by Gibb, Lew
Jerry turned the other way. More pallets and boxes and a stairway that seemed to lead to the roof. Jerry moved past it toward a person-sized door in the center of the end wall, hoping the zombies had all been attracted to the gunshots on the other end of the building.
The dogs trotted ahead, and the women followed. They were just finishing dressing—pulling on shoes and hopping trying to tie them. The blonde with the pistol brought up the rear, a look of intense concentration wrinkling her forehead. Jerry felt good about having her watching his back. When Rachel looked like that, nothing could stop her. Plus, the way the woman had handled Picke showed she could take care of herself.
A few more muffled gunshots sounded from outside, and then the sound was replaced by distant screaming that reminded Jerry of Mike at the hospital and made the hairs on his forearms prickle.
Jerry reached the door and pressed his ear against the cool metal. When he didn’t hear anything, he pushed the locking bar and inched the door open, trying to peer through the widening crack into the darkness beyond.
A hand shot through the opening and snagged his hair, fingernails rasped against his scalp. Kodi and Mandy threw themselves at the door, barking furiously and actually pushed the door open farther. Jerry lost hold of his pistol when he put his gun hand against the jamb to keep from being pulled through the widening gap.
Then his attacker’s face shot through the opening.
It was a shirtless male zombie with a tattoo of a dragon’s head covering the entire right side of his muscular chest. The dragon’s body curled away under the guy’s arm, and one taloned foot clutched a grimacing skull in it’s fist. The zombie opened its mouth.
Teeth snapped together inches from Jerry’s face.
Jerry jerked back.
Kodi’s jaws latched onto the guy’s forearm, dangling from the guys arm with only his back feet touching the floor. Even though the shepherd was shaking his whole body, the grip on Jerry’s hair remained firm.
A gunshot exploded beside Jerry’s head. A spray of blood and brain speckled the door, and the grip on his hair released.
Picke’s blonde captive pointed her pistol at the falling zombie until Jerry grabbed the push bar and jerked the door toward himself. Another hand shot through the narrowing opening and grabbed his forearm. The blonde stepped to Jerry’s other side and fired three times through the crack. The gunshots were painful even to his already deadened ears.
The grip released. Jerry slipped on something and fell. He landed on his butt and stared at the tattooed zombie’s dead eyes while the dogs went crazy as a series of hands that shot through the gap. The shepherds snapped and chewed on the offending hands, preventing them from grabbing Jerry.
Two more shots and another zombie crumpled on the tattooed zombie’s legs. Jerry kicked at the dead zombies’ heads, and live ones’ grasping arms while the blonde yanked the door. Her eyes were as big as golf balls.
Jerry scrambled to push the arms back through the opening. It felt like a whack-a-mole game that fought back. The dogs were now contributing to the problem. Each had an arm in its jaws, shaking it back and forth, and preventing the door from closing. A thunderstorm of pounding echoed throughout the warehouse as hundreds of hands, fists, and more than a few bodies assaulted the overhead doors.
“This isn’t working,” Jerry said through gritted teeth. “As soon as they start to pull, we’re done.”
The blonde was about to say something when she was interrupted by a loud crash. “Shit!” she yelled.
Jerry jerked his gaze toward the sound.
One of the overhead doors dangled from its track like a loose tooth, and an avalanche of zombies was pouring through. Several went down and were trampled by their more coordinated allies, but the rest flowed over the top like a tsunami over a beachfront shack.
Two of the women were already sprinting back, eyes bulging and mouths wide open. Their screams were swallowed by the zombie screeches filling the warehouse.
Jerry gauged the distance between the women and the stairs to the roof, then estimated the distance they would have to go and looked back at the blonde. Her eyes seemed even wider, but she still seemed to be holding it together. “Run for the stairs on three?”
She nodded, and yelled “Three!” Then sprinted for the stairs.
Jerry shouted, “The stairs!” at the other two women, as he took off after the blonde.
The two women changed course at his yell and beat them to the stairs. Taking them two at a time while Jerry and the blonde were still fifty feet away. Then the office door exploded inward with a bang like a stick of dynamite going off.
A big zombie with fresh blood staining the front of his white t-shirt shot from the opening like a tweaker running from the police. No way Jerry and the blonde were going to beat him up the stairs.
“Go!” Jerry yelled. He pushed the blonde’s shoulder, planted himself in the zombie’s path, and braced for impact. At the last second, Jerry dodged to his left and stuck a foot in the big zombie’s path.
The bottom of the stairway was protected on either side by eight-inch steel pipes filled with concrete and set into the warehouse floor to keep forklift drivers from wrecking the stairs. The zombie flew at the metal pipe like he was doing a head-first slide into second base. His head hit the pole with a sound like a bat hitting a washtub.
Jerry jumped over the splayed arms and legs and started up the steps. The dogs passed him about halfway up and shot through the door at the top only a couple of strides behind the blonde.
The door slammed. As soon as Jerry was through, he reversed course, skidding on the gravel-covered roof leaned his shoulder against the door beside the blonde. Almost immediately, the zombies were hammering on the other side, adding to the cacophony of screams from the perimeter of the building and the dogs’ renewed barking.
The other two women stared at the door like it might reach out and bite them.
“No way can we hold this if they hit the bar,” Jerry said, leaning his whole weight against the door. His boots struggled for traction on the lose gravel.
The blonde yelled at the two women, “See if there’s a ladder down or something to block the door.”
Neither one moved.
“Now!” she screamed.
They snapped out of their trances and ran in opposite directions.
The blonde shook her head and looked at Jerry. “Can you hold it for a minute?”
He leaned a little harder against the door. Did he have a choice? They had to do something. His mind was blank. “Go.”
She pushed off and disappeared around the corner of the small enclosure surrounding the stairs. The door jumped and moved toward him two inches before his weight slammed it back and the latch clicked. The blonde appeared from the other side of the enclosure dragging a weathered chair. seeing the pistol in her hand made Jerry realize his own pistol was still downstairs.
“Looks like someone was sitting down on the job up here,” she said with a grim smile.
Jerry twisted out of the way but kept his weight against the door while she jammed the chair’s back under the handle and kicked the feet to secure it.
Jerry stood and pushed away from the door while giving it a nervous look. There was a thud like a dropped bowling ball. The chair rocked slightly and the door shook and opened an inch before it slammed back into the jamb.
“That’s not going to hold long, “Jerry said. “We have to get out of here.”
The blonde nodded. Beyond her, the women were jumping up and down and waving their arms above their heads. Jerry could just make out the outline of a pair of metal arches protruding from the short wall surrounding the roof.
“What’s your name?” Jerry said, as they sprinted toward the ladder and the waving women.
Chapter Seventy-Two
The scene at the football stadium reminded Rachel of the over-the-top zombie movies Jerry liked so much. Rachel chuckled at the irony.
“What’s funny?” Clay said, steer
ing the dump truck toward the bridge Rachel had pointed out.
“I was just thinking that if the zombie movie makers hadn’t been so good, I might not be here right now.”
Clay wrinkled his nose. “You never think about the smell in a movie, though. It’s like someone threw a pile of rotting meat in an outhouse.”
Rachel grimaced. He had it exactly. Everywhere Rachel looked, bodies lay scattered around a ring of military trucks parked in the stadium lot. The bodies were all missing different amounts of flesh and limbs and decaying in the sun. Bloodstains marred the trucks’ green and brown camouflage as if the occupants had been trying to blend in with their bloody surroundings. A few pockets of live zombies fed on the deceased in groups of two to five, but they either hadn’t noticed the dump truck or they had enough to eat where they were.
When she turned to answer him, she realized the corner of her building was just visible. It was only about a half mile away, and her longing for Jerry and the dogs was as strong a feeling as she had ever had about anything. She imagined sprinting across the lot and beneath the highway, then up the street to her house. It seemed so simple.
Clay stopped the truck. “I don’t think this is going to work.” Rachel pulled her attention back from her imaginary reunion with Jerry and the dogs. “Not unless we find a tow truck and a bulldozer.”
“Shit!” Rachel yelled. “Shit, shit, shit!” Nothing was ever going to be easy in this new world. The bridge was clogged with bodies that were piled in a ramp of death up to the tops of the large trucks blocking the roadway.
She pounded the dash for a while with both hands. Why couldn’t she just go home and be with her husband?
Clay looked on impassively.
Rachel realized she wasn’t helping anything with her tantrum. She closed her eyes and breathed through her nose the way Jerry coached his patients to do. She imagined the area they’d walked and run through the area countless times, without all the bodies and vehicles. “Okay.” She opened her eyes. “We can go down the left side of the parking lot and behind those buildings. If it’s clear, we can take the bike path around the amusement park to my street.”
Clay backed up and maneuvered onto the road encircling the stadium. “Looks like the military kept the perimeter clear for their own traffic.”
Then they were cruising along the bike path at a relatively rapid fifteen miles an hour.
Over the past few days, Rachel sometimes felt like she should measure her progress in days per mile rather than miles per day. Their relatively high speed made her uneasy. It was as if, by accomplishing her goal, she would somehow jinx it. She was nearly paralyzed with fear that she would awake to find it was all a dream and she was actually back on top of the building in Wheatridge or still in the mansion in Boulder. She stared at the place where she knew her building to be.
“Hey, Rachel.” Clay clapped a big hand on her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. If they’re not here, we’ll catch up with him in Commerce City.”
She was clenching her teeth so hard her jaw hurt. “It feels unreal.”
“It’s real, but where do we go from here?”
they were at a fork in the bike path. “Right.” She pointed. She couldn’t believe she was actually going to make it. “Then right at the next corner. My building is the first one on the other side of the tracks.”
“So do you live on the right side of the tracks, or the wrong side?”
“Is that supposed to be humor?”
“Just trying to lighten the mood.”
“I appreciate it. But let’s just get there.”
As they approached Rachel’s street, the number of cars clogging the roadway decreased.
“This is it,” she said. A large military truck of some kind was parked on the corner. Did the military have some sort of command post in her building? A row of cars with lawn furniture and bicycles entangled between them blocked access to her street.
Just after Clay stopped the truck in the center of the intersection, a large black man in fatigues popped up from the far side of the military truck and pointed an assault rifle at her.
“What do you want here?” the man said. His tone wasn’t aggressive, but it wasn’t friendly either.
Rachel thought about it for a few seconds. Answering the question completely would take quite a while. What she wanted was primarily her husband and her dogs. Next, she wanted a safe place to lie down where she didn’t have to worry about zombies breaking in at any moment. Safety for the others traveling with her was also high on the list. She began to wonder about farming and electricity, clean water and clothing, and all the other things they had lost over the past few days.
“Rachel!” Clay said, startling her. “Answer him.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Rachel blinked. She couldn’t think of anything more articulate to say than, “Is Jerry Wilson here?”
A blonde, ponytailed head appeared over the huge truck’s roof. “Oh my god! Rachel?”
“Um, yes.”
The woman—teenager, really—seemed to levitate out of the roof, then leapt onto the hood and dropped to the ground in what seemed like a single movement. She was carrying an assault rifle and had an actual fucking sword dangling from her left hip.
Rachel glanced sideways at Clay. He shrugged.
The blonde teen covered the distance to the dump truck in two strides and hopped up on the step. Rachel would have flinched, but everything happened so fast, and the girl’s huge smile was anything but threatening.
“I’m Holly,” she said, then reached in and gave Rachel a one-armed hug. “I’ve been hearing about you for the past ten days. You are one lucky woman. I mean, everyone who survived this long is lucky, but you—Jerry loves you so much.” She looked past Rachel and waved at Clay. “Hi.”
Rachel was taken aback by the effusive welcome but cared only that the girl knew Jerry. “He made it? Jerry’s here?”
Holly frowned. “He made it. We made it, actually. He rescued me the first day. But he’s not here now.” She shrugged and hopped down. “You guys better come inside before the zombies zero in on your truck.”
The man with the assault rifle introduced himself. “I’m Zach. We’re sure glad to see you, Rachel. We’ve heard a lot about you. And those dogs of yours are absolutely amazing.”
Rachel’s heart skipped a beat at the mention of the dogs. “They’re alive?”
Chapter Seventy-Three
Jerry looked across the roof at Olivia. She shook her head again and Jerry felt the strength go out of him just a little more. The zombies who had showed up in response to Georgie’s shooting and Stevie’s screaming were still there. He’d been pressing his weight against the door for the past couple of hours, and his legs were burning with fatigue even with the chair Olivia had found doing most of the work.
He was lucky to have rescued her. She was turning out to be the best thing that had happened all day. He hoped Rachel was getting along better than he was. Lucky for him, he hadn’t been stranded on the warehouse roof with Picke’s other two prisoners.
Maybe he was being unfair. Karen and Stacy were all right. Well, Karen was. Stacy was seriously testing his patience. She freaked out at every new assault. So much so that Karen had actually started covering the agitated woman’s mouth after the third time she squealed, which had added to the zombie cries and let them all know there were humans on the roof. The two of them were doing the best they could. He felt bad about dissing Stacy, even if only in his own thoughts. The strain was getting to all of them after six hours of a zombie siege that showed no signs of ending. The ones outside circled the warehouse, screeching and howling and causing the ones inside to pound harder and slam their bodies against the door, which riled the ones outside even more—and so on in an endless feedback loop that kept them from wandering off in search of easier pickings.
He tried to divert his thoughts by thinking positively about Rachel’s chances. If she was handling things as well as Olivia, all he needed to do was surv
ive long enough for her to make it home.
The door thumped again, and the chair rocked. Jerry pressed harder against the chair, and Karen slammed her shoulder into it just at the latch’s edge. The door thumped shut.
“That was the third time in a row!” Stacy screamed. “They figured out how to work the bar!” Her voice was hysterical, and her eyes darted around the rooftop. It looked like she was getting ready to bolt. She was wind-milling her arms and then hugging herself like she had six hours earlier when Jerry and Olivia had thought she was signaling a way down. It turned out she had been trying to say there were zombies everywhere—something she had been reminding them of every two minutes or so since.
Olivia peeked her head over the edge of the roof to check on the status of the thousands of zombies that had been drawn by Picke’s minions. Mandy lay at Olivia’s side, having taken an immediate liking to the former pro-mountain biker and all-around bad-ass who was just a few years older than Holly. She’d adopted the lanky blonde as her personal protection project, probably because she was so much like Rachel.
Or maybe Jerry was anthropomorphizing, and the dog just liked the shade of the wall. Kodi had positioned himself halfway between Mandy and Jerry like he wanted to be close to his BFF but felt conflicted about abandoning the guy with the food. Olivia shrugged then ducked back down and leaned against the wall. He suspected the other two women wouldn’t be alive if it hadn’t been for Olivia. Jerry hoped Rachel was handling the apocalypse with the same toughness.
The three women had been in Denver for a night out with some friends when people started biting each other. Following Olivia’s lead, they’d hidden in the bathroom for two days and spent the time since running from the zombies and scavenging food from empty houses until they decided to try and join up with some other survivors on the theory that there would be safety in numbers. Jerry got the impression that one was Stacy’s idea. The first group they came across had been Picke and his boys.
Jerry had an idea. He motioned for Olivia to come over and started patting his pockets.