“We need to find Felix,” explained Halverson. “If we can’t go to Felix, maybe we can get him to come to us.”
“You mean he might hear the shot and come here to investigate?” said Reba.
“He’ll come with the rest of the walking dead to investigate.”
“But he isn’t one of them.”
Halverson figured otherwise, but he said, “Then he’ll hear the noise and come over here to join up with us.”
“Might work,” said Mannering. “But those things are gonna be heading this way, too.”
“No doubt,” said Reba.
“So you want us to just sit here and wait for them to surround us?” said Becker. “Why don’t we just kill ourselves?”
“We need that satphone Felix’s got so we can find out what’s going on in the rest of the world,” said Halverson.
“You’re risking all of our lives for a stupid phone, using us as bait.”
“We need that phone.”
“Let’s put it to a vote.”
“You guys don’t have to stay. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“Then toodle-oo,” said Becker and started driving his cart through the intersection, weaving through the parked cars.
“How can you catch up with us without a cart?” asked Mannering.
“I’ll stay with him,” said Victoria.
“I thought you wanted to go to your daughter.”
“We do need to find out what’s happening so we can find out where the nearest emergency shelter is.”
Mannering shrugged. “I guess we can wait a while.”
Reba nodded. “We owe it to Felix to wait for him if he’s out there somewhere.”
Becker stopped his motor cart. “Bad idea.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Ten minutes later, Becker asked, “How long do we have to wait here like sitting ducks?”
“Until Felix shows up,” answered Halverson.
“What if he doesn’t show up?”
“He should be one of the first here.”
“You think?”
“He’s somewhere nearby and he can see better than anybody else with his goggles.”
“This is not a good idea. We’ll end up getting killed.”
“Your negativism isn’t helping matters,” said Victoria.
“I wouldn’t be negative if we were on our way out of here.”
“Promise?” said Mannering.
“It’s not in my nature to be a sacrificial lamb.”
Halverson picked up on creatures congregating at the other end of the block. They traipsed toward him and his group.
“Here they come,” said Mannering.
“Felix should be easy to recognize,” said Halverson. “He’ll be the one wearing NVGs.”
“And the one packing two Glocks.”
“In the shape he’ll be in he won’t know how to use them.”
“Says you.” Mannering swept the area with his gaze. “I don’t see him.”
Halverson strained his eyes, trying to cull Felix from the mob of creatures working their way down the sidewalk.
“We need to go,” said Becker.
“Go ahead,” said Reba. “You went off by yourself last time. Why not again?”
“That was different.”
“Yeah. You had an extra sack in your cart last time.”
“That’s not what I meant. You’re reading things into what I’m saying.”
“You must be a lawyer. You can wiggle your way out of anything if you talk long enough.”
“I did go to Yale Law and I’m proud of it.” Becker puffed out his chest.
“First thing we do is kill all the lawyers,” said Mannering. “Like Shakespeare said.”
Halverson caught sight of a creature bumbling through the abandoned cars on Wilshire, closing in on him. It was a twentyish male creature with three day’s worth of black stubble on its face. The thing’s worm-gnawed face grimaced at the sight of Halverson.
Halverson swung the Persuader in the creature’s direction, fired, and blew the creature’s decomposing head off.
The gaggle of zombies on the sidewalk pricked up their ears when they heard the report. The creatures seemed to move with more determination now, narrowing the gap between them and Halverson’s group.
“Now you’ve gone and done it,” said Becker.
“So where’s Felix?” said Mannering.
“This whole plan was ill-advised.”
Halverson stiffened to attention. He thought he saw Felix in the third row of the phalanx of living dead. In any case, Halverson saw someone wearing NVGs. The figure was dressed like Felix, decided Halverson, but then again Halverson wasn’t really sure what Felix was wearing when he purportedly went to a restroom. And there was also the possibility that a ghoul had ripped off Felix’s NVGs. But Halverson doubted that scenario. If a ghoul couldn’t eat it, a ghoul didn’t want it.
“I think I see him,” said Halverson.
“Where?” asked Mannering.
“In the third row. He’s the only one wearing NVGs.”
“Oh yeah, I see him. You sure that’s Felix? I can’t see his face.”
“Who else would be wearing NVGs?”
“One of these creatures could have filched them from Felix.”
Halverson shook his head no. “I doubt it. Why would they? They can’t think. They don’t know what NVGs are.”
“So now what do we do?” said Becker.
“We go get him and get all his equipment.”
“Felix!” Reba hollered at the approaching creatures, waving at Felix. “Over here!”
The creatures keyed on the sound of her voice and headed toward her.
“Why did you yell to him where to get us?” demanded Becker.
“That’s the whole point. We want him to know where we are so he can rejoin us. Or am I missing something?”
“I hate to disabuse you, Reba,” said Mannering, “but I think Felix is one of them now.”
“No, he’s not. He’s hiding among those things. Hiding in plain sight. He’ll run toward us and join us as soon as he sees his opportunity.”
“He’s one of them,” said Halverson. “We’re gonna have to kill him.” He cleared his throat. “It, I mean.”
“He can’t be one of them,” insisted Reba. “He simply got lost back there and now he’s found us. That’s all. He’ll be here any minute.”
“If we wait for him to get here, we’ll be surrounded by those things. We have to attack them now and get all of Felix’s equipment.”
“He’ll come running over here any second. Just wait.”
Shotgun in hand, Halverson slid out of his motor cart’s seat. “I’m going after him. Anyone coming with me?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Becker. He scratched the tip of his nose. “This is your bright idea.”
Mannering fingered his cleaver. “I’m coming. I need to give this thing a workout.”
He clambered out of his seat.
“I’m not going with you to kill Felix,” said Reba, facing Halverson. “He was right about you. We should’ve kept you tied up so you can’t harm anyone. He always said you were out to kill him.”
“Felix isn’t Felix anymore,” said Halverson, tired of explaining himself. “It looks like him, but it’s not him. He contracted the plague and turned.”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
“What’s really going on?” said Victoria, put out. “Why is this happening? That’s what I want to know.”
“If I was religious, I’d think this is some kind of curse,” said Mannering.
“You’re not religious?”
“I want to believe there’s some point to all this insanity, but I don’t see it.”
“Maybe you’re not looking hard enough.”
“I’d like to believe somebody or something is watching over us to make sure everything comes out all right in the end.”
“Divine retribution?”
“There isn’t
any. That’s why I became a cop.”
“To put things to rights?”
“To try to, anyway. But being with the force, I see that things are more messed up than most people realize.”
“We have to kill Felix,” chimed in Halverson.
“Why do you hate Felix so much?” demanded Reba.
“I don’t hate him.”
“Everything you say about him belies that.”
“Don’t you understand?” said Halverson in frustration. He didn’t know how to get through to Reba. She seemed unable or unwilling to come to grips with reality. “Felix isn’t Felix anymore.”
Why did she continually want to blame him for Felix’s infection? Halverson wondered.
“You’ve been wanting to kill him every since I can remember,” said Reba.
“I said we’d have to kill him after he turned into a creature.”
“But that’s not the real reason, is it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I finally figured it out. You hate him because he’s a better leader than you.”
“You don’t understand what’s really going on here.”
“No. The fact is I do understand. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“This plague is wiping out humanity. We have to fight it or we’ll turn into one of those things.” Halverson pointed at the juggernaut of zombies’ scrabbling arms and jerking legs inching toward them like a colossal centipede from hell.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“How do you know Felix is one of them?” asked Reba.
“He’s with them, isn’t he?” answered Halverson.
“He’s faking being one of them.”
Halverson chewed over her words.
“She could be right,” said Mannering.
“He couldn’t pull it off. They’d turn on him. They would sense he’s alive and tear him to pieces.”
“Maybe he found some way of doing it,” said Reba. “The point is, you don’t know for certain.”
Halverson didn’t buy it. “If he’s faking it, why doesn’t he run over here to us right now and join us? What’s he waiting for?”
“I don’t know. I can’t read his mind.” She massaged her frowning brow in thought. “We have to wait for him.”
“We can’t wait for him. At this rate, if we wait for him, we’ll be surrounded by creatures when he gets here.”
“Felix!” Reba called out again and waved at him.
Several of the zombies groaned at the sound of her voice, their diseased mouths watering at the prospect of a fresh morsel of living human flesh. Eyes fixed on nothing, the creatures kept plodding ahead inexorably.
“I say we attack and get Felix before we’re surrounded and can’t escape,” said Halverson.
“Let’s do it,” said Mannering, hefting his cleaver.
“You can’t kill him,” pleaded Reba.
“We’ll take off his goggles to make sure he’s one of them before we kill him.” Mannering turned to Halverson. “How’s that?”
Tired of arguing, Halverson nodded. “We’re not gonna have a whole lot of time to screw around once we start killing those things. We have to hit ’em hard and get out of there in a New York minute.”
“I hear ya.”
“There’s hundreds of those things there. The longer we prolong the fight, the less chance we have of escaping. There’s no way we can kill all of them.”
“You’re preaching to the choir.”
“When I start shooting, more of those things will head here and join the brawl.”
“What are we waiting for?”
Halverson dug shotgun shells out of his trouser pockets. He shoved the shells into the pump-action Persuader.
“Why can’t you just get your goggles and your phone from him without killing him?” said Reba.
“If he’s already turned, we’ll be doing him a favor by killing him and putting him out of his misery.”
“Let’s stop screwing the pooch and get it over with,” said Mannering, breaking into a sweat, twisting his cleaver in his hand.
“If those things get too close, I’m taking off,” said Becker from his motor cart.
“We wouldn’t expect anything else from you,” said Reba.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Reba rolled her eyes.
“Don’t you roll your eyes at me,” said Becker.
Ignoring Becker and Reba, Halverson and Mannering advanced on the zombie horde.
“You take his phone and goggles, and I’ll take his Glocks,” said Mannering. “I’ll feel a whole lot better with a couple of Glocks in my hands.”
Halverson racked the slide of the Mossberg. He opened up on the lead creature. A charge of number 8 lead shot blew off the zombie’s head. Halverson racked the slide again. He fired. The buckshot obliterated the skull and brains of the next creature. The creature dropped dead on the spot, spraying the ghouls following it with gore from its atomized head.
Halverson picked up on Felix skittering in unison with the other ghouls with his herky-jerky uncoordinated leg and arm motions. Halverson could not imagine that Felix was still human.
Nevertheless, Halverson would keep his word. He would wade into the ghouls and unmask Felix to make sure he had truly turned—even if it meant risking being bitten by the ghouls.
Wielding his cleaver Mannering charged the front line of lumbering creatures. He swung the cleaver and lopped off the head of a twentysomething, rangy, blond, curly-haired ghoul. Caught in a flurry of groping hands, Mannering kicked and shoved in all directions as he plowed through the front lines to reach Felix.
Felix shambled toward Mannering, hung open his mouth, and prepared to bite Mannering. That was what it looked like to Mannering, anyway.
Mannering snagged Felix’s wrist, hauled him from the crowd of creatures clustered around him, and swung Felix toward Halverson.
Halverson blew another nearby zombie’s head apart with buckshot and snatched Felix’s night-vision goggles. Halverson didn’t have time to unfasten the goggles. He simply ripped them off Felix’s face, busting the leather straps that held the goggles in place on Felix’s head.
Halverson beheld Felix’s face and winced in disgust. “You see him?”
Mannering beheaded a ghoul standing in front of him and glanced over his shoulder in Felix’s direction.
Felix’s eyes were clouded with white. His face was twisted into a grimace, revealing decaying teeth and a blue, reptilian tongue that flickered in and out of his crumbling, half-decomposed mouth.
“Felix, are you OK?” asked Mannering.
Felix worked his gaping jaws, but no words came out.
“Satisfied?” asked Halverson.
Mannering pivoted and stepped closer to Felix. Mannering’s face waxed ashen as he beheld Felix’s moldering wreck of a face.
“Yeah,” said Mannering. “He’s gone.”
Halverson pumped the Mossberg, jacking another 70 mm cartridge into its chamber. He would take no joy in putting Felix down, but he had to take out Felix. It was the only way to free Felix from the eternal hell of “life” as a ghoul.
Halverson trained the muzzle at point-blank range on Felix’s head, squeezed the trigger, and pulverized Felix’s head. The occipital bone of Felix’s skull blew out onto the creatures massed behind him.
“Felix!” screamed Reba.
Felix recoiled from the shotgun blast. He fell back onto a row of creatures surging behind him. For a moment, the creatures held him up, preventing him from hitting the sidewalk.
Eager to plow ahead, the creatures tossed Felix aside to the cement, clearing their way for their pursuit of Halverson and Mannering.
Felix was on the brink of being trampled under the feet of advancing creatures when Halverson unleashed shotgun blasts into their serried ranks.
The shotgun empty, Halverson started swinging it at the creatures, alternately thrusting its muzzle and then its stock at them as he gripped the sh
otgun in the middle with both hands positioned about a foot apart, driving back the encroaching ghouls, staving them off Felix’s corpse.
Halverson knew he could not keep this up much longer. There were just too many of the things and the sheer weight of their numbers would overpower him and crush Felix underfoot. Halverson also knew he had no choice but to fend off the creatures if he wanted to retrieve his satphone and the Glocks from Felix’s corpse.
Seeing Halverson’s plight, Mannering strode to Halverson’s side and swung his cleaver. The blade whistled through the air and guillotined a middle-aged woman’s head. Gaunt and sneering, the decapitated head bounced off the sidewalk then trundled off into the street. The moldering body collapsed in its dilapidated dress.
Mannering brought the cleaver down on another creature and split its skull in half, dropping the creature in its tracks. When he scythed the head off a creature beside the sprawling corpse, the following creatures paused as they remarked the head sailing over them to the back of their ranks.
Halverson took the opportunity to stoop and pat down Felix’s trouser pockets for the satphone. He patted something hard in Felix’s right-hand pocket. Halverson delved his hand into the pocket and fished out the satphone. He pocketed the phone.
He came out of his crouch swatting his Mossberg at the nearest creatures.
“Go for it,” he told Mannering.
Mannering completed severing a large black male ghoul’s throat and hunkered down over Felix’s body. Lifting Felix by one arm, Mannering contrived to flip his cadaver over as a legion of zombie feet shambled ever closer to him.
Mannering immediately spotted the two Glock pistols wedged inside Felix’s rear waistband. He extricated one pistol at a time. He inserted the first one into his front waistband and rose with the second one clutched in his hand, firing at the oncoming throng of creatures and dropping two of them in their tracks.
“Got the Glocks,” he said.
“Let’s go,” said Halverson.
Halverson discharged another shotgun blast into a reeking, decomposing overweight creature thrashing toward him. Halverson fell to backing away, covering his retreat with shots from his Persuader.
Mannering scragged the nearest two zombie heads that were leaning forward to take a bite out of his throat. At first the targeted creatures reeled back, but their corpses were then borne forward by the surging wave of creatures behind them.
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 44