In the Dead: Volume 1

by Jesse Petersen

The stairwell was quiet again, just as it had been when they first entered it. The only sounds were those of his own breathing, as raspy and broken as it had been a less than a quarter of an hour before.

  And yet everything seemed different. More terrifying.

  More real.

  Carrie turned toward him and Zander held out his trembling hand so she could help him up. Instead, she stared at him, her shotgun still held like a club.

  “Did he bite you?” she asked, her voice echoing in the stairwell.

  Zander felt the blood leave his face. He hadn’t noticed, he’d been too afraid.

  “I-I don’t think so.”

  “Not good enough.”

  He turned to find Mrs. Floyd coming down the stairs, and she had her cast iron skillet lifted menacingly. There was no doubt he’d end up with as squashed a skull as the final zombie if he didn’t prove he wasn’t cut or bitten.

  He looked at his hands and saw there were smears of sludge on them. He wiped them on his t-shirt and breathed a sigh of relief. No cuts.

  “Anything on my face?” he asked.

  Carrie shook her head slowly. “Lift your shirt up.”

  Zander did as he’d been told and looked. Nothing.

  “I think you’re okay,” Mrs. Floyd sighed with relief.

  “But we’re out of ammo in both guns,” Carrie whispered.

  Zander swallowed hard as he pushed to his feet. “Yeah. Even if I find the Glock I threw at the last zombie, it was empty.”

  “Maybe we should go back up,” Mrs. Floyd whispered and her gaze slipped to the top of the stairs where they had come from.

  “Where’s your dog?” Zander asked.

  Both Carrie and her mother stared at him. “That’s your question, when we’re debating what to do?” Carrie asked.

  Zander nodded.

  Mrs. Floyd shuddered. “On the first day, when everything was so confused, I came upstairs and there was a man in the hallway. You know how Sierra was…”

  Zander chuckled. “Evil?”

  Mrs. Floyd glared. “Protective. She started barking at him. I tried to hush her, but before I could, he spun around and it was clear he was… one of them.”

  Her eyes filled with tears and Zander swallowed. “The dog went after him?”

  She nodded. “And he tore her to pieces right there in the hall. I hid in my apartment with my gun.”

  “So they made it up the stairs before,” Zander said softly, moving his gaze to Carrie. “And they were making a way up and would have broken through that barrier at some point whether we sped up their progress or not.”

  “What are you saying?” Mrs. Floyd asked.

  He shrugged. “If they came up once, if they tried a second time… eventually they’ll get to the apartment. Some time they’ll get through the door. And they’ll either find whoever is in there has starved to death… or they’ll attack. Either way, you lose more than your dog.”

  Carrie stepped toward him. “Hey-” she began, but Mrs. Floyd lifted her hand.

  “He’s right.” She glared at him. “Cold, but correct. Staying upstairs isn’t going to save us. It’s just going to prolong the inevitable. I vote we go down, try to find some other weapons… and at least try to make it somewhere safe.”

  “That’s what I vote, too,” Zander said. He smiled at his neighbor. “See, turns out we can agree on something.”

  Carrie shut her eyes. “Okay,” she finally conceded after a long pause. “Okay.”

  There was a moment when they all just stared at each other. Then Zander motioned for the staircase. “Keep an eye out for the Glock. And for any other weapon. And be ready to swing on anything that moves and looks remotely infected.”

  Carrie pushed in front of him and they began to move down the stairs again. They made it down two more flights when they found Zander’s empty Glock. He took it, though without ammo it was almost not worth the carry.

  The rifle they found in the grip of a dead hand another flight after that, however, was worth something and Zander led the way again, with the rifle poised for battle.

  It never came. After what seemed like forever, they reached the entrance to the parking garage and stopped.

  “Anything could be out there,” Zander said. “It’s going to be dark. The generators that have keep the building lit have never been hooked up to the parking garage. Check your corners, go slowly and does anyone have keys to a vehicle?”

  Carrie reached into her pocket and dangled a set from her fingers. “Assuming no one stole my SUV and zombies didn’t eat the tires, we’re good.”

  Zander breathed a sigh of relief and slowly opened the garage door.

  He looked around. It was nearly pitch black. Only a slim few lines of sunlight came in from the entryways from the streets and that barely cut through the inky darkness. His eyes adjusted slightly, but not enough where he could really see, so he closed them and tried to focus on his hearing.

  But there was nothing.

  “I think we might be okay,” he said softly. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Me neither.” Carrie touched his arm and he jumped. “Sorry. We need to go to the left and I think it was one row over and about three spots up. I’ll click the locator button when we’re closer.”

  “Gotcha.” Zander reached back and took Mrs. Floyd’s hand and they moved forward as a human chain. Step by step, slowly, slowly until they had moved in the general direction Carrie had indicated.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I’m going to hit the locator button.”

  There was a click and then the parking garage erupted with the blaring sound of a horn over and over. The lights of an SUV a few feet away started flashing on and off, on and off, lighting up the darkness.

  “Shit, I hit the alarm,” Carrie said and began to fumble with her keys to find the off button.

  Zander stared as the lights came on and off again. When there was brief light he saw them. So many of them.

  “Run!” He began dragging Mrs. Floyd toward the beeping, sirening vehicle. “Run! There are twenty or thirty zombies over there!”

  The light flickered again. The zombies were on the move and if they hadn’t been able to see the creatures, the growling thunder of their bloodthirsty screams made the intent clear.

  “Fuck!” Carrie said and jumped for the SUV door. She flung it open and dove into the driver’s seat.

  Zander drug Mrs. Floyd forward and went for the back door on the driver’s side because it was closest. As he opened it, he flung Mrs. Floyd forward into the backseat and dove in behind her. As he started to close the door, the zombies in the parking garage swarmed the vehicle, growling and drooling on the windows and banging on the doors with bloody, stumpy hands.

  “Start the car, Carrie,” Zander said as he locked the door on his side and reached across Mrs. Floyd to lock the other.

  Not that it would help. They weren’t going to open the door to get in. They were going to break out all the windows or flip the car.

  “Start the car!” he repeated.

  She fumbled for the ignition and the engine roared to life.

  “Buckle up!” she barked and floored the SUV.

  Zander scrambled for the seat buckle and Mrs. Floyd seemed to wake up enough to do the same as the vehicle lurched forward. Zombie bodies rolled under the wheels until the bumps were as bad as on the worst road. Others slid across the front window and clung to the side of the car, flailing off as Carrie swerved and sideswiped other vehicles to shake them off.

  The light that had barely touched the parking garage, keeping their enemies hidden, grew as they screamed toward the exit. The parking garage arm was already broken so Carrie burst through and they all blinked as they hit the street and swung wide onto the sidewalk.

  The zombies wandering around looked at them with blank eyes, then went back to shambling and the ones still half-stuck to the car fell away as Carrie spun the car south toward the I-90 entrance.

  “So where do we go?” Mrs. Floyd
asked, her voice soft and frightened.

  Carrie looked at them in the rear view mirror briefly and her eyes met Zander’s.

  “East,” they said in unison.

  And no one said anything more until the freeway.

  Company’s Here

  Nadia stared at the horoscope staring up at her from the paper.

  Aquarius: Company from out of town could mean trouble.

  She rolled her eyes and folded the paper up before she tossed it in the fire bin. It wasn’t like she believed in horoscopes. The stars couldn’t dictate what was going to happen to her on any given day any more than she could by dumping out a bunch of letter magnets and arranging them into random sentences.

  Anyway, no company ever came out here.

  She stepped outside and smiled as the waves in the distance banged up on the rocky shore. She and Randy had moved out here, away from Seattle, away from the bustle of the city… away from the problems they’d left there, six months before. Yeah, life was different now. No fancy dinners, no high powered meetings, but no investigators popping up to ask Randy questions about insider trading, either.

  “Hey!”

  Nadia shook off her thoughts and waved as Randy started toward her up the beach. Their dog, a retriever named Duncan was two steps ahead, wagging his entire body rather than just his tail.

  “Hi,” she said as he got closer. “Looks nice out there today.”

  He nodded. “Going to be hot. It might be a good day for a swim.”

  “Sure.” She leaned down to give Duncan a scratch behind the ears.

  “Did you look at the papers?” Randy asked.

  She lifted her gaze slowly. “Yeah. Nothing in there about the case or you.”

  His lips pursed. “Then why do you look freaked out?”

  She felt the blush fill her cheeks. “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing. I know you better than that. What’s up?”

  “My horoscope freaked me out,” Nadia muttered under her breath.

  Both Randy’s eyebrows lifted. “Your horoscope.”

  The blush started to feel uncomfortably hot and Nadia folded her arms as she glared at him. “You’re going to make fun of me? Really?”

  He bit his lip and she could see he was making a lame effort not to laugh. “No, of course not. So what did the stars tell you was your ultimate doom?”

  Nadia lifted her hand and slowly extended her middle finger, then she started off toward the beach. Randy caught up with her in a few long steps. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a playful squeeze.

  “C’mon, I want to know. What did it say?”

  “Just something about company coming and causing trouble, that’s all.” She shrugged as she looked off at the gray-blue waves as they rolled up and over the sand. “I know it’s stupid.”

  But Randy wasn’t laughing anymore. “Look, if they weren’t talking about me or the case in the papers, they aren’t coming out here. They don’t care enough about insider trading to chase us out to the ocean.”

  Nadia sighed. “Just enough to send you to white collar jail for what? A year? Two? Five since you aren’t Martha Stewart and can’t get time off for good candle making or flower arrangement or whatever?”

  “No, my hair isn’t blond enough for that,” Randy said as he ran a hand through his brown hair, much longer now than it had been when he worked in Seattle and wore a suit every day.

  Nadia couldn’t help but smile. There were benefits and disadvantages to getting off the grid. Randy might always be looking over his shoulder, but at least he smiled more while he did it.

  She took his hand and they walked out to the beach together. Nadia kicked off her flip flops before they reached the water’s edge and smiled as the sand bunched between her toes. Duncan jogged down the beach a few yards, digging in the sand and looking for driftwood to carry around.

  She opened her mouth to say something to her boyfriend, but before she could Duncan started to bark. Both of them looked down the beach and Nadia started. Far down the beach was another person.

  “That’s weird, right?” Randy said.

  Nadia nodded. There was a reason they’d picked Sandhill, Washington as a place to lay low. It was a beach town, sure, but one of the tiniest ones on the coast. It wasn’t a Spring Break Mecca or a hideaway for Seattle’s rich and famous. Normally, on a weekday morning like this one, she and Randy were the only people on the beach. Only in the evenings and on the weekends did they see their “neighbors”.

  Duncan came to a halt as he stared at the figure coming toward them in the distance. He was a friendly dog, a big gallomphing, drooling, idiot, but a friendly one. He tilted his head at the figure and then started running toward the person at his full-out sprint.

  “Aw, c’mon Duncan!” Nadia called after him. “You’re going to scare him!”

  “He’ll be fine. He only sniffs their crotches and tries to get them to play catch,” Randy reassured her. He let go of her hand and grabbed for a flat shell that had washed up on shore. “Anyway, it gives us some alone time.”

  Nadia laughed as she rolled her eyes. “It’s true. We never can talk about the important household matters in front of the dog.”

  “Little pitchers,” Randy said with a grin. “No, I do think we need to talk about stuff, though, Nadi. I’ve been thinking. Maybe it’s time I go back and just turn myself in.”

  She spun on him with a gasp of air. “What? What the fuck do you mean?”

  His eyes went wide. “Language dear.”

  “Don’t joke around,” she snapped. “Not about this.”

  “Well, I was joking around about the language thing, but not about the turning myself in thing,” he said and this time he was totally serious.

  She blinked. “But… you’ll go to jail.”

  He hesitated for a minute and then shrugged. “Maybe. I mean, I was part of a group of people. They might not care much for one person versus ten.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “Except that you ran. They could easily make you an example.”

  He reached out and caught her hand. “What if I call the lawyer and just get his advice? See if he can work out a deal.”

  She shook off his touch. “Why are you bringing this up now?”

  “Because horoscopes about ‘company’ are making you tense. And we’re running out of money. It isn’t fair to make you live in a crappy one bedroom house in a shitty little town because I fucked up.”

  He expelled his breath in a long burst and walked further into the ocean. The water lapped around his calves. Nadia stared at him.

  “Language,” she said softly and he shot her a smile over his shoulder.

  Duncan barked in the distance and Nadia glanced down the beach with a frown. “That doesn’t sound like his normal bark,” she said, more to herself than Randy.

  Normally Duncan’s bark was welcoming and bouncy, but now a snarl echoed from the beach and they both watched as the dog circled the person who was now within two hundred yards of them. He barked again and then ran full on toward Nadia and Randy.

  “What is his deal?” Randy asked. “I’ve never seen him do that before.”

  “Maybe that guy,” Nadia said, because she could see now it was a man coming toward him. “Yelled at him.”

  “We would have heard that,” Randy reasoned. “Think he used one of those pitch whistles?”

  “You mean the ones only dogs can hear?” She shook her head. “I guess that could be it.”

  Duncan raced closer and Nadia crouched down to look at him as he moved toward them. “You okay-”

  The dog didn’t stop but bolted past her and down the beach in the opposite direction. He had wild eyes like he was scared.

  “Duncan!” Randy snapped, using his best ‘listen to me, dog’ voice. The one they’d learned in the dog training course last year when they income for such silliness. Duncan usually listened to that top dog voice, but this time he kept going, running around a bend in the di
stance where he disappeared from view.

  The guy Duncan had been barking at was closer now and Nadia tilted her head as she looked at him.

  “What’s up with that guy?”

  Randy wasn’t looking at the guy, though, he was still peering down the beach where Duncan had gone. “What guy?”

  She motioned toward the visitor to their beach. “The guy, Randy! There’s something wrong with him.”

  Randy looked down the beach where she was motioning. The stranger was moving at a steady clip toward them and was now about a hundred yards away… but he wasn’t really walking. He was… dragging toward them, one shoulder hunched downward and his left leg didn’t lift, but pulled a trench in the sand behind him.

  “Oh my God,” Nadia cried as she moved toward the man. She could now see his face was bloody. “Are you okay?”

  The man didn’t answer, but continued up the beach with a faint moan that dissipated on the air like smoke. She moved to get closer, but Randy caught her arm.

  “Nadia, go in and call 911, okay,” Randy said.

  She blinked as she looked at him then stared at the man who was coming closer with every step. His eyes were so blank. And red.

  “Be careful,” she said, squeezed Randy’s arm, then ran for the house.

  #

  Every hair on Randy’s arms and the back of his neck stood up, kind of like they had the last day he’d been at work and everyone was whispering about investigations and jail terms and staring at him like he had sprouted a second head that was humming the National Anthem.

  He’d always had the knack to know when bad shit was about to go down and looking at the stranger who continued to stagger toward him, he figured the guy couldn’t be bringing good news.

  “Hey, mister,” he said, taking one step closer. “Are you okay? You get hurt in a car wreck or something?”

  He didn’t believe that was the case when he said it. After all, the road was almost a mile away. It wouldn’t really make sense for someone to come all this way. Though judging from the way the man moaned in response, maybe he was just so fucked up he didn’t even know where he was.

  “Sir?” Randy repeated as the man reached him.