by A. P. Fuchs
It was Mark who had noticed his older friend was missing, and it was Mark that told her he thought his friend might be in trouble. At his insistence, Michelle went out with him, but not without his mother tagging along. That was fine, and she understood that. If she had been with her own son when he had gone out with a team for weapons, her boy might be alive today.
The group decided to go one street over and check the cars there. Once they arrived at the street, she tried Dillon on the talkie again.
“I’m buried here,” he said.
“We can’t spend the day looking for you—”
He cut her off. “No wait!”
“Calm down, Dillon. What I was going to say was we can’t spend the day looking based on a hunch or a vague description. You have to be more specific.”
“I can’t be more specific. I can’t see anything!”
“How about, um, smell? What do you smell?”
“Smell? Fine.” A pause. “I told you, it stinks. Really good. We’re talking like puke and horse crap mixed together.”
Michelle wrinkled her nose. “What were you doing before you got trapped?”
“Like I said, I was trying to cross through a car to get to this hole.”
“What? What street were you on?”
“I don’t know. I’m not from here, remember?”
“You could have at least taken note of the street.”
“Okay . . . it was an underground parkade.”
“There’s a couple around here. What was by it, or what building was it by?”
“A gray one. Part of it was missing.” He took a deep breath. “My head hurts. Real sharp pain at the top of it. I’m sweating and it burns.”
“You cut?”
“Maybe. I’m dizzy.”
Mark pulled down Michelle’s arm and spoke into the walkie-talkie. “Dillon, why did you go into that car?”
“Big zombie. Part of its head was missing. It saw me. Stomped over. I ran, but there was no place to hide. At least, nowhere it wouldn’t see me try and hide. Noticed this car up against a parkade entrance. Went in one side, and as I was coming out the other door—I think the zombie grabbed the car! But right after it went dark and all this stuff went against me. Another car. I’m stuck! Help me, I’m stuck!”
“Calm down, Dillon,” Michelle said.
Rhonda looked at her with worried eyes. Andrew looked elsewhere, presumably watching for any oncoming zombies, big or small.
Dillon’s breathing came through the talkie hard and fast. He was hyperventilating.
“Dillon, listen to me,” Michelle said. “Calm down. Take a deep breath. Nice and slow. We’re coming. We’ll find you.”
“I—I can’t . . . the air—” The talkie cut out again.
Michelle glanced around. The information he gave her was scattered, but it was enough to at least give them an idea of what they were looking for. “Okay, think.” To Rhonda, “There’s that parkade on Smith.”
Rhonda nodded.
Mark said, “But we were just there.”
“Let me think,” Michelle snapped.
Rhonda gave her a sharp look.
“Sorry,” she said, realizing the pressure was getting to her.
“The only other one that I know of in range,” Andrew said, “is the one by the Convention Centre.”
“That’s right,” Michelle said. She ran the surrounding streets through her mind’s eye, the way they used to be. “Any others?”
“I think there’s this other one, but I can’t be sure,” Rhonda said.
“And a gray building,” Michelle said.
“They’re all gray,” Mark said. “The Rain dyed everything.”
“But not completely. You can still see their original color in between the streaks.” She pressed the walkie-talkie’s button again. “Dillon? Dillon, you there?”
Static.
“Dillon?” She waited again but there was no reply. “Let’s go to the Convention Centre,” she said. “First choice. It falls within range of the walkie-talkie, too.” A low rumble shook the ground. She scanned the skyline, but didn’t see any giant zombies in the immediate area. But they weren’t far off either. “Keep your eyes peeled,” she said. “We stay close to the buildings for now. Hope we don’t miss Dillon if he tries to reach us. Something tells me we won’t be alone for much longer.”
14
Big, Big Trouble
August lay in the dark on an old cot. He thought he saw a shadow pass by the window to his room earlier, but might have been mistaken.
His shoulder had been tended to, and of that he was grateful, however the bandaging job hadn’t been all that great, and he had been left to deal with the pain on his own. He knew medicine was hard to come by, but they should have kept that in mind before shooting him. In between winces and waves of flame-laced agony in his shoulder, he had to keep adjusting the bandages, and lean on his shoulder to put pressure on the wound. At one point he had to strip the thin mattress cover from the cot and use it as a makeshift compress just so he could rest without constantly having to supply pressure to his shoulder.
Fatigue pressed against his eyes and as much as he wanted to sleep and heal, he couldn’t. Adrenaline kept him awake most of the time. The only bits of rest he got were due to sheer exhaustion. No dreams, just a black sleep, minutes passing swiftly. Every time he opened his eyes he felt like he just closed them but he sensed otherwise.
“Just wish I knew what they wanted with us,” he said. He glanced toward the ceiling. “Any ideas?” The dark ceiling stared back, cold and silent. “You know, it would be a great help if You opened Your mouth, especially at a time like this. Look at what’s happened. Why don’t You at least say something or signal something or whatever? We’re talking significant supernatural circumstances here and You’re leaving us to fend for ourselves? How does that make sense? You showed John the Apocalypse and had an angel guide him through it. You had Daniel by the river and showed him some stuff then had an angel say this meant that, and all the rest. You have us here fighting zombies, losing families, bleeding our guts out—and no angel.” His heart ached. “Okay, so one angel who was good at showing up and saying hi then disappearing.” His breath caught when he realized something. “You might not exist here. We’re not at home where we saw these things. There’s zombies here, but what if they originated in a different place in a different way? The big ones. Des . . . the boy changed from living to dead on his own.” He swallowed the dry lump in his throat. “Are You real here?” Can the earth exist without You? The Book says otherwise. But that Book was from the other dimension. Oh no. What if—
His thoughts were cut short when he heard footsteps coming from down the hallway. They were close, nearly just outside the door.
* * * *
“Bored yet?” Tracy asked Joe.
He sat on his haunches, leaning against a heating duct long gone cold in the middle of the roof. “No. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s patience.”
“I’m still waiting, you know.”
“I know.”
“I know what you said.”
“I know.”
“You can’t just cut yourself off and sit there, pretending like it never happened. If anything, I think you’re crazy and have encountered too many zombies.”
He nodded. “Yeah, well, sometimes I think I’ve gone crazy, too. Somewhere along the way. Even now.” Some days I feel like another piece of me has slipped off and disappeared into the dark.
She came over and stood beside him, leaning against a venting system and resting her palms on the handles of the guns sticking out of their holsters. He didn’t look up at her. “I don’t want to be up here with a loony. If things go south—”
He nodded. She would kill him. Of that he had no doubt. Tracy seemed personable, but also seemed the type that you didn’t want to get on her bad side.
Joe glanced up and down the length of the roof. Groans wafted up from below. The heavy footfalls of gi
ant zombies boomed somewhere in the distance. It was because of them he was here. Because of them the world was the way it was. Because of them August had to kill Des, someone who was becoming his friend. Because of them he was cut off from August and Billie.
Hope Billie’s managing, he thought, then added softly, “Hope she’s okay.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Then, “My friends. The ones that got away in that bi-plane. Just hope they’re all right.”
She didn’t reply.
Silence remained for a while, then Joe said, “They came here with me. There was a storm. A couple, actually, but the last one . . . we thought it would take us home. Instead, it brought us here.”
“To Winnipeg.”
“No. Not the one we knew, anyway.”
“Start making sense, Joe, or so help me I’ll shoot you. I’m not wandering around with someone who’s crazy.”
“Give me a break from all this, that’s for sure.” He rubbed his hands together, wiping the dry skin off his palms. “I’m from another world, Tracy.” He stood and faced her. “Seriously.”
She eyed him coolly. He could tell she thought he was crazy, yet there was a hint of something in her eyes that suggested she was considering he was being honest.
“Man, I’m not even going to play the ‘I’ll humor you’ game,” she said.
“You don’t have to, but I swear I’m telling you the truth, and I’m telling you because I think there’s more going on here than just the dead rising.”
“Just the dead rising? Just? You really are nuts. In case you haven’t noticed, the world is in Hell right now.”
He huffed through his nose. “I know about Hell. I’ve been there.”
“We’ve all had trauma.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been there,” he shouted. “I’ve seen it, Tracy, I swear. I swear to you that I know what lurks beneath this earth and so help me these zombies pale in comparison. You think things are hard now, there’s something far worse beneath this planet. I saw . . . I saw people, real people thrown into a lake of fire. I saw things—creatures—ugly and hideous and scarier than any rotting corpse down there. I heard screams, Tracy. Screams, the kind laced with hopelessness and despair, hoarse and feral. Humanity broken beyond repair and transformed into something else. Something” —he looked off to the side— “something no longer human, not like those creatures down there.”
Her face was like stone, her expression dead. “Those things down there are not human, Joe.”
“But they were us once. They are a glimpse of what we all become when we die. What I saw was . . . was what we are after we die. Our true selves ripped from our flesh, the part that carries on after death that’s still us and not some shell. I saw our spirits, Tracy. I saw them suffer. I saw the fire, smelled the stench, heard the cries for help. The creatures down there—the wings, the eyes, the faces.” He closed his eyes and the image flashed before him, those beings with the spider-like bodies, the scales. The heat. The screams, like a million voices shrieking as they were slaughtered alive over and over. He shook himself out of it, the memory gripping him, making him cringe. Heat flushed through his body and sweat coated his skin. Heart pounding, the world went dizzy. What he saw . . .
“That sounds—”
“Crazy, I know, but I swear it’s true.”
“So is that the ‘world’ that you’re from? Hell?”
He shook his head. “No. Obviously not. That’s not . . . . It’s not the way I meant it. My . . . my world is . . . is like yours. I’m from Winnipeg, too. But another one, some other dimension.”
She turned around and began walking away. “Give me a break, Joe. You’ve lost it and I won’t entertain a madman.”
He stomped over to her, took her by the arm and spun her around. “I’m not crazy and I’m not lying. You wanted the truth, here you go. Don’t you dare turn this around on me. Yeah, I sound nuts. Fine. I get that. But I got here through some crazy supernatural storm in a helicopter and here I am in a world where zombies are fifteen stories high and people can change into zombies if they want to. I’m not used to that. In my world, the undead were there, but that’s all they were: rotting corpses that walked around and tried to eat people. What you got going here is—”
“Wait. Zombies that change shape?”
He nodded. “I’ve seen them. Our friend, Des, was one. He died in my world before we escaped from the roof of the Richardson Building and flew into the storm the first time. We . . . we wound up in the past. I went to Hell and saw how this whole thing started.” It all made sense now. “Those aren’t mere zombies down there. They’re demons possessing corpses, spreading themselves through bites and infections.”
“And we’re not, um, possessed because—?”
“I’m not sure, and we’ll find out, but listen, we came back and crashed on the Richardson Building’s roof. Des greeted us when we got back and this was after the dead took him. They wouldn’t have just left him alone. I’ve seen too many of these creatures to know that. They would have eaten him, guaranteed. But he greeted us upon our return, looking fine. But I noticed he was different; he didn’t act the same. Then he changed and went from live to undead inside a second. Tell me you’ve seen that here before.”
She slowly shook her head.
“Then anyone you know could be one.” He looked down. “Even me.” He braced himself to be shot, but instead Tracy just stood there, taking him in.
A few moments later she glanced away and pulled out her gun.
* * * *
A door screeched open in the distance. Billie moved in the direction of the sound. She rounded a corner and emerged in another hallway. At the end of it, a door was open.
“A trap,” she said quietly. “Del.” Or August. She shuddered at the idea that Del crossed her mind first and not her friend.
With the one keyboard stake she had left, she made her way toward the open door.
A shadowy figure stepped out of the doorway and Billie immediately hid behind the nearest doorframe. The figure looked both ways up and down the hallway, then disappeared back into the room.
“Here we go,” she whispered and came out of hiding and moved toward the room.
At the doorway, she went to its edge, back against the wall. She listened for any sound within. There was none. She silently counted to three then poked her head around the corner. The room was dark, a bed in the middle, a figure under the blankets. The wheezing coming from the figure was old and raspy. Barely able to see in the dim lighting, she noticed the figure had bandages wrapped around its arm and shoulder.
Has to be him. Resting. Looked out into the hallway for trouble then lay back down.
“Psst, August,” she whispered. “You awake?”
No reply, just the steady wheezing.
“Come on, we got to go. Get up.”
She thought she heard a noise from somewhere down the hallway but could have been mistaken.
“August? Hey? Wake up. Let’s go. I just saw you.”
The figure didn’t stir.
One last try, she thought. Not hanging around here any longer than I have to.
Billie went into the room and tip-toed up to the bed. “August, wake up. It’s me, Billie. I know you’re hurt, but we got to leave now.”
She shook his shoulder.
The figure’s face lolled into the available light.
It was Del.
Billie screamed.
Del’s eyes went white and his mouth opened wide, jagged teeth clean and a dry tongue wiggling inside. He was on his feet in an instant, his strong undead hands reaching for her.
* * * *
Joe stood there, his fingers aching to grab the X-09 and point it at Tracy, but he held back, knowing his next move would determine her trust in him for as long as he was in this world.
Tracy stared down the barrel. Joe stared back. Both were silent.
The heavy footfalls of giant zombies boomed; the building shook with their vibration
. Undead moans rose from the streets below. The gray and brown sky loomed over them like a veil one wears at a funeral, bringing a shadow onto everything.
Tracy didn’t move, her stance perfect, braced for the kick of the gun once it went off. Joe again ignored the weight of the X-09 in its holster and put aside the need in his fingers to wrap themselves around its grip.
“Not today,” Tracy said, and lowered her weapon. “Not tomorrow nor ever. Unless you become one.”
Joe nodded.
“But you’re a coward,” she said.
He furrowed his brow. “Why?”
She took a step closer. Joe didn’t flinch. “Because I could be one of them. Even now I could turn on you and you’d be dead.”
“True. I would be dead.”
“Why didn’t you pull your gun and shoot?”
“I’m not in the business of killing folks who are still alive.” What he meant was killing folks who still lived by the rules of the living and hadn’t degenerated into psychos who played with people and zombies for fun, like the goons who tried to get a zombie to rape Betty in the other world.
“You don’t know that about me.”
“I do. I don’t just spend time with anyone, Tracy. I don’t do that anymore. Your humanity revealed itself the day you rescued me, but more in the way you treated me.” Des lost his concern for others. That’s how I knew he was different even before I learned what really happened to him.