Dead Highways (Book 3): Discord

by Brown, Richard

  Silence.

  The second bedroom wasn’t actually a bedroom, as it didn’t contain a bed, but was instead a catchall for various things. A computer desk with cardboard boxes stacked on top. Exercise bike in the corner. Old boom box from the 90s. Picture frames and artwork bought and never hung. Little figurines and other random nicknacks. I think every house has at least one of these rooms (often the garage), where all the stuff that doesn’t belong in one of the other rooms goes to collect fat layers of dust. The Home Shopping Network museum of bad late-night decisions. The in-house cemetery for impulse purchases.

  But still no Robinson.

  I knew then that he had to be in the last room at the end of the hall, and I suspected the last room belonged to his son. Unlike the previous three rooms, the last door was closed.

  And locked.

  I heard a noise from downstairs—the front door opening, followed by Ted’s voice.

  “Jimmy…Robinson, where are you?” he shouted. “We need to go now!”

  Before I could yell back, the front door slammed shut and Ted was outside again.

  My hands started to tremble so I shoved Sally back in her holster. I jiggled the doorknob again, this time with both hands.

  Yep, definitely locked.

  I knocked hard on the door. “Robinson! Robinson!” My knocking quickly escalated into closed-fisted banging. “We have to go! Please open up! Please…”

  Silence.

  With my heart thumping hard and fast in my chest, I sighed and stepped back from the door. A single thought ran through my mind, over and over, filling me with terror and sadness.

  He’s dead!

  He’s dead!

  He’s dead!

  Then I heard movement from the other side of the locked door that gave me instant hope.

  “Robinson!” I called out again. “Is that you?”

  Sure it was. Him or something else. Perhaps his dead son filling up on his father.

  Again hearing no response, I backed up and charged into the door, trying to break through. It looked simple enough on TV. The door quivered but didn’t open. I tried a second time, but all I had to show for my efforts was a sore shoulder.

  A voice spoke from the other side of the door. “Just go. Leave me.”

  It was Robinson’s voice.

  He’s not dead!

  He’s not dead!

  He’s not dead!

  “What are you talking about,” I said, putting my ear to the door. “I’m not gonna leave you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Robinson said back. The tone of his voice was soft and muddled. “Just go on without me, Jimmy.”

  “No!” I shouted. “I’m not gonna go on without you! I’m not gonna leave you here! Stop this and open the fucking door!”

  I went at the doorknob again with both hands, shaking it back and forth, hoping the lock was old and would eventually give.

  It didn’t.

  So I kicked it. And then I kicked it again. As before, the door wouldn’t budge. I thought about shooting the lock with my gun but was afraid the bullet would either ricochet off the metal and hit me, or connect with Robinson on the other side.

  Another noise from downstairs.

  It was Peaches this time. “Jimmy, where are you?”

  She said more but I couldn’t make out any of it. As if my nerves weren’t already on high alert, I realized the huge gang of infected from the interstate must have been right upon us. The loud popping sound of gunfire erupted outside, drowning out the sound of her voice.

  I ran back to the staircase and descended the steps two at a time. Peaches wasn’t waiting for me at the bottom. The front door was left wide open, banging against the rubber doorstop. I went around the corner and outside. Peaches was in the front yard with the others, spilling lead. The frontline of the large collection of undead had reached the edge of the driveway, and despite seeing many of their brethren take a bullet to the head and fall to the concrete in front of them, they pushed forward unimpressed.

  “Robinson is upstairs but he won’t come down!” I yelled. “He’s locked himself in a room!”

  Everyone stopped shooting for a moment and looked over at me sweating and trembling in the doorway.

  “Then we leave him,” Aamod replied.

  “No, we need to help him!”

  “There’s no time,” Peaches said, joining me at the front door.

  “Yeah,” Ted agreed, starting to fire again. “We go now or we die.”

  We had a clear out, if we wanted to take it. We could cut through the neighbor’s lawn to get back out onto Hollygrove Street. Then we could head back the way we’d come. The horde would certainly try to follow, but we could put enough distance between us and them to get away. We could escape this threat with no harm done other than some tired legs, especially Bowser’s.

  We had a clear out.

  The problem was I didn’t want to take it.

  “Help me!” I yelled. “I’m not gonna leave him here!”

  Peaches tried to grab me, but I slipped away from her and went back into the house.

  I heard Ted yell, “Fuck!”

  A moment later, everyone stopped shooting and stormed through the front door into the muggy house. Ted, last to come in, slammed the door shut behind him and locked the dead bolt, as well as a brass door chain near the top.

  Not ten seconds later, while we all stood around trying to catch our breath, the first of the zombies reached the door. With the help of many others crowding in from behind, the wooden door began to swell inward, cracking as it expanded.

  Not good.

  “This door isn’t going to hold,” Aamod said, stating the obvious.

  “We’ll go out the back,” Ted replied, looking directly at me.

  I stepped up on the first stair. “Robinson is up here. Hurry…help me get him.”

  “I’ll go,” Bowser said, bullying his way past me.

  I was glad someone was willing to come upstairs and help coerce Robinson down, but due to Bowser’s leg problems, it took him longer to get up the stairs, and I was stuck waiting behind him.

  On the second story landing, Bowser asked, “Which room is he in?”

  I snuck past him, jogged to the end of the hall. “This one on the end.”

  Bowser limped down the hall, stopped beside me and started banging on the closed door. “Robbie, you in there? Open up!”

  “Get out of here,” Robinson said back.

  “Nigga, open the goddamn door!”

  No response.

  Bowser shook his head, pissed off. “Get back, Jimmy.” He raised his pistol and took two shots at the door, blasting off a large chunk of the wood near the doorknob. With one final shove from his meaty shoulders, the door snapped open. I instantly felt like a jackass for not using Sally on the door earlier. I lacked Bowser’s confidence, and it cost us some valuable time.

  I stepped into the bedroom behind Bowser. Robinson sat Indian style on the floor in the far corner of the room with a stack of photos spread out on his lap. He looked up at us and said, “You idiots. You should have left me.”

  “Come on, get your ass up,” Bowser said. “We gotta get going.” Robinson lowered his head and glanced back down at the photos in his hands. “Now motherfucker! Get up!”

  Someone screamed, cutting the thick tension in the room. A female voice, either Peaches or Naima. Then thumping sounds—the rest of the group charging up the stairs. I cut in front of Bowser and walked across the room to Robinson.

  As I figured, the room Robinson had locked himself in belonged to his son. I remembered being eight-years-old. My room back then looked a lot like this one. There was a twin bed with Iron Man bed sheets. Posters of sports stars hung on the walls. School bookbag thrown on the floor. A plastic tee-ball trophy displayed proudly on the dresser. And last but certainly not least, toys all over the place. Everywhere but in the toy chest. The kid may have been part Robinson’s blood, but he sure took after his mom.

  I stoo
d over Robinson. He peered up at me and through wet eyes said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, bending down to his level. “I’m sorry too.”

  Loud crashing sounds from outside in the hall.

  Ted yelled, “They’ve breached the door. Bowser, need your help.”

  Bowser slipped out of the room.

  “Why didn’t you leave?” Robinson asked. “Save yourself.”

  “No, I wasn’t gonna leave you up here to die alone.”

  “But now we’re all gonna die.”

  “Maybe.”

  I glanced behind me, back at the bedroom door. More loud crashing sounds blew into the room from outside in the hall. Then gunfire. I imagined the infected piling inside the front door, filling every inch of the house. They’d soon pinpoint our location.

  “I know how you’re feeling,” I said, focusing back on Robinson. “Like you’ve got nothing to live for now that you know your son is gone.” My eyes began to water as I summoned a painful memory. “Remember my grandma?”

  Robinson took a deep breath. “Yeah, I do.”

  “She was all I had in my life. I never knew my parents, and I’ve never had many friends. So when she left that day…when we let her go…a part of me left too, a part I can never get back. I still wonder sometimes if she’s still out there, but then I stop, because it’s too painful to think about her being one of those things.”

  Robinson nodded. He knew exactly what I was talking about, just as I knew he would.

  “But even though she’s gone, and I can’t bring her back, or ever replace her, I feel at peace. Because I have something else now. Something I never had before.”

  “What?” Robinson asked somberly. “What have you got now?”

  “I’ve got friends,” I replied. “Friends like Ted. Bowser. Naima. I’ve got a pretty girl that I like who I think likes me too. And I’ve got a man that’s been like a father figure to me this last month. And I’ve never really had anything like that in my life. So you wonder why I didn’t just leave you here. Why I didn’t save myself? There’s your answer.”

  Robinson dropped the photos in his lap and leaned forward to give me a hug. I hadn’t had one of his awesome teddy bear hugs in a while. The discordant cracking of gunfire from down the hall told me it would probably be the last.

  Chapter 95

  “We have them blocked off,” Peaches said, coming into the room. She was sweating and breathing heavy. “For now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We blocked off the stairs,” she replied, pushing her hair out of her face. “Go see.”

  I slipped by her and went out into the hall. The rest of the group stood on the second story landing near the top of the stairs. They all looked just as tired and sweaty as Peaches.

  “How’s he doing?” Ted asked, as I walked up.

  “Robinson?”

  Ted nodded. “He okay?”

  “He will be. Just having a hard time with it right now.”

  I squeezed between them in the narrow hall and stopped at the stairs. My jaw hit the floor.

  Wow.

  While I was consoling Robinson, the rest of the group had been busy tossing anything and everything they could find down the stairs. Cardboard boxes. Boom Box. Pillows. Nightstand. Ugly orange lamp, glass shattered in pieces. About halfway down was the computer desk, flipped on its side; one of the wooden legs had broken off. The last thing to go down had been the dresser from the master bedroom. They had removed the drawers and threw those down first. At the base of the stairs lay a giant pile of dead bodies stacked six feet high. These were the first entrants in the house, gunned down before they could even figure out how to claw their way up the stairs. Beyond the pile, a dozen zombies lurked. More were probably around the corner, filling the entire first floor. The dozen moaned as they peered up at us, trying their hardest to push forward, but couldn’t get past the obstacle course standing in their way.

  I was impressed.

  “Good job,” I said. “I feel bad for not helping.”

  “Won’t do much good anyway,” Aamod said. “How long you think we can make it up here? We just blocked our way out.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” Ted replied.

  “Oh sure, we’ll figure something out,” Aamod fumed. “Like always. We should have left when we had the chance. This is so stupid.”

  “You can still go if you want,” Bowser said.

  “Yes, sure I can, real funny.”

  “I’m not joking. I’ll throw you down the stairs with the rest of the crap.”

  He said it with a straight face and there was no doubt in my mind Bowser would do it if the rest of us weren’t there to stop him.

  “Come on, daddy,” Naima said, pulling her father down the hall.

  Bowser laughed. “I’m so sick of that guy. Why do we keep him around?”

  “He’s been useful at times,” I said, feeling ashamed for defending Aamod.

  “Oh right, like earlier when we almost died trying to cross that road. That was his stupid idea, remember?”

  “He’s a packaged deal,” Ted said. “Comes with Naima. Just try to ignore him.”

  “You forget he threatened to kill me? Cause I haven’t,” Bowser replied. “Believe me, I got eyes on the back of my head. Last thing I’m gonna do is ignore his ass. I don’t trust him.”

  With that piece of business out of the way, we headed into the room on the far end of the hall to check on Robinson. He was still sitting on the floor in the corner, photos spread out on his lap. He had slowly begun to clean them up. I got down on the floor and sat beside him. Peaches, Naima and Bowser took a seat on the twin bed that had belonged to Robinson’s son.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” Robinson said, addressing everyone crowded together in the room. “I guess I wasn’t as prepared for this day as I thought.”

  Aamod smirked. “I told you, didn’t I?”

  “What?” Robinson asked, confused.

  “You were in denial,” Aamod went on. “This trip was for nothing. And I told you. You were scared of the truth.”

  Bowser popped up from the bed ready to finish what he hadn’t finished in the hall.

  Ted stood in his way. He put a hand on Bowser’s chest. “No, no. Everyone needs to cool it. Sit down.”

  Bowser swept Ted’s hand off him. He didn’t sit down. “Get out of my way. I’m gonna teach this bitch a lesson.”

  “Sit down, Bowser,” Robinson said.

  “Fuck that. I’m through with this guy talking shit. I’m gonna knock his teeth out.”

  The anger was escalating quickly. I was afraid the guns would come out next.

  Perhaps sensing the same thing, Ted turned his focus from Bowser to Aamod. “Go out in the hall for now. Please.”

  Once again, Naima was the one to break things up. She rushed in and ushered her father out into the hall.

  “Damn, Robbie. What happened to you, man?” Bowser asked. “You should be over here fighting with me. You used to be tougher than this.”

  “Sit down and shut up!” Robinson shouted.

  Bowser sighed loudly and finally sat back down on the bed.

  After a moment of awkward silence, Robinson said, “I was never a fighter. I’m not you. And you know that.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “And I’m saying I appreciate what you’re doing, or what you think you’re doing for me. I know you got my back, you always have, even when I didn’t always have yours. But there’s no need to take it out on him. Not now.”

  “Did you hear what he said?”

  Robinson nodded. “I heard. And he’s right. I should have come here alone. I should have never brought any of you here. I was scared. I was thinking selfishly.”

  “Don’t give me that,” Ted said. “We weren’t gonna let you go alone.”

  “Still, I feel guilty for getting all of you into this mess.”

  “We’ll get out of it,” Ted said. “But feeling g
uilty ain’t gonna help. So let it go.”

  “Any ideas?” Peaches asked. “To get out of here, I mean?”

  “Maybe.” Ted stood next to Robinson and looked out the only window in the room. “Crap. I was thinking maybe we could go out the window.”

  “That’s a high jump,” I said.

  “We could tie the sheets together or something to climb down. But it doesn’t matter anyway, unless you want to go crowd surfing. The backyard is full of infected.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, they probably got the whole house surrounded. That’s not good.”

  Robinson bowed his head. “I’m so sorry guys.”

  “Quit saying’ that,” Bowser remarked. “We’re here because we chose to be. That’s not on you. You didn’t twist our arm. And as for them out there, it ain’t your fault the world is the way it is…that they’re they way they are. Stop blaming yourself for everything.”

  “For now, I say we rest up,” Ted said. “Eat a bite if you’re hungry. Then we’ll put our heads together and think of something.”

  We spent a good half hour resting, snacking, reloading, recovering our energy. We took turns using the one bathroom. Luckily, I was second to go. After taking a long piss, I cleaned myself up as best I could, wiping down my body with a bath towel I found in the cabinet. A mix of sweat, blood, and dirt came off on the towel. When finished in the bathroom, I had Peaches bomb me with her cherry-scented spray. I’d be good-to-go for another four hours or so.

  Aamod stayed out in the hallway, sitting with his back against the wall across from the stairs. Naima lay beside him, in and out of a nap. Every few minutes Ted would wander out there and make sure they were okay, and to check the status of the stairs. The junk blocking the way held up great. The zombies below made little to no progress. We had successfully prevented them from getting up, but at the same time prevented ourselves from getting down.

  I sat Indian style on the floor next to Robinson, flipping through some of the photos he’d found. “Good looking kid,” I said. “Must have got his looks from his mom, huh?”

  Robinson smiled. “Yeah, he sure did. Trissa had such a great smile. He had her smile.”

  “How often did you come visit him?”

  “I used to visit a lot in the early years when he was a baby. Once he was old enough to stick on a plane, I’d pay to have him come to Florida whenever I could.”