We pass warehouses, including a beer warehouse that makes Nelly drool, until we come upon a concrete building the length of a city block. It’s flat and squat, with at least a dozen loading bay doors along the street side. Rows of trailers line the back of the lot in which a few zombies ramble.
“Dude, this place is gigantic,” James says after he’s pulled to a stop. He tucks his hair behind his ear and his legs pump up and down.
“No wonder no one wanted to come back,” Jamie mutters.
I can imagine the nooks and crannies hiding Lexers in a building this large. We’ll only venture into half of it; the food on the cold storage side is definitely past its sell-by date. Terry pulls past the guard house and around the building. There are the standard-issue Lexers who lay on the concrete, finally dead, and those who begin the excruciatingly slow task of coming to devour us.
“Sometimes I wish they were just a mite faster,” I say. Everyone but Peter laughs, and I nudge him. “Joking.”
He nudges me back. “Oh, was that what that was?”
“Let’s meet them halfway,” Nelly says. “We don’t have all day to wait for ten dumbass zombies.”
It feels good to stretch my legs; every muscle has tightened upon seeing this place. The Lexers’ groans are louder than our footfalls in the quiet. I’m used to the silence by now, especially in the woods, but sometimes it’s still strange in places with dead machinery, trucks and buildings that used to have such noisy purpose.
Once the Lexers are down, we inspect the lot. Whoever said a storm is coming must be right; the temperature has dropped in the past hour. Frank rubs his eyes. He stayed behind to examine the bodies we dropped, maybe looking for his son, and I grow more sympathetic toward him even though he hasn’t become any nicer to us. “The others are all in there?” he asks.
Terry nods. Tara and Philip shift on their feet, and I wonder how many times they’ve done something like this. By the way she holds her knife, as if she’s going to slice carrots instead of stab through bone, I’m thinking not many. But I like Tara, so I sidle close. “You should hold your knife like Psycho,” I say.
She bites her lip. “What?”
“You know, Ee-ee-ee.” I hold up a fist and pretend to stab what’s-her-name in the shower.
“Right.” She turns it in her hand and says, “Thanks.”
Patricia rolls her eyes and swings her machete. Tara throws her a dirty look. Now I’m certain that I love Tara.
“So, let’s get the first ones out,” Zeke says. “Then we’ll go in and get the loading doors up.”
After a futile attempt to raise the loading bay doors from outside, some of us wait in the pickup’s bed while Nelly opens the employee door and comes running. Over a dozen Lexers emerge from the gloom, shuffling along until they fall headfirst down the stairs. They rise up, answer our calls with hisses and walk our way. I lift my axe and spike one before pushing it as far away as possible to leave room for the next.
A woman with the remnants of tattoos under her rotten skin throws herself against the pickup. I bury the spike in her forehead and she slides to the ground before I can move her. Peter shoves his machete under the chin of a tall one and then uses the blade to toss him away.
“Impressive,” I say. He glances at me in amusement and tosses another.
“Now you’re just showing off,” I say, which elicits a real laugh.
We wait for the stragglers to make their way across the lot. The last one is moldy, with a single tuft of hair and exposed ribs, but it gets back on its feet every time it trips. It’s the epitome of zombies—no matter how dead they should be, somehow they keep going. I guess you could say the same about us. It lands face-first into another body on the ground, rises covered in brown gore, and then slips again.
All the others are dead and, as Nelly said, we don’t have all day, so I jump to the ground and cover the five feet. Its hand scrabbles for my ankle as I bury the axe blade. I spin around, slam into Peter and squeak in surprise.
“Glue,” he says, and steadies me by my shoulders. “You sure you can do this? You look awful.”
I don’t argue; I made the mistake of looking in the mirror before we left. “Yeah, I can.”
Nelly grimaces at the gray sky. “Today is a shitty day to die.”
“We’ve already decided we’re not dying,” I say. “Right, Peter?” Peter nods, jaw tight.
Jamie’s flushed face is surrounded by a halo of black frizz that’s escaped from her bun. She looks like the Jamie of two weeks ago, small and bursting with energy instead of tired and beaten down. “I’m not dying.”
Nelly gives a firm nod. “Let’s do it.”
An orchestra of groans filters through the open door. A far-off clatter comes from somewhere inside. I can’t tell if it’s as bad as it sounds or if the vast space amplifies the noises, but even with that factored in, it sounds like somewhere I don’t want to be.
I put extra magazines in one coat pocket and fireworks in the other. I have my axe in my hand, a spare knife on my belt and the reality that I might be about to die hanging over my head. I take a deep breath and immediately regret it when my lungs seize. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.
CHAPTER 55
We enter through the door marked Receiving Office on the far end of the long building. This is one of what I’m sure will be many tricky parts—how to see without being seen for as long as possible. Zeke and Liz enter first, followed by me and Peter. Zeke’s flashlight illuminates the remains of what were once beds and are now twisted piles of blankets, sleeping bags and cardboard. There’s a rudimentary woodstove made out of a metal barrel, daylight seeping in around the stovepipe that feeds through a hacked-out hole in the wall. The air smells strongly of zombies and faintly of burnt plastic and shit and spoiled food.
Zeke covers the flashlight beam with his hand and motions us to the windows that face the warehouse’s main floor. The few skylights make what could be pitch black a shadowy gray. The light is brightest at the top of the shelves, which run in long rows to the rear of the building. There are empty spaces on the shelving, but the majority is pallets of plastic-wrapped boxes as far as the eye can see. We suck in our breath. No matter what they’d said, I don’t think any of us believed there could still be this much stuff left anywhere in the world, much less a city. It’s akin to finding the dragon’s treasure, but there’s still the dragon to contend with.
Lexers move in the light that filters to the floor. More Lexers than we bargained for. They don’t know we’re here, but they will soon enough. The plan is to raise the loading doors, both to let in light and let out the zombies, and then kill them in relative safety from the vehicles outside.
Once Nelly, Chuck, Rich and James have joined us, Zeke presses his flashlight to the glass. To our right is a single loading door and a small office built into the corner. He turns the beam left, to where the remainder of the warehouse stretches for hundreds of feet. The loading area in front of the first few doors is cleared and past that are the pallet rooms Terry mentioned, as well as jumbles of debris too shadowed to make out. It looks like all hell broke loose.
The five foot high fence is made of strips of metal and runs from the wall to our right into the darkness. It looks secure enough to hold back the hundreds of zombies behind it. In places, boxes are piled against the fence. In the places where they aren’t, Lexers strain against the metal, arms groping through the wide spaces. It’s taken us thirty seconds to get the lay of the land, which is also enough time for everything in here to have noticed us. The ones on this side of the fence lurch toward the office with dumb, ravenous faces.
“You ready?” Zeke asks. “Head to the first two doors after the fireworks.”
Nelly and I lob our lit Zombie Zingers to the right, away from the main area. The tiny flames arc into the dark. A few moments later, when the groans have reached a crescendo, the room is filled with loud cracks. The Lexers turn toward them, lit by the flashes of light.
We jump th
e ramp and make for the loading doors. I flick on my headlamp—there’s no choice in the matter if we want to avoid tripping. Nelly tosses more fireworks well away from the first. The last thing we need is to start a fire or make zombie torches. Using fireworks indoors is already risky enough.
Peter and I stand sentry while Chuck and Rich get to work. Nelly and James guard Liz and Zeke. I hand Nelly more fireworks to throw. He played football in high school. I flunked softball. He’s the obvious choice.
Daylight shoots across the floor when our door rises two inches, but it goes no higher. Chuck yanks on something with a curse, and Zeke and Liz aren’t having any better luck. Three Lexers approach, skin bleached and blood black in my LED light. James hits one with his machete and then lunges for another. He didn’t have much practice on the farm, and he kills them as if he’s been waiting a year to do it. Peter gets the other and returns to my side.
More Lexers limp toward us. The rattling and light have attracted them, and Nelly’s added fireworks do nothing to dissuade them. The door cranks up another few inches, although not enough to escape. I try to focus on what’s in front of me and not panic that more Lexers have cut off our route to the office. At this point, it’s either into the fray or out the door. Rattling comes from behind, and then the front of the warehouse is light enough to see that every Lexer this side of the fence is on its way.
“Cassie!” Peter yells.
I turn, heart hammering, to see the door not much farther from the floor than when I last looked. The smallest of us—me and Liz—might be able to fit through. Liz flattens herself to the floor and slides out feet first. Peter motions for me to do the same. I want to be sure they’re safe. I want to get out of here. It feels wrong to leave and stupid to stay.
Nelly shoves me to my stomach when I hesitate, waits for me to feed my feet through the opening, and hacks at the oncoming bodies. Peter pushes at my shoulders while someone pulls my ankles from outside. I wince as the edge of the door scrapes along my back. Peter looks the same as he did a year ago when he thought he was as good as dead—black eyes and pale skin and resigned expression. I won’t let it end this way, with him saving my life one last time. I kick the hands off my feet and try to gain purchase on the floor, but he gives me a final shove that sends me to the concrete outside.
I peer through the opening, my eyes adjusted to the dark enough to see Peter fighting his way deeper into the building, toward the shelves, with the others just ahead of him.
“We’ll come back in!” I yell. Too many people have been left behind, too many people are a mystery, and I will not tell Bits I’ve left her father behind unless I have no other choice. And I promised Adam and Penny I’d do my best.
Peter lifts a hand. I watch him disappear into the dark until a putrid face sinks to the opening and forces me to back away.
Liz’s chest heaves. “The doors should lift by the chain once you’ve pulled a release cord on the electric controls, but someone’s fixed them so they won’t go up. It looks like wire’s threaded through the links. We need something to cut them. We can’t force them any higher.”
Ben runs to the truck for our bolt cutter and a pair of wire cutters and meets us at the office door. “Stay out here,” he says to Mikayla. She shakes her head stiffly, terrified but unyielding. I don’t know what she had to do on the way here, but at the farm she was always in the kitchen and never at the fence.
“Who has the radio?” Kyle asks.
Liz unclips the radio from her belt and holds it up without a word. We stare at the only link to those inside. But if they’ve made it to the shelves, they’ll be safe for a while.
“Wait out here,” Kyle says to the Talkeetnans. “We’ll get the door open. You start on them after they’re out.”
They nod, either completely willing or too frightened by the snarl on his face not to heed his command. Liz and I lead the others inside to the office windows. A couple of shadowy figures stand on the second tier of shelves behind the fence. I wish I could tell who they are, but I’m also afraid to know.
The Lexers are so focused on the shelves that they don’t notice when Kyle runs his Maglite along the glass. A light flashes from the shelves. Three short bursts, three long bursts, three short bursts. Then again. We all know the Morse code SOS signal. Kyle answers with three short, one long, one short. Understood.
“I’m at the door with Liz,” Kyle says. “The rest of you keep them away as long as you can.”
We hop over the ramp and to the floor, retracing our earlier route. Kyle boosts Liz to his shoulders to work on the chain while the rest of us fan out. There’s not many to kill because whoever is on the shelves is purposely making enough noise to keep their attention.
Light floods in behind me, illuminating garbage, discarded clothing, bodies, five gallon buckets-turned-toilets that spilled their contents long ago, and Lexers that have begun the short shuffle toward us.
We hop off the ledge and run to the pickup while Lexers drop off the loading dock. It’s a parade of open sores and exposed bones and ragged clothing, and when they hit the truck it rocks hard enough that I grip the side. I hack into brains and eyes and anything else I can reach. The faster this is finished, the sooner I’ll know who’s alive. The Talkeetnans hang out the back of the semi’s trailer and kill their fair share.
Peter. Nelly. James. Zeke. My axe beats with every name. I don’t know Chuck and Rich, but Peter loves them and that’s enough for me. The bodies pile around the pickup until they become a wall too high for the next ones to climb. I sight down my pistol. The .22 scrambles their brains just like John said.
And then it’s done. We jump to the ground in the sudden quiet. It’s impossible to avoid stepping on the bodies, and I destroy all of Peter’s boot-scrubbing when I sink ankle-deep into what I think is empty space but is actually a torso under two corpses. We move the trucks so we have space to kill the remaining Lexers before we take down that fence and lead them outside.
Inside, the quiet is swapped for moaning. The fence rattles at our approach. There must be two hundred, maybe more.
Liz swings a flashlight and yells, “Who’s up there?”
“All of us,” Zeke’s deep drawl rings out. “You gonna let them out the door or what?”
I droop in relief while Liz whoops and yells, “Simmer down, Z.K. You’ll be out in a few.”
We mull over killing them while standing on the boxes along the fence, but the stacks look too unstable to hold our weight. The fence is bolted and welded, with a gate near the open loading bay door.
“Let’s check the fence line to make sure this gate will let them all out,” Kyle says. “Then we’ll do it.”
Half of us follow the metal toward the rooms of pallets. The fence sways but holds, although I wouldn’t spend too long teasing the Lexers behind it. We turn to make our way back and see Frank stabbing through the fence down in the light of the open bay. In the few seconds that it takes me to wonder what he’s up to, he steps on a lower rail and leans over, dragging a Lexer up and over the top.
“What the f—” Kyle begins before we take off in Frank’s direction.
Between zombies pushing and Frank yanking, the fence gives way with a loud pop. We stop dead; we’ll never make it to the exit now that Lexers pour into our safe area, killing our surefire plan. I will them to head for the light, but they don’t. They head for us.
We scatter. I race between two pallets and find myself in one of the makeshift rooms. I turn for the entrance, where a preteen girl with long hair and an eyeball that’s oozed from its socket knocks me to the floor and comes down after me. Her mouth opens in slow motion, teeth gleaming in my headlamp. I scramble to my feet, but more are in the entry, and I back away until I hit the rear wall of boxes almost as tall as me. Preteen zombie is on her feet. Five Lexers are closing in. I’m fucked.
***
My brother climbed mountains. Eric always said there was nothing better than the rush of reaching a peak, that he thought no drug
could come close. Why he would want to climb to somewhere cold—to risk his life for a thrill—was beyond me, but I’d listen to his stories with awe. And one always stuck out in my mind.
He’d been on the top of some mountain or other, making his way up the ice, when he’d started to slide. Not just a little slide, but one that took him over the edge of a cliff of ice. Eric didn’t panic, although the story alone, told by the woodstove in my parents’ cabin, was enough to make my heart race and mouth go dry. He said the scene played out in slow motion. That he felt as if he had all the time in the world to think about his next move. Just in time, he sank the spike of his axe into the sheet of ice as far back as he could reach and used the handle to pull himself up and over.
And that’s what I hope will save me now. I kick at the first two zombies and slam my axe into the top of the pallet wall. I pull to check it’s secure and use the handle to climb, my feet scrambling on the side. When I reach the top, I sink to my knees and struggle to breathe through the muck in my lungs.
There’s so much noise that I can’t think, but I’m grateful to still be breathing, such as it is. I wave in the blinding beam of a flashlight from the shelves before it moves to search for others and then turn off my headlamp so it doesn’t act as a zombie beacon. I rise to my feet and stumble when a hand catches my boot from behind. They’re on both sides now, and I don’t have enough clearance to escape a two-sided attack.
The boxes shake and shift. The cardboard beneath my feet sinks an inch, then another. It’s going to collapse. I leap for the pallets that make up the side wall of the room and know instantly that I’ve overshot the distance. I teeter on the edge before plummeting hand-first to the concrete floor. I’ll feel this in my wrists tomorrow, but right now I don’t feel anything but sheer terror mixed with relief that I’ve landed on the other side instead of into their waiting arms. An empty can skitters past, kicked by something coming my way, and I raise my hand. My axe-less hand.
Until the End of the World (Book 3): All the Stars in the Sky Page 29