Clucking his tongue, Daymon took his foot off the brake and let the truck roll forward until the creature was broadside with Oliver’s door.
Instantly, the thing rushed the door, mashing its face against the window. The clicking noise of its teeth impacting the glass reverberated in the cab, setting Oliver’s arm hair standing to attention. Its face was marred by circular bite marks oozing a viscous yellow liquid. One eye was missing, and the optic nerve—or at least what looked like one to Oliver—snaked from the puckered opening and rested limply on one sunken cheek.
Casting his gaze downward, he saw that the female creature’s flaccid breasts bore punctures and scratches, likely from encountering brambles and branches while traipsing the countryside in search of prey.
“No water is getting near these balls,” Oliver stated, inching away from the window, the seatbelt crossing his body suddenly going taut.
Renewing its efforts at trying to eat the meat through the rapidly clouding passenger side glass, the thing opened its maw wider and planted its maggot-riddled tongue where Oliver’s face had been.
“Look at that thing,” Daymon said. “You want her to slip you some of that? I could punch the window down and let you touch it.”
The monster was palming the window now, bony fingers splayed out like gnarled tree roots. It tilted its head and, almost as if it could sense the fear radiating off of the fresh meat, shot a confused dog’s look straight at Oliver.
“You better go now if you want to make it to the compound and back within the hour,” Oliver said, throwing a visible shudder.
“Don’t worry,” Daymon said. “We’ll make it.”
Turning away from the persistent abomination, Oliver showed Daymon his watch. “That’s only forty some-odd minutes. How are you going to make that happen?”
“Like this,” Daymon shot, simultaneously releasing the brake, matting the pedal, and steering into the rotter. “I’m going to drive it like I stole it.”
Chapter 9
Taryn was holding the creature at bay—barely. Still, the thing had been able to snake one arm through the four-inch-wide gap between door and jamb and had gotten hold of a fistful of the nineteen-year-old’s fleece jacket.
“Hurry up, Wilson!” she hollered across the parking lot. “Damn thing got the jump on me!”
Unable to see the true gravity of his fiancée’s situation, he tucked his carbine to his shoulder and called back, “Why don’t you just step away from the door and I’ll pop it when it comes on out?”
Taryn was straining mightily, her shoulder mashed against the door, all hundred-and-five pounds of her small frame invested fully in the life-and-death struggle. “I can’t. It’s got ahold of me,” she said. “If you’re going to be my husband, Wilson … you have to jump when I say jump!”
And he did. Not literally, though. However, even before he had followed through on the first powerful stride towards the fix-it shop’s front door, he had spun the carbine out of the way, letting it hang on its sling at his back. The easier to handle Beretta semi-auto pistol had cleared its holster and was in his fist as he halved the distance to the short, unkempt hedges fronting the combination stairs/wheelchair ramp.
To Wilson, as he ran headlong for the stairs with the carbine thumping steadily against his backside, time seemed to slow down, allowing him to see that the looming, vertical rectangle of white Taryn was crouched before was stickered over with certificates promising A+ Customer Satisfaction, ensuring AAA Accreditation, and trumpeting Chamber of Commerce Membership Since 1982. All minutiae to the twenty-year-old considering the first and only true love of his life was in imminent danger. And as his adrenaline-affected vision began to narrow, he shifted focus from the big picture to the gnarled fingers beginning to find purchase on the tightly braided shock of hair hanging down the back of Taryn’s camouflage jacket.
He cleared the trio of cement stairs in one bound and added all hundred-and-seventy-some-odd pounds of mostly wiry muscle to the effort. But it was too late, for the thing had quickly transitioned its grip from Taryn’s jacket to her long ponytail and was reeling her head toward the shadowy opening which, inexplicably, was beginning to widen instead of narrow as it should given the added weight.
Reacting to the sudden sight of his girl’s head snapping back, Wilson disengaged the Beretta’s safety and, without thought of the consequences, thrust his right arm into the narrow opening. After twisting his wrist and bending his elbow to get the muzzle pointed to where he envisioned the thing’s head to be behind the windowless steel-door, he squeezed off half a dozen rounds to no good effect.
Slumping backward, her knees beginning to buckle, Taryn slipped her knife from its sheath and motioned with her eyes to the arm dragging her down.
Instantly getting her message, Wilson accepted the offered knife with his free hand while loosing the remaining four rounds from the Beretta at the shadowy shapes inside the darkened store.
Seeing Wilson going for her twisted hair with the black Tanto-style blade, Taryn drew a breath and in a choked voice blurted, “The wrist. Cut the tendons. That’ll make it let go of me.”
Having been in a nearly identical predicament himself, albeit with the offending appendage sans the attached reanimated corpse, Wilson had every reason to sympathize. So he hacked away with the razor-sharp blade, slicing a trio of inch-deep furrows across the pallid swath of skin on the Z’s upturned forearm.
On the third pass of the Cold Steel blade the Z’s fingers snapped open and a thin tendril of sticky black fluid painted a crazy pattern on the cement all around Wilson’s boots.
Freed from the cold hand’s grip, Taryn drew her pistol and crabbed sideways from the door. “Let it come,” she hissed at Wilson, her eyes never leaving the ever-widening crack between door and jamb.
Ears still ringing from his own weapon discharging so near to his head, Wilson relied on his minimal lip-reading skills, complying only when he realized what Taryn had in mind.
“Let ‘em come,” she urged, eyes dark with anger.
Wilson eased his weight from the door and backpedaled to his left, taking up station partway down the wheelchair ramp.
Naturally, with the weight of the monster—or monsters—still pressing out on it, the door flung wide open, hitting the outside wall with a bang.
Painted by the intruding slice of white sunlight, the sneering creature looked more ghost than living dead. Eyes panning left and right, it remained rooted, seemingly stuck making a decision as to which morsel looked the most appetizing. Then, as quickly as the rotten male cadaver had filled up the door, several pale arms snaked around both sides of his body.
The Beretta in Taryn’s small fist bucked twice. The first 9mm slug cut the air just to the right of the zombie’s left ear and hit a wire rack containing pamphlets, sending it spinning slowly clockwise and a spritz of shredded glossy paper airborne. The natural rise of the discharging pistol combined with a slight flinch brought on by the first sharp report sent the second bullet high and left of the first. Which was a welcome yet unintended consequence that saw the speeding missile careen sidelong off the bridge of the thing’s nose and embark on an exploratory mission of the inside of its cranium. There was no explosion of brain, bone, and hair as Taryn had expected. Instead, the strangely silent first turn’s head snapped back and its body instantly followed that same trajectory to the floor.
Already having slapped a fresh magazine into the Beretta, Wilson was pleading for Taryn to get off the landing when a pair of first turns suddenly spilled through the doorway, clambering over the twice-dead corpse. Numb fingers swiped the air a yard in front of Taryn, but, inexplicably, the long- dead duo stopped their forward surge just one footstep beyond the door’s threshold.
“What the eff?” Wilson exclaimed, lowering his weapon.
“You’ve got to see this to believe it,” Taryn said, massaging her scalp and slowly distancing herself from the curled fingers kneading the airspace to her fore.
Cha
pter 10
The familiar abandoned school bus in the roadside ditch was a yellow blur as the new Chevy fishtailed through the slight S turn where Center crossed 16 and became State Route 39.
In the passenger seat, Oliver was beginning to think he was about to live out a scene from Bullitt or Gone In 60 Seconds. And as the realization settled in that the man driving the pickup was not a trained driver, let alone a stuntman, he began to wonder if live out was the proper way of framing the upcoming experience. The prospect of Daymon taking a corner too fast and leaving them alive and trapped in the crushed hulk and easy prey for the walking dead was almost too much for him.
Glancing sidelong at his passenger, whose right hand was curled around the grab bar, Daymon snickered and applied more gas, throwing the truck hard through a left-hand sweeper. “You need to barf, Oliver?” he asked. “’Cause if you do, it better not be in the gym bag.”
“What’s in the bag that’s so damn important?” Oliver queried through tightly clenched teeth.
Daymon began, “A couple of things for Cade, a couple of things for Duncan, and a couple or twenty things for Raven and Sasha.”
“What?” Oliver pressed.
Tongue firmly planted in cheek, he said, “If I told you what’s inside the bag, I’d have to kill you.”
“It better not be full of effin Snickers bars and six packs of Diet Coke. ‘Cause if it is …” Oliver made a play of grabbing for his carbine. “I just might kill you.”
Near simultaneously—or so it seemed on account of how fast Daymon was driving—the lower mine and upper quarry entrances both flashed by. The former had come into view first off the left-hand side. Then, a tick later, the brush-covered road snaking up the mountainside was in the rearview and growing smaller by the second.
Woodruff
The fix-it shop was a handful of blocks east of Main Street and only two long country blocks south of Woodruff’s northern boundary. Set back from the two-lane and fronted by a large gravel lot, the once-white cinderblock garage was now mottled gray from what Taryn guessed to be several decades’ worth of seasonal change. Rain, wind, and no doubt an inordinate amount of the white stuff that had just recently come and gone had taken its toll on the swaybacked structure. From the ground to roughly waist-level on Taryn, furry green moss clung tenaciously to the red brick foundation.
She was leaning against the Raptor’s fender and looking in the general direction of Main when she first heard the engine sounds approaching from the south. That Wilson had just hailed the others to come and offer their opinion on what they had found inside the shop led her to believe it could only be the Graysons’ F-650. And that initial assumption moved closer to one hundred percent in her mind when the vehicle was near enough for her to discern the unique exhaust note. Still, trained ear or not, and the times being what they were, she shouldered her carbine and aimed the business end at the nearest intersection where the vehicle in question was sure to emerge.
Across the lot, Wilson was standing behind the rusted-out shell of an old Studebaker pickup and aiming his carbine at the intersection. Should their assumption be false, from where he and Taryn had positioned themselves, any evasive maneuver the vehicle should undertake would expose both the driver and passenger to a shallow crossfire from the pair of AR-15s.
Better to be safe than sorry was what the older folks were always preaching. And after the ambush in Huntsville, the Kids had been more than happy to take that advice to heart.
North and southbound traffic was regulated at the intersection by a pair of stop signs. To the left, a late-model import sitting on four flat tires and a waist-high white picket fence fronting a two-story house partially blocked the vehicle’s approach on Main from view. However, once the matte-black bumper and massive grill broke the plane, there was no mistaking the vehicle for anything but the towering Ford.
Peering through the 3x magnifier atop his carbine, Wilson confirmed the two in the truck were indeed Jamie and Lev. “Clear,” he called out, still training the muzzle on the passenger door.
“Copy,” Taryn said, setting the rotters in the doorway off on a new round of try-to-climb-over-each-other which sent the rest of the automotive brochures spilling onto the ground outside the entry.
Lowering his carbine, Wilson smiled and approached the Ford with one hand raised in greeting.
Once her window had powered down completely, Jamie asked, “Whatcha got?”
“Follow me,” Wilson said, setting off for the short stack of stairs to his right.
Jamie exited the idling truck, one hand holding a boxy pistol, the other resting on the handle of her sheathed flat-black war tomahawk.
Wilson and Lev formed up behind the women and followed them up the wheelchair ramp fronting the building.
Disregarding the unruly pair of zombies stalled out in the doorway, Taryn stopped and knelt next to the gaunt first turn. “I walked right into a trap,” she said, turning the twice-dead corpse over so that its neck faced the others. With the angled tip of her Tanto, she pointed to the gaping wound where an Adam’s Apple should have been. “All three of these have been … for lack of a better word, silenced. It’s as if someone took out their voice boxes … or damaged their vocal cords so badly they’ve been rendered mute.”
“That’s why we bang on doors first,” Lev said.
Coming to Taryn’s aid, Wilson said, “She did. Three or four times.” He moved closer to her and squared up to Lev.
“I waited the full ten-count before trying the door, too,” Taryn added, her eyes flicking from Jamie to Lev. “Look here.” She probed the creature’s left ear with the knife. Where there should have been the usual canal and raised cartilage inside, there was now just a hole roughly the circumference of a dime. It had well-defined edges and was partially filled in with crusted blood black as marrow.
Jamie asked, “Is it the same on the other side?”
Grimacing, Taryn grabbed the shock of dirty hair atop the corpse’s head and turned it over. Same thing. A neatly bored hole crusted over with some kind of dried fluid.
The other two monsters continued battering themselves against the doorframe, teeth bared in silent snarls. Both had puckered bullet wounds peppering their torsos.
“Those holes aren’t the work of hungry larvae,” Lev said. “Someone’s used them for target practice.” He took a step toward the doorway and craned to see the handiwork up close. Quickly determined that the bullet wounds looked new. And like the rotter at his feet, these two had had their ears drilled out and their throats operated on.
“So what’s keeping them in check?” Jamie asked.
“Let’s find out.” Lev drew a knife from a scabbard on his hip. He set his right foot forward and leaned in like a fencer, jabbing the dagger hilt deep into the eye of the corpse on his right. Instantly an awful-smelling liquid seeped from the punctured orb and the shirtless Z collapsed vertically into a heap, bony knees twisted Indian-style, sharp elbows and knobby vertebra straining against pale, parchment-thin skin.
After dispatching the other Omega-infected monster in the same manner as the last, Lev stepped over the tangled corpses and into the inky gloom.
A handful of seconds after entering the bowels of the auto garage, Lev emerged with the knife sheathed on his hip and a long, silver length of what looked to be a plastic jump rope coiled around one fist.
“Did these two get tangled up in that?” Wilson asked, crunching his boonie hat down over his red mane.
Lev shook his head. “Nope … same story inside there as the rehab place. Someone picked the place clean. They didn’t stop there, however. They left these two tethered to a four-by-four support beam with this plastic-coated wire.” He deposited the end he’d been holding atop the corpses. “These two were left with just enough leash to allow them to almost reach the door … but not enough for them to wander too far away from it.”
Jamie said, “Whoever did this wanted them to be close enough to react to the light when the door opened.
Fuckers wanted us to get our faces chewed off the second we set foot inside.”
“Precisely,” Lev agreed. “This old boy,” he pointed to the one that had reached the door first. “He slipped his tether when the skin and flesh sloughed off his ankle and foot.”
“First turns,” Wilson said, covering his mouth and nose against the stench. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to looking at ‘em.”
“Why booby trap this place? And how’d they do it without getting bit themselves?” Obviously annoyed, Taryn hitched her camouflage coat sleeves up, exposing the scaly dragons and sneering skulls inked in black on her forearms. “I almost bought the farm,” she said, voice wavering subtly.
“They plucked them out of the wild when it was still snowing … or at least still below freezing,” Jamie theorized. “Pretty easy to do whatever it took to silence them and then run a power drill into their ears when they’re not squirming and trying to take a bite out of you.” She moved closer to Taryn, went up to her tiptoes and gently inspected the young woman’s scalp.
“How bad is it?” Taryn asked in a near whisper.
“Not so bad. It could stand a little splash of hydrogen peroxide, though.” Jamie looked the younger woman in the eye and her voice took on a motherly tone. “First that crispy thing at the Shell station the other day. Now this? Girl … you have got to be more careful. Especially when entering automotive garages.” Flashing a smile of relief, Jamie turned to face the guys.
Lev suddenly went still and met the others’ eyes one at a time. Body rigid, he rose from his haunches and swept his gaze over their surroundings. After a quick glance at his watch, he stated, “I don’t like this one bit. Too much organization went into preparing this. I’m going to call this in to the compound.” He cast a glance up the street. Panned his gaze left to an expanse of overgrown yard seemingly split by the shadow cast by the steeple atop a nearby church. “Then I think we should head back to the post office a little early. Clear it of dead and wait for Daymon and Oliver to get back. Once they return we can all decide where we go from there.”
District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Page 6