Fred had shouldered the crossbow and had the .44 Magnum out. The shots clapped like thunder when he fired.
Derek had taken a position farther away, crouched down by the mailbox near the edge of the driveway, and was peering through the rifle’s scope as he fired at the remaining zombies on the roof of the house.
Kevin and Rhonda stood back-to-back, each in their own little world as they downed zombies.
Within ten minutes, they had thinned out most of them. Becky walked over to Ryan, rubbing her shoulder. “You were right. It does have a kick.”
“I’ll massage it later,” Ryan said. “Among other things.”
“You really know how to show a girl a good time,” she said and giggled.
Spontaneously, he said, “I love you,” without knowing why he said it. Maybe, he thought, because it might be the only chance you’ll get.
“Wow, you couldn’t have picked a more romantic setting.”
“It’s all about the timing.”
“I love you too.”
After all the zombies in front of the house were dead, and none were filtering out through the upstairs window, Ryan took Kevin and Rhonda with him to clear the inside of the house. They made quick work of it, moving single-file, going room-to-room, and then upstairs to check the bedrooms. When they reached Katlyn’s bedroom, they discovered a zombie kneeling on the bed, hand in its pants, gazing up at the Lady Gaga poster on the wall.
“Is it doing what I think it’s doing?” Rhonda asked.
Kevin said, “I think so. It must remember what it used to do when it was alive.”
“A chronic masturbating zombie.”
Kevin pulled out his cell phone and held it up, pointing it at the zombie.
“What are you doing?” Ryan asked, aiming his Glock at the masturbating zombie.
“Taking a picture,” Kevin said.
“That’s just plain wrong.”
“Smile and say ‘I’m gaga for Lady Gaga,’” Kevin said and snapped a picture, the phone’s flash going off. The zombie turned its head to look at them.
“Oh gross,” Rhonda said, “he’s wearing his ‘O’ face.”
Ryan fired, spraying blood and brains on the Lady Gaga poster.
Outside the house, Fred helped Jack, Melinda, and the kids down from the top of the truck. “That was friggin’ awesome!” Bobby said as Fred lowered him to the ground. “Can I have some ice cream now?”
“Maybe next time, kiddo,” Fred said, ruffling Bobby’s hair. “If there are any treats in there, they went bad a long time ago.”
Bobby’s smile faltered for only a moment. He didn’t seem all that disappointed. He rushed over to his father and said, “Wasn’t that cool, Dad?”
“I think it was really cool,” Jack said, hugging his son just as Ryan exited the house and was crossing the snow powdered lawn over to him.
“I figured it could only be bad news if you were calling me,” Ryan said.
“I didn’t,” Jack said. “That was all Melinda. But thank God she did.”
Ryan held his hand out. “Grabbed these from the house.” Jack glanced down and his wallet and car keys were in his brother’s hand. “Take Mel and the kids and get out of town. Drive a while and then get a hotel. Better yet, go visit Mom and Dad.”
“What about you?” Jack said. “You could come with us.”
“I’ve got a job to do.”
“Still busy trying to prove yourself, huh?”
“Had to crawl out from under your shadow sooner or later,” Ryan said.
Jack took his wallet and keys. He offered his hand. Ryan shook it. “Just take care of yourself, all right?”
Ryan nodded. Melinda gave him a quick hug, and then Ryan watched his brother herd them over to the car, watched as they backed out and headed down the driveway. The car stopped when it reached Ryan, and Jack rolled the window down and said, “How will we know when it’s safe to come back?”
“Watch the news,” Ryan said. “If there’s nothing about Trudy on it, then maybe we won.”
Jack stared at him for a moment, looking like he wanted to say something. They held each other’s gaze. Both of them knew that there was a lot of catching up to do, that there was plenty that had gone unsaid over the years, enough that they could have went on for hours talking about it, but most of it was exchanged silently then, conveyed with a simple look.
Jack rolled up the window. Ryan watched them pull away until the taillights disappeared into the distance. Becky came over and stood next to him. “You didn’t even introduce me,” she said.
Ryan only smiled. The others had gathered and walked over to the two of them. They stood in the darkness, staring out at the barren fields that went on and on for who knew how long. In the summer months, these same fields were bright with the vivid green of corn and soy beans, and there was the constant sound of tractors rumbling along. But at this time of year it looked like an apocalyptic wasteland; something out of a dystopian science fiction movie. There was no hum of insects. Things were silent. There was a strong breeze blowing through the trees, but no leaves left to rustle. The sky had started to gloom over; a thick gray pall eating the stars. It meant snow was coming. Probably within the next hour or two.
“What now, boss?” Fred asked.
Good question, Ryan thought.
They needed a plan, but his mind refused to play that game. If he had had his way, he would have gone on staring into the night for hours, letting his thoughts drift off, leaving his brain an empty and peaceful hunk of gray matter with nowhere to be except the present moment.
“Ryan?” Becky said.
“Yeah?”
“Where do we go from here?”
Chapter 18
It was snowing by the time they got back into Trudy. It was 2:00 A.M. Past the witching hour, but still within that ominous timeframe during which most people felt safer being cozily curled up in their beds, the doors locked and deadbolted.
The streets were deserted, and to anyone who didn’t know any better, it would have been the expected scene for this time of night in a town with a population that hovered just a smidge over ten thousand.
Maybe some of them are sleeping, Ryan thought as the ice cream truck crept west along Ogden Avenue. But not most of them. His hunch was that if any of the houses’ residents were home, they were hidden in closets, under beds, in the basement, or in locked rooms. Those who owned guns would be cradling them now, rocking them like babies in their arms, their ears alert for the slightest out-of-place noise.
The rest would have gotten out of town or were holed up in the convention center. He remembered the noise in the background when he had spoken to Penny; it had sounded like half the town was there.
And what about the rest? Either dead or undead.
They took a left on Shapiro, drove three blocks, and then turned right onto Crooked Pine Lane. The convention center was on the west side of the downtown area.
As they reached the downtown area, Ryan killed the truck’s headlights.
“It’s so quiet,” Becky said. She sat in the passenger seat, the shotgun’s barrel jutting up between her knees.
Kevin stood in the space between the seats, a hand on each of the backrests to hold himself steady as he stared out the front windshield.
Behind him, Derek said, “It’s too bad it isn’t like in The Faculty where all you have to do is kill the Mother Bitch and the rest of them die too. Hive mind or whatever they call it.”
“That’s only in science fiction movies,” Fred said.
“What about Slither?”
Fred shook his head slowly. “Huh uh. The thing that infected Michael Rooker had alien origins.”
Before they made it to the convention center, Ryan drove around the block so they came down a street with a front-facing view of the brick building that served as the convention center. Back in the day, it had been a high school with an attached auditorium. In ’96, the town had acquired funding to build a new school, which was loc
ated only a few blocks away. The old Trudy High School had sat in squalor, left to deteriorate until 2002, when it had been auctioned off for a dollar, gutted, and then rebuilt and refurbished as the Merryweather Convention Center (named after Paul F. Merrywether, whose estate had financed a sizeable portion of the project). The convention center’s grand opening had been in April of ’03. Since then, it had mostly served as a location for indoor sporting events and productions by the local theater group, but several years ago they had managed to bring in Garth Brooks for a one-night-only concert, which most of the townsfolk considered a feat of magic, but which Ryan and his friends had considered a colossal waste of time.
Ryan stayed close to the curb, allowing the truck to roll forward under its own momentum. They saw them then. Hundreds of them, maybe pushing a thousand or better, lining the street outside the convention center’s front doors. They had sandwiched themselves together, forming a stampede that used their own bodies to ram the doors, the ones in the back shoving against the zombies in front of them.
“Oh my God,” Becky said, cupping her hand over her mouth.
“Must be a third of the town,” Kevin said, stepping aside so that Rhonda could see out the windshield.
“Not quite,” Ryan said, “but it’s a lot.”
“How could there be so many of them already?” Rhonda asked. “The shuttle only crashed yesterday.”
“Like bacteria growing in a petri dish,” Kevin said. “Only Trudy’s the petri dish. It spreads quickly. I still think it has to be by exchange of bodily fluids, but it’s gotten to people so fast it makes me think it could be airborne.”
“That means any of us could be infected,” Becky said.
“If that was the case, we’d have changed already. Maybe it has something to do with proximity. Hell, it could be anything.”
“Either that or we have to be dead in order to be brought back,” Derek said.
Fred stood up, his knees popping. “What are we supposed to do against that? We’d need an army to take them all on. Or a couple’ve tanks. If we had a bomb, we could take most of them out at the same time.”
“My mom could be in there,” Derek said.
Even from a distance, they could see the convention center’s wooden doors heave and shudder under the unrelenting attack.
“They’ve probably got it reinforced from the inside. So far, it’s held up.”
“But it won’t hold forever,” Ryan said. “Not with all those things going at it like that. If they get in, the whole place will be a deathtrap.”
“A slaughterhouse,” Kevin said.
“Exactly.”
Kevin said, “That’s not what I meant. Something Derek said got me thinking. That stuff about hive minds. I don’t think they’re wired together, but they have a tendency to flock.”
Derek looked at Fred and said, “Told ya. They flock. Probably communicate telepathically.”
Kevin shook his head. “Nothing like that. It’s closer to how wolves behave, I think. They run in packs. At least if they catch the scent of brains, they all come running like Pavlov’s dogs. Nothing supernatural or alien about it.”
“You’re saying they congregate,” Rhonda said.
“Sort of. I’m willing to bet that most of those things are right here, trying to get into the convention center. I’m sure there are stragglers like the ones at Ryan’s brother’s place, or anywhere else they catch the whiff of gray matter.” Kevin pointed out the window at the mass of zombies standing in front of the convention center as though they were waiting to get into a KISS concert. “If we took those out, there would only be a handful left.”
“We need a way to blow them all up.”
“Even if we had a bomb, we couldn’t risk doing it so close to the convention center. Not with all those people inside.”
“That’s my point,” Kevin said. “We need to get their attention. Get them to flock someplace else. Somewhere we want them to.”
“How do you suggest we do that?” Ryan said.
“Simple,” Kevin said. “We just need the right kind of bait.”
Ryan pulled up in front of CWI Meat Processors, the ice cream truck’s headlights illuminating the steel entrance doors.
“Go around to the side,” Kevin said. “There’s a door over there all the employees use when they go out for smoke breaks.”
Ryan pulled the truck around the left side of the building. The east side of the building had aluminum siding, a vast blank sea of it, except for a set of concrete steps that led to a single steel door. Kevin jumped out of the truck and tried the handle. It was unlocked. “Some things never change,” he said. “The night manager was always getting written up for forgetting to lock the damn thing.”
When they were inside, they moved down a narrow hallway that led them past the administration offices. Kevin paused at a door on their right with a magnetic placard that said SUPPLY CLOSET. “Give me a sec,” he said as he opened the door and disappeared inside. He came out thirty seconds later. “Okay, let’s keep moving.”
The inside of the slaughterhouse was enormous. Even in the dark, they felt the presence of a huge open space. They switched on their flashlights.
“What’s that sound?” Becky asked.
“Sounds like women screaming.”
“Pigs,” Kevin said. “Squealing. It’s not so bad with a wall between us and them, but when you’re up close…let’s just say a minute or two of hearing them squeal like that is enough to drive a person bonkers. Makes it harder to be sympathetic to the fact that they’re on their way to that fabled hog heaven in the sky.”
Ryan shined the beam of the flashlight around. He could see rows and rows of chutes with long metal gates. It looked like a labyrinth.
“Stinks like shit in here,” Fred said.
“That’s because it is shit. Damn things shit all over.
“Tell us again what exactly we’re doing here,” Ryan said.
“This was the worst job I ever had,” Kevin said. “By far. But it was the only place hiring when I moved back from Boulder.”
“Fifty bucks says this turns into another Angela story,” Fred whispered to Rhonda. She didn’t find it amusing.
“Shut up,” Kevin said as he led them past the chutes and into another room. The stink of shit was stronger in this adjoining room, and the squealing sounds were amplified. Ryan shined his light to the left and saw hundreds of pigs standing in cramped corrals.
The next room was much like the one before it, except instead of pigs, it was filled with cattle.
“It’s so cruel,” Rhonda said. “Makes me want to go vegan.”
Kevin glanced back at her. “I guarantee if you saw what they do to them, you’d go vegan in a heartbeat. Come on. It isn’t far.”
Kevin led them past another room, this one with a tiled floor and walls of shiny polished steel. There was a large drain in the floor. That’s where the blood drains,” Rhonda thought. When they hose off the floors, it all goes down there. In her mind, she imagined an impossibly large pit of blood hidden beneath their feet; an ocean of crimson that had been collecting for years and years by the sacrifice of countless innocent animals. “I don’t know how you could stand to work here.”
“I couldn’t. That’s why I started the store.”
They stopped in front of a thick metal door. Kevin yanked back on the handle and pulled it open. Frigid air formed a pall of mist as it poured out from the adjoining room. “Almost there,” Kevin said, leading them into the walk-in freezer. Huge sides of beef dangled on chains, ribs and muscle visible.
“This is almost worse than the zombies,” Derek said.
At the rear of the meat locker, they stepped into another room. There were several metal racks on wheels, each with five shelves.
“You’re kidding?” Rhonda said.
“They keep them separate from the other meat,” Kevin said. “They aren’t popular in the States, but there’s a big market for them overseas.”
“B
rains?” Becky said.
The pinkish-gray mounds were arranged neatly on the racks, at least a dozen to a shelf. To Ryan, they looked like strange organic artifacts, excavated from an alien planet. There was something about looking at them up close like this that made him feel funny inside, as if he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to.
“Bait,” Kevin said.
“Derek gave me the idea,” Kevin said. “He said that stuff about hive minds, and then I thought there must be a way to lure all those things away from the convention center. Get them all together, and then find a way to blow them up or something. But then the question becomes, ‘how do you get a thousand brain-eating zombies to go where you want them to?’ The answer seemed pretty simple. They did the same thing in Return of the Living Dead 2.”
“How are we going to carry them all?”
“Got it covered. Grabbed these from the supply closet,” he said, holding up a box of Hefty 30-gallon trashbags.
“There’s a flaw in your theory,” Fred said. “How do you know they’ll eat pig brains? What if they only eat human brains?”
“You really think they’re picky?”
“I don’t know. But what if they are?”
“Pigs are a lot like people. Their brains are similar, only smaller.”
“You’re making a big assumption.”
“I’m open to ideas.” When Fred didn’t respond, Kevin pulled a trashbag from the roll and handed it to him. “Then start bagging.”
Chapter 19
“So let me see if I’ve got this right,” Fred said as they drove back toward town. “You wanna get the attention of a thousand or more brain-eating zombies, leave them a trail of breadcrumbs, only using pig brains instead of breadcrumbs, lead them to the other side of town, and then kill all of them by blowing up the State’s second largest oil refinery? Does that about sum it up?”
The Z Club Page 11