Behind him, the hundreds that had pursued him from Briggs were hauling their unfeeling bodies down the street. To his right, the scores that had risen from their grisly meal were staggering relentlessly toward him.
Even though he knew the door was securely locked, Ron pulled on it again. Why had he thought otherwise? He didn’t even have to turn around to see the progress of his pursuers. He could see their bright and hideous images in the reflection of the polished glass doors. Cutter shook the door and screamed. He could run again, but he could already feel the shooting pain firing up from his knee, knowing that he wouldn’t get far before he’d be reduced to a painful limp, no matter what was chasing him. Casting around, he searched for something to use as a weapon, or for something to try to use to smash his way in, but then he recalled the sales pitch from the realtor,
“These doors are shatterproof acrylic,” he boasted. “You can’t break them unless you use a battering ram or a pickup truck,” he had added. He had to run, he knew. After that…well, he just had to hope he could find refuge.
Moving quickly, one of the shamblers was only a dozen feet away when he turned. Ron drew back his fist and prepared to punch the damned thing, when suddenly he felt hands grabbing him from behind, pulling him by his sweat-stained shirt so that he toppled backward. Cutter screamed, waiting to feel the bite of dead jaws on his flesh.
As he fell back, he realized that he was inside the condo tower. The door that had opened silently behind him was pushed solidly back into place, and a man was tugging on him, all but dragging him by his right arm into a shadowed hallway.
“At least get up and move, goddamn it!” The voice came from a young man of lean build and some height. His grip was very powerful and Ron figured he must be an athlete of some kind. Gathering what remained of his wits, Ron pulled himself upright and followed the man into a hallway and then to a door that opened into yet another stairwell. Ron hesitated at the door, but the man insisted.
“Fucking get in here, or shatterproof or not, they’ll push that glass in and follow us wherever we try to run.”
Cutter did as he was told and followed the guy into the darkness. As he closed the door behind them, the fellow produced a flashlight. A beam of white light pierced the shadows, and Ron saw that his rescuer was showing him the way up the stairs. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll lock the door here,” He heard keys, jangling one against others, and a lock slid shut. “But I’ve noticed that they calm down pretty quick if they don’t see anyone to eat. They’ll probably just mill around the building for a while and then wander off. They’ve been doing variations on that theme all day.”
Already, the younger man was moving briskly up the stairs. “Come on, damn it,” the youth repeated, shining the light just briefly in Ron’s face.
“Okay,” he answered. “I…well, thanks,” he said. “I thought they had me.”
“That’s okay,” the man replied. “I was watching you heading this way. I think I watched you all the way from that warehouse; that office supply place. What were you doing there? They got any guns there?” he asked, hope in his voice.
“No,” Ron said. “I… uh…I work there. They made us go into work today. They made us…” he trailed off.
For a second, his savior said nothing, and then he spoke up. “I understand,” he said. “They were trying to dick us all.”
In a few moments, they were on the third floor of the tower. “I’m Ted Siskey, by the way. You can call me Ted.”
Ron nodded as they moved out into the light of a hallway. “Ron,” he answered, extending his right hand. “Cutter.” For the first time, he had a good look at the Siskey. As he had figured, the guy was only about twenty-one or so. He was taller than Ron, probably six-feet-four or so, and very lean. His hair was blond, his eyes green. Siskey looked like he belonged on a recruitment poster for the German Army.
“You live here?” Ron asked. He had to pause then, his knee was all but screaming at him.
“No,” Siskey said, shrugging. “I was visiting a pal of mine who works security here.” He sighed. “Used to work security. They…uh…they got him about two hours ago. He went out front to check some doors…goddamn it.”
Ron didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything to that, but that explained the keys, at least. When Ted moved on, Ron followed him, limping slightly, hoping that they could find some painkillers. He would like to chew a few aspirin at least.
“Who else is in the tower?” Ron finally asked. “I know they only sold about a hundred units here. Out of three hundred, for Pete’s sake.” He laughed. “I came to a sales pitch about two months back,” he added. “Hell…maybe I met your pal when I was here.”
“Jake,” Siskey said. “His name was Jake Sears. Played baseball with me my senior year.”
“Baseball?” They stopped at the end of the hallway where there was a window and they both peered down at the street, which was packed with the dead.
“UNCC,” Siskey added. “I went there on a baseball scholarship. Graduated this past year,” he said. “Jake was a junior, so he only had one more year. He worked here to earn his spending cash.” The shamblers were still agitated and they were obviously trying to push their ways into the building. “Poor bastard,” Ted whispered. Ron heard it.
“If they get in, are we safe?” he asked.
“Fuck if I know,” Ted admitted. “What I suspect, though, is if we don’t find some guns, we’re screwed. My suspicion is that Uncle Sam ain’t going to arrive with the cavalry to rescue us or anyone else. So we might have to shoot our way out of here.”
Ron nodded. “I think you’re telling the truth,” he said. “You talk to any of the tenants? Ask them if they have any firearms?”
“Couple of people peeked out, but they shut their doors really quick and I haven’t spoken to anyone,” he said. “Can’t say as I can blame anyone for being bashful.” He pointed toward the ceiling, indicating the next few floors. “I’ve only gone up to the fifth floor. No higher. Seems Jake said nobody lives on floors seven through ten. So they should be all vacant. I knocked at a few doors, but if there was anyone home, they didn’t say anything. I think we can go on the assumption that at least some people aren’t home.”
Ron thought about it for a while. “You have a master key for these units?” he finally asked. “If there’s nobody likely to come home, we might as well see if there’s anything around that can help the rest of us. I know I’d feel a lot better if I had a good pistol or rifle.” Cutter thought of his old 22.220 back at home in Virginia at his parent’s place. It was his favorite hunting rifle and his dad kept it in good order for him. He wondered if his dad was using it right then.
“Matter of fact,” Ted replied, “I do.” He held the key up. “Jake said this key will get us into any unit.” He shook it so that it jangled, briefly. “However, I don’t want to get shot down like a thief, so I want to make damn sure nobody’s home before we go into any of these places. After all, they’re somebody’s homes. I don’t want to get my head shot off for no good reason.”
“I agree,” Ron said, nodding. “Hell with it. Let’s just go door to door and knock.”
And that was how they found Tim Edmundsen’s condo.
**
“Jake said it was on the third floor,” Ted informed Ron as they went up the darkened stairway. The air was cool in the well and Ron knew that the shaft was acting like a natural air conditioner, pulling warm air out and leaving cooler air inside. At the bottom of the stairs, it was probably pretty comfortable even then.
“He went in it?” Ron asked. Despite his rescuer’s guarantees that the condo tower was zombie-free, he kept stopping to listen for the approach of footsteps, or of the chilling moans that marked the shamblers. Peering over his shoulder into the darkness, he paused, only a little as he followed the fit, younger leader.
“No. But he talked to the guy. A real gun nut was how Jake described him. He saw the movers hauling gun cases and at least two gun vaults up here. He just cou
ldn’t remember which unit. We’ll have to try them all until we find it.” They were at the landing and Ted pushed the door open. Light flooded into the stairwell. Both men squinted into the brightness.
“What if he’s home? A guy like that would be likely to shoot first and talk later.”
“Actually, Jake said the guy never finished moving in. He wasn’t here as late as last week. Just his stuff. Jake told me the guy was just stopping by about once a week to organize his new digs. I think he was out of town until…well, shit. It doesn’t matter, now, does it? I don’t think the guy’s ever coming home.
“And even if he did, from what I know about guys who are into guns like that, he’d be careful before he pulled the trigger. More than anything else, those guys are about safety. I don’t think he’d shoot us. Anyway, I intend to knock first, and he’d have to realize that I have a key.”
“I guess you’re right,” Ron said, stopping to massage his knee. He looked up to see that Ted was looking at him.
“You going to be okay? Your knee giving you trouble?”
Cutter nodded. “I’ll be all right. It hasn’t completely healed. I was still in therapy.” He laughed, thinking of missed appointments. “Fuck it. Let’s just find the guy’s place and see if there really are any of the guns your pal was talking about.”
**
As they say in the funny papers, the third try was the charm.
Siskey had knocked on the door of Unit 412 for a good two minutes before he inserted the master key. Ron hadn’t liked that they were making so much noise, but neither did he want to get shot by an irate homeowner. So they’d rapped on the very solid door and called out, leaning into the door to speak to anyone who might be inside, holed up for the duration.
“I’m going to unlock the door,” Siskey yelled to the wooden barrier, informing anyone on the other side that he was going to do just that. He inserted his master key and disengaged the lock. More light flooded into the hallway as he opened the door.
“I’ll be damned,” Ron said. Ted just stood there, staring at the room.
Inside, the place was furnished in an almost minimalist manner. There was a bland couch that was obviously also a convertible bed, colored in what Ron had often heard described as ‘corn’, a kind of pale yellow. A small coffee table sat in front of it and a flat screen TV was mounted on a wall some six feet beyond that table. To the left of that room was an alcove that contained a small kitchen and dining area, with a door leading back to another space that was likely a single bedroom with a bath.
However, the living area was what held their attention. Four maple wood gun cases stood against one wall and each was full of rifles and shotguns. Just a quick inventory revealed to the pair that they were looking at twenty-eight firearms. Drawers at the base of each case soon gave up more content: half a dozen pistols, ranging from a compact .38 to a 9mm Glock to a .357 Smith & Wesson police issue revolver. Some small .22 caliber pistols glittered where lightly oiled rags failed to cover them. Each gun case held no fewer than 100 rounds of ammunition for every gun present.
Going to one of the cases, Ron was happy to discover that like the others it was unlocked. He opened it slowly and put his hands on one of the rifles. “Do you care if I take this one?” He thought it best to ask Siskey before he acted. He didn’t want any conflict to arise over some small slight.
“No. There are only two of us and…” Ted counted silently. “Over two dozen rifles and shotguns. Anyway, I didn’t come up here for a rifle. I want a pistol and I see what I need.” He knelt and retrieved the .357 from the space that had been custom built for it in the case. Opening a drawer, he found a box of shells and loaded the weapon. All the while, Ron was hefting the 22.220, getting the feel of it, smelling the good scent of gun oil and feeling the polished wood of the stock. This was pretty much like his favorite gun back home. With this, he could shoot his way to his old neighborhood and rescue his family, if he was able. Or he could blast his way to freedom and leave Charlotte, North Carolina, far behind and take refuge in the hills to the west. With that gun, he could do just about anything.
“Ron.” He heard Ted’s voice and it startled him from his daydreaming. He turned to face the young man who had pulled him out of such a bad situation.
“What is it?” He looked at the tall, athletic fellow standing before him. For the first time, Ron took a really good look at him and saw the dirty jeans he was wearing, the scuffed Air Jordan’s, and the white shirt that covered his body, much like Ron’s own shirt. And that was when he noticed the tracery of fresh blood on Siskey’s left wrist.
“I was bitten,” he told Ron. He waved his free hand, the bloodied one. “Nah, it wasn’t when I was pulling you in. Don’t feel guilty. I was trying to save my pal, Jake. He didn’t make it, but he did give me the master keys. I just wasn’t careful and one of them took a bite out of my arm.” A drop of blood came free of his wrist and fell to Mr. Edmundsen’s new carpet.
“Damn,” Siskey said. “If Edmundsen comes back, tell him I’m sorry about the carpet stain.” He smiled.
“What are you going to do, Ted?”
“You know what I’m going to do. You know what happens when you are bitten. They told us that much and I’ve seen it happen. You get so sick you want someone to put you out of your misery. Then you die, and then you come back like those fucking geeks staggering around waiting to bite someone else.
“Fuck that. It ain’t happening. Not to Ted Siskey.”
“We can treat…we can put some disinfectant on the bite,” Ron said. “You don’t have to kill yourself.”
“Look. I’m not going to argue with you. I’ve seen it. My mom and dad, my girlfriend,” he sobbed. “It doesn’t matter what you do. Alcohol, penicillin, ampicillin, Bactraban; I’ve seen people try it all.” His eyes met Cutter’s gaze. “I am going to ask you for a favor, though.”
“What’s that?” Ron asked.
“Just be my second, so to speak. If I fuck up and don’t kill myself with the first shot…finish it. Okay?”
“Fuck.” Ron stared at the floor.
“Okay?!”
Ron looked up, into Ted’s face. “Yeah. I’ll do it.”
Before Cutter could say or do anything more, Siskey shoved the barrel of the gun into his mouth, aimed it at a high angle, and pulled the trigger. The sound was hideously loud in the confines of the apartment; blood and brains showered the couch and coffee table behind him as Siskey’s body slumped to the floor, sitting solidly on his ass before tumbling like a sack of wet sand to the carpet.
Ron did not have to administer another bullet.
Now, eighteen months later…
**
Since that moment, Ron Cutter had been pushing on. He had spent all of that month, and almost every month since then running and hiding. Sometimes he wondered how he had made it. The simple thing was that he had. Cutter survived and was now one of the lucky and mean few thousand who still lived in the streets of Charlotte. One of his Jewish pals had told him some years ago that the way many of the survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps had made it through those hellholes was by being the meanest, cruelest sons of bitches around. Maybe that was so, Ron figured. Maybe that was so.
From his perch on the top floor, Cutter had a good view of the streets below and the land exposed for several blocks to the south. His own outline was obscured by a jumble of material in the form of rolls of tarpaper, cans of roofing pitch, and a collection of tools that would never be used to patch the leaky roof over which he now marched. The men who had transported all of that stuff to the rooftop in preparation for the backbreaking toil, they would never have to complete were probably all dead, like so many others. Just like millions of others, he mused. Here in the United States alone there were hundreds of millions of others, and then there were the billions who were now dead all over the Earth.
Well, not quite dead in the traditional sense. The dead now got up after a little while and shambled around, dead but not willin
g to lie down and take it. These days the dead stood on their uncertain feet after an hour or so, and then they got down to the mindless business of seeking out the living. For some reason the only thing that got them interested in much of anything was the prospect of tearing the living to pieces and having them for a meal. Even after almost two years of having to deal with that fact, Cutter still pondered it on a daily basis.
Cutter put his telescope to his good left eye and surveyed the streets. He was legally blind in his right eye—the result of a boyhood illness, and he preferred a single optic telescope to a pair of binoculars. Nothing moved down there except for bits of trash that were blowing in the wind, and a few of the reanimated dead folk who were in such bad shape that they could barely inch along. Two figures in particular had been stranded between the burnt out wreckage of a pair of big Mack trucks at the intersection of Maryland Street and Pack Avenue. They were fresh kills, but he hadn’t heard anyone screaming in the past week, so he wasn’t sure who they could have been or where they could have come from. Maybe they had drifted into Charlotte from the countryside thinking that after a year since the catastrophe they would be able to find help in the big city.
No effing chance, he thought, squinting into the scope and focusing until he could make out the pathetic wreckage of flesh and bone that was trying to move. One had been a man and there was nothing at all left of him below the waist. One arm was completely missing and the other was just a stump below the elbow. During the attack that had killed him, his guts had been carried off and eaten. Cutter doubted if the guy weighed more than thirty pounds at this point. Cutter felt fairly certain that his companion was a woman. There wasn’t a lot more of her left than of her companion, although she still had both arms and one leg. Neither of them had figured out how to crab their ways free of the mass of burnt metal that had been enormous trucks just a few months before. He had stood on that very same roof and watched them burn, he recalled.
These days, the only excitement around was what you made for yourself. Like when you went to find something to eat. If you didn’t watch every damned thing you did, that was always good for a lung-busting good time, and God help you if you weren’t careful. Because there sure wasn’t much in the way of kindness and charity left in the world.
The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) Page 3