by D A Madigan
He couldn't even see her face, just the bare gleam from the whites of her eyes, and then a little flash of teeth. But he could feel her breath on his face, and smell it, and he winced and pulled back; she'd clearly been blowing somebody in the not too distant past, and it had to be her crazy old dad, and that reminder was all Derrick needed to cool his jets way down.
"I need your help," she whispered, breathily, and Derrick could hear the pout in her voice when she said it.
"Help with what?" Derrick whispered back. "Your daddy runs this whole mug and you run your daddy, what the fuck you need the house nigger for?"
He heard her pull in her breath, and then heard her let it out again in what sounded like a sob. "You don't know," she whispered, tears in her voice. "He makes me do the most awful stuff... and he's crazy! He says anybody that doesn't do what he wants is an enemy of the Lord and his mission on Earth is to destroy the enemies of the Lord!"
"An' you want me to do somethin' that puts me on the enemies of the Lord list," Derrick said. He figured he knew what the little cunt was doing now. Maybe she really was tired of her crazy old man pokin' her three or four times a day. Maybe she liked her some black dick. Maybe she really thought she could trade up, and didn't know that Derrick wasn't allowed to have any bullets for his scary lookin' rifle.
Or maybe she was just bored and trying to stir shit up and didn't care who won.
"Okay," Derrick said. "Look, I don't know what kinda shit you tryin' to put me in, little girl, but just so you know..."
"I'm not tryin' to get you in trouble," she whispered back, furiously. "I like you, I really like you! You're cute and stuff. An' I heard my daddy won't give you no bullets for your gun an' I think that sucks so I brought you some."
And motherfucker! The crazy bitch pushed a baggie of what felt like bullets into his hand!
He couldn't tell in the dark, just by feel, but it felt like maybe ten... twelve... maybe a full fifteen round clip's worth of bullets. No good on the geeks, but he could take out a lot of armed officers with a dozen bullets. He'd have to start out with that crazy bitch Cass, though... he'd seen her shoot, and she was the motherfuckin' Angel of goddam Death with a gun. She didn't have eyes in the back of her head, though, so that was exactly where he'd put his first shot. Then nail the General... and then...
"You shoot my daddy first," the crazy little cunt was burbling now, face nearly against his neck. "You shoot him first and then I'll say that you're the boss now cuz you saved me from my crazy daddy. The other officers all love me and they'll do what I say. And I'll do what YOU say. Anything you say..."
And before Derrick could stop her (not that he was tryin real hard to stop her, or, really, at all) she was leaning down and he could feel her hands unzipping and slipping into his fly and finding him and pulling him out and then he felt her breath and then, oh baby, yeah, her tongue and her lips and her mouth, all hot and wet, sliding down around him in the dark and...
A flashlight speared into the corner and found the two of them -- Derrick crouched on his heels, shoulders against two adjoining walls, knees spread. Dorothy crouched between his legs, moaning, head bobbing in and out, in and out...
"Well," Derrick heard a voice he knew was Captain Cass', whispering in the tiled room. "Ain't this fuckin' cute."
Poking into the cone of light cast by the flashlight, pointed directly at Derrick's head -- an M9 military issue pistol.
Derrick felt his stomach turn over...
xi.
Franklin Morabito felt ill-used.
No, by the Jesus. Franklin Morabito WAS ill- used. This was not something he was 'feeling'. There was no valid 'rest of the story'. He had let these... these LOOTERS... into his store and he had done his best to help them out even though it was his clear duty to resist their thievery and depredations in every way and what had he gotten for it? Insulted. Threatened. Assaulted.
Well, enough was enough and this was enough.
The nigger bitch with the gun had come out of the storage closet and was over comforting the brats. Good. Excellent. He was in her line of sight, but her attention was elsewhere. As long as he didn't approach her, she wouldn't even look up at him. Which was fine.
Franklin got up, slowly and smoothly, not looking furtive or sneaky at all. As if he didn't have a care in the world, he turned and started walking down the aisle towards the back.
At the back, he turned left and walked to the Household Supplies aisle and selected a bottle of vinegar and a bottle of Clorox bleach. He unscrewed the cap from the bottle of Clorox, took out his pocketknife and carefully removed the silvery foil protective circle inside, and set the bottle down on the ground at his feet. Unscrewed the cap on the the bottle of vinegar. No protective foil circle here... who would tamper with a bottle of vinegar, after all?
Now he had to be careful. Precision was called for. Precision, and control. Franklin was personally proud of his emotional discipline. His hands weren't shaking at all. He felt cold, dispassionate. His store had had an infection for nearly a month, but now, he would lance that boil and clean it out. He would operate, by God, and remove the malignancy!
He knelt, carefully, and reached with his right hand for the bottle of Clorox, holding the bottle of vinegar in his left. He would tip out several ounces of Clorox onto the floor, and then pour some of the vinegar into the Clorox bottle. Slam the cap back on the Clorox bottle and hold it there with his thumb without screwing it on. Walk back down to where the nigger and the brats were and roll the bottle of Clorox --
Vivian's bullets, which she had been aiming at Franklin's torso, took him in the neck and upper face as he was in the middle of bending his knees. She knew exactly what mixing bleach and vinegar would produce. When she'd looked up a minute or so ago and not seen Franklin anywhere she'd come looking for him, stopping to listen every few seconds -- thankfully (blessedly, even) Franklin was not a naturally stealthy person. She'd come around the corner of the Household Supplies aisle at the far end from where he was standing, and then, just watched for several seconds to be absolutely sure that the goddam crazy man really was trying to kill her and all three of the babies, too.
And then she'd shot the prick.
When she'd been younger, her nana had given her shooting lessons using the old .38 Police Special her gramps (whom she had never met) had carried walking a beat on Louisville's west side for twenty years before Vivian had been born. The lessons had not been extensive because bullets weren't cheap, but her gramps had strongly felt women needed to learn basic self-defense, and her nana had felt the same way. So she'd learned how to hold a gun, how to aim it... and how to hit what she was aiming at.
Franklin grunted as the bullets hit him. The gun that Vivian had shot him with was a short barreled Colt King Cobra with a mirror bright stainless steel finish. Jerry, Sheila's former co-worker, had liked his small arms shiny. Jerry had also preferred his handguns to have some stopping power to them, which was why he had loaded the King Cobra with .357 Magnum cartridges. The recoil from the first shot was unexpectedly strong (much stronger than that produced by the standard .38 special ammunition Vivian had fired before) and drove the barrel upwards, which caused the second shot to hit Franklin high in the face -- just above his right eye, in fact. The impact of each bullet contained enough force to knock a full grown man three feet backwards from a sitting or standing position; Franklin was spun and flung backwards, the bottles in his hands flying outwards in opposite directions from each other as his body whipped around and his fingers opened in his microsecond death spasm.
Vivian stood there, staring down the aisle at the body sprawled face down at the far end in a rapidly spreading pool of blood. Her wrists ached from the recoil of the two shots, and she was dimly aware that both the younger kids were crying now.
Her mind was numb and, for the moment, silent.
She was aware she'd just killed a human being... possibly one of the last living human beings in the world.
Somewhere out of sight, sh
e could hear soft liquid glugging sounds, as one or both of the containers Franklin had been planning to mix from continued to empty onto the floor.
If those puddles spread and met...
That would be dangerous, all right. That's why she'd shot him, to prevent the crazy man from mixing the two chemicals and creating toxic chlorine gas. So now she should...
Franklin's hand began to twitch.
His arm bent, bringing the hand closer to his body, dragging it into the puddle of blood underneath him.
He started to push himself up.
Vivian stood there, the now useless pistol in her hands, watching as Franklin's body struggled, slowly, to his... it’s... feet.
Behind her, the two younger kids started to scream more loudly...
xii.
"Sheila had a crow bar on her," Dan remembered, as Skip was wringing his fingers after fruitlessly trying for five minutes or so to pry up the bolted trap door.
"Damn, that's right," Skip said. "All right. So we need to throw another bag of blazing briquettes down to scatter the zombies. Then I can slide down the rope and get the..." He stopped. Dan was shaking his head.
"I'm fairly sure," Dan said, in the low whisper they were both employing, so as not to draw attention to themselves from the horde of undead below, "that she'll be a..." Dan's voice failed him for a moment. He closed his eyes. After a second or so, he continued, "...zombie, too. So if we just toss something at random..."
"She'll run, too," Skip said. "All right. We need to take a look."
Skip dropped to his hands and knees and low crawled over to the edge of the building, picking up one of the cardboard tube periscopes the kids had made under Vivian's direction. He was resolutely not thinking about what might be going on downstairs in the store; he was doing everything he could do to get back in there and he needed to focus on the task at hand.
He lifted one of the cardboard tubes, and then looked back. Dan was just standing over by the trapdoor. It made Skip feel uneasy. If Dan turned from that bite...
"It's okay," Dan whispered. "I'm... I'm still all right. I just.... I can't look at her like that."
Skip nodded. He could relate; he wasn't looking forward to looking at Sheila like that, either. Gutsy Sheila, smart Sheila... Sheila who had gotten a Galaxy repair van halfway across the city to rescue her husband and kid during the zombie apocalypse... and stopped to pick up a stranger and her two kids on the way, just because it was the decent thing to do. Sheila, who had gone out to find medicine for his no good stay at home ass.
It should have been him. He should have argued harder, convinced them all...
Fuck it. It was what it was.
He extended the cardboard tube out from the edge of the roof and looked down. It was fully dark now, coming up on 8 in the evening. Hours and hours until sun up, and the power grid in Louisville had long since failed. It was impossible to make out details below... but nonetheless, even in the very weak and diffuse light from the stars and the sliver of moon above, he could detect motion. There was a crowd below, milling around.
If they wanted to get that crowbar, they needed to drop a flaming bag of briquettes directly onto Sheila's reanimated body. It would ignite instantly and burn to cinders within seconds; the burning coals in the bag would scatter and probably ignite half a dozen other zombies, and the remainder of the horde below would run screaming away in every direction, and stay away until the last of the fires was out. Which would give them... or, rather, Skip, since Dan wasn't going to be doing any sliding down or climbing up ropes with that hand... time to get down and recover the crowbar from the ashes and then get back up to the roof again.
Seemed like an unworkable plan; until daylight, they'd have no real way of picking one zombie out of the crowd below, unless they leaned over and used a flashlight... which would tend to give away the presence of people in the store, or at least, on the roof.
But Skip had tools out in the chopper... and for that matter, there were tools in the van, which was parked right behind the building. And he could get down onto the roof of the van with the rope fairly easily.... and he didn't think Sheila had even locked it up, just slammed the back doors closed. Zombies generally didn't open doors...
"All right," Skip whispered to himself. He crawled back to the trapdoor and murmured to Dan "Can't pick her out. New plan -- I'm going to slide down the rope to the roof of the Galaxy van, then try to get into the back of the van and get some tools. I'm sure there must be some. Once I get them we should be able to force this trap door."
"We should scatter them with another burning bag," Dan said, sounding unutterably weary.
"I don't think so," Skip said. "I'm not sure how many times we can take that pitcher to the well before they wise up that someone's bombing them from the roof. They keep surprising us. But I can get down onto the roof of that van pretty quietly and then lean down and open one of the van doors, which will keep them from getting in to that space between the back doors and the van. In the dark they probably won't even notice me. I think it's our easiest move."
Dan was in too much pain, and too cold, and too exhausted, emotionally and physically, to argue with him.
Skip crawled back, got the rope Sheila had used, and crawled with it over to the back edge of the roof.
Just as he got there he would have sworn he heard a soft metallic 'click' sound from below... almost like a car door closing. He shook his head. A zombie must have brushed up against the side of the van. Zombies couldn't open car doors. If they could they wouldn't smash all the glass out to get at drivers and passengers inside vehicles.
He peeked over. Yep, there was the van. The roof was maybe twenty feet below him... easy peasy to slide down that far. He could tell there were zombies milling around in the back lot, but not as many as at the side.
Okay.
He carefully paid out enough rope to reach the roof of the van, then went back and resecured the rope to the vent pipe jutting out of the roof so that only that much and no more would pay out. Then, low crawl on elbows and knees back to edge. Grab the rope. Swing the legs over... okay, got the rope with the ankles, good... now, slide down slowly... slowly... be very careful....
Skip landed so lightly on the roof of the Galaxy van that he could barely hear the noise his boots made himself. He looked around. The dim shapes milling aimless around the van seemed to take no notice of him. But he was cold, as cold as Dan was, having volunteered his winter weight corduroys and his leather jacket to Sheila's recon mission. The cold November night cut straight through the too-small pair of sweatpants he was wearing.
Nonetheless, he was very careful how he got hunkered down on the roof of the van. Then, even more carefully, he eased down onto his stomach. The top of the van was wet with dew (this time of year in the Ohio Valley, he was lucky it wasn't frost) and his clothes started to soak through in patches. He ignored that, too, reaching slowly down the back of the van, leaning down to grab the back door handle. Push down on the thumb button, pull it open just a little. Put his other hand on the edge of the door. Pull back up onto the roof, then push the door open.
With a nearly silent creak, the door swung open.
Skip took a deep breath. He couldn't think of an easy, smooth way to do this. He had to get into the van and pull the door closed behind him -- all, hopefully, without drawing the attention of the horde milling aimlessly around him.
The fact that the van's interior light had not come on when Skip eased the back door opened indicated the van's battery was flat. Skip wouldn't have expected anything else, after nearly a month sitting out in the weather with no maintenance. But it meant, if he got trapped inside the van, he wouldn't have much in the way of options. Certainly he couldn't drive off.
Well. Whatever was happening inside the store with Vivian and the kids, wasn't getting any better while he waited.
Skip breathed out, squirmed around on his stomach, and swung his legs down and into the van.
It was the full-head rubber Ha
llowe'en mask that saved his life.
As he grabbed the still closed door to pull himself in, something lunged at him from out of the van. Something in a cyclist's helmet; Skip could see that in the dim light from the stars and sliver moon. Something bulky, with gloves on its hands, grabbing at him. Something biting at him, growling like a dog, but...
And Skip realized what it was.
It was Sheila. A zombie, now. But somehow, she'd remembered, even dead, that there were people up on the roof. She'd somehow figured out that they might want to get into the van. She'd crept around and hid in the van, waiting for him, like some horrible trap door spider...
...and now, the rubber Hallowe'en mask she'd worn to keep from being bitten on the face was keeping her from biting him.
Skip's mind raced even as he slammed his hands into Sheila's leather jacketed shoulders, trying to push her off of him. In another couple of seconds at most, the other zombies outside would be trying to climb into this van through the open back door. Unless he could get his lighter out. If he got his lighter out and struck a flame, Sheila would go up like a torch. The other zombies would run like hell, but Skip would most likely go up with her and the van might catch fire. If the van caught fire --
Something cold and hard and metallic and heavy smacked Skip in the knee. For a crazy moment he wanted to laugh hysterically and ask if Sheila had a pistol in her pocket or she was just happy to see him --
And then he remembered the oxygen tank she'd been carrying.
He did not think about it. Once he became aware of the oxygen canister, he realized it was probably the only possible hope he had of surviving this encounter. He dropped his right hand off her shoulder while getting his left forearm under her snapping, growling chin. With his right hand he found the oxygen canister and turned the metal wheel to start the oxygen flow. His fingers had already touched the cold rubber hose attached to the outflow valve; now he lightly clasped it and traced his grip down to the far end of the hose. He could feel strong pressure as something flowed out through the hose, hear a hissing --