by Gibb, Lew
He turned, and his eyes flicked over Jerry, Alberto, and the kids. Jerry could tell he was about to say something, probably not complimentary, when his eyes looked beyond the doorway, and his demeanor changed completely.
“Hey, beautiful.” He stood and shouldered past Jerry, already holding out a hand, and stopped in front of Holly. “Where you been all my life. My name’s Justin. What’s yours?”
Jerry caught the slightest eye roll from Holly before she smiled, took his hand, and answered, “Holly. Nice to meet you.”
“Yes. It’s very nice to meet you, too. Why don’t you come on in? Make yourself at home.” He backed into the kitchen still holding Holly’s hand. “There’s some beers in the fridge. We can get to know each other better.”
Jerry couldn’t resist. “Yeah, Holly. Why don’t you and Justin go have a drink and get to know each other? We’ll whip up some dinner and call you when it’s ready.”
Justin was still smiling and so focused on Holly, he seemed completely oblivious to anything else.
“Actually, I’m really hungry,” Holly said, retrieving her hand and giving Maria a pleading look as she squeezed past Justin into the kitchen. “Would you mind if we made some food for dinner?”
“You got it, Mami.” Justin turned and followed her. “Mi casa es tu casa.” He spread his arms and looked around the kitchen.
Chapter Forty-Six
The sounds of Emma and the rest of the group exploring their new sanctuary faded as Rachel took two steps into a room at the front of the warehouse. It was probably the main office for whatever business occupied the space. Emma had confirmed her position as matriarch by ordering everyone to search the warehouse for lurking zombies, and while they were at it, some food and somewhere to sleep. No one challenged her. In fact, everyone jumped to it as soon as she finished speaking like they were used to doing what she said. Rachel had decided to do her searching on her own. She wasn’t quite ready to trust people.
Rachel could get into having a family that obedient. She usually had to cajole and convince Jerry to do pretty much anything, and the dogs seemed to just be humoring her most of the time.
A short bark of laughter escaped her mouth at the thought of how she’d basically ordered Jerry to take back the MREs. Did she really want to be married to someone who actually followed an order like that without question? If Jerry ever talked to her that way, she’d slap his face and then, at the least, he’d be sleeping on the couch till he groveled and apologized sufficiently. And now he was actually right about the apocalypse.
“I am such an asshole,” she whispered. “I’ll be lucky to have any kind of family the way I’m going.”
Rachel grimaced and scanned the space to push thoughts of what a selfish bitch she was out of her mind. A pair of cheap particleboard desks sat back-to-back in the center of the room with a couple of battered, chest-high lateral file cabinets pushed up against the faux-mahogany paneling. All were covered with random office supplies and the occasional Broncos souvenir. A dark plaid couch sat against the back wall. A tool calendar hung from a pushpin up near the front door. It reminded her of the auto shop the dad of one of her best friend’s had run in the eighties. She was pretty sure a woman had never worked there. It didn’t look like anyone really worked there.
The front wall and door were mostly covered with rough cotton curtains but were pulled back enough to reveal the edges of the full-length glass panels behind them. All that glass made Rachel’s palms sweat, and her right hand drifted toward her pistol. If a zombie ran full speed into those windows, the glass would break, for sure. It’d even break if more than two of them leaned against it. Then a zombie horde would fill the ten-by-ten space in about three seconds and devour anyone who happened to be dumb enough to be standing in front of it.
She was about to turn and head back to find the others when the key, dangling from the calendar’s pushpin, caught her eye. She sucked air through her teeth and stepped over to the door. Light bleeding into the room from the rest of the warehouse turned the glass into a black mirror. Eric had found a couple of big flashlights and a big battery-powered lantern that he’d set up in the middle of the space so they could see what they were doing. She didn’t dare yell for them to turn off the lights.
Rachel put her hand on the door’s aluminum push bar. She stood like that for a few seconds, not wanting to find out. Why wouldn’t the door be locked? The office was empty, wasn’t it? So was the warehouse. She couldn’t believe she was standing there trying to convince herself it was locked when there was a surefire way to know. The breath she had been holding whooshed out, and she pushed. The door moved.
Rachel froze.
“Fuck,” she hissed under her breath. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Her heart seemed to be trying to pound its way out of her chest as she imagined a zombie randomly pulling the handle, yanking it out of her hands, and letting loose one of those horrible jungle-bird sounds when it saw her.
She jerked the door shut. It banged against the frame, and the sound seemed to reverberate in her chest. With a wince, she froze and stared at the dark glass. She could feel the tendons standing out in the hand holding the door. Was anything moving out there? It was hard to see past her own terrified reflection. Then her eyes snapped to the tool calendar. The bikini-clad woman mocked her from the Corvette’s hood, but the shiny brass key was still pinned to the wall.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Rachel wasn’t sure who she was thanking as she reached for the key. Whomever it was must not have been listening because her hand never made it to the key. Someone grabbed her from behind. Her arms were pinned to her sides, and air whooshed from her lungs as two arms wrapped around her chest. The skin on her neck tingled, anticipating the teeth sinking into her neck. Rachel’s system went from zero to terrified in a split second. She twisted, trying to fling her body forward, and caught a glimpse of a pair of doughy white hands locked together just below her breasts. She tried to snap her head back and smash her attacker’s nose, but she hit nothing and the arms held tight. Her ear actually burned with the expectation of being bitten off. She shook her head and flung her body forward again. Nothing bit her. No zombie scream. She threw all her weight into another backward head butt. Whatever or whoever was holding her used the move to lift her off her feet, then drove her into the door. Her knees hit the glass with a pair of thuds that sounded like drumbeats and the door swung open a foot. Rachel’s terror ramped up to eleven as a wedge of light from inside illuminated a slice of concrete walk and black shapes moving around in the dark. Some of the shapes were definitely moving her way.
Then a chorus of ear-piercing screeches seemed to come from everywhere at once, confirming that the monsters were definitely on their way to dinner.
“Let’s see who you save now,” Gary’s voice hissed in her ear. His lips brushed her ear, and she shuddered. He laughed. But now she had a target.
Rachel snapped her head back at the sound. Her head crunched against something, and a white light flashed in the dark.
“Bitch!” Gary yelled.
The dark shapes seemed to zero in on her even more. They created a seething wall of dark with a few faces visible in the wedge of light.
Gary’s arms loosened, but not enough for Rachel to get free. Her self-defense teacher’s voice mocked her. You have to practice the moves until you can do them without thinking.
Rachel promised the ghost of her teacher she would practice every day if she could just live through this night.
And then her teacher’s voice answered her in her head: Pressure points! Wrists. Arms. Neck. He had made them point to the appropriate spots as he’d barked the words. Rachel clawed at Gary’s arms. He cursed her again, even louder.
The shadows moved closer. Rachel dug both thumbs into the soft undersides of his wrists.
“Fucking bitch!” Gary screamed. His arms let loose. Then he shoved her out the door. Rachel’s toe caught on the threshold, and she fell. Gravel bo
rdering the walkway dug into her palms when she stopped herself from face-planting in the landscaping, but she barely felt it. Gary kicked her legs, and the door slammed.
She scrambled to her feet. The shapes were much closer. She turned and wasted valuable time with a futile yank on the handle even though she heard the lock snap shut before she reached it.
Gary pressed his face against the glass, grinning maniacally as he raised both middle fingers. Rachel slammed a fist into the glass. He jerked back but kept giving her the bird. She thought about shooting the glass and had her pistol in her hand without conscious thought. Gary’s eyes were huge as he turned and ran. Rachel didn’t fire. She didn’t want to endanger the rest of Gary’s family.
A chorus of new screeches made Rachel spin around. An almost solid wall of zombies was closing on her. She could see their faces now with their hungry eyes and their hands already reaching for her.
Rachel raised the pistol two-handed, picked out the least dense section, and fired as she started to run at the wall. She shifted her aim left. Fired. Shifted right. Fired again and kept firing as she closed in on the horde. She only needed a little space. At such close range, she couldn’t miss. A shape dropped with each kick of the Sig in her hands. A hint of a gap appeared in the wall of darkness. When the slide locked back, Rachel lowered her shoulder and tried to run faster. The first collision felt like a heavy door that bounced away from her with a loud grunt. Then she was past. She staggered into another body with her legs still churning like a fullback on the goal line. Something grabbed her arm. She spun, slammed the pistol into a face. She couldn’t even tell if it was a woman or a man. The hand let go, and she spun again. She squeezed between two more shapes and into open space.
There, the zombies were still dense, but at least there was some room between them. She thumbed the pistol’s magazine release. Let the empty fall. Dodged a zombie and fumbled a fresh magazine from her pocket and jammed it home. When the slide snapped into place, she was already aiming.
Rachel emptied the magazine again and cleared a zombie-free corridor that was closing fast. Then she was past the hoard and running parallel to the building.
The street and the warehouses on both sides curved away to the left. The mob was thicker to the right, so she kept going. She dodged the stragglers and sprinted for the end of the building, thinking if she made it to the back door, Gary wouldn’t be able to stop the others from letting her in.
Ten yards from the end, her pace faltered.
A fresh pack of zombies poured around the building.
Rachel made a sharp right away from the approaching mob and headed across the street. Her thighs burned, and her breath was starting to come in gasps. She needed to pace herself. With a conscious effort, she slowed. The zombies were spaced wide enough that she could dodge them. She kept going until she rounded the building on the opposite side of the street, taking the corner wide to avoid any zombies coming the other way. The footsteps of pursuing zombies crunched in the gravel bordering the building. It sounded like they were right on top of her. Rachel chanced a look back. They were actually about twenty feet back.
New screeches from ahead scrambled her thinking and sent a fresh surge of adrenaline through her body. Any plan she might have been forming evaporated. All she wanted to do was get away. When the heart speeds up, the mind slows down, she chanted in her head. Jerry always said something like that to himself when people were freaking out and he needed to stay calm. He also liked to tell himself it wasn’t his emergency. “Well, this is my fucking emergency,” Rachel said as she rounded the corner into the street running along the ends of the warehouses.
Four pairs of identical-looking buildings separated by wide alleyways were on her left. A tall concrete wall, too tall to climb, separated the area from the highway on her right. Rachel turned down the first street and ran by several identical doors to the where she and Emma’s family had entered the warehouse, risking a quick glance over her shoulder. The zombies were twenty feet back. She ran a little faster, and by the end of the row, she had a thirty-foot lead.
The shrieks of the pursuing horde increased as soon as she paused to check one of the door handles. Locked. Rachel gave up on the doors and sprinted to the end of the row, dodging a woman who looked exactly like Madonna—if the singer had gone on a three-day meth binge and then had her nose bitten off—and then sprinting past the next two streets. Then she was out of room. The last alley had a thirty-foot-tall concrete sound barrier separating it from the highway. Rachel skidded to a stop at the back corner of last building, braced her pistol against the brick corner, and took aim at the leading five or six zombies. The pack was strung out, and after she put the leaders down, she had a fifty-foot cushion. She turned and ran. The first two doors were locked. And the next two. She was planning her route from the twenty-yard recycling dumpster at the end to the roof when the fifth handle spun in her hand. She was already letting go when she realized it had turned and the door was open.
Rachel stopped and snatched at the door’s edge, caught it, and flung the door open. She threw herself inside as the mob was coming around the corner behind her. The horde’s screams sounded like they were inside her head when the door banged closed with a sound like a gunshot and plunged her into complete darkness. She jammed the pistol in her holster and gripped the handle with both hands. She squeezed the handle so hard she heard her knuckles pop. Maybe the zombies hadn’t seen which door she’d gone in.
“Not fucking likely,” she whispered under her breath, bracing a foot against the door frame. Zombies weren’t supposed to know how to work doorknobs—at least, she didn’t remember Jerry mentioning it. She wished she had paid more attention to his rambling.
The start of pounding on the door made her heart beat faster, and she clamped her scream in her mouth. The muscles in her back strained to hold the door against the coming assault. She actually did let out a yelp when the handle moved in her hand, but when it didn’t move again for a couple of minutes, she decided it had just been one of the zombies bumping against it.
She shifted her grip to relieve some of the pressure on her aching muscles, and her palm brushed a little button in the center of the door handle. A groan escaped, and Rachel let her head fall forward. It banged against the door.
“Shit!”
She gripped the knob tighter and stood there, paralyzed with fear for ten seconds, feeling the door vibrate in her hands before she could bring herself to press the button with her thumb. The pounding felt like it was inside her head as she shuffled back a couple steps, eyes still glued to the knob. Rachel flexed her fingers and dug the flashlight from her pack. When she snapped it on, the light hurt her dark-adjusted eyes. She blinked and pointed the beam at the floor. Of course Jerry had bought something that was almost a laser. She remembered him bragging about how he’d found it on the internet and how it had, like, a billion luminations or whatever the unit they used to measure light was called. A curse slipped out, and she clicked the light off. What if the zombies saw the light under the door?
“Idiot,” she said at normal volume. The zombie pounding drowned her words. “They already know you’re here.”
With her hand cupped over the light, she clicked it on again. She was in some kind of document storage room with a cheap metal desk in the center and rickety-looking shelving filled with shrink-wrapped stacks of paper on three walls. A steel door stood between the shelves on the wall opposite the door she’d came in. Rachel tried the handle to find it was locked—of course.
Rachel wanted to scream at the anal-retentive motherfuckers who locked their doors during the apocalypse.
There was a small steel desk against one wall. Rachel lunged at it and rifled through the drawers. When her hands hit the ring of keys in the middle drawer, her legs almost gave out in relief. Even in the relative safety of the room, her hands shook so badly, it took four tries to get the first key in the slot.
“Yes!” Rachel’s yell when the third key turned was d
rowned out by more screeching and pounding. She shouldered the door open and swung through.
The door closed with a hollow thunk, and she snapped the deadbolt home.
“Holy fucking shit!” she screamed and collapsed against the door.
Jerry had said her kitchen-mouth was as bad as some of the firefighters, but there were times when a wimpy gosh-darn-it didn’t convey the right level of outrage you needed. Especially about motherfuckers like Gary. That little shit-stain was going to get bitch-slapped within an inch of his goddammed life if she ever saw him again.
Rachel took a deep breath and let it out. She did it again while scanning her surroundings. The cursing and the breathing did the trick, and her heart seemed to slow from scared-fucking-shitless to just terrified. Her hands were still shaking like those of a smoker on a flight to China. Dim emergency lighting illuminated a huge warehouse space very similar to her previous sanctuary. Large, heavy-duty shelves, like the ones at Home Depot but dark green instead of orange, ran from front to back and floor to ceiling. The center was clean, like maybe a big order had just been shipped out.
She was ready to try her luck going out the front door when she noticed a metal ladder bolted to the back wall. It led to a trapdoor in the ceiling about two square feet and right beside one of the banks of shelves. The pounding at the door seemed to increase in volume, and she realized it was coming from the front of the building. So much for that option. How did the zombies in front know she was in the building? Rachel didn’t have the time or the energy to contemplate that one. Instead, she climbed the ladder to the trapdoor. A padlock secured the door to the frame. Thanking whatever reflex had caused her to stuff the ring of keys in her pocket, she examined the choices. The short brass one with the same logo as the lock stamped on its face looked like a winner. Since she wasn’t immediately in danger of becoming a late-night-snack, her hands were steady enough to slide the key home on the first try.