Hooper jerked his head up to see six people slowly wading out of the lake. A gangly old man, clad in a tattered suit and red tie, led the way. His ragged arms reached for Hooper with an unmistakable determination. The two little girls behind Old Gangly wore sinister grins and light blue dresses that were soiled and torn. Long, dark hair clung to their faces which appeared much fresher than the three old ladies bringing up the rear. Massive decay peppered their storm-colored skin, exposing hardened muscle tissue and mottled bone beneath. Each aged female wore a different colored necklace and gown, but looked like they hailed from the same upper-class tax bracket.
The sodden horde heedlessly shuffled through the gloomy water, agonizing moans floating from their colorless lips along the way. Hooper blinked rain from his eyes, swinging his gun from fiend to fiend, not sure who to shoot first. A gunshot broke the heavy drone of raindrops, echoing across the lakeside. Hooper jumped and turned to see Johnson slump over onto his side with blood pouring from a hole in his temple, his gun still hanging loosely in his hand.
Hooper’s breath caught in his throat. “David!”
A bearded man sprang from the water with a deafening roar and a titanic splash to match. He charged with the ambitious resolve of an NFL linebacker and had the body mass to boot. The ground seemed to shake beneath his thundering steps. Hooper spun around on his heels and fired two rounds, dropping him back into the water. The other stiffs showed no concern and kept plodding closer.
“Hooper!” Rory yelled, edging closer to the woods with Rachel and Woody.
The sheriff lined up one of the little girls in his sights.
“Hooper!” Woody screamed.
Hooper pulled the trigger, splattering the old ladies behind the girl with her brain and bone matter. The shabby trio sneered and kept coming without missing a beat. The bearded man burst from the water again and attacked. Hooper shot him in the stomach and turned. “Run!” he yelled, bolting for the tree line.
“Come on!” Rory said, leading the others into the woods. The branches snapped at his face, giving him déjà-vu from the night before. The woods were nearly as dark, but the wet trail much harder to navigate. Thorny shrubs clawed at their bare legs, trying to slow them down as if they were in cahoots with the ghouls. Without looking back at the dead people now passing the tents - Woody, Rachel, Rory and the town sheriff ran like hell.
Chapter Twelve
Forty feet from the glistening Dodge Charger, Sheriff Hooper hit the unlock button on his keychain in mid sprint. “It’s open!”
They jumped inside the black car and slammed the doors shut at the same time, new car smell piercing their senses while the rain drummed its beat on the roof with a mad fury. Their mouths gaped for air that came hard and fast. Hooper hit the locks button and jammed the keys into the ignition but didn’t turn them.
“Holy shit, I can’t breathe!” Woody wheezed, sweeping wet hair from his face in the passenger seat.
“I don’t believe it,” Hooper panted, staring out the rain soaked windows with bulging eyes. His chest rose and fell as water dripped from the bill of his ball cap into his lap. “I just shot Logan Dixon in the head,” he said dully.
“You had to,” Rory said, twisting in the backseat. “He would’ve killed all of us.”
Hooper rubbed water from his eyes and hit the steering wheel with his fist. “He had four kids!” he cried, dropping his face into his hands. “Myer’s got a brand new little baby girl. It should’ve been me!”
No one knew what to say in the respectful silence that followed, so the storm did the talking. Lightning flashed and the thunder rolled, vibrating the car’s windows.
“We should go,” Woody said faintly.
“I just lost two deputies and two divers!” Hooper sniveled, making Woody recoil. The sheriff rubbed his face raw and finally stopped. He looked up, taking a deep breath and lowering his voice. “It’s all my fault.”
Rory frowned, staring at Hooper long face in the rearview mirror. “It’s no one’s fault! But if you don’t get us the hell outta here, it will be!”
Hooper glanced at him in the mirror before dropping his gaze and nodding softly. He turned to the squad car’s radio and tried it. The static was even worse than the one hooked to his shoulder but he called for help just the same.
“Rory?” Hooper said, looking at him in the mirror.
Rory looked up from his cell phone and shook his head.
“Great!” Hooper said, hitting the steering wheel with his fist again. “How is that possible?”
“Let’s just go!” Rachel shouted over a long bout of rolling thunder. “The car still works doesn’t it?”
“She makes a good point,” Woody said, nervously scanning the woods. “Let’s get the hellz outta here, yo!”
Hooper rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, trying to clear the insanity coating his eyeballs like a thick layer of pollen. He took a deep breath and turned the keys, bringing the beefy patrol car’s engine to life. He hit the headlights and then the wipers, which did little to deter the pouring rain. He flipped the blades on high and shifted into reverse. “I can’t see!” he said, looking out the runny rear window, his arm propped up along Woody’s seat. “You see anywhere I can turn around?” he shouted, giving the car some watchful gas.
Rory and Rachel turned in the vinyl backseat and peered out the blurry window. Lightning flashed, illuminating what Rory thought was a walking corpse at first. “Watch out for that tree!”
Hooper hit the brakes, bringing the car to a shuddering halt. They lurched in their seats, their hearts jumping. Hooper wiped rain water mixed with sweat from his brow. “Dammit, I can’t see!”
“Crank it a little to the right and you’ll be fine.” Rory jerked his thumb to the right as Hooper let off the brake. “Nice an easy. That’s it, keep going.”
A huge crash made the car dip forward. They screamed in unison and spun around to see the same bearded man crouching on the hood, glaring at them with sunken eyes. Hooper slammed on the brakes and the stiff face planted into the front windshield, pinning the wiper on Woody’s side.
“Jesus!” Woody shrieked, stomping his feet into the floorboard, trying to push his seat backwards.
The man sneered, oblivious to a giant leech suctioned to his ashen forehead, and got back to his feet. His hand found the driver’s side wiper for balance while his bloodshot eyes found Woody for dinner.
“Drive!” Woody cried.
The blade snapped off in the brute’s meaty hand. He teetered on the heels of brown wingtips for a full two seconds before tumbling backwards. He rolled off the car’s front end and disappeared into headlights of driving rain.
The car’s occupants craned their necks, straining to see over the dash. Suddenly, fuzzy silhouettes appeared in the distance, calmly standing amongst the tall trees.
“Oh shit,” Hooper mumbled. “This doesn’t look too good.”
“Damn,” Woody mumbled. “They don’t give up.”
As if they had heard him, the dead began shambling closer, taking their sweet time like they were enjoying the hunt. As if injecting fear into their prey might make the meat taste better. Without taking his wide eyes from the motley crew, Woody scrambled to ensure his door was locked. One of the approaching figures tripped and fell to the ground, then casually got back up and rejoined the slumbering mob.
“Why aren’t we moving?” Rachel cried, bracing herself against the front seat like they were out of control at eighty miles an hour.
A young dead lady appeared out of nowhere and began pulling on Hooper’s door handle. He recoiled and took aim with his handgun.
“Don’t break the glass!” Rory hollered. “They can’t get in.”
The sheriff wrapped his index finger around the wet trigger, dumbfounded by the dark caves staring back at him. Her form fitting dress was purple and wet but not torn. Her stringy hair twirled through the rain with each desperate yank on the handle. Rory guessed at some point - not so long ago - s
he had been a pretty school teacher or maybe a law-abiding bank teller. Maybe she had been a nurse who had gotten the short end of the stick with a drunk driver on her way home from a long shift at two in the morning. Either way, for whatever reason, she was now jerking on the handle with everything she had, her single-minded grunts easily penetrating the hammering storm.
“Look out!” Woody shouted, ducking into Hooper’s lap.
The bearded man’s fist burst through the passenger side window, spraying Woody with glass. The man snatched Woody’s shaggy brown hair. Woody shrieked as the thing pulled him to the window. Woody planted his feet against the door and used both hands to wrestle with the man’s slimy meat hook. “Drive!”
Hooper stared down the sight on his black nine-millimeter and pulled the trigger, sending the man snapping backwards. The loud blast assaulted the inside of the vehicle, making their ears ring. Hooper turned to the back window and got into the gas. The car jumped backwards, kicking gravel into the undercarriage. Purple Dress refused to give up on the door handle, clumsily stumbling along with the rolling car which bumped into something. The back end bounced up and down. The front tires rolled over something next and Hooper gave it more gas, squinting out the back window as an old man rolled out from under the front end. He didn’t get back up. Purple Dress finally let go of the door handle but ambled after the patrol car just the same.
“Don’t slow down!” Rory said, staring out the back window.
“Floor it!” Rachel cried.
“I can’t see!” Hooper yelled.
Woody pushed back into his seat again, staring out the front window. “He’s still coming!”
The others whipped around to see the blurry outlines of the bearded man and another tall man with long hair running towards the car at an alarming rate of speed. The other things shambled closer in the background with less urgency, but with the same unwavering determination.
“Pull in there!” Rory said, pointing to the right.
Hooper cranked the wheel, sending the back end into an open grassy area. He pressed the brakes to the floorboard, skidded to a stop and shifted into drive.
“Go, go, go,” Woody muttered, staring out his broken window at the long haired man getting closer. The man’s dark hair swung back and forth across his waxy face, giving quick glimpses of the anger lurking beneath, as he sprinted towards the car. Rain poured through the shattered window, soaking Woody to the bone.
Hooper punched it, revving the throaty engine. The tires spun in the wet grass and the car barely moved.
“Go!” Woody screamed, leaning into Hooper as the long haired man reached through the window and snatched Woody’s t-shirt.
Woody punched him in the face and clearly broke the man’s peeling nose, but the thing didn’t care, pain a thing of the past. Hunger was today. The bearded man reached over the long haired man’s shoulder and snatched at the air, desperate for purchase.
The Charger’s wide tires found some gravel and finally caught. Woody’s t-shirt tore off in the man’s rotting hand as the car jumped forward, spraying the two fiends with gravel and mud.
“Look out!” Rory cried, tensing for the collision.
Hooper saw the young black man in a filthy white suit standing in the middle of the road. “Hang on!” he yelled, stomping on the gas pedal. The engine roared and the patrol car’s push-bumper smashed into the stiff, sending him hurtling backwards. Mangled arms and legs cart wheeled through the air and landed in a rolling tumble. Hooper gripped the wheel with white knuckles and thinned his eyes, steamrolling the corpse with a violent double thud.
The car fishtailed and evened out. Rory turned in his seat to the rear window and watched the slogging silhouettes fall further behind, his heart in his throat. “They’re still coming,” he mumbled incredulously. “They’re still coming.”
Rachel took his hand and turned back to the front. Rory could feel her racing pulse in her soft hand.
Hooper glanced over at Woody and quickly returned his attention to the winding wooded road ahead. “You all right?”
Woody examined his torn shirt and arms through full pupils. “I think so.”
Hooper slowed down and leaned closer to Woody, squinting out his side of the window where the only working wiper was flapping back and forth.
“Don’t slow down!” Woody wailed. “My window’s gone!”
“I can’t see, Woody!” Hooper fired back. “Do you want to get into a wreck?”
“Not here,” Woody said, nervously scanning the trees for more walkers. “Whatever you do, do not crash now.”
The sheriff let off the gas and slid the speeding squad car sideways onto Highway Ten, like a professional stuntman in a modern day version of Smokey and the Bandit. His foot hit the gas again. The meaty tires responded, finding traction and gripping the wet blacktop with authority, straightening the car out with a final jerk. Hooper eased up on the gas as the rain relentlessly pounded the front window, the lone wiper working overtime and coming up short.
Rory leaned forward and squinted at the blurry road unfolding in the distance. “Just make it to Doc’s and we’ll use their landline.”
Hooper tried the car’s radio again, keeping his eyes on the road for the most part. He spit more codes into the receiver and let up on the button. More static replied. He spoke again, this time in normal person talk – normal with a strong hint of extreme anxiety – and released the button. More static. More swear words. He slammed the handset back into its cradle and leaned back. “How can everything be down?”
Woody turned to him, his face sliding like a slow moving avalanche. “Maybe these things are everywhere. Maybe everyone at Doc’s is already dead.” He turned back to the road, pausing to swallow. “Maybe the entire country is dead.”
Hooper shot him a frown and returned his attention to the slick highway without a word.
Rachel glanced behind them again. “Maybe we should just keep going. Get as far away from the lake as possible.”
Thunder cracked above them, rattling the car’s dash against the windshield. Rory plucked a leaf from Rachel’s short locks and pitched it onto the floor. “We gotta get to that phone.”
“He’s right, Rachel,” Hooper said calmly. “People live out here and they’re going to need help. Plus, I couldn’t see with two wipers, let alone just one. We’ll be lucky to make it to Doc’s without ending up in a ditch.”
The rain drummed on the roof and road with a relentless ferocity, forcing him to maintain a painstaking crawl. The four grew silent, dripping with water and unabated despondency. The shock of witnessing people die was heavy, making each breath a struggle, each thought a rigorous labor.
Rachel sighed loudly. “How many guns do you have in this thing?”
Hooper found her eyes in the mirror and snorted, returning his gaze to the curving highway ahead.
Lightning split the sky, illuminating the gray afternoon outside the window. The lights inside the bar flickered. Doc turned to Alex and wrinkled his brow. “What’re you drawin now?”
“It’s a graveyard, Grandpa. And those are tombstones,” he smiled proudly, pointing a green magic marker to some tall slabs with undecipherable epitaphs scribbled across them.
Doc puckered his leathery brow and ran a hand through his grizzled hair. “Tombstones?”
Alex nodded and went back to work with the marker, coloring in the graveyard’s plush green grass. “They’re all the people who died from smoking.”
Doc’s face slumped in the bar’s dim light with Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood oozing from the old Wurlitzer. He shook his head and exhaled a long breath. “Oh, that’s nice,” he muttered, going through the door leading to the office in back. Thunder cracked and the lights flickered again. Mick and Rob glanced around the yellowed ceiling, turned to each other and shrugged.
“This going to be fun to ride home in,” Rob snorted, taking a long swig from his bottle of Miller High Life.
Kourtney ruffled Alex’s blond hair with one hand
and nonchalantly slipped him a folded dollar bill with the other. “Nicely done,” she whispered, kissing him on the top of his head.
Alex slipped the bill into his front pocket without stopping the green marker.
“If ya ask me, you’re lettin that kid watch too many cartoons,” Mick said, gesturing to Alex with his bottle.
“Yeah well, no one asked you,” Kourtney said, placing a lime on a plastic cutting board.
“That SpongeBob will mess you up, brother,” Rob said, adjusting his long, gray hair into a tighter ponytail. “Have you seen the cartoons kids are watching these days?”
Mick chuckled. “Bunch of talking banana pirates and shit!”
Kourtney stopped cutting and shot him a look.
Floodwater Zombies Page 13