Dead Hunger VI_The Gathering Storm

by Eric A. Shelman

  I hesitated for a moment, watching it all unfold before me. I knew I had to act because I couldn’t take what was happening any more.

  The red-eyed freak was distracted and I had learned all I needed to know from the macabre act playing out in front of us. I pulled my 9mm from my drop holster and took two quick steps toward her. I turned my shoulder into her and knocked her backward. Her feet caught on the body of the downed 300 pound rotter and she tripped, falling hard onto her back, her head colliding solidly with the concrete floor, giving her extraordinary brain a severe jolt.

  Her reanimated rotter baby, still connected to her by a shriveled umbilical cord, slid beneath the basement steps, the cord tearing in two as it slammed against the far wall. A sickening gurgle emitted from its throat.

  I had ridden the powerful creature down in free fall, already knowing I would not need the gun. I let it slide away, pushed her remaining arm against the floor and snatched a handful of her hair in a tit for tat gesture.

  I took greater advantage of my grip on her than she had earlier, when the roles had been reversed.

  “Girls, heads down!” I screamed. I didn’t look to be sure. I wasn’t taking my eyes off that bitch. Pulling her head up, I slammed it back into the concrete once, twice, and a third time, all of my strength behind it, until I heard a sound that told me her skull fractured and I saw the evidence of her formerly grey matter running black and gooey beneath her.

  I released her and stared down at her face. Finally. She was as dead as she should have been well over a year ago.

  I heard something and looked up to see Charlie withdrawing the machete from the zombie fetus’s head. When our eyes met, Charlie said nothing. She just nodded.

  I thanked her with my eyes.

  “More mothers,” said Isis. “Near.”

  “We have to leave here,” said Hemp. “Everyone, gather your things and we have to go. We’re far too exposed now.”

  Hemp was dead right. We didn’t argue. We started gathering necessities.

  *****

  Chapter Twelve

  The streets were flooded now. Far worse than when we had arrived and just figuring out a way to detour around the many puddles of indeterminate depth was a bitch.

  “Flex, I don’t know, man,” said Punch, his eyes on a river of water flowing across the roadway ahead.

  “Neither do I, but it’s a fuckin’ Land Cruiser, so it should be able to handle a foot or two of water.”

  “I’m just worried about getting swept off the road into deeper stuff,” said Punch. “This crap is obviously coming from some river overflowing somewhere.”

  The rain was torrential and even the heavy 4-wheel drive was feeling every shift in direction the blasting wind took. First the gusts slammed us head on, forcing me to press the gas harder to continue my forward progression, and next thing I knew I was cranking my wheel hard left into the wind to prevent us from being blown off the wet roads. My arms were getting tired from fighting the steering wheel.

  “I gotta push through, buddy,” I said. “We’re gonna need to find an alternate route besides the way we came in, too,” I added.

  “Yeah, those roads were marginal then,” Punch said. “I know I saw other alternate north south corridors on the west side of the interstate. Just stay on this road as long as you can. If we have to get off to get around something, we’ll just make sure we get back to it.”

  I rolled through a puddle that turned into a tiny lake. The river we’d rolled through moments earlier was flowing fast, but was only about a foot and a half deep; something the Land Cruiser could handle with relative ease.

  Now the wheels were submerged. We rolled forward more, and I saw the water top the fender wells. Only when it topped the hood did I become concerned about the vehicle’s ability to keep water out of the electrical components. Even well-sealed electronics would start to leak if the submersion was prolonged.

  A hand appeared in the water ahead, but I could do nothing but continue inching forward toward it. If I stopped, there was a chance that either I would become stuck or the engine would stall. As I gained another two feet, the hand slid onto the hood, followed by the connected arm, shoulder and head. The other arm appeared, and before we knew it, a dead face peered through the windshield at Punch and me, his ravaged, nude body spread-eagle on my hood like Punch and I had been engaged in a macabre zombie hunt where we’d bagged ourselves a buck.

  The engine kept running and I did my best to ignore the former floater – now a crawler – who had determined that we were a mobile island refuge. I’d shake him off as soon as the Toyota’s big tires found solid purchase on higher ground.

  Meanwhile, I rolled forward, paying silent homage to whatever patron saint it was that was in charge of keeping combustion engines running.

  We drove on, and each time the engine sputtered or hesitated, I gripped the steering wheel more tightly as though such force could prevent anything bad from happening. Had I driven any faster, the water would have splashed onto the windshield, so I inched along, the clinging, nude dead man riding us onto dry land.

  In another thirty feet the water receded and soon, we were again able to see the asphalt beneath us. I revved the engine, trying to dry any components that had begun to get wet, and after a bit, the engine began to smooth.

  The storm was knocking us around even as we sat still. Our guest did not vacate the hood, so I thought it was time to use a little bug spray on him. Despite the pounding rain, I rolled down my window, and with my super soaker in one hand, I sprayed him in the face with another shot down his back just for good measure.

  Watching what happened next was fascinating. The face shot had begun the process of melting his features, like a wax figure from Madame Trousseau’s Museum. His eyes ran down his cheeks and his nose melted to his open, gaping mouth. He gnashed on, appearing to swallow himself.

  “Fuckin’ A,” said Punch. “Wow.”

  My hands resting on the steering wheel, I watched the shot of urushiol that I’d sent down his exposed back working, and as we looked on with fascination, it dissolved him like sulfuric acid, his body splitting end to end right along his spine. As the zombie-caustic liquid worked its way through his narrow mass of reanimated flesh, the peaked slope of the hood and the weight of the two halves of his body pulled him slowly apart, the connecting tendrils and melted innards stretching away from one another like the inside of a warm, gooey cinnamon roll being torn in two for sharing.

  His right side slipped across the hood toward the driver’s side of the Land Cruiser, occasionally hindered by the intense wind that rippled it like the surface of a lake. The rotter’s left side, in this case assisted by the same wind, slid off toward Punch’s side of the vehicle. It was impossible to turn away, even as the already destroyed face that still turned toward us began to tear apart, pulled along by the steady disintegration of the body behind it already underway.

  Because the lower trunk of the creature had not been fully effected by the urushiol, eventually, the whole mess slid forward from the hood and out of view. I was more than certain it had come to rest in one form or another on the inside of my cow catcher, slopping onto itself like a massive pile of raw liver.

  I was suddenly glad it was raining. If it were hot and sunny, we’d have ourselves some baked on zombie that might permanently damage our winch, which was mounted directly behind the cowcatcher, the cable running through the heavy steel pilot.

  The rain peppered away at the hood, and eventually the streaks of gore left behind were rinsed away, leaving no sign that the zombie had ever clung there – at least from inside the SUV.

  Punch looked at me. “Holy shit, man. That was something.”

  “Imagine the first time we saw that juice at work,” I said.

  “Better go, man. While we’ve got open road.”

  *****

  As it turned out, the storm was solely responsible for the flooded streets in the city. From the map, Punch didn’t see any nearby rivers w
hose banks could have overflowed enough to cause such flooding. Old Hurricane George was just a massive storm producing torrential rains.

  The roads had been high and dry up to the point where we saw the bridge ahead of us. According to the sign, hanging by one mount and dangling upside-down, it spanned the Catawba River. The pilings supporting the bridge beyond the flapping sign had washed out, and the two-lane bridge was angled sharply to the west with the southbound lane completely submerged in water. The river washed over it so fast that I didn’t even have to look to Punch for his opinion.

  “Shit!” I yelled over the howling wind and sharply angling downpour.

  The water sheeting across the bridge met the incredible force of the wind, which whipped it into the air in a ocean-like spray of mist. The finer particles of water were pounded back to the earth by the driving rain in a circular battle that would not end until the storm passed. There would be no winner in the conflict that raged before us, and certainly, with visibility ahead entirely diminished, we were the losers.

  “We gotta go around it, Flex!” shouted Punch, quickly unfolding the map enough to see other possible routes we could take to skirt around the damaged overpass.

  His finger ran along our current path, and as he leaned toward me to offer his solution, something slammed into my driver’s side window.

  I turned to see a skeletal female pressed against my door, so short that her head barely reached the top of my mirror. One bony hand clung to the window, and I guessed that she had been blown into the side of the Land Cruiser by Hurricane George.

  I threw the vehicle into reverse and punched the gas, catching her head with the rear view mirror, plucking it from her shoulders. It caught there in that steel nook between the door and mirror mount, and I could not take my eyes from it as the body it once utilized for mobility fell away and collapsed on the side of the road. Still intact and undamaged, the head looked at me and began to gnash its few remaining teeth, its black tongue, shriveled and tar-like flitting in and out of view.

  I slammed on the brakes and cranked the steering wheel, but the head did not fall away. Once the truck was facing a direction where the sharply angling rain would not pour into my window, I said, “Punch, give me that fuckin’ Maglight off the floor there, man, would you?”

  He retrieved it and passed it to me, saying, “Your girlfriend’s pretty cute, man, and I can see she’s kinda attached to your truck. Sure you wanna end it this way?”

  “Yeah, fuck off,” I said, laughing. I hit the down button on the window, let it click into Auto mode and held the heavy flashlight with the handle down. Once the window hit bottom, I pounded on the top of the rotter’s cranium, driving it out of its wedged-in position.

  No tears and no goodbyes. She popped out and dropped to the pavement below without so much as a grunt. I put the window back up.

  “I can go through this shit a thousand times and every time it’s different,” I said. “I guess I’m just thankful she wasn’t a red-eye.”

  “I’ll second that,” said Punch. “Buddy, drive about half a mile back this way to Sutton Road and make a left. You’re gonna need fuel, too.”

  I looked at the gas gauge. It was on empty. I tapped it. “That’s not right, man. We filled it just before we got into town, remember? We left the cans where your GTO is.”

  I tried the headlights. Nothing. I realized the dashboard lights were dead, too. I looked at Punch.

  “The only thing working is the ignition,” I said.

  “I thought I smelled something earlier, but I didn’t want to jinx us by saying anything,” said Punch. “The electrical system might be sizzling away as we speak. Better make time, Flex.”

  I hit the gas hard and we reached Sutton Road and I turned. I saw the signs for I-77 immediately.

  “Shit,” I said. “Maybe we can zigzag our way through.”

  “Other than that we’re looking at an old train bridge about half a mile east of here,” said Punch.

  “Wonder if the bed is wide enough to drive across,” I said. “It might actually be our best bet.”

  “Only a half mile to the 77,” he said. “Let’s take a look. If it’s a no go, we’ll just flip it around and take Sutton back to the train tracks.”

  I drove on, fighting the storm and praying I didn’t stall the Toyota. There was no longer any guarantee that a turn of the key would yield any result.

  *****

  Something else had blocked the upper door since I had returned to the basement. We now stood in two inches of water and Nelson and Dave were at the top of the stairs taking turns kicking the door.

  “How’s it going, guys?” asked Hemp, who had taken everything from the basement he thought we could use, but we still did not have an idea where we would go or how we’d get there.

  “It’s open a couple of inches,” said Nelson. “Another couple of my Subdudo kicks ought to crack the sucker.”

  “Be my guest,” said Dave, moving three steps down. I saw it wasn’t easy coming at the door from below, because there wasn’t an upper landing upon which to stand.

  “Here goes nothing,” said Nelson, standing on the second step below the door. He didn’t appear to use much effort, yet the door shook pretty good in its frame and I heard a substantial crack.

  “I think I got it,” called Nelson, looking down at us. Trina and Taylor had become very reserved. I could tell they were scared and I thought it strange that these two little girls were more frightened of a hurricane than they were of reanimated corpses. Ain’t that just the way of the world today.

  “One more kick outta do it,” said Nelson. “Looks like it might split about two feet up, so we’ll have to do a step-over maybe.”

  “Everybody, come over here,” Hemp said, standing in a far corner where the rain wasn’t being blown by the savage wind.

  Everyone moved toward Hemp. He spoke in a loud voice to be heard over the cacophony of nature’s rage.

  “I’ve consolidated a lot of things,” he said. “But I need you all to gather every gun, every piece of ammunition and every baseball bat,” he said. “I want you to have anything and everything that can kill the abnormals. Knives, urushiol-filled squirt guns, you name it. There may be no opportunity to come back here.”

  “What about the WAT-5?” I asked. “Hemp, did you get it all?”

  He nodded. “We’re good for another hour,” he said. “When we get to the lab it might be a good idea to take more.”

  “Oh, my God,” said Charlie.

  We all looked at her. “What’s wrong, Charlie?” I asked, but the way she was holding her stomach was something I’d seen many times – including once with myself. “Oh, my God, Charlie. Did your water break?”

  She looked at us and nodded, her eyes terrified. “I’m afraid so,” she said.

  Hemp rushed to her. “Charlie, are you having any contractions yet?”

  Charlie shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I was having some pretty good cramps, though. Didn’t want to say anything.”

  “Of course you should have said something,” said Hemp. He looked at me. “And Gem, the answer to your question is that I have our entire supply of WAT-5 in my pocket. I’ve got enough that all of us are good for another twenty-five hours or so.”

  I was relieved to hear it. If we had to leave, we needed protection, at least from the normal rotters. “Where does that leave us?” I asked. “Do you still have the base mixture on ice somewhere?”

  When the eye vapor from a regular zombie and the component coming out of the earth was blended under sub-freezing temperatures, it formed a gel-like substance. Once it warmed, the blended components self-multiplied – I don’t know the technical term for it, but it keeps growing forever until you halt the process by adding urushiol. Without the urushiol, a quarter-sized amount would fill a cookie sheet in a matter of two or three minutes. We never found out whether it would eventually stop on its own. We would merely make what we needed and re-freeze the remainder so that
we wouldn’t have to mix the two components again.

  Hemp said, “We’ve been down here for some time now, so I’m assuming our small generator on the lab has run out of fuel, without us there to refill it. If that’s the case, I’m assuming the freezer’s temperature has risen significantly above 32 degrees at this point. The mixture might be growing exponentially as we speak.”

  “Hemp,” I said, “That’s a perfect place for the doc to deliver Charlie’s baby.”

  “It is,” said Hemp. “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Well,” said Scofield, taking Charlie gently by the arm and leading her to a chair in one of the driest corners, “until we get you there, I want you to relax.”

  Charlie went with him but did not sit. Instead, she held onto the back of the chair and kept one hand on her stomach.

  “Charlie, you need to get off your feet,” said Scofield. He looked up at Dave and Nelson. “How’s that door coming, guys? This little lady needs to get somewhere safe and dry.”

  Charlie gritted her teeth and folded forward, her eyes squinted against the pain. Hemp rushed to her and steadied her.

  “Ow, shit,” Charlie moaned. She blew out hard, emptying her lungs, then sucked in a deep breath. “Wow. Wow,” she said, her eyes moving from Hemp to Doc Scofield.

  “Okay, that was a contraction,” said Scofield. “Gentlemen, I can deliver the baby here, but I’d prefer that she not be lying in almost three inches of water.”

  It felt as though we were in some sort of limbo. So many things needed to happen, but it seemed everything that did happen was happening to us, not being initiated by us.

  We were in reaction, rather than action mode. Not good in the times of zombies. I looked up to see Rachel watching Nelson at the top of the stairs and Bug holding onto Isis, his full pack on his back, clearly ready to roll when an exit was established.

  Lola sat quietly in the corner watching everything unfold, and Serena stayed with Trina and Taylor, making sure they were calm. The two children looked at Charlie, and I could tell they were worried about her.