Well no, not really, but you catch my drift.
Dorcas had pulled the ambulance around so it was facing Jolly’s storefront head-on. Then she flashed our headlights—three short, three long, then three short. She waited about ten seconds and did it again. I knew what she was doing. I learned about it in cub scouts when I was in grade school. That was before I quit my troop. The whole idea of carving a little wooden car out of a chunk of wood to see if I could win a race against all the other little wooden cars wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. Still, I did learn a thing or two. Dorcas was using Morse Code. She was spelling out S.O.S. with our high beams.
The flashlight in the store abruptly shut off.
“Damn,” she whispered under her breath.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a swear word.”
“Duh, I know that. What do you mean, ‘damn’?”
“We probably scared whoever it was away.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “There’s no place to run.”
We sat for a moment, waiting for any sign. Abruptly, the light winked on again, but this time the beam was further back in the store, deep in the darkness.
“What do we do?” I said.
“We try it again.” Dorcas repeated the S.O.S. and waited for a response. The light in the store went off again. She swore under her breath. After a moment, it blinked back on and sent us a reply—three short, three long and three short.
I looked out my window. The poxers in the parking lot had noticed us and were making their way toward the ambulance. “Dorcas, how’s the zombie situation on your side?”
When she went to look out her window, she yelped. There was a poxer staring in at her, up close and personal. Once again, I was reminded how gross these things really were—not movie gross but real life gross. Their eyes were haunted and gray, and their teeth were stained the color of whatever they had last eaten. Of course there was the matted hair—caked with mud and blood—and the clothes that were just plain dirty—like hillbilly dirty.
The poxer slapped its filthy palms against the ambulance widow and Dorcas freaked. She immediately threw the ambulance in reverse and backed away from Jolly’s Pharmacy and the poxers in the parking lot.
“What are you doing?” I screamed.
“I have an idea.”
“Care to share?”
Dorcas didn’t answer me. She drove alongside the strip mall, past the video store, the dollar store and Goodwill. At the end of the row of stores, she pulled sharply around the side of the building. Our high beams caught the cracked pavement. It was littered with trash, old wooden pallets, and dead weeds. This was the sort of place kids who ditched school hung out at, which probably meant almost every tween in Guilford.
Dorcas twisted the wheel again and drove around the back of the strip mall.
There was nothing in our headlights—just the dirty backside of a low-rent strip mall and a set of train tracks along the edge of the woods that probably hadn’t seen a train in years. The broken rails disappeared into the gloom.
“Look for a door,” she spat as she drove slowly down the derelict alley. There were a few of them and each was marked. The dollar store just had a dollar sign crudely painted on it. Goodwill had an official logo. The door that I assumed led to the video store was blank—then there was the door to Jolly’s Pharmacy. Someone who thought they had a sense of humor had spray-painted a little extra under the name. It said ‘Jolly’s . . . NOT!’
I guess that was supposed to be funny.
Dorcas parked the van and peered into the beam of light in front of us. There was nothing. We both checked our side view mirrors and they were empty too.
“Let’s go,” she said, and quietly opened the ambulance door. For some reason, I didn’t want to chance opening mine. I was too close to the train tracks and the woods. Who knew what was watching us? Instead, I climbed over her seat after her and lowered myself gingerly to the ground.
Together we slipped over to the door of Jolly’s Pharmacy. Dorcas was holding the flashlight but wouldn’t dare put it on. I had a lighter ready, just in case, because lately being prepared had come in handy lots. She took a deep breath and reached down to turn the knob on the door. It didn’t budge.
“No,” she whispered.
Not that I didn’t believe her or anything, but, well, I didn’t believe her. So I reached down and twisted the knob as hard as I could while shoving my weight against the door.
This time it opened.
“Show off,” she muttered.
“I work out.”
We slipped inside the door and closed it behind us. Jolly’s Pharmacy was pitch black inside. I held the lighter up close to the doorknob and flicked it on to see if there was a way I could lock the door. I already knew that poxers weren’t all that handy with doorknobs but, you know, better safe than sorry.
Unfortunately, the knob was one that only locked with a key. There was a dead bolt, though, so I slid the little piece of metal into place. I guess that made me feel a little safer, but not much.
“We’re inside,” Dorcas shouted out into the darkness. It was so sudden that I jumped. “Where are you?”
The pharmacy was quiet for a moment. Finally, the beam of a flashlight blinded us and a man’s voice said, “Never mind where I am. Who are you and what do you want?”
“We’re friends,” I offered, shielding the light from my eyes. Frankly, I didn’t know if we were friends or not, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
“You carrying?” said the man’s voice.
“Carrying . . . a gun?” gasped Dorcas. Then she laughed in that raspy way that made me think she was going to keel any second. “Listen, sonny. I’m eighty-two years old. These arthritic fingers couldn’t hold a piece even if I wanted them to.” She grabbed my hand and whispered in my ear. “You have your piece, right?”
A feeling of dread washed over me like a tidal wave. “My gun’s in the ambulance” I whispered back, like the total badirchand that I was. Dorcas dropped my hand like a hot potato.
“Good going, kid,” she whispered.
Hey, this was a human—a human who signaled S.O.S. Why would I bring my gun, right? Right? Oh, crap, please tell me I didn’t screw up. Please.
“What about your friend?” barked the voice behind the flashlight. It was really weird not to see who was doing the talking. All I could think was that he was one of Diana’s eggheads and I was royally screwed.
“I’m only sixteen,” I said and my voice actually cracked. “It’s not legal for me to carry a gun.”
“Don’t be a wiseacre,” snapped the man’s voice. Wiseacre, huh? I figured anyone who used the term wiseacre was probably closer to Dorcas’s age than mine.
Suddenly, the light was gone from our eyes and instead, the flashlight illuminated a disembodied face. Trina and I used to do that late at night when we huddled on one of our beds and tried to spook each other out with scary stories. It was weird and I was definitely getting spooked, especially when the face started getting closer and closer and closer.
It stopped about ten feet from us.
“Let me see your faces,” the man said. Dorcas took the flashlight and held it up to hers for a moment, then to mine.
“We pass the test?” she growled.
“Yeah,” said the man. “You pass.” He came forward until he was right in front of me. Dorcas shined the flashlight on him. He was an old black guy, not quite Dorcas’s age, but probably not very far off.
He stuck out his hand. “Roger,” he said. “You can call me Roger.” He sounded sort of deadpan. I tentatively stuck my hand out. He took mine in his and pumped up and down once like shaking hands was an outdated formality that he really didn’t care about anymore. Then he let my hand go and actually put his arms aroun
d Dorcas and hugged her hard, like she was his long-lost sister or something.
Her arms went rigid, but after a moment they softened and she put her arms around him, too. Finally, Roger started sobbing, taking in big gulps of air between his tears. It was sad and lonely and made me wonder how long this guy had been scared out of his mind and hiding inside Jolly’s Pharmacy.
In the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we met another survivor. His name was Roger Ludlow, age sixty-six, life-long resident of Guilford, Massachusetts.
20
“MILLIE’S ONE OF them.” Roger said to us. We were sitting in a hidden corner of the pharmacy, out of sight of the front window. Roger had turned on three little plastic jack-o-lanterns that ran on batteries. New Englanders take their Halloweens very seriously. Decorations are usually on store shelves by the first day of school.
The little pumpkins flickered in the darkness. “Maybe it’s a blessing,” he said. “Lord knows I tried to get her to see a doctor in Boston, but she didn’t want anything to do with it. She said when it was her time it was her time.” He choked back some tears. “The doctors only gave her six months, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dorcas. She puffed on another cigarette then offered one to Roger.
“Why not?” he said and took it from her. “These are supposed to be bad for you, but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.” She offered the pack to me but I put my hands up and shook my head.
“I’m cool,” I said. “Really.” Dorcas and Roger might have lived their lives already, but I hadn’t. It did matter. It mattered a lot.
Roger told us that he and his wife, Millie, were inside Jolly’s Pharmacy when everything happened. Guilford’s a dead kind of town anyway, so there were only a few other locals besides them in the store. They all turned into poxers, but he didn’t.
While the electricity was still on, he ended up luring Millie and the others into the basement and locking the door with the manager’s keys he found in the back office.
“I was scared,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know what made my Millie and the others go crazy. Everything happened so fast. I knew these people when they were . . . when they were still normal.” Roger sounded so sad. “There was Patsy Norris,” he said. “She’d been working that front register for years. And then there was the druggist—John something-or-other. And that troublemaker girl who went and got herself inked all over the place. She was reading magazines—probably getting ready to steal one. That girl was always bad news.”
“You mean they’re all still in the basement?” I gasped.
Roger nodded his head. “I’ve been hearing them every once in a while—like rats underneath the floor. I’ve thrown down a few packages of beef jerky every day, but I finished the whole rack this morning. They got to eat something, you know.”
No they don’t, I thought. They most definitely don’t.
“You locked the front door, right?” I asked nervously. It was a fair question.
“Sure I did,” he said. “I was scared out of my wits. There were more of those things outside, and when they saw me they started pounding on the windows and the door. My hands were shaking so badly it’s a wonder that I found the right key to stick in the lock.”
He looked miserable and alone. Whatever personal hell we had gone through this past week, maybe Roger Ludlow’s was worse. He obviously didn’t know that poxers burned. All he knew was that his dead wife was living in the basement and he wasn’t about to let her starve.
Dorcas finished her cigarette and ground the butt against the floor. Roger just sat there, looking like he would never be all right again. I suppose he already looked like that before Necropoxy even hit because his wife—his Millie—already had a death sentence sitting squarely on her shoulders—and his.
Still, time was ticking away and we had to get the things we needed and get back to Swifty’s. Every second seemed like an hour and we really had to hustle.
“I’m sorry, Roger. I really am, but my mother’s sick. She may be dying. And our friends are sick, too. We have to get medical supplies from behind the pharmacy counter and get back to them as soon as we can.”
Roger sat there brooding in the darkness. He didn’t say anything. He just stared at the floor as his cigarette burned away. It was creepy.
Finally he said something under his breath that neither of us heard.
“What was that?” Dorcas asked him.
He looked up at her with swollen, red-rimmed eyes. “I said they’re my supplies—for me and my Mille. You can’t have them.”
I felt like I was slapped in the face with a free weight. We had run into our share of weird things during the past week, but this? This was just pure insanity.
“You’re kidding, right?” I got to my feet. I think the palms of my hands spontaneously became sticky and slick at the same time.
“No,” he said flatly. “I’m not kidding. The supplies belong to us. We need them.”
I felt a wave of anger wash over me. “There is no us, Roger,” I said, my voice coming out a little more acidic than I planned. I suppose I should have called him ‘Sir’ or ‘Mr. Ludlow’, but when I opened my mouth what came out was Roger—just plain Roger. “There’s only you. Everyone else here is dead. Do you understand? Dead.”
“Don’t you tell me that,” he barked.
“Millie’s dead,” I screamed. “And all those other people you told us about—they’re all dead, too. They’re poxers now, or zombies, or whatever the hell you want to call them. But you have to wake up and realize that they’re dead and they’re not coming back.”
Roger’s face didn’t move. He didn’t flinch or blink. It was like everything I was saying was bouncing off a bubble of insanity. The lights were on but nobody was home, you know?
Dorcas struggled to get to her feet, so I reached out my hand to help. Her weathered face was riddled with concern, probably not far off from the look I had plastered on my own puss.
“The kid’s right, Roger. These people have a disease. It’s not your fault or my fault. It just happened. In a way, be thankful that Millie didn’t have to go through the pain of the next six months. What happened is a blessing,” Dorcas said. “A blessing.”
“A blessing?” Roger cried. “A blessing? I’ll tell you what a goddamned blessing is. You and your snot-nosed kid are a blessing,” he barked. “Just when I was running out of beef jerky the two of you show up.”
He fumbled with something in his coat pocket. I should have noticed the bulge before, but now I couldn’t focus on anything else.
Roger Ludlow, a life-long resident of Guilford, Massachusetts, staggered to his feet and pulled a jackknife from his pocket. It was one of those big ones that had a g’zillion different thingamajigs on it, like can openers and screw drivers. He flicked open a large blade as though he had practiced doing so a hundred times in the past week.
“Yes, indeed,” he laughed, like a certified nutball. “God sent us a blessing and my Millie’s eating good tonight.”
21
REALLY? I MEAN, REALLY?
I took Dorcas by the hand and we ran. Jolly’s Pharmacy was dark, and away from the flickering of the pumpkins, the aisles—supposedly capped by displays of pantyhose and baby formula—were really, really dark.
Why did I leave the gun in the ambulance? What a moron. What a space case.
Cartoon images ran through my mind of Roger serving me and Dorcas on giant plates with apples in our mouths, surrounded by braised carrots and roasted potatoes. I felt like throwing up, but whatever was in my stomach was cemented in place by fear.
“Here piggy, piggy, piggy,” Roger called out from somewhere in the darkness behind us. His voice was paralyzing. If my head was doing the thinking instead of my gut, my head would have told me to curl in a little ball and p
op my thumb in my mouth. Thankfully, my gut was in charge, and my gut was telling me to run—anywhere—away from Roger Ludlow.
I remembered what Jimmy had said about that crazy guy heading to Maine when we were back in Amherst. Mr. Psycho had pointed a little gun at me, causing me to almost fudge my pants. After he left, presumably to go blow his brains out, Jimmy said ‘It’s going to be like that from now on. People are going to be crazy or shell shocked or are just plain not going to trust each other’.
Jimmy was three for three—Roger was crazy and shell shocked and we certainly didn’t trust him, not even a little bit, especially with a blade in his hand and murder on the brain.
Dorcas and I Helen Kellered our way to the front of the pharmacy as quickly as we could. Behind me, a flashlight blinked on, but thankfully, it was totally pointing in the wrong direction. Dorcas knew better than to say a word. Instead, she squeezed my hand tightly. The only small amount of discernible light in Jolly’s Pharmacy came from the big picture windows in the front of the store. There was a tall basket filled with giant rubber balls standing there, almost up against the wall. I deposited Dorcas on the floor behind it and motioned for her to be quiet. In the gloom I saw her rapidly shake her head. I guess that meant, ‘I’m not going to say a freaking word—no way no how’.
I didn’t blame her one bit.
I ran across the front of the store, about as far away from Dorcas as I could. Then I yelled out in the darkness, “Hey, you bastard.”
His flashlight quickly pointed in my direction.
“Hey, yourself,” Psycho Roger called out. “Don’t think you or that old lady are getting out of here. My Millie’s hungry, and my wife always gets what she wants.”
I didn’t even have time to roll my eyes. I headed down an aisle, fumbling around in the dark, hoping my sight would adjust to the gloom. At one point, I stumbled across two monster cut-outs made out of cardboard. I think one was a sparkly vampire—yeah, for real—and the other seemed like a shirtless dude with a wolf standing behind him. Just as I went to duck around them, Roger’s flashlight shone down the aisle, and I froze between the two frightening monsters, a killer smile plastered across my face. The light swept across the three of us before disappearing down the next aisle.
The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 1): Wicked Dead Page 9