by Rich Baker
“Here we go,” she says. “814.”
D-Day looks at the door and whispers.
“You’re sure you want to do this? We had a reason to go into Upham’s place, and Cheryl’s was no violation because she’s dead. We have no cause to go in here other than we’re suspicious.”
Carmen matches his hushed volume. “It’s not like there’s a judge who will throw out an illegal search. Worst case, it’s not her, she’s in there watching Maury, and gets pissed. She’ll have to just deal with it.”
D-Day nods, and before he can direct her, Carmen assumes the crouching position next to the door and gives him the thumbs-up. He pounds on the door like he did at Upham’s apartment, calling for Melissa and getting no response. He calls for her again and waits. Nothing but silence answers him. He takes a deep breath, swipes the card, and they burst into the apartment.
Six
The smell of the undead hits them as soon as they open the door. It’s not overpowering, but pungent. There’s no threat in the entry, the kitchen or the dining area, so D-Day closes the door, and they resume the search of the apartment. In the guest bath, they find a box of latex gloves on the counter. A severed leg resides in the bathtub, oozing black goo in a trail that disappears into the drain.
They leave the bathroom and head for the bedroom. They look around, but nothing in here seems out of the ordinary. The master bath seems normal as well. They cross the living room and head into the second bedroom.
Melissa has set up the second bedroom as an office. She has a long, L-shaped desk in the corner by the window. A thirty-two-inch flat panel monitor sits at an angle in the corner with a wireless keyboard and mouse in front of it. There’s a big inkjet printer on top of a file cabinet that matches the desk. A comfortable looking leather office chair sits flush against the desk. They check behind the door and to the left of the entry way and find no threats. When they turn back to the desk, they also see a large corkboard mounted on the wall.
“Holy shit,” D-Day says.
They stare at the corkboard for a minute, taking it in. Melissa has it covered with pictures, no doubt printed from the big inkjet.
“This is the kind of thing you only see in movies,” Carmen says. “Right? I mean, people don’t really do this.”
“Apparently they do,” D-Day replies. “At least, this person does.”
In the upper left, there’s a picture of Mike Upham and Melissa at dinner, taken selfie style, so they’re hugged real close to each other. They’re both smiling huge grins like they’re having the time of their lives. There are a few other pictures of similar nature taken in different locations; the Denver Zoo, at a baseball game at Coors Field and in front of a tent in the mountains. In some of the pictures, Upham’s eyes have been blacked out with a marker. In others, his face is scribbled out completely.
There are other pictures mixed in, with Upham and the other murder victim, Cheryl, smiling at each other. In one they’re getting into a Mercedes with a Colorado vanity plate that reads “UPHAM$.” In another, D-Day recognizes the buildings fitness center, and Upham is standing by Cheryl, who is on a treadmill. Neither of them seems to notice someone taking their picture. In that photo, Cheryl is wearing a sports bra and pair of tiny spandex running shorts, worn low enough that D-Day can see the butterfly tattoo peeking out of the waistband. Melissa has written ‘WHORE’ in capital letters across Cheryl's image.
They take it all in for a long minute. Carmen breaks the silence.
“This bird is a cuckoo,” she says. “She’s gone full stalker on those two.”
“You think? She’s clearly gone off her nut, beyond stalker to killer,” D-Day says. “We need to find her before she hurts anyone else.”
They head out of the bedroom and D-Day sees something on the breakfast bar that he missed before.
“Oh no,” he says. He grabs the black plastic cube and flips it over. “No, no, no. She can’t be that crazy.”
“What is it?” Carmen asks.
“This is the battery charger for a cordless drill,” he says.
“So?”
“There's no cordless drill or batteries in here, at least not that we’ve seen,” he says.
“I still don’t see the significance,” Carmen says. “She isn’t killing anyone with a cordless drill.”
“Not yet. We need to find her, now,” he says, “Before she undoes the screws in the west staircase doors and lets in the dead!”
“You think she’d do that? It’s suicide!”
“You said that before, remember? She’s already tried to turn one loose inside, for what reason I don’t know. Why make them when you can get them from the source?”
He leads the way to the entry door and pulls it open. He starts through, but stops short and Carmen bumps into him.
“What the…” she says, then she sees it too.
A rope is pulled tight at doorknob height, running the length of the hallway. At the far west end, it’s tied to the door to the west stairwell. At the east end of the rope, Melissa stands by the east stairwell holding the rope. She wears a tool belt with the cordless drill in a holster. She looks like a demented cross between an old west gunslinger and a shop teacher.
“You put it all together pretty fast,” she says. “Good for you. You know, I had come so close to killing them both before everything went to shit, but the thought of going to jail stopped me. I figured now, with the world burning itself down, I could get away with it. But everyone came back before that bitch turned, and I didn’t have a chance to grab the letter opener from her back. I wanted to put it in front of that son-of-a-bitch, let him know that I killed her with HIS fucking monogrammed letter opener. She gave it to him, you know, as a gift, while he and I were STILL DATING! He’d probably been fucking her already.” She raises her voice an octave, mocking Cheryl. “’Oh, Mike, thanks for fucking me behind your girlfriend’s back, here’s a swell letter opener with your initials on it because I’m so into you. Well, go behind MY back, I’ll jam that fucking gift into YOURS! It was going to be perfect! Then you had to go all white knight on me, and do your little autopsy on that whore. I knew when you found the injection site it was only a matter of time until you connected the dots.”
“How did you know I found the injection site? You were watching me?” he asks.
“If you had checked the supply room we could have had this out then, but lucky for me you were in a rush to dispose of poor old slutty Cheryl’s smelly zombie body. You had the edge then; now I’m the one with the advantage!”
“Melissa, we can talk about this,” D-Day starts, but before he can get another word out, she gives the rope a hard tug. They hear the west door open, and D-Day turns his head to see it swing wide, a startled zombie standing on the other side. D-Day turns and sprints at Melissa, raising his rifle as he does so.
“FUCK YOU!!” she screams as she disappears into the east stairwell. Before he can get to the door, D-Day hears the cordless drill working. He grabs the handle and pulls, but the door won’t budge. He fires three shots into it but doubts the rounds got through since it’s a solid core steel fireproof door.
“She’s put screws in the doorframe!” he exclaims. “Just like I did to block the west end.”
Mentioning the west staircase reminds him that she used the rope to spring the west door open. He trots back to Carmen, and just as he arrives he sees the hydraulic cylinder pulling the door shut, but then the first zombie walks through the doorway, pushing the door wide open for the others behind it.
“Not again,” Carmen says. “I can’t believe she did this!”
Zombies are crowding the doorway now, fighting to get in. They aren’t running this time; in the short day since the outbreak started, they’re more injured and in worse shape, but they’re still moving faster than D-Day would like.
“We have to get that east door open, or we’re going to be trapped on this floor,” he says. “And that’ll be the end of us.”
“We can go back to h
er apartment. That would buy us time, wouldn’t it?” Carmen asks.
“We’ll be stuck. Once this floor fills with these things, we won’t have enough ammunition to get clear. That’s our only way out,” D-Day says, pointing at the east stairwell door. He raises his rifle and fires several shots, dropping three of the undead and shooting the jaw off of a fourth. “I’ll work on slowing them down; you see if you can find where she put the screws and shoot them with the pistol.”
Carmen nods and runs to the door. Her movement only makes the undead more agitated, the ones in front moving faster at the prospects of fresh meat. They’ve advanced about a quarter of the way down the hall. D-Day fires another volley, sending the four in the front to their permanent deaths. Those next in line stumble on the bodies: two of them falling completely. They start to get up but get tangled in the legs of the ones behind them. For a few seconds, there’s a stalemate of flailing arms and legs congesting the hallway. D-Day puts a few rounds into the group, but they’re thrashing around so much that none of the bullets hits the off switch.
“How are you coming, Carmen? They’re about halfway here,” he calls out.
He hears a gunshot in response.
“I got one of them, but I don’t know how many she put in there,” she calls out. “I don’t know if I’m going to get them all in time!”
The logjam of undead breaks loose, and their steady advance resumes. D-Day dispatches another half dozen, but all he can see behind them are bobbing heads and shambling torsos. He empties his magazine, killing another three, and swaps it for a full one. He drops four more with seven shots. They’re jamming up again, getting entangled with each other. He backs up a few feet to get some separation and then hears another gunshot, and another.
“Carmen, talk to me! What’s happening back there?” he asks.
“I got another one, but the door isn’t budging,” she says. Her voice is starting to crack. “Damn it, why did that bitch do this? I’m going to kill her!”
“Save it, Bustamante. Focus.”
She renews her efforts, then hears pounding on the door.
“Crap! I think they’re on the other side of the door here, too!” she shouts. She can hear the push bar on the other side being pressed by something, followed by more pounding. She runs to D-Day’s side. “I think we’re surrounded.”
D-Day can hear the panic in her voice. He looks at her and his stomach aches. Her face looks like she’s in physical pain. Her eyes are welling up, and she grimaces, fighting back the tears.
“It’s not over until it’s over,” he says and turns his rifle back on the horde with renewed focus. Six shots, six kills.
“God dammit!” Carmen exclaims. “I am not going out like this!” She draws her pistol and takes aim, killing four zombies with six shots. They’ve created another logjam, with the undead fighting to get over the pile of dead bodies. They’re stepping on each other, breaking ribs and legs and arms as they go.
D-Day swaps magazines again and resumes firing. Carmen swaps magazines in the pistol.
“This is my last one,” she says.
“You can take my pistol when you run out,” D-Day replies. “You’re doing great, by the way. I’m glad you’re with me.”
“Sure, no one wants to die alone,” she says. A noise behind her draws her attention. “Shit! Here they come!”
The east stairwell door breaks free of the screws that were holding it shut and starts to swing open. Carmen gets ready to shoot the first shambling creature that comes through, then lowers her gun.
“I don’t believe it!” she cries out.
Seven
“Dad!!” Carmen screams. “D-Day, come on!!” She tugs at his vest as she starts running for the door.
George Bustamante is peeking around the edge of the door, then shoves it open for them as they run past. D-Day stops and reaches up to the hydraulic arm that slowly – too slowly – pulls the door shut, and pops out the pin to disconnect it. George slams the door, shutting them off from the advancing horde.
Carmen grabs her dad and hugs him tight. “Dad, thank you, thank you! We thought we were done for! How did you find us?”
“I followed the gunfire,” he says, holding up a hammer and pry-bar. “And I broke the screws with this. I’m lucky you didn’t shoot me! And we still might be goners, by the way. That’s why I was looking for you – the undead are all over the building now. I sent your mom to the roof, but I don’t know how many people are still alive elsewhere. How did this happen?”
“A crazy bitch lost her boyfriend, so she wants to kill everyone,” Carmen says matter of factly.
“What? That doesn’t make sense? Is that true?” he asks. He glances from Carmen to D-Day.
“More or less, that’s it,” D-Day says. “Let’s get moving.”
They head from the eighth floor to the ninth and find it sealed by screws. The tenth floor, where George came from, is unlocked but a quick glance inside the door is all D-Day needs to know that they don’t want to attempt getting back to his apartment.
The eleventh floor is also open, also overrun. They go up another flight of stairs and D-Day peeks around the door on twelve.
Aggie, the woman who found Cheryl’s body, is covered in blood, a large ragged flap of flesh hanging loosely from her neck and a hole in her cheek where a zombie has bitten through it. She sees D-Day and makes the horrible screeching sound the dead make, blood and mucous spraying out of the hole in her face as she does so. She launches into a sprint toward the door. More of the undead, residents and outsiders alike, turn and start after her.
“Gotta go,” D-Day says, pulling the door shut a moment before the unfortunate woman slams into it. “To the roof!”
They ascend the last flight of stairs and ease their way through the door to the roof. D-Day peeks through the cracked door. The main room is empty. They exit the stairwell, and D-Day takes the pry-bar from George and shoves it under the door, kicking it to wedge it tight.
“If they get into the stairs, that will hold them for a minute or two,” he says.
Carmen looks around. “Where’s mom?” she asks.
“She must be out on the roof,” George says.
They exit the rooftop maintenance building, greeted by heat and an oppressive foul odor. Carmen makes a face and works her tongue like she can taste it and is trying to push it out of her mouth. A voice startles them.
“Smells gross, doesn’t it?”
They turn and see Melissa standing behind Carmen’s mom, sneering at them.
“Elizabeth!” George cries out. He starts for her, but Melissa warns him off.
“Not so fast, pops,” she says, yanking Elizabeth’s head sideways and exposing the syringe of black fluid she’s stuck in her neck. “I don’t have to push this too hard, and it’s ‘bye-bye mommy, hello monster!’”
“What is wrong with you?” Carmen asks. “You’re completely demented.”
“Now, now, teacher’s pet, if you’re trying to get me to let mommy go, insults are probably the last thing you should try. Maybe a little flattery would be nice,” Melissa says.
“Melissa, what’s your end game here?” D-Day asks. “The building is overrun. You have no place to go. WE have no place to go. You have to know you’re not leaving this roof. Why take innocent people out with you?”
“That’s where you’re wrong, dickhead,” she says. She presses the plunger on the syringe and shoves Elizabeth toward the trio.
“NO!” Carmen and George scream in unison. They rush toward her as she starts convulsing and screaming in pain.
D-Day swings his rifle to bear as Melissa runs toward the edge of the roof and jumps off. He’s about to pull the trigger when Carmen pushes him.
“No!” she screams. “That’s my MOTHER!”
“I was aiming for Melissa,” D-Day says. “But it looks like she took the easy way out.”
Carmen is gone, standing by her father, who has Elizabeth in his arms. Her thrashing is already starting to s
ubside. Black spider webs are spreading through the veins on her face and neck. George is crying, his shoulders shaking with uncontrollable sobs. Carmen is rubbing his shoulders, also sobbing.
D-Day’s neck hairs stand up. He looks first at the maintenance building, expecting to see undead coming through the door, but there’s nothing. He glances around, and then he sees it.
A rope, pulled taut, tied to one of the large brackets to which the window washers attach their equipment.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says and walks over to the edge of the building and peers over the parapet. Melissa is struggling with the rope, dangling fifteen feet below the edge of the building.
She’s wearing a harness she must have taken from the maintenance room, but she’s got something set up wrong, and the rope is stuck.
Satisfied she’s going nowhere, he turns his attention back to the Bustamantes. Elizabeth has gone still, and George is holding her tight, sobbing and saying her name over and over. Carmen is trying to pull him away.
“Dad, you have to let her go! She’s going to come back any minute now, and then it won’t be Mom, it will be something else, one of the dead. Come on!” She tugs at his shoulder, but he shakes her off.
“George, she’s right. You need to get away from the, uh, the body,” D-Day says.
“She’s not a body,” he says through his tears. “She’s my wife. I didn’t get to say goodbye! I didn’t get to say anything!”
“Dad, please, you can say all of this from a safe distance -” Carmen starts, but stops short when Elizabeth’s eyes open wide. The pupils are blown, so the eyes look black, and the whites are bloodshot.
“Elizabeth,” George says. “I’m so sorry! I let her do this to you; I should never have left you alone!”