by James, Jill
Emily nodded. “Makes sense. So where?”
“We’re heading over past the church. Nice neighborhood there. I’ve seen a bunch of motor homes and trailers in the area.”
Seth glanced around as they passed the church. A giant X in red marred the pristine whiteness of the doors, which were covered with crossed plywood to stop any zombies from using the church as a nest.
He saw Emily’s shoulders tense as they passed a small school and playground. He could sympathize; he hated when they found children undead. It was all kinds of wrong to have to put down little ones.
The play yard looked deserted except for a few mounds of decaying flesh held together by shreds of clothing. He looked away, swinging the rifle Joe had handed him in a semicircle to survey the neighborhood for threats.
“Stop,” Emily cried, hopping out of the truck bed before the vehicle came to a complete stop.
Seth jumped down to cover her. “What?”
She jerked her head toward the Confederate flag hanging from a porch flag holder. “A candy bar and a pack of gum say we find a weapon cache there.”
He smiled at the mention of the only currency that now mattered and counted for anything, the things now in short supply. “I’ll take that bet. I say they bugged out when the shit hit the fan and took the guns with them.”
Emily grinned. “I accept. Just know that I love Hershey’s.”
She reached out and knocked on the door, followed with her ear against the wood. Another knock and she grabbed the doorknob. Turning it, the door swung open. She pushed her crossbow over her shoulder and pulled a gun from her holster. Standing still, she sniffed deeply. Holding up her fingers in the okay sign, they all filed into the house, Joe left standing on the porch when they went inside.
He and Emily moved through the living room to the kitchen. He heard the Logans as they proceeded down the hall to the bedrooms. Like the police in the past, doors opened, followed by the “clear” call echoing in the empty house. A lost reminder of a lost world.
The kitchen reeked of spoiled food smell. The kind that made you catch your breath and wish you hadn’t. They’d learned early on to leave refrigerators closed. Scratching sounds in the cabinets broadcasted there wouldn’t be any pantry findings in this kitchen. The small animals were taking back their fields and meadows that had been covered by suburbia.
Seth heard closets opening and closing down the hall. He and Emily moved to the door in the kitchen leading to the garage. He spotted a vintage Corvette and an enormous gun safe.
Emily squealed like a girl in a jewelry store. Something must have spooked the tenants, because the safe stood open, guns and ammo spilling out like pirate loot.
“Yes.” She hopped up and down. “I knew it. You owe me candy,” she sang out.
Seth moved over to the garage door and pushed it up. Light spilled into the open space, highlighting the cherry-red car, the safe, and tools scattered across a work bench designed for more than a basic do-it-yourselfer.
Looking up, he spotted belongings in the rafters. Wincing, he jumped onto the hood of the ‘vette with a metallic ping and denting of the hood, apologized in his head, and pulled down tents, cots, a cook stove, and crates.
He jumped to the floor and found a pry bar on the bench. A few tugs and the boxes opened, light falling over mounds of brass casings. Turning, he spotted equipment to make bullets sitting on the workbench.
“Emily, I’m going to get Bob and the others. We need to get this stuff back to the base. We’ll be able to make our own bullets.”
“Fine, I’ll clean out this safe. There’re enough weapons here for a gun shop.”
♦♦♦
Half of my body was in the safe when something bumped my foot. “Just a minute, I think this is a box of grenades. I’d like to not blow myself up.”
A moan filled my ears and every hair on my body stood up. My bladder wanted to let go and my stomach turned. A hand grabbed me by the ankle and dragged me out of the safe. The stench had bile rising up my throat as the creature held onto my foot, trying to pull it into its mouth.
The reeking skinbag stood up and pulled me with it. The pressure built as the thing gnawed on my boot. Hell no, I wasn’t going to go hanging upside down and done in by a bite to my toes.
I brought my other foot around behind the thing’s knees, swept it forward, and took that zombie down. Unfortunately, I went down too. Good thing I could jump up faster than a zombie did when you knocked it down.
I jumped up.
Then I jumped down.
Right on his head. With a crunch, my boot pulverized its head and brains. And I kept on jumping. I was not going to die like Nick. Like Josie. Like Peter. Like Benny. Like the young girl my first week at the camp. Like all the faces and names I could remember since this started. My neighbors in the city. The police officer helping us into the evacuation bus.
“Hell, no,” I screamed until I was hoarse. I stopped and looked up. Seth stood in the doorway, with Josh and Suz behind him. They all stood there with their mouths open and guns raised.
“What? Haven’t you seen anyone kill a zombie before?” I joked, then my throat seized up and the tears flowed. I turned away, but the tears wouldn’t stop. Arms surrounded me and held on tight.
“Are you okay? Are you bit?”
I shook my head, my voice gone. “No. No bites,” I whispered.
“It’s okay. We all get to freak out a little from time to time. Just makes us human. Today was your turn.”
The laughter trickled out between the tears. I stood straighter and pulled away a little. “I’m fine now.”
I stared at my gore-covered boot. “Shit, I liked this pair. It took me weeks to break them in.”
Seth hugged me with one arm and kissed my cheek. “I’m sorry I left you alone out here. The area looked clear.”
I hugged him back. “It’s okay. I think I took care of the problem.”
“Yes, you did,” Suz voiced from the doorway. “I saw tons of shoes, boots, and clothes in the bedrooms. The family must have been packing to bug out.”
Grabbing my knife out of my pocket, I sliced the laces off and toed off my boots. Skirting the mess by the safe, I walked into the house. I turned at the last second. “Before it showed up, I found a box of grenades in the safe.”
Suz grabbed my hand and pulled me down the hallway. Suz Logan is strong. She looks like a beauty queen with her sun-bleached blonde hair and bright blue eyes, but I’ve seen her take down five zombies on her own, with a stick and a knife. She and her brother came to Brentwood early in the Z virus infestation. They’d lived in Concord, but it was gone now. The only people left were pockets of survivors too stubborn to leave, surrounded by the undead. The only major thing left there was a hospital. A few doctors and nurses refused to leave their unmovable patients and offered help to the survivors left behind.
Suz and her brother Josh were inseparable. They never went on a mission without the other. She’d told me even before the zombies, they’d been alone, the last members of their family. Most had died of the flu epidemic. She and her brother had been sick too. They’d woken up and everyone else was dead.
We went into a bedroom and I was hit by flying boots. Suz just laid into me.
“That was stupid. You know that, right? While you were stomping the hell out of ghoulie number one, did you even stop to think about numbers two through one hundred that might have been out there? I’ve already mourned Nick this week; I’m not adding you to the list.”
My mouth fell open. Damn, I’m so stupid. I wasn’t thinking.
“Suz, I’m so sorry. I’m usually better than that.”
“Damn straight, you are.” She punched my arm. “And don’t you forget it. I taught you everything you know.”
I winced. “Yes, ma’am.”
Pulling the boots on, I glanced around the room and at the stuff on the bed. Wow! Camouflage pants and jackets, Kevlar vests, arm guards, shin guards, and even protective vests made f
or a woman filled the bed to overflowing. I grabbed one and held it up.
“This is so going to be mine.”
Looking around at all this preparedness, I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to the occupants. There wasn’t any damage, so they hadn’t been attacked in the house. But they hadn’t left and taken all their stuff either. Had they been ready to go and ran out to help a neighbor? Had they needed some last-minute item and just never made it back? I hated all the not-knowing in this new world. Lives just stopped, like a broken clock, and there was no one left to restart the world.
Chapter Nine
Concord Hospital
Concord, California
Dr. Shannon Drake cradled Carla Ripley’s thin hand between her own. Not that the woman knew she was there, but it comforted Shannon to spend a few minutes each day with the comatose patient. Frantic from morning to night, these moments with Mrs. Ripley calmed her. She talked to the woman and heard answers in her head.
She sighed. “We should be seeing Seth again soon, Carla. He comes about every other week.”
The son had brought her in months ago after she’d escaped from Oakland and fell into a diabetic coma on the trip out. Shannon still couldn’t figure out how she was still alive. The doctors finally decided it had something to do with the flu epidemic she had survived. For whatever reason, the patient lingered on.
“Maybe you’re the lucky one, not us. You get to sleep away this whole nightmare.” She laughed. “Maybe when you wake up this will all be over.”
Everyone looked to Shannon for answers. After the first wave of attacks, she was the senior doctor left in charge. Senior, ha! Wasn’t that a joke? At thirty-five, she was in charge of an entire hospital. They all looked to her for answers, and she just didn’t know them. She didn’t want to be a leader, just a doctor. But, choices had been taken away, along with every other freaking thing. Food. Medical supplies. Clean water. Everything was in short supply.
She rubbed her eyes. They felt as if they were sand-blasted. Not enough hours in the day to get everything done. On top of the usual insanity of a hospital, she also had to organize food and supplies with Ripley, make sure the generator kept working, and worry about zombies.
She was just so tired. When did it all just stop? When did she get a break? Not since her intern days had she felt so bone-weary.
“Carla, you have a wonderful son there, you know?” She patted the woman’s bruised hand with gentle strokes. “We would have never made it without his deliveries.”
A nurse came into the room. “Dr. Drake? The patient in 2F is having a heart attack.”
Shannon put Carla’s hand down gently on the covers and jumped up. There hadn’t been a code blue alarm, not since the beginning of the Z virus. That one had every zombie in the area at their front door. After that, a nurse ran and got the doctor. She still wondered how they could hear it all the way outside. The damn things had supersonic hearing or something.
After thirty minutes of trying, Shannon stepped away from the patient. “Damn it. Who was responsible for charging the defibrillator?”
A young man stepped forward. “I was.”
She read his nametag. “Well, Todd. If you had been paying attention when you were charging, you would have noted that the charge wasn’t holding, the button going back to red as soon as it was unplugged.”
“Dr. Drake. I’m sorry.”
“Todd, I’m sure you are. But that doesn’t bring Mr. Jamison back, does it?”
Todd smirked.
Shannon smiled unwillingly. “Okay, you know what I mean.” She pulled her gun out of the holster and handed it grip first to the young man. “Mr. Jamison’s non return is now your responsibility.”
She left the room and stood by the closed door. She waited for the slight sound of the silenced weapon and the young man’s sobs before she headed upstairs to visit the rest of her patients. That he had cried meant there was hope for him yet.
♦♦♦
“Work, dammit,” Jed Long yelled at the radio as he pounded on the side of the casing, and then stopped to rub it like he’d hurt the inanimate object. He’d started as a janitor at Concord Hospital until the Z virus turned everything upside down, and Dr. Drake had discovered his hobby was ham radios. After that, he was the communications hub for the Far East Bay Area.
Thanks to Seth Ripley, he’d been able to make a run to his apartment downtown, and return with all his radios and equipment. He swiped long hair back behind his ears. Now, he was connected to the area and the world. Not that there was a lot of world left out there. Spain and Portugal had gone dark early on. Cornwall seemed like the only place left in Great Britain, must be the rough terrain he’d seen pictures of in school. Paris fell in the first few days. The flu vaccine may have been meant for the United States, but once it mutated into a lethal virus, worldwide travel took care of the rest of the planet.
Asia held on the longest; with so many people vaccinated for the bird flu, it took another mutation to do them in. Before they went dark, China was reporting deaths and risings in the hundreds of millions. He shuddered. Thankful the country was on the other side of the world. The thought of hundreds of millions of undead was enough to make him never sleep again.
He pushed his glasses back up his nose and turned the dial on the radio calibrated for the local camps and compounds. A shrill hum vibrated into his headset. He twitched and yanked them off, slamming them to the desktop. The hum had been infiltrating the radio for days.
He rubbed his jaw. The hum set his fillings to vibrating, threatening to fall out, and unless a dentist miraculously appeared, he wasn’t getting new ones anytime soon. The door behind him opened, and Jed spun around in his chair. That young nurse, Amy peeked around the door.
“Hi, Jed. Talking to anyone interesting?” She talked while chewing and popping her bubble gum. He wondered where she kept getting some. And how she managed to walk and chew at the same time, when it seemed like her brainpower would only be capable of one or the other.
“Now I am,” he said with a smile.
She smiled back, swallowed her gum, got down on her knees, and swallowed him.
A while later, she sat up on the mattress they’d fallen on to and handed him his glasses. She looked around as a hum filled the space like feedback from a microphone.
She covered her ears, while Jed jumped up and turned down the sound on his radio. The hum grew dimmer, but remained. He pulled on the headset. He switched frequencies and it died. His fingers played with the dial, bringing the sound back. Glancing at the chart thumb-tacked to the wall, he saw it was the location for the small enclave across town. A few stubborn holdouts were trying to survive atop a small strip mall just off the freeway. A couple of old men and their cult-like followers who chose to live by the mantra of at least two women for every man and no woman alone. The only reason they still existed was drivers like Ripley who’d take supplies to them from time to time.
He pressed the mic. “Rob’s group. Do you read me? I’m getting feedback. Anyone there?”
“They—everywhere. Can’t—them off. God—us.”
“Rob’s group. This is Jed at Concord hospital. Can you read me?”
Nothing but static. Even the hum was gone.
Jed jumped up, pulling the headset with him. He jerked back, ripped it off, and threw it on the desk. He grabbed his pants and yanked them on, throwing Amy’s clothes at her. “Get dressed. We have to find Dr. Drake.”
Chapter Ten
“Man, I hate new boots,” I muttered, swishing my toes in the bucket of sun-warmed water. The boots Suz had thrown at me earlier in the day were brand new. Correction. They had been brand new; they were well broken in now. I had the blisters to prove it. Looking away from the pink-tinged water, I stared at Seth instead. He turned on the lantern and hung it from the tent pole.
Squatting, he took my feet out of the water and gently dried them, patting with a towel. I sighed. The feet must be an erogenous zone I’d never heard
about. I leaned back on my elbows and enjoyed the unexpected pleasure. Carl had been all ‘me, me, me’. I would have never thought to get such tenderness out of him.
I stifled a yawn. What a long day. But we’d brought back ten truckloads of stuff: food, ammo, guns, and equipment. Closing my eyes, I could still see the acres of tents on the rooftops. A few more trips and everyone would have the comfort of canvas and nylon for defense against the heat we had now and the rainy season to come. Not to mention privacy. My face heated up with a blush.
Sitting up, I ran my fingers through Seth’s thick hair. Strands of black, brown, and sun-streaked blond fell through my fingers. I ran my hand behind his neck and pulled him toward me. “Let’s go to bed.”
He crawled from the foot of the bed like a panther on the hunt. His body heat covered me as he slid along my legs and rested at the apex between them. His hard flesh pulsated against my core.
My fingers ran over his smooth-shaved cheeks. In the middle of everything, he’d found time to shave. Blood heated in my veins and my pulse rapid-fired in a staccato burst. Tears formed and blurred my vision. This was a very kind man.
He sat up and pulled off his shirt. A very hot man, too. Even with the ‘mom’ tattoo I’d discovered on his chest. I smiled as he pulled off my shirt as well. Unhooking my bra, he lay down and covered me; touching skin to skin. I sighed. I could stay this way forever. Until, he moved and I wanted more.
My fingers tangled in his hair, pulling him close. His lips found mine. His tongue slid along the edge until I opened my mouth and let him in. He tasted of the chocolate bars we’d found at one of the houses. Finding only two meant we got to keep them for ourselves. More than five of something eatable required us to return it to base to be put with the rest of the supplies.
Our tongues slid together and a moan escaped me as his fingers found my nipples. They glazed lightly over them, just like I loved best. His kisses left my mouth and traveled to my earlobe, my shoulder, and the delicate spot in between that had my back arching and warmth flooding my center. Tingles sparked along my nerve endings.