Lilly frowns and rolls her eyes, much like Abby.
I go outside. The door opens onto a little alleyway. Another brown brick building stands opposite of the bookshop. It is dark, but my eyes have adjusted already. Unfortunately, as I stalk down the alley, I find no ladders running up the sides of any buildings. Probably for the best. I’ve had too many close calls when it comes to heights and ladders, especially back in Woodhaven.
Near the other end of the alley is a dumpster. It comes up to my chest. I climb on top of it and then scurry up the opposite wall. It’s not an easy task, and I almost slip and break my neck more than once, but I make it. The parapet isn’t much cover, especially if for some reason someone shines a light up here, but it’ll do for now.
When I stand, the first thing I do is check every nook and cranny for a zombie. I’ve learned the hard way about that; again, back in Woodhaven with Freddy, my old high school bully. He was atop the pharmacy, devouring his date the night of the Fourth of July parade.
There are no zombies up here. Not much of anything. Now I wait.
In the distance, I hear more popping gunshots. Voices, too. It’s funny how far words carry in a silent world. Of course, I can’t see anything. The buildings across the street obscure my view. What would I see anyway? Nothing I would want to see, nothing I haven’t seen before. Mutilated creatures that were once humans, being killed by mangy humans with guns who were once normal.
A chill wind blows my too-long hair from my brow. It’s only now I realize I’m sweating, losing more moisture I so desperately need. I arm the sweat away and smack my dry lips.
A minute passes.
Two.
Three.
And then about five more until I hear the rumbling engine start up again. Soon the truck rides the main drag of road, going about twenty miles per hour, taking its time and burning sweet fossil fuels. It turns down the street the bookstore’s on and barrels past.
I keep my head barely visible over the low wall, peering out.
At the end of the street, the vehicle keeps going. I watch as long as I can, before its red taillights are swallowed up by the darkness.
In the silence, I wonder what needs to be done, and I’m not exactly sure.
Eight
I’m greeted by a steady stream of splashing when I climb back down onto the dumpster.
“Oh shit!” Roland yelps, turning away. The splashing stops for the moment.
“Sorry,” I say and head back inside the bookstore, but not before I hear Roland’s voice drifting toward me.
“Hits me in the head, then can’t let me piss in peace…”
When I enter the store, Abby and Lilly sit up, their eyes wide, waiting for the plan.
Before I give it to them, I say, “You know, I think I might’ve just seen Roland’s penis.”
“Ah, yeah,” Abby says, furrowing her brow. “He wanted to pee inside, but I wouldn’t let him.”
Lilly’s disgusted, but she shakes her head and asks, “So?”
“Truck went south of here, down the road. Straight shot, I think. I watched it for a long time before I couldn’t see it anymore,” I say.
“We know the general direction, but we don’t know the place,” Lilly says. “That sucks.”
“Shouldn’t be hard to find. I doubt there’s many people hanging around this ghost town,” Abby says.
“But the few that are here are going to defend it like starving dogs over a T-bone,” I say.
Roland comes in. He’s limping slightly, and the knot on his head has somehow grown another few centimeters since I saw him out in the alley.
“I think it’s only fair, Jack, that you show him yours,” Abby says, snickering.
“Show me what?” Roland asks.
“Never mind her,” I say. “She’s being immature. Back to the plan…”
“What’s your play?” Lilly asks.
“Aw, man, we gotta keep moving, huh?” Roland slouches as he walks to the cashier’s counter. He climbs up and sits on top, his lanky legs dangling.
I nod.
“That’s okay. Guess it makes sense,” Roland says. “Honestly, I’m just glad to be out of that hellhole of a prison. I wish Nacho and Mandy was with us, but I’m still here and that ain’t too bad, I guess.”
I flash him a somber smile, wishing the same for more than just Mandy and Nacho. The list of those I wish were still here with us would stretch all the way to fucking Woodhaven, but lingering won’t do me any good. It won’t do Roland any good, either.
I go back to Lilly’s initial question. “Well, we need a car. We could walk to Ohio, but we’ll be twenty years older by then. Right now, our options are slim. Those people have a working vehicle, which makes it safe to assume they have more than one. If not, they’ll fight for the truck, fight to the death perhaps.”
A car in the world now is a hot commodity. It’s almost magic to some of the younger people who don’t remember when America was once choked with traffic every day, when the exhaust fumes were a threat to the environment. I’ve been to settlements full of kids born after the End, and they had never seen a working car, only the rusted husks of old Fords, Hondas, and Buicks. Some of them didn’t believe that those relics had ever worked at all, and I can’t say that I blame them.
“Are you prepared to fight to the death?” I ask the other three, already knowing the answer.
“Do you even have to ask?” Abby says.
“Yeah, Jack, we’re in too deep now,” Roland agrees.
“What about, you know, just asking them for a ride?” Lilly suggests. “Ask to borrow the car.”
Roland chuckles, but it’s an eerie sound, without humor.
“What?” Lilly probes.
“We’re talkin’ about the people who boobytrapped a damn Speedway with explosives!” Roland exclaims. His face droops with the sadness for his lost comrades.
“For the zombies,” Lilly replies.
Roland shakes his head. “They damn well knew any survivors that came through their little neck of the woods would hit that place as soon as they saw it. That was a conscious decision there, Lilly.”
“He’s right,” I say. “Which is why we have to tread lightly around here. Any place they think would be of interest to anyone not them is probably rigged with explosives.”
A major bummer. My mouth’s so dry, I feel like I could strike a match on my tongue. We need food and water. Not to mention guns. Mandy’s and Nacho’s were blown to hell, and our other rifles were dry when we fled the radioactive city.
But first, sustenance. My head is feeling light. A migraine may even be brewing somewhere in the back. Not exactly ideal conditions, but I’ve been here before. I’ve been here all too many times.
When I was wandering the west after the Overlord burned Haven to the ground, I couldn’t find drinkable water for days. Dehydration was beating me, and soon, I knew, I’d drop to my knees and not get back up. Either I’d die, or some lucky zombie would find a warm meal on the highway just waiting for them.
But I hadn’t completely lost hope. Discarded in the median was an old, wilting Dasani water bottle. Of course, it was empty; God, if there is one, has never been kind to me. In fact, I pictured a muscular, bearded man in white looking down on me from the clouds and laughing his ass off as I did what I had to do next. I pissed in that water bottle and then drank it. It was disgusting, warm, bitter—all the adjectives one might imagine—but it kept me going and wetted my cracked lips and dry throat.
Maybe six hours of slow walking later, I came upon a roadside diner, abandoned, but with a stack of bottled water in their storeroom. I downed two bottles as quick as I could, threw up, and then downed another. Anything to get the nauseating taste of my own urine out of my mouth.
We are not that bad off now. Not yet. I really, really don’t want to do that again unless I absolutely have to. I’m sure I’m speaking for all of us here.
“At least we don’t have zombies to worry about,” Lilly says.
“They popped them all and then went back in for the night.”
Abby steps forward, shaking her head. “We always have zombies to worry about. Jesus, how did you survive this long?”
Shrugging, Lilly says, “Luck, I guess.”
“You know how to pick ‘em,” Abby whispers to me as she walks back to one of the plush reading chairs.
I don’t reply. I’ve heard it from her before and I’m sure I’ll hear it again.
“So, when do we go?” Roland asks. “Maybe we wait until the morning. Seems like we’re dealing with a buncha vampires here. Nocturnals.”
“Nope,” I say making my way for the door.
“Oh, don’t say it,” Abby pleads from the other side of the room. “Don’t do it, Jack.”
I smile at her. “We go now.”
“Dammit,” Abby says, but she doesn’t look the least bit frightened.
I can’t say the same for Roland and Lilly.
I move the barricade and ease the door open. “Let’s do it.”
Nine
Between the four of us, we have three sidearms and about twenty rounds. That’s not much, but then again, I’ve accomplished much more with less.
“Be on the lookout for trip wires, claymores, mines—that kind of stuff,” I tell them. I take it upon myself to lead the way and tell the other three to hang back about ten paces. If I fuck up and miss a trap, they’ll at least have a better chance of coming out relatively unscathed. We don’t need another Mandy and Nacho incident, not again, and hopefully not ever. Six people wasn’t much but it was better than four.
Down the dark road I go, very slowly. We pass an array of broken-down shops and businesses, places I think were already hurting before the end of the world. The economy at the time of our collapse was proving nearly just as bad as an epidemic.
That may be hyperbole.
Still, places around towns like these don’t thrive. Not much to do in the middle of the sticks, and as far as I’m concerned, having driven through Indiana quite a few times, most of the state really is just farms and fields and woods. Beautiful sometimes, true, but not the bustling metropolis that Chicago, my previous home, once was.
A store on my right is shuttered closed. The doors are still intact. It looks like a laundromat, really one of the last places that would be looted in the event of a crisis, if at all. My steps toward it are short and choppy, each one measured, each one full of fear and the anticipation of death. One misstep and I’m dead—or worse, I lose a leg or an arm but I’m still alive, then the guys in that truck are notified, and I’m helpless.
I approach the sidewalk, however, without a problem. No explosives, no traps. I peer into the front doors, cupping my hands against the cold glass.
As a kid, I spent a fair amount of time at the Woodhaven laundromat. When I used to ride my bike from our house to the park, the laundromat was on the way, and it was the only place in town that sold Mellow Yellow. I used to love the stuff when I was younger, but as I grew older, I couldn’t stand it. Funny. I’d kill for one now, though, even one that was over fifteen years expired.
“Jack?” Abby hisses. “What the hell are you doing?”
Then I see it, what I knew would be in there. It’s a Coca-Cola vending machine, no longer lit up, but standing ominously to the left of the entrance.
“Drinks,” I say.
“What?”
I mime taking a gulp.
They’re still about eight steps behind me.
“Come up here, I’ll need your help. Come straight toward me. I think it’s safe,” I say.
“Think?” Lilly repeats.
I shrug at her. Best I can do.
Slowly, surely, they come.
“Door’s shuttered and locked,” I say, giving the handle a pull. “Short of wasting more ammo and blowing it down, I figured you three could find a different way to get it open.”
Abby raises her eyebrows. “Jack, you thought right.”
She shoves the point of her hook into the lock. It makes a terrible screeching noise that has me and the others clutching the sides of our heads, but at a distance, I figure it probably only sounds like a bat. No worries…hopefully.
Surprisingly, the lock pops out of the handle and the door swings open on rusty hinges. A well-timed gust of wind masks the terrible sound. Abby bends down and begins working on the shutters. They’re padlocked to a bolted loop in the ground.
This takes a little longer and the noise is excruciating, keeping us all on edge and looking over our shoulders for those asshole zombies or asshole dudes in the truck, waiting for the ground to start vibrating with the rumble of its engine.
None of that happens. No one comes, not even the ever-present dead who stalk the night in search of warm flesh.
Abby lifts the gate up wide enough for her to fit under. “Wait here,” she says. “I reckon I’ll have to bust open the vending machine, too.” She looks at her hook and smiles.
Man, she’s really adapted. Abby Cage is as strong as anyone I’ve ever met, perhaps the strongest person I’ve ever met. I remember the day she lost her arm. The day Jacob lopped it off because she’d been bitten by a zombie on our way to Mother’s village, not too far from D.C.
It’s funny how the most tragic things stay with us for so long, how they implant themselves in our brains and come out at the most inappropriate times.
Oh, how Abby screamed when Jacob hacked her hand off. How she bled. It was terrible, but she’s still alive. Even now, after all these years she’s still alive.
Abby rolls under the gate and disappears into the darkness. We are outside, pressed against the cold brick wall, hidden behind the pillars that support the awning hanging just over the sidewalk.
Abby jiggles and rocks the vending machine. I look through the crack in the door, past the shutters again; she’s working the hook into the side panel where you select your drink. She’s jabbing it, stabbing it, making a shit ton of noise.
Just as I open my mouth to tell her to try to be slightly quieter, she straight up stabs the front of the machine, raking through the plastic front. The sound is the equivalent of a buzz saw, and on top of that, Abby is grunting like she’s going for a new world record bench press. With the blade impaled in the vending machine’s front, Abby plants her right foot on it and yanks, still grunting.
“Abby!” I whisper-yell.
“Hold on,” she replies.
“She’s gonna get us killed,” Lilly says.
“I’ve been saying that for years,” I reply, looking at Lilly, her face a pale oval in the darkness.
She scowls and then her face changes as my eyes are on her; it changes into an expression of horror. Something lurches from out of the shadows inside.
I spin around, already knowing what I’ll see.
Ten
It’s a zombie.
It’s not one that is overly decrepit, either. It’s one that seems like it turned only recently. It shuffles toward Abby.
“Shit!” Roland yells, but his voice is drifting away behind me.
I’ve already rolled under the shutter and drawn my own blade.
Abby’s hook isn’t coming out of the vending machine, and the zombie is about five steps away from taking a chunk out of her shoulder or neck.
I come at it with my knife raised, my teeth gritted, my eyes narrowed. The adrenaline flooding my system is something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to.
The zombie, however, has other plans.
It raises its arms, blocking my blow and stumbling back. I fall forward, entangled with it. The stench of death pummels my nostrils, then the smell of dust and dirt as I fall to the floor, rolling around with the monster.
Its jaws snap shut—click-click-click.
I throw an elbow that connects with the side of its face. The blow sends a jolt through my forearm. It’s painful, but it frees me up enough to scoot backward. It’s now I realize that my knife is nowhere to be found, knocked free when the two of us fell.
&n
bsp; Away from the zombie, I get a better look at it. It’s undoubtedly a man, freshly turned, not yet fully-decayed. He has no ears, just wrinkled holes where they once were. I wonder if someone bit them off, or if our friends down the road tortured him and cut them off themselves. He wears a dingy pair of chinos and a ripped t-shirt. On it is a word, perhaps ‘NIKE,’ but it’s now too shredded to even make out one of the letters.
My knife, I see, is by Abby’s planted foot. She’s still too invested in breaking free from the vending machine, so she isn’t paying attention.
“Abby, a little help,” I say.
“Just a minute.”
“I don’t really think I have a minute.”
Roland and Lilly come in, crawling under the shutters.
To Abby, I say, “Just kick my knife over here.”
The zombie’s yellow eyes, the color of sickness, size me up.
“Geez, Jack, you’re so needy,” Abby says.
I hold up a hand to Roland and Lilly, telling them to stay back, that I’ve got this, and I do.
“I’ve heard that one before,” I say to Abby.
“I bet you have.” She looks at me over her shoulder and smirks. On her forehead, large droplets of sweat have formed and roll down to her temples and cheeks, then drip off, lost in the darkness.
Finally, she kicks my knife over. The sudden movement causes the zombie to grunt; it almost sounds like he’s grunting in curiosity.
Slowly, I bend at the knee, never taking my eyes off the monster. It follows my descent. I hesitate. The fresh ones, the recently turned, always seem to be a little more intelligent than the walking bags of dust that you usually see now. They’re stronger, too, full of vigor, adjusting to the newfound strength that being a reanimated nightmare has to offer.
“Like a Band-Aid,” Abby says. “Just get it over with. He’s certainly not going to play with his food.”
She’s right, but I hate that she’s right, so I say, “You know, you could just take off your hook, and you wouldn’t be stuck.”
“Not the point. My hook is my hand. I’ve already had my hand off once. Don’t wanna do it again.”
The Dead Collection Box Set #2: Jack Zombie Books 5-8 Page 60