joint, the flame of his lighter erasing whatever night vision the two men had.

  "If you're going to pollute perfectly good air like that, I'm going back in," said the other. He went inside, leaving the first chuckling, then coughing as the marijuana smoke he was inhaling irritated his lungs. The words meant nothing to the dead thing approaching across the parking lot. It lurched along, obscured by the rain and darkness, intent only on the prey, the increasingly growing hunger, a burning need of unfathomable intensity.

  The worker finished the joint and dropped the stub on the wet ground, where it sizzled briefly. He exhaled and shivered, wondering if the cold night predicted snow again this winter. It had snowed heavily last year, as well as the year before, but it always melted away in just a few days. He turned away from the rain and bent to tie his boot, then stood. A scraping sound behind him made him turn, and there not even three feet away was a badly injured man. His face and arms were abraded raw, and one of his arms was bent oddly at the elbow. One leg was obviously shattered, with bone fragments sticking through his clothing in several places. He was covered in blood and soaked wet from the rain.

  "Jesus Chr–!" the worker had time to say, and then the undead thing was on him, tearing and biting. Teeth clamped on his throat, and he saw his own blood spray like a jet into the face of his attacker. His scream died before it was uttered, his windpipe crushed and torn under the teeth that were killing him.

  That same arterial blood flooded the mouth of the dead thing, and the struggling of the prey diminished and ceased. For a time there was only the sound of flesh being torn and chewed, but then something changed. The prey was no longer prey, no longer food to drive back the hunger. The worker opened dead eyes and sat up. Both undead struggled to stand, ignoring each other utterly as the hunger rose in both of them. Sounds from inside the warehouse drew them. Together, yet always alone, the two undead walked in the open door. Screams followed shortly after.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Essential Supplies Warehouse, September 11, 2013

  Sheriff Jim Reilly shoved his way through the small crowd that had gathered outside the warehouse and grabbed the arm of Dr. McKinnon, pulling the man with him back toward the door. It was early in the morning, the sun only just risen over the mountains to the east.

  "Come on, Doc," he said, "we have a survivor, but he's hurt pretty bad."

  Reilly led the doctor, who was clutching a medical bag in his hands, around the large pool of blood by the door and past the pair of heavily armed deputies who were keeping the gawkers outside. Another deputy had been sent by Reilly to bring the doctor from home once the Sheriff had seen what waited in the ES warehouse. McKinnon had arrived dressed in sweatpants and a thick blue sweater, but with his doctor's bag firmly gripped in his large hands.

  "What's happened, Sheriff?" Dr. McKinnon asked, his accent thickened by stress.

  "Undead incident," Reilly replied tersely. "Nine dead, one survivor. Almost the entire night crew."

  The two men walked inside, and the doctor gasped when he saw what awaited them. Half a dozen bodies lay where they had fallen. Blood and brain matter and tissue were splattered over walls and supplies and equipment. Streaks and splashes of blood were seemingly all over the concrete floor. Inside the office, the windows were sprayed with gore, and it was there that Reilly led the doctor.

  Three bodies had been pulled to the side of the room by several deputies, and all had been shot in the head. One still had a handgun gripped in her lifeless fingers, and all three had visible bite wounds. Reilly stood aside and let McKinnon pass to the back of the room, where another deputy crouched beside an injured man. The doctor began to talk to his patient, and Reilly mentally catalogued the injuries he could see.

  "So, what happened to you?" the doctor asked.

  Small calibre gunshot through the right shoulder, Reilly thought. Broken clavicle. Shock.

  "Got shot," the man replied, shaking and pale. "But I'm not bit."

  "What's your name? Can you tell me what day it is?"

  "John. My name's John Adler," the man said, clenching his teeth. "It's Wednesday, I think."

  The doctor quickly assessed the man, pulled a pressure bandage out of his bag and applied it. He called two deputies to help him lay the man down on an improvised backboard, an ironing board they had retrieved from deep in the warehouse. He wrapped the man in a blanket and then returned to Reilly.

  "I need to get him to the hospital. Right now. There's no exit wound, so the slug is still in there."

  "The ambulance is coming, Doc," Reilly replied. The tension in his voice made McKinnon look at him sharply.

  "You alright, Sheriff?"

  "Just look after your patient, please."

  "Get the ambulance here." The doctor turned back to the wounded man and spoke to the deputies. "Alright, you two, let's move him outside."

  Reilly left the office and returned to the loading dock. He stood among the dead and surveyed the scene with a policeman's eyes, seeing patterns, directions of attack, and the struggle to stay alive that for most had failed. He looked at the blood sprays and could follow the battle back from where it had ended in the office, to the dock where most of the night shift had died, then out the door to where a zombie had killed a worker, and both of them had come inside.

  Reilly knelt beside one body, the corpse of Deputy Hothi, appalled by the condition of his friend. Broken limbs, abrasions to the face and arms, blood all over him, and a hollow point bullet wound to his skull. Hothi's brains were sprayed all over a forklift nearby. One of the workers had managed to kill him with a well-placed shot.

  But not before they killed three other people, he observed. Looking closely, he saw that the deputy had no bite wounds on his body. It was clear that he had died of the other injuries, but how had he gotten them? Reilly touched the body's ribs, feeling the softness and grinding of bone against bone.

  Internal damage. Something hit him, hard.

  He looked up and saw another deputy nearby. He stood and walked over to her.

  "Carrie," he said, "has anyone looked for a blood trail?"

  "Not yet, boss," she said. Deputy McAunaul was a tall brunette, carrying a Mossberg shotgun. She wore a not-exactly-regulation bandolier of black and purple leather over her jacket, shotgun shells in most of the loops. "I doubt there is one, though. It rained pretty hard there last night."

  "Take another deputy and see if you can find anything, okay? Mannjinder was hit by something. A vehicle, most likely, and close by. He can't have walked too far with this leg. See if you can find where."

  "On it, boss," she said. She pointed at another deputy standing at the door, indicating for him to follow her, an
d the two of them left together.

  The ambulance arrived. Reilly watched as the survivor was taken away, with Doc McKinnon close at hand. The doctor had been roused from his home and brought directly here, as the warehouse was closer to his home than the hospital was. Now the doctor climbed into the ambulance with his patient.

  Looking around at the grim faces watching, Reilly knew that the deputies were taking this personally. Mannjinder was one of them, and his loss would be felt in the days to come. Reilly knelt again to search the corpse's pockets, placing the contents on the ground nearby. House keys and his handcuffs, Sheriff's office ID, and his service revolver. That was all.

  No notebook? Reilly checked again, but it wasn't there. Hothi was very good about keeping his notes in order, but the book was missing. It never left his pocket, so the only reason it would be missing… Is this murder? Was it possible that Hothi had discovered something, like the name or motivation of the killer?

  What was he looking into? Ah, I told him to go ahead looking into whatever it was Corrone was up to. And now here's Mannjinder dead along with almost the entire ES night crew.

  He wondered where Corrone was now.

  Another deputy was spreading blankets and sheets over the dead, and Reilly helped him spread a blue cotton sheet over Deputy Hothi. The deputy looked to Reilly, who waved him away. The Sheriff was still standing there when Deputy McAunaul returned. She walked right to him.

  "Boss, you should see this. We didn't find a blood trail, exactly. But we think we found where he died, a few blocks from here."

  "Show me," Reilly said, finally able to snap himself away. The bodies were being placed into bags now, to be taken away for cremation or burial. Cleanup would begin right away. Essential Supplies was, after all, essential. It had to be up and running again as soon as possible. He walked past two orderlies from the hospital, busy loading a body into a zippered plastic bag. They wore masks and gloves.

  "We got lucky, Boss," Carrie said, leading the way across the parking area. A few blocks away from the warehouse she stopped on the empty street. She pointed to the ground, where a piece of broken reflector from a bicycle lay. It was tiny, no more than a finger’s width in size. Reilly let his eyes lose focus a little and began to walk in a slow spiral around the reflector. Several meters away he found something he was sure was a small patch of skin. He knelt and poked into the cracks in the pavement with his pocket knife. When he lifted the blade up into the light, the tip was stained red.

  "This is the place, alright." He shook his head and the two of them returned to scanning the ground. Reilly saw something small and white, gleaming on the dark street, and poked at it with the blade.

  "What's that, chief?"

  "One of Mann's teeth," he said. "It looks like this is where he was killed. Any sign of his bike?"

  "Not that I saw. I looked around a bit before I came to get you, and there's no bike here."

  Reilly paused, deep in thought. Hothi's bicycle had been here, but wasn't now. Hothi had died here, then reanimated. He hadn't been bitten, but died of the extensive injuries sustained from what Reilly thought was a vehicle collision. Whoever had hit him had then taken his bike, leaving Hothi to die on the street. There would be damage to the vehicle, and they might get lucky and find the bicycle too.

  "Carrie, we're going to look at every vehicle in the Safe Zone. Today. We're going to look for his bike as well, since I think whoever killed him took it. If we find it, that will lead us to the bastard who did this."

  "Any suspects, Boss?" Carrie asked, holding her shotgun with a need to use it.

  "One, but we have nothing certain on him. Alexander Corrone, the day shift boss at the warehouse. So let's look at the ES truck first. If it's damaged we arrest Corrone. If not, we keep looking. It goes without saying that I really want the son of a bitch alive."

  "Oh," she said, "darn."

  "I'm serious," he warned. "I want him alive. No shot-while-trying-to-escape bullshit. If we're going to have any kind of closure on this, we need a trial."

  What the outcome of a trial of a serial killer might be, especially with no formalised laws other than what the Council agreed on, was anyone's guess. This was an area that Reilly wished had been dealt with, the formal laying out of crimes and punishments, as well as a system for trial. Quite a lot of what they did was just common sense keeping people out of trouble. Only a few Council laws had been approved by the Mayor, so the only real crimes in the Safe Zone were theft, assault, and arson. Assault, if proved, was like arson; it resulted in immediate assignment to a prison work detail, a life sentence at hard labour, since it threatened everyone who lived in Mission. There had so far never been a murder trial in the Safe Zone.

  "I get it, boss," the deputy said, shaking her head. "Don't like it, but I get it."

  "Alright, Carrie. Let's get to work."

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Outside the Wall, September 11, 2013

  "Are you seeing me?" Alexander asked the zombie that stalked him on the other side of the damaged Essential Supplies truck. "Or is it something else? My body heat?"

  He walked a slow circle around the vehicle, the dead forestry worker pursuing relentlessly. The zombie didn't reply to his questions, and Alexander would have been astonished if it had. It didn't matter. His interest in the thing soon faded, and he stopped at the back of the truck and waited for it to come to him. When it came around the corner he swung a heavy mallet into its head, felling it instantly.

  The dead man had been lurking nearby when he had driven up the road just half an hour ago, and had followed him to the spot where the other ES truck was hidden in the brush. The two had played a brief game of cat and mouse before Alexander killed it. Then, without so much as a change in expression, he reached into the bed of the truck and pulled out the smashed bicycle. The frame was twisted, wheels broken. There was still blood staining the seat, despite the rain which had followed him out into the mountains, only now clearing up. He hauled the ruined bike to the edge of the woods and tossed it into some bushes.

  His muscles twitching at the thought of all the work ahead of him, Alexander dug gloves and his pocket knife out of his jacket. He had just spent part of a day moving supplies onto one truck, and now he had to move all of them back onto the damaged truck. It was a good thing the deputy was dead, because Alexander would have been tempted to kill him at the moment for making all this work necessary. He wished he had some lackey to do the work for him, but that would lead to questions, which would lead to another death, and he was simply too tired at this point to bury another body in the forest.

  Provided it didn't reanimate, he thought, which led him down another path of speculation. Alexander had often mildly wondered how the undead could track the living so unerringly. It certainly wasn't keen vision; they had eyes clouded by decomposing tissues. Hearing wasn't it either, he had guessed. Quite a few of the undead couldn't hear a conversation going on twenty yards behind them. The stench they emitted was enough to impair their own sense of smell as much as it did the living. So what was it? How did the corpses know a living thing when they saw it, and how did they track it?

  He thought about this now as he started transferring all of his gear, so carefully packaged and protected, from one truck to the next. Pondering the mystery gave him something to do while he worked. If he didn't occupy his mind with something then his present circumstances would sneak back in, and he would only be able to focus on his misfortune.

  The cause of the undead outbreak was another thing. He had heard that somewhere back east someone had actually found out what the trigger had been, and learned why the undead had appeared almost at once all over the globe. The thing was, Alexander simply didn't care. The cause of the apocalypse was irrelevant to him; he simply lived in its aftermath and attempted to thrive. In fact he had been thriving until yesterday.

  Perhaps it wasn't too late yet. Perhaps the deputy hadn't returned, and was still lying there, cold and still. Perhaps he'd risen and
been slain. There was no way of knowing. Alexander had left at once, as soon as the deputy was dead, and had not stayed around long enough to see if the man rose or not. So perhaps he wouldn't have to flee to Seattle or some other community to begin again. It was possible that the sheep in Mission would never connect him to the death of Deputy Hothi, especially if he was seen driving a truck without any damage to the hood and grill. The damaged vehicle would have to be his escape, if he ever needed it.

  Getting this truck off the list of Essential Supplies vehicles had been a bothersome chore, but worth it. Essential Supplies had originally had two assigned trucks, but Alexander had seen the advantage immediately of having only one, and using the other as his personal safety net. He had started by always having one vehicle in for repairs or service, so that people grew accustomed to only ever seeing one ES truck. Next, he had falsified the records when they were updated, giving both trucks the same ID number. After that he had simply moved the 'spare' truck out of Mission one day. Years had passed since anyone had even mentioned the other truck. All the sheep were used to seeing just the one.

  A groan nearby made him look up. Another of the undead had come along the road, and had seen him. He drew his handgun as it approached, and quickly looked around to be sure it was alone. No more were in sight, so he considered killing it silently, but the mallet was in the other truck bed. One gunshot would be safe enough. He was far enough up the forestry road to be sure he couldn't be found.

  Turning his attention back to the dead woman, he noted something odd. Her feet. She was wearing shoes of different styles on both feet. Her clothes hadn't rotted away and fallen off, either. So, she was fresher than most, he observed. He took note of the rest of her gear. Her clothes were worn but well-tended to, and small repairs were visible. She wore patched jeans, stained with blood and filth, yet intact and held up by a leather belt. There was a gun holster strapped to her leg, flapping loosely with nothing in it. She wore three shirts, a layered look that would have been stifling had she been alive. Her hair was knotted and full of twigs and leaves, and impossible to tell what colour it was from the mud. The wounds that had killed her were bites, along both arms, so deep that bone showed through in several places.